In the media, angels are usually portrayed as gentle and mild-mannered—a far cry from their biblical depiction as heaven's warriors. Surprised? Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah looks at more characteristics of angels that pop culture routinely gets wrong. From his series "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help," here's David to introduce the conclusion of "What Are Angels Anyway?" Well, maybe you're among the many who have believed the angels were like little cherubs, kind of fun little things to think about—nice and cuddly little people that will help us when we get in trouble.
Well, we're going to find out a lot more about angels today than that, and we'll discover what the Bible really says, as we continue our discussion of what are angels anyway. During this month, we make available a book on angels that I hope will be a blessing to you. People have long been fascinated by stories of angel sightings. Yet, many contemporary beliefs about angels are based on misconceptions and myth rather than biblical truth. And that's why we're doing this series to unlock the real meaning of angels.
And you say, "Well, I kind of like the old myths." If you really understand who angels are and what they do. They make myths seem so meaningless, so trivial, because what God has prepared for those who love Him is so much greater than the things people make up about it along the way. You'll figure that out as you go with us. Hey, there's a study guide for this series as well. You can get the study guide from DavidJeremiah dot org.
There you can get the guide, and you can order enough for the people in your study group. Maybe your leader has the book, and you have the study guides, and you. Go together and discuss what the Bible says about angels. And now here's part two of what are angels anyway. Angels are innumerable, but let me tell you something else that's very important for us to understand about them.
They're invisible. Angels are invisible.
Now most of you are like me. We've been sort of oblivious to angels most of our lives.
So there's really no telling how many times they've intervened when we've needed them.
Some years ago, when I had my ordination for the gospel ministry, I was in ordination council, and they asked me a question. We were discussing angels, and they asked me, "Do you believe in guardian angels?" And before I could answer, my mother, who was sitting there, said, "Well, if he doesn't, I do." That's what she said in the meeting, and she had watched me grow up and all of the close calls I had had along the way. But we are not usually aware of the intervention of angels in our lives because they're invisible.
Well, you say, Pastor Jeremiah, if angels are invisible, then how is it that so many angel sightings have been reported, both in the Bible and in today's world? There has to be an answer to that, and frankly, there are two answers to it, and they're both right from the Word of God. Turn in your Bibles to the 18th chapter of the Book of Genesis, Genesis chapter 18. And let me teach you a little bit from this passage in the life of Abraham. You remember the story of how Abraham was so concerned about his nephew Lot because Lot was in a lot of trouble.
He was in Sodom, and so he was pleading to God that Lot would be rescued. And the Bible tells us in Genesis chapter eighteen that God heard his prayer, and beginning at the beginning of the chapter, it says, "And the Lord appeared to Abraham by the Terebinth trees of Mamre, as he was sitting in the tent door in the heat of the day, and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing by him. And when he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the ground.
Now, if we had time to read the rest of this text, we would discover that one of these three men were actually Jehovah, the Lord, he's mentioned several times in the passage, and the other two men were angels. But when Abraham saw them, they just appeared to him like three men. Here's the point: one of the reasons why people see angels is because angels have the ability to appear to us as human beings if they choose to do so, or if God so ordains. In this story, they appeared to Abraham as Jesus. And two angels, all three of them, looking like men.
And I went through the story and wrote down in my notes that if you read it carefully, you will see that these angels ate, they washed, they walked, they held hands, and they took a physical form. They looked like men, but in the midst of the story, as you know, as Abraham was pleading with them for his nephew's life. The Lord said to the other two who were with him, "You go down there and take care of Lot and get him out of the mess that he's in." And so we read in chapter nineteen and verse one. Watch this. And the two angels came to Sodom in the evening.
Who are the two angels? The two angels are the two men of the eighteenth chapter. They were disguised as men and looked upon as men, and then the Bible tells us who they really were. They were angels.
So that's why some of you have told me the stories you've told me, how that somebody was in the hospital and you went in, and there was a man there in the hospital room that nobody could identify. You didn't know where he came from or where he went. And he was there in a helping, ministering way, and you believe it was an angel, and it very well may have been because angels have the ability to put themselves in human form so they can be seen. That's one of the reasons why angels have sightings these days. But there's another reason.
And it's even more exciting to me, and that is not only can angels appear in the form of a human being, but oftentimes God can open the eyes of individuals so that they can see what otherwise would be unseen. And I want to tell you two stories to illustrate that from the Bible. One of them is one of the most humorous stories that I have ever read in the Scriptures. It's found in Numbers chapter 22 and 23. And it is a very interesting story.
