Good evening brethren and sisters and young people. It’s a very great privilege to be here with you in a new ecclesia like Happy Valley, seeing you all with children here is a wonderful thing; it takes me back a few years to my younger days when we did similar things. It is a very wonderful state in ecclesial life in these younger years!
We are going to, in the next few nights, God willing, undertake to do a study of the angels of God. And as our bro. chairman said, it is a great privilege to come aside in the middle of the week, and on the weekend coming up, to come aside from our mundane pursuits and the futility of the cares of this life, and to stand for a moment on holy ground, and to get a glimpse of eternity, as we can, through looking at the angels of God. I want to say at the outset, it is not our proposal that as it says in the New Testament, it’s not our purpose to end up worshipping the angels. That’s not a great attitude, but we need to understand the angels. And in so doing, what it will do is increase our love and affection and our thanks to our God, who has used the angels to express to us, the future that we have.
Now there are three reasons why we would undertake a study of the angels. The first one I shall mention is to strengthen our vision of divine nature. You know we have a very familiar and precious promise that we’ll look at in some detail later on, Luke 20:36 which says, ‘but those that are counted worthy to attain unto the age to come, shall die no more, for they shall be equal unto the angels’. So right at the outset in that particular phrase, the Lord Jesus Christ said, that if we want to know something about our immortal experience, what lies at the end of our road toward the kingdom, the angels are the measuring point of what it is like to be eternal. That we have a joy set before us if we understand what angels are like, but not only the wonder of their immortal bodies, of the great powers that they have at their fingertips, but most of all, b&s and young people, the thing that inspires us about the angels is the way that they relate to God the Father, Himself.
In order to understand their relationship, their joys, and their excitement as they go about performing His work in the earth, you know, we desperately need in this age in which we live, we need that motivation, that inspiration, that there lies ahead of us, a very great and exciting and happy reward, that we will share one day divine nature, that we’ll understand what it is to share eternity with God, because the bible talks about a time, in which those who put their trust in God, shall be the elohim of the age. They shall be the mighty ones of the age. Oh, the rejoicing in the hope of the glory of God of being a part of His eternal existence. So there are two parts to that, the first one, is to know what the angels’ bodies are like and what their powers are, and then to know, how they relate to God and how they work for God. And we’re going to see when we end up tonight what an interesting experience that is for the angels.
The second reason is that we might appreciate the value of our personal angel. The bible makes a very clear statement that the angel of God encamps around those who love and fear Him. One of the simplest promises you could find in the bible, that the angels are sent forth to minister to the heirs of salvation; and yet we know from the way that we conduct our lives that it is one of the hardest to really believe. So we want to strengthen our perception, that there is for everyone of us, commissioned by God, a personal angel that encamps around us. To not only see their hand at work, but most importantly to go through characters in the bible, who have worked with their angels, and to find out what are the trigger points? what are the things that we can do that can assist the angel to fulfill their role, of getting us in the kingdom? So that’s the second reason that we need to know a bit more about the angels because, if there is an angel that works with you and me, then we need to know how to work with that angel.
And thirdly, to be aware that the angels are those that God uses to perform His will amongst the nations. They’re described in the bible, as His hands and His eyes that go through the earth, particularly as His eyes as they’re called by Daniel, the watchers even holy ones, and they accomplish His will throughout the earth. They move kings and nations according to God’s timetable, they are responsible for the bridge of foreign affairs, in accordance with what God would have come to pass amongst the nations. And there are angels that are assigned to different tasks, there are angels that we’re told in Ezekiel 9 verse 1, that have charge over the city of Jerusalem. There are angels that Paul talks about in 1 Timothy chapter 5 that have charge over ecclesial life, and we’re going to see some interesting groups of angels with particular jobs to do. But the vast bulk of the angels’ work is the task of moving world history in accordance with God’s plan, and through them, God rules in the kingdom of men. He sets up kings and removes kings, He defines the boundaries of nations, He decides the outcome of battles, and the angels have been working behind the scenes, very largely, particularly in the last 2,000 years, and are about to openly reveal themselves, when the Lord Jesus Christ comes in the power of His Father, with all His mighty angels revealed. And then, they will finish the work that God has given them to do. So there are some of the things that the angels can do for us.