It is the story of Israel in their military campaigns, and Israel had developed a reputation of defeating everybody they fought against because they had Jehovah God on their side.
Well, the king of Moab was a man by the name of Balak. And he had heard about how Israel was being so rough on their enemies, and Balak got this idea that the way he could keep Israel off his back was to go and find the prophet Balaam, and pay Balaam enough money so that he would curse Israel, and then Israel wouldn't be a threat to him.
So, if you read the story, you know he goes and he finds Balaam, and he says, "I want you to go and curse Israel." And Balaam says, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll talk to the Lord about it and see what He says." So he talked to the Lord. Lord said, "Don't do it." He went back and he said, "I can't do this." Lord said, "I can't do it." And so Balak says, "Well, I'll tell you what. I'll up the ante. I'll give you some more money.
I'll make it more attractive to you." So he says, "Well, let me go tell the Lord." And he went back and told the Lord. Lord said, "No, I want you to do this." And so he came back the third time. And finally, the Lord said, "You go with him, but you tell him only what I tell you to tell him." So here's the story. Balaam gets on his donkey, and along with the king of Moab, Balak, they head off toward Moab. And on their way, they get to a place, and the donkey stops.
Now Balaam's a little upset about this because. The donkey stopped and won't go forward, and he starts—you know—I'm imagining a little bit—but he starts working this donkey over.
So finally, the donkey goes off the path, over out of the way, and runs up against the wall, just about breaks old Balaam's leg, and he's really getting upset about this now. And the more upset he gets, the more angry he gets. In fact, in one place in the scripture, he says to the donkey, "If I had a sword, I'd kill you." The donkey just finally sat down and wouldn't move. And Balaam is really frustrated. And finally, what we discover as we read the story is that the reason that the donkey sat down was that the angel of the Lord was standing in the pathway in front of the donkey, and it terrified the poor animal.
The donkey saw what Balaam couldn't see, and there is some discussion as you read the story as to which of the two is really the donkey.
Now I'm not sure in this whole story which one fits where. But then I want you to notice what happens. All of a sudden, in the midst of this story, and read the verse Numbers twenty-two thirty-one. Then the Lord opened Balaam's eyes, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way with his drawn sword in his hand, and he bowed his head and fell down on his face. What happened was, the angel was there all of the time.
The donkey saw it first. And then God opened Balaam's eyes, and he saw it.
Sometimes angels are seen because God opens the eyes of those who are watching, so they can see what otherwise they wouldn't be able to see. Here's one other illustration. In the book of Second Kings, there's the story of the war between Israel and Syria. I never have quite understood why the Syrians thought it was so important to go and kill Elisha. But they sent their whole army to Dothan, where Elisha lived, just to kill the prophet.
You know, in a time of war, a spiritual man who's living right with God can be a great threat to those who don't know God.
So they thought the way that they would be able to beat Israel would be to take out the prophet.
So they sent their armies to Dothan.
Well, one day in this story, Elisha's servant was out walking around. You know, just maybe having an after-dinner walk. And all of a sudden, he comes running back into camp, and he says to Elisha, "The mountains are filled with the Syrian army. What are we going to do?" And Elisha said, "Don't sweat it." He said, "Those who are with us are greater than those who are with them." And I've often wondered if the servant must have thought that Elisha had really flipped out because all he saw in the mountain were the Syrian soldiers, and all he saw when he came back to camp was himself and Elisha. But Elisha says, "No, no, we got more than they do." And then we read in Second Kings six seventeen these words.
Then Elisha prayed and said, "Lord, I pray, open his eyes that he may see." And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw, and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots. There it is, chariots of fire, all around Elisha.
So you see, men and women, sometimes God just opens the eyes of people so they can see what others cannot see. Do you think God can do that? Surely He can. A more modern story took place. In the early 1950s, Mau Mau uprisings that spread throughout the African country of Kenya.
The movement protested the colonial domination of the British, but American missionaries were often the targets of brutal attacks. Also, a group of missionaries with the African Inland Mission in Kijabe, Kenya, learned of an imminent attack on their mission. The Mau Mau warriors, moving through the area, planned to kill them and any Africans who had believed the Christian message.
So warned, the missionaries and the African Christians gathered their families onto the mission base. The men decided that they would defend their families the best they could. They took a few rolls of barbed wire and made a barricade. Turned on the floodlights that they had on the base, and then they waited. On the night of the expected attack, the men put their wives and children in the centermost building and told them to pray.
The men stood guard with the few weapons at their disposal. They waited all night, but no attack came. They rejoiced in God's protection, but the full story remained unknown to them. Several months later, one of the missionaries led a captured Maumau warrior to faith in Christ Jesus. After his conversion, the man told the missionary his story.