There are lots of indicators in the work of the angels of how we will work eternally with our God. I want to just show you a little summary of passages that have to do with the angels. You know, one of the phrases in the bible used about the angels very frequently, it describes them as those that stand by! They stand by the throne of God, they stand by the people that God is working with on the earth. We read for example in 1 Kings 22 and verse 19 where the prophet Micaiah said, ‘I saw Yahweh sitting on His throne with all the host of heaven, standing by Him on His right hand and His left’ and it was Gabriel who came and said, ‘I am Gabriel that stand in the presence of God’. You see, the angels are those who stand around the throne of God awaiting His direction; He dispatches them on missions here and there. And when they come to the earth on God’s work with His people, they stand by His people. We’re told in Zechariah 3 on a number of occasions, Zechariah 3 and Zechariah 1, the angel of Yahweh stood by, we’re quoting Acts 27 and verse 23 where Paul says, ‘there stood by me this night, the angel of God saying ‘fear not’; notwithstanding the LORD stood with me and strengthened me’. Zechariah saw the angels standing by the right hand side of the altar of incense, and then in Zechariah 3 and verse 7, ‘faithful saints are promised that their reward will be to have places among those that stand by‘. In other words, equality with the angels, that’s the Old Testament equivalent of that promise of being made equal unto the angels. To be given places or right of access amongst those that stand by, and then in the prophet Zechariah in our scene, going forth from standing by. We’ll come back to those things, that’s just a little overview of the fact that the angels are those, who God had chosen to perform His will. And you see, it’s because in the future, God might choose us to perform His will, that we can learn so much, from the angels who stand by His throne thus.
Now before we get into the study, I want to just make a claim for this study; I know it’s very normal for speakers at the start of any special effort to get up and say, ‘this is the greatest study you’ll ever hear’ and you’ve heard it all before. I want to tell you about the study of ‘the angels’ and I can honestly say I’ve been studying this now for nearly 30 years, it’s just something I’ve just latched onto, and everything else I’ve done over those years, has only increased the information we have on the subject, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to learn yet. When I started the study of the angels, it’s not like any other study you’ll do. You won’t go away from this with a whole raft of head knowledge, you won’t go away so you can now concentrate on these three verses, because the subject of the angels goes across the whole of the bible; it takes in every book of the bible. And I think once you get the key to the angels, you are going to find many familiar contexts, they’re going to open up a bit more than they might have before. It does require contemplation on heavenly things, we are going right into heaven itself, to see what God’s revealed about His own dwelling place. And in some ways that’s a little bit scary because we don’t have a lot of information about heaven, but what we do have, is very revealing about God and His angels. And above all, we rank them with our own future! We’re trying to understand the way that God worked with His angels, that we might understand the way that God is going to work with us. One thing that I promise is, that if you give this study some diligent consideration, I promise you this and I know this from experience, having give this study a number of times now, you’ll never read your bible the same way ! If you can get your mind around where angels appear, I’m going to show you a couple tonight just as examples of how it will change the way, you read the bible. You’re going to start seeing angels where you perhaps never saw them before; you know, I was brought up reading a bible like all of us were as children, and when it said, ‘and the LORD appeared unto Abraham’, I thought they just heard a voice coming out of the sky, but it says the LORD appeared unto Abraham, and you’re going to be very surprised when you start looking for angels, how often they are there, representing God, and you’ll have your insight opened.
You know, there was a young man who found it very difficult to believe that God was actually working in his life. This young man was in the city of Dothan, and they were surrounded by the Syrian army and he didn’t know what was going to happen. The prophet said to him, ‘fear not, for they that be with us, are more than they that be with them. And Elisha prayed and said, O LORD, 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 of fire round about Elisha’. You know it was quite remarkable, we all know that story how the young man’s eyes were opened; and I believe if we can give this study diligent attention, our eyes will be opened to see angels where we never saw them before, and to realize like that young man came to realize, that they that be with us, are more than they that be with them. In other words, the angels concentrate their work around those that are seeking their God! And we’ll come to see that the angels are there. And it goes on to say in that record in Kings that the angels then came down to Elisha and communed with him, spoke with him. It’s really quite fascinating!
The other thing about angels that needs to be realized, is that when we’re talking about the angels today, and our future, we are talking about the lasting reality of life; so work’s hard isn’t it?, we work hard in our jobs, and our homes and on the pile of bills that have to be paid, to realize that the real lasting reality is the things that we most surely believe! All of those things in time will pass away, and as God doth intervene, so do we. The lasting reality is the hope that we have of sharing eternity with our God. Over the intervening years, God has shown men that eternal beauty; He did it to Jacob, when he was coming back in fear of his brother Esau; we are told he saw a host of God encamped around him. He did it to Zechariah in the night visions, and He showed him that Michael the Archangel was resisting the Samaritans; to the humble shepherds of Bethlehem as they sat upon the hillside at the time that Christ was born, they saw the heavenly host as the choir singing, and all those things are given to us, to convince us of the reality, that God and His angels do exist, that they are there, and everything that we see about us today is about to be taken away, and the eternal things will last!
So with that preamble, let’s just get into the subject, and start with a couple of quotations in Ephesians; let’s come across to Ephesians and look at these two quotations, Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 10, any study of the angels has to begin with their relationship to God Himself. And Ephesians 1:10, writing to the members of the ecclesia, Paul says this, ‘That in the dispensation of the fullness of times, He (that is God) might gather together in one, all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even in Him’. So the work of the Lord Jesus Christ is designed by God to bring together into one, things in heaven and things on earth’. So you see, there is a heavenly part of God’s family and there is an earthly part. Come across to Ephesians 3 and verse 15, that’s exactly what Paul says, ‘For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named’, and the word ‘family’ is the Greek word ‘patrea’ which means ‘those that claim descent from a common father’, so there is one Father of all and there is an earthly family, there are those in heaven and those on earth, and God’s intention in Christ was to bring the two together. So you see, we have reference to our angels, that that’s exactly the way the angel addressed John in Revelation, and we’ll come to that later on, ‘I am of my brethren’, he says, so in God’s eyes He has both earthly sons and heavenly sons; they are one family. No wonder He’s called in the book of Hebrews, the Father of spirits, He is the Father of immortal beings, and the angels are seen as co-labourers, as their brethren. ‘I am thy fellow servant’ said the angel to the apostle John, because the day’s not far away that we will share their nature, we will share their work; we’ll be born of spirit to be like them!
So you see, there is a divine family both in heaven and in earth, that God intends to bring together into one. So then, we ask the question ‘where do the angels come from?’ Come back to Psalm 104, in Psalm 104 we have a psalm which is praising the creative power of God. And we have a bit of a clue as to how the angels came to be that heavenly family. Here’s where we get our title from, Who maketh his Angels spirits, His ministers a flaming fire, it comes from Psalm 104 and from verse 4, look at the context; what we’ve got in Psalm 104 is the psalmist extolling the great power of God’s creative hand. In verse 2, ‘Who coverest Himself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain’, you know, God has established all the solar system just like we would pull a curtain across a window. ‘Who layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters’: He’s made all structures of the foundations of the earth. ‘Who maketh the clouds His chariot: Who walketh upon the wings of the wind’. God is in control of all the elements. And one of the things that God has made, in verse 4, ‘He maketh His angels spirits: His ministers or servants a flaming fire’. So you see, God has made them spirit beings; let’s get it clear of what that actually means, now, sometimes when you say ‘spirit’ people think of invisible creatures floating around that you can’t see. Well, the bible talks about there is a natural body and there is a spiritual body; so if we are a natural body we are earthy, we corrupt, we fade away, we die, and given time we totally disappear. But a spiritual body is a physical body that God has perfected and made immortal, but God has given that body part of His spirit power, and makes it into an immortal physical body; a body that will never die, never corrupt, a body that will last forever. For they have been made spirits by God, you see, God is the only underived immortal; God is the only being that has never gained His immortality from someone else. He is the Uncreate, He’s without beginning. There never was a time when God had to be made, He’s the Eternal, the Infinite, but He’s chosen to share His immortality with people who have pleased Him, and somewhere He made His angels spirit; He made them spirit sons of God.
We don’t know where or when that happened. We do have a clue that they were made spirits as part of their reward. Now, it’s always been a principle with God, as revealed to us, that God rewards those who faithfully go through their time of probation; that’s why we’re going through a time of probation and testing now, that God at the end might reward us. That’s the principle He’s working with us and it seems logical that He’s worked with the angels on that basis; we know from what it says in Genesis chapter 3 and verse 22, the angel said there, ‘the man having now sinned has become as one of us, knowing or appreciating the difference between good and evil’. So with part of the angelic knowledge to understand good and to experience good and evil, it seems very likely therefore, the angels had come through a time of probation or suffering before they were made immortal spirits. So you see, if God has consistently applied the principle of probation before exalting people, then we probably can assume that the angels came out of a similar experience to ours, whether on this earth or some other place, we have no idea, but they were rewarded and made spirits by God, as part of His creative power, they were made into spirit beings.