On the night the attack was to be executed, he was among a large contingent of warriors who had surrounded the mission. And just as they were about to attack from all sides, large fiery creatures—there it is again—large fiery creatures appeared from out of the night. The creatures stood between the Mau Mau and the missionaries and raced in a circle around the barricade. Frightened by the sight, the warriors fled from the area and refused to return.
Now the missionaries may not have seen them, but God opened the warrior's eyes to see what normally would have been invisible—His band of holy angels. Angels are spirit beings, but occasionally God allows these mighty creatures to step into realms and render service to those who will inherit salvation, and that's what happened.
So let's review. Angels are innumerable and they're invisible, but they become visible to us because often God can make them take on the character of a human, and sometimes God miraculously opens the eyes of individuals so they can see what otherwise would not be seen. Let me speak to you thirdly about the fact that angels are invincible; they are powerful. I was reading something that really amused me.
Some of you know how much I love C.S. Lewis. He has written a parody on the Christian war, the war that we fight in Christian realm. In the Screw Tape letters, he has something to say about angels, which kind of gives us some idea of how insipid our concept of angels has become over the years. He talks about the art that has grown up around angels from the very beginning, and this is what he says: He says, "Fra angelicals, angels carry in their face the gesture and peace and authority of heaven." Later came the chubby and infantile nudes of Raphael.
Finally, the soft, slim, girlish, and consolatory angels of the nineteenth-century art. He said, "In Scripture, the visitation of an angel is always alarming, and the angel always begins in Scripture by saying, 'Fear not.'" He said, "The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say, 'There, there.'" I thought, yeah, that's the way we approach angels today—like a household pet, you know, somebody that we can bring into our life to kind of be a little encouragement to us. But you know what? The Bible teaches that angels are incredibly powerful creatures of God. In the book of Revelation, the term strong angel and mighty angel appears.
In fact, Gabriel, one of God's chief angels, the term Gabriel means the mighty one of God. In the New Testament, when angels are listed in the designation of power, the term that is used to describe them is the word power, dunamis, which is the word from which we get our word dynamite. They're powerful. David the psalmist describes him like this in Psalm 103 verse 20. Bless the Lord, you His angels, who excel in strength, who do His word, heeding the voice of His word.
Daniel gave credit to the angels for delivering him from the lions den. Daniel 6 22. My God sent His angel and shut the lions' mouths so that they have not hurt me. And in one night, according to the Old Testament, one single angel destroyed one hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian warriors. Do you remember that story?
In Second Kings nineteen thirty-five, we read, and it came to pass on a certain night that the angel of the Lord went out and killed in the camp of the Assyrians one hundred and eighty-five thousand. And when people arose early in the morning, there were the corpses, all dead. And I always smile when I read that verse because that's the only kind of corpse I ever heard of—is a dead one. I don't know why that's there, but it's sort of like to just make dead sure we know he's dead, you know. But the point is that one angel did that in one night.
He slew the Syrian soldiers. Angels are not playthings; they're powerful things. In Matthew twenty-eight and verse two, in the resurrection story, we're told that one angel rolled the stone. Away from the grave, not so that Jesus could get out, but so that the people could look in and see that it was empty. And people who have studied that say that that piece of granite, eight feet in diameter and two feet thick, Would have weighed some four tons or eight thousand pounds, and if you read the story carefully in the language of the New Testament, you discover that the angel didn't just pull the wedge out from under the stone and let it roll down the hill.
The angel flipped that stone as if it were a pebble, and it landed over in the field, away from the tomb. That was what was so amazing about it. One angel did that. In the book of Revelation, we see angels holding the four winds of heaven, discharging the vials of judgment, sending down Jehovah's wrath upon the guilty nations that have rejected Him. And Paul, writing to the church in Thessalonica, says that when Jesus Christ appears, it is going to be with His mighty angels.
Second Thessalonians one seven, and to give you who are troubled rest with us when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels. And if you are writing the references down, read the next verse too, because it goes on to say, "In flaming fire." Taking vengeance on those who do not know God, and on those who obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Angels are powerful; they're invincible. They're not playthings. They're not pets.
They're not nice little things to believe in. The angels of God, His immediate and first creation of anything that has personality, the angels of God are invincible. They're powerful. They're not omnipotent as God is, but they are powerful. Let me add this really quick thought: that angels are also immortal.