And in Psalm 103, right at the end, we have a description of the way that God uses them. Let’s read from verse 19, ‘Yahweh hath prepared His throne in the heavens; and His kingdom ruleth over all. Bless Yahweh, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His Word. Bless ye Yahweh, all ye His hosts; ye ministers of His, that do His pleasure’. So there’s the key description for why the angels exist; they excel in strength, they’ve been given spirit beings, they’ve been given God’s power, that they might perform His commandments. They stand by His throne awaiting His direction, they hearken to the voice of His Word. They’re very alert to what God wants done, and ‘all ye His hosts’ or armies as they’re called here, the word ‘host’ should be translated as ‘army’. ‘All ye His armies, ye ministers of His, that do His pleasure. Bless Yahweh all His works’ and the angels are those who preeminently have the opportunity to bless God as they stand around His throne. So you get and idea, don’t you? from Psalm 103 and Psalm 104, of beings that God has made immortal to share His throne, and to perform His work in the earth; and their whole existence is involved in performing the will of God.
In the opening hymn we sang the words of the Lord’s prayer where it says, ‘thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven’, and the Lord Jesus Christ based His prayer for God’s will to be done on the earth, on the fact that God’s will is perfectly performed in heaven. And we know, don’t we, the folly of many who believe, that angels rebelled against God! You’ve probably seen pictures like this, where the different churches believe and portray that, in this particular case, the angel that they call ‘satan’ decided that he had had enough of being second fiddle in the choir, or something like that, and decided to rebel against God, and they then portray, of course, that he lead a rebellion of war and hence they had angels running around the earth who are opposed to the will of God. And that, of course, flies right in the face of what the Lord Jesus Christ said about God’s will being done in heaven. The reason I’ve put this picture up is two-fold; 1. is just to cite that point about the fact that angels do not and could not rebel against the will of God, because God is the One who have made them what they are; and the other reason I’ve put it there is to try at the start of the study to blow away from your minds, some of the perceptions that we get about angels from the pictures we see.
You see, in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries when they started to illustrate the bible, they couldn’t understand how people could fly without swan’s wings. You’ve probably seen pictures like this with great big wings that somehow just attach to the back of the skeleton. Of course, we know, that you don’t need wings to fly! There are examples of prophets who were transported by God, all that meant was they were moved from here to there, like Philip from Azotus to Gaza, very quickly moved around because God wanted them to be there. So forget about the concepts that we might have picked up from books about wings and bows and arrows and little chubby babies up in the corner of the room; all of those little characters that we see, forget about all those ideas! we are talking about spiritual bodies, perfected beings that when they appear on the earth, look like ordinary people! They don’t come round with great big swan’s wings tucked in their jackets. So forget about those concepts and forget about the idea that angels could rebel against God. Christ said, ‘God’s will is done in heaven, they are His servants, they perform His will’.
The mission of the angels, and why they exist is found in their name which was spoken of in the Old Testament and New Testament as ‘messengers’. Consider the word ‘malach’, in the early Old Testament, apart from two references, every time you read about the angels in the Old Testament, you have the word ‘malach’ which means ‘a messenger’ or ‘to send as a deputy’, somebody sent to represent God. There are two exceptions Psalm 8 which talks about the Elohim, we know that refers to the angels, because when Paul quotes Psalm 8 in Hebrews 2, he quotes Elohim as ‘angels’, ‘God hath made Him a little lower than the angels’, so he’s interpreted for us that angels are the Elohim. The only other exception is one in Psalm 78 verse 25 where it talks about ‘Israel ate the bread of the mighty ones’ which of course, is the food of angels, which was the manna which came done in the wilderness.
In the New Testament we have a couple of words, the second really is only a combination of the first one, ‘Aggelos’ it means ‘to carry tidings or a messenger’; it appears as angels 181 times and as messenger 7 times, and the combination word, ‘Isaggelos’ translated ‘like unto the angels’ we find in Luke 20 verse 36. Now that’s interesting they are messengers that perform God’s will, now we come to the point that Greg ask about, why does God choose to use them? Well, God doesn’t need anyone to perform His will, God could perform miracles on the earth without any being, being involved. And when you think about it, God doesn’t even need us in the future, but we know the will of God is to share His glory with other people; and that’s the great wonder about the God that we see. He condescends to include the angels, and He will condescend to include us, as part of His eternal purpose. So the angels have very graciously accepted God’s invitation to be part of His eternal purpose, and we pray one day that we may be invited too! ‘Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world’, is the hope that we have. And you see, that’s the great thing about God, that He’s expanding His glory into other beings, if they will only align themselves with the way that He thinks! That’s what we’re asked to do today, is to prepare ourselves to be part of eternity by getting to know our God and to understand His ways. And that’s why the angels are there, because God has very graciously condescended to include them, He may ….. that they might perform His will and that He might have companions in His eternal existence.
Okay, so they are the messengers of God, that’s their role, to perform the things that He wants done. You find very often in the Old Testament that they’re referred to under the phrase, the ‘Elohim’. Now in our bible that appears as the word ‘God’ the little God, when you read that word, it’s the word ‘Elohim’ in the Hebrew on most occasions you read it, it’s actually referring to an angel. I refer to Jacob when he fought with the angel, he said, ‘I have seen God face to face’. Now he hadn’t starred into the face of the Father, he had starred into the face of the angel who represented GOD on that occasion, ‘I have seen God face to face’, he said; it was the Elohim, it was the mighty one, the Elohim means ‘the mighty one’ so these mighty ones are those who represent God, and we have the principle of God manifestation coming across in the way the angels appear on behalf of GOD. We understand that principle, don’t we, of what God manifestation is? Does everyone understand that? Well, let me just explain it; God manifestation may sound like a big word but it’s very much like if we had a problem with our water meter. We’d ring up and somebody would come to the door and say, ‘I’m from SA Water’ or ‘SA Water’s here to fix your meter’. Now the bloke at the door isn’t SA Water, he’s actually Bill Smith, but from your point of view, he’s come to fix your meter; he’s representing the organization behind it and he comes to the door and says, ‘SA Water here, where’s the meter problem!’ So you see, the individual is there on a task, he’s a messenger, he’s a messenger for the organization. That’s what the angels are, they come along and say to people, God says this and God says that, so they are there to represent God and to appear where God needs to intervene on the earth. In the case of Jacob, God wanted someone to fight with him, so the angel came and Jacob fought with the angel and he said, ‘I have seen God face to face’, in the form of His angel. You know it’s amazing, that’s what I said, that’s one thing I hope you get out of this study, if nothing else, at least in the future you’ll read your bible a little more carefully when it comes to angels!
Let me ask you a question, did Samuel ever see an angel? He did! If you come to 1 Samuel with me, let me show you something; this only dawned on me about 4 months ago, so I don’t claim to be very bright on this, but it’s amazing how you can read something for years and years, and unless you’re actually looking for the angels, you won’t see them! 1 Samuel 3 and verse 10, you all know the incident, here’s Samuel the child in the temple and he hears a voice ringing through the temple saying, ‘Samuel’ and he runs off thinking Eli’s calling him and he does that twice; but what happened the third time? Well, I’ll tell you what happened, it says in verse 10, ‘And Yahweh came and stood‘, ever notice that before? Yahweh came and stood, (now that didn’t dawn on me until 4 months ago), it didn’t say the third time that it was just a voice, it says He came and stood alongside this child and called. I always imagined that this was a voice booming out from the curtains somewhere; it doesn’t say that, it says Yahweh came and stood and said. You see, the angel was there, this was Yahweh and we’re going to deal with this in our second study, but here is the angel that speaks in the first person for God; this is the mightiest of the angels, he doesn’t have to quote God this time. The other angels all say, ‘thus saith God’, this one comes and says, ‘I will do this‘, he is the personal representative of God Himself. They all represent God but this one doesn’t have to quote God, he speaks in the first person for God; and he came and he stood. You see, I’d like to indicate already how differently we can start reading our bibles; that angel, that was Yahweh there!