Angels never die. Luke chapter twenty, verse thirty-six says, "Neither can they die any more, for they are equal to the angels." The angels do not die. There are exactly as many angels today as there were on the second day of creation. None of them have died because angels don't have physical bodies. They don't know anything of what it's like to get ill or grow old or decay or eventually die.
Angels don't know anything of the limitations that are part of having a physical body. God created them as non-physical beings. It's interesting to note that in Daniel nine, for instance, the angel Gabriel appeared to the prophet Daniel. Then, more than five hundred years later, this same unaged Gabriel appeared to Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist. He was exactly the same Gabriel; he hadn't changed at all.
He was the unaged Gabriel, the angel of God. They are immortal. Last but not least, angels are intrigued by salvation. The Bible tells us that angels are aware of every moment when a person repents of his sin and becomes a Christian. And according to Luke fifteen ten, they rejoice.
Likewise, I say to you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. The angels rejoice because of what has happened when a person has trusted Christ as their Savior. Isn't that a thrilling thought? The angels really know what's going on. One writer says that they set the bells of heaven to ringing with their rejoicing before the Lamb of God.
Yet, although the angels rejoice when the people of God repent and are redeemed, listen carefully now. They cannot do one thing. They cannot testify personally to something that they have never experienced. They can only point to the experiences of the redeemed, but they can never say, "I know what it's like." To have been lost and now have found Christ, I know what it's like to be redeemed because angels don't know that experience, and that's what First Peter is talking about in First Peter one twelve. When we read to them, it was revealed that not to themselves but to us, they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven.
Watch this last phrase. Which things angels desire to look into? They wish they could understand what we've experienced, but they cannot. There is nobody who can ever know what it's like to be born again who has never been born again. There's no one who can ever know what it's like to be overwhelmed with the burdens of sin and guilt and unforgiveness, and then have one day the Holy Spirit come into your heart and the Spirit of God quicken your heart, and Jesus come and forgive it all.
The only ones who will ever know that are the people of God who have experienced it. It kind of feels good to be one up on the angels, doesn't it? Back in 1924, Reverend Johnson Oatman Jr. and John R. Sweeney wrote a hymn about this very thought.
And I remember growing up in the church when my father was a pastor, and we'd have evangelistic crusades, or we'd have a special night in our church. It seemed like the best singer we had in the church would always be chosen, and they'd come and sing this song. It was one of the great songs that was always sung. I haven't heard it sung in years, but the message of this song is the message of the intrigued angels. Listen to the words of it.
It is called, "Holy, holy" is what the angels sing. There is singing up in heaven such as we have never known, where the angels sing the praises of the Lamb upon the throne. Their sweet harps are ever tuneful and their voices always clear. Oh, that we might be more like them while we serve the Master here. Then the angels stand and listen, for they cannot join the song, like the sound of many waters by that happy blood-washed throng, for they sing about great trials, battles fought and victories won, and they praise their great Redeemer who has said to them, "Well done." So, although I am not an angel, still I know that over there, I will join a blessed chorus that the angels cannot share.
I will sing about my Savior, who upon dark Calvary freely pardoned my transgressions and died to set a sinner free. And then the chorus goes like this: "Holy, holy, is what the angels sing." And I expect to help them make the courts of heaven ring, but when I sing redemption's story, they will fold their wings, for angels never felt the joys that our salvation brings. Amen. Isn't it wonderful to be redeemed? Isn't it wonderful to be forgiven?
As great and mighty and powerful as the angels are, they cannot know the joy of a single moment that we know, who have had the Lord Jesus wipe our sin away and give to us the righteousness which is His alone. Amen. Hey, tomorrow we're going to talk about angels you've heard about. There are some famous angels in the Bible. We we meet them in different places, and we're going to we're going to look them up tomorrow and find them and find out what the Bible wants us to know.
Because we'll learn some things about the importance of angels in our lives as we meet the famous angels of the Bible. You can get a copy of this month's resource, which is the book on angels, by sending a gift of any size to Turning Point during the thirty days of this month, and if you do that, we will. Gladly send you this book. All you have to do is send your gift and ask for the book on angels, and it will be sent to your home. You can have it as a reminder of all the things we've talked about and a resource to use going forward.
Hey, I hope you'll do that. And now, until tomorrow, this is David Jeremiah. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time right here on this good station. Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor Dr.
David Jeremiah. Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, P. O. Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163.
Visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org/radio, or calling 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's book, Angels: Who They Are and How They Help. It's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also view over 1,200 of Dr. Jeremiah's sermons on any screen, anytime you like, on our Turning Point Plus streaming service for a monthly gift of any amount.
Visit TurningPointPlus.org for details. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series "Angels: Who They Are and How They Help" here on Turning Point.