Another example, just come to Numbers 12, and we have an occasion when there was murmuring against Moses, this time by his own brother and sister. Reading from the end of verse 2, ‘there was this murmuring going on ‘and Yahweh heard it’. Verse 4, ‘And Yahweh spake suddenly and told the three to come up. And Yahweh came down in the pillar of the cloud‘, now the angel was still concealed in a cloud because of the presence of Miriam and Aaron. But the angel came down and stood with these three. Then in verse 9, when he had finished saying what he wanted to say, ‘he departed from them’; but there are numerous passages in the bible where it says that Yahweh came and Yahweh departed, and somehow we’ve been educated over the years just to read over them, but in effect it’s telling us that that angel was standing in this case in the cloud. Miriam and Aaron did not see him, they were told in verse 8 that it was only Moses who would see this one face to face. In verse 8 he says, ‘with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even openly and not in dark speeches, and the similitude of Yahweh shall He behold’. Why did they speak against Moses? You see, Moses was such a great man in the eyes of God , that when he spoke to the angel there was no cloud, no dark signs, there was no voice out of the night; when God spake to Moses through His mighty angel, it was face to face as a man speaks to his friend. And that was the Yahweh angel that came and spoke with Moses in that way!
So you see, the angels do represent God upon the earth; they actually come and appear as extensions of God, to pass on His will to men. We come back to that in our second study a little more; perhaps that’s given you an indication of how to start reading your bible a little differently. Now as a brief, the angelic family are the army of heaven. You often read in the bible the phrase ‘the Lord of hosts’ or Yahweh Sabaoth as it is in the Hebrew, the name of God with an army; the Lord of hosts means Yahweh (the name of God) with His army, Yahweh of armies. And that particular title of God is indicative of God’s power to perform His will, because He is the God who has an army of powerful messengers, whatever He says He’s going to do, He will accomplish. Particularly, we have that title used in context where God is warning people about impending judgment; that’s why the book of Malachi is full of the phrase ‘the Lord of hosts’, the Lord of hosts will do this, because judgment was hanging over their heads and the God of judgment would come with all His mighty angels against them. So when you read the phrase ‘the Lord of hosts’ it’s a title of God indicating He’s a God in control of a mighty army of angelic beings. And what a number there are! And there’s a number of references in the bible that indicate the great number of the angels. I’ll just list them off for you, Heb.12:22 talks about an ‘innumerable company of angels’. Rev. 5:11 you have them described as ten thousand by ten thousand, and the Greek means ‘myriads of myriads’, so to the Greek when you got to ten thousand it wasn’t worth counting any more, so it just became a huge number multiplied by a huge number of angels. And the Lord Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane said to His disciples in Matt.26:53, ‘I could have 12 legions and that was 72,000 angels; just like that, there could have been 72,000 angels at His disposal. And when you think that 2 fairly minor angels turned up to destroy Sodom. And one angel killed 185,000 Assyrians in one night, I wonder what 72,000 could have done to the men of Herod? You see, there are a great number of angels, as we believe there will be a great number of the saints in the age to come! They are a very vast army that God has at His disposal!
So that’s the mechanics about the angels, what their work is, the family relationship they have with God. There’s a reference in Psalm 89 to the angels, and they are likewise called upon to give praise unto God. Let’s just read from verse 5, ‘The heavens shall praise thy wonders O Yahweh: thy faithfulness in the congregation of the saints’, Now you have to understand that ‘saint’s in Hebrew is ‘qadowsh’ which means ‘the holy ones’ and we know it’s talking about the holy ones in heaven here, because it goes on to say, ‘who in heaven can be compared unto Yahweh?’ So the focus of the Psalmist is, let’s elevate God, let’s compare God to everything around Him, even in heaven where there are mighty angels. God exceeds them in His glory. Well, who in heaven can be compared unto Yahweh? who among the sons of the mighty? Just the angels can be likened unto Yahweh. So as glorious as they are, they’re nothing compared to the Father Himself. ‘God is greatly to be feared’ (and God there is El and not Elohim) God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the holy ones and to be had in reverence of all them that are about Him’. Now let’s take it from Rotherham’s translation (Rotherham as you know is a more literal translation of the Hebrew).
Verse 5, ‘So shall the heavens praise thy wondrousness, O Yahweh, Yea, thy faithfulness in the convocation of holy ones’ (and the word ‘convocation’ is ‘kadesh’ in the Hebrew, so it’s the sanctuary of holy ones’) Here’s a glimpse into heaven, here’s God with His angels; it’s a sanctuary.
Verse 6 ‘For whom in the skies can one compare unto Yahweh? or can one liken unto Yahweh, among the sons of the mighty?
Verse 7 ‘A GOD inspiring awe in the circle of the holy ones exceedingly, and to be reverenced above all who are round about Him’. Now the angels are round about the throne of God, that’s where they dwell with God, but GOD inspires awe in them, and they live (not in fear of Him) they live in absolute amazement at the depth and the wonder of our GOD, of the greatness of His mind, of His external existence. But I want you to notice the word used by the Psalmist ‘in the circle of the holy ones’, it’s the Hebrew word ‘cowd’ and it means ‘a gathering in secret to share secrets’. If you want to make a little note of Ezekiel 13 verse 9 in the margin, you will find that a cross reference to where that word’s used in another place in the bible; but it has the idea of a little secret get-together to share information. So the Psalmist describes heaven like it; he says it’s a glorious place where God is the centre of attention, the angels are around about Him, but they mostly share information, they share secrets; they have knowledge amongst themselves, that delights them, and that interests them.
I’m going to show you a case where that was actually revealed to us how that operates. Come to 1 Kings chapter 22, because one of the prophets was given an insight as to what was going on in heaven. This is very instructive, it’s the way God operates and in verse 20, it’s the prophet Micaiah and he was on trial for his life before Ahab and Jehoshaphat, and as expected by Ahab he had not prophesied as Ahab would like him to, so when they pressed him he said in verse 19, ‘Hear thou therefore the word of Yahweh’ (and he now describes a vision that he had, he describes something he’s been shown) and he said, ‘I saw Yahweh sitting on His throne‘. You know, Stephen later on was to say the same thing when he was on trial for his life ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of man standing on the right hand of the Father’; it seems that these men were given a vision to show them what was actually going on in heaven. And Michaiah said, ‘I saw Yahweh on His throne and all the host of heaven (the army of heaven) standing by Him on His right hand and on His left’. In other words, standing around the throne, and you see, what had happened here was that God wanted Ahab to be killed in a certain battle, in a certain way, at a certain time. And Ahab was very reluctant to go to this battle, and there had to be something to move him to go into battle; and of course, the angels are given the task of saying, get Ahab into battle! And the pictures we paint of Michaiah, this was the way that God was going to achieve this. ‘And Yahweh said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ so here’s a conversation, here’s a secret being shared in heaven. There’s a question being asked of the angels, you see, God knows what He wants done and God knows how it will be done, but the angels don’t! And so God puts it to them, how are we going to accomplish this? not as though God needed to find out, or was lost for a solution; what He was doing, was giving them an opportunity to use their initiative!
So what settled this mess? one angel suggested this and another suggested that, ‘And there came forth a spirit (meaning of course a spirit creature, a spiritual body, an angel) ‘and stood before Yahweh and said, I will persuade him. And Yahweh said, wherewith? (what’s your suggestion?) he said, ‘I will go forth and become a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets’ (that idea of a ‘lying spirit’ is actually a ‘spirit of falsehood’ as Rotherham translates it) In other words the angel would go out and create amongst the prophets, whatever motives the prophets might have, these are the false prophets that surrounded the king, he would create amongst them a spirit of falsehood that would be some reason why they’d want to provoke the king and go into that battle. And the angel had found the right suggestion because the reply was, ‘and Yahweh said, thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so’. That’s the right answer, but you know, that angel had worked out what God wanted done; you see, it was no good God just sending down a bolt of lightning and killing Ahab, he had to go into that battle of his own free will, he had to make the choice himself, but God surrounded him with prophets who would give him that advice, whatever their motives, they would give him bad advice, and he’d go into battle as God required.
And the angel that had the right suggestion got the job; ‘that’s right’ God said, ‘you go and do it’. That angel had to remember that in Judges 9 verse 23, when God wanted to send a vision amongst the men of Shechem in the time of the judges, that the same thing had been done then, as it says, ‘God sent an evil spirit amongst the men of Shechem’, He created rivalries and tensions and jealousy so that they gave some pricking advice, and you see, what God does is to work providentially behind the scenes to cause people to make decisions, in this case to get the king into battle where God wanted him! Do you know what happened when he got to battle? Well, look at verse 34, here’s king Ahab in battle and he’s actually disguised himself to look like an ordinary soldier; nobody really knows he’s there. And it says in verse 34, ‘A certain man drew a bow at a venture’ (the margin says, at his innocency) here’s a man that says, there’s one hour left, there’s a whole battlefield here, what am I going to do with this one arrow; and he decides to shoot it up in the air. And you can just see the angel, now remember what’s going to happen to Ahab; he’s got to die but he’s got to die of loss of blood, because his blood’s got to get back to the pool of Samaria and that’s a long way away from where he is in Ramath-gilead. So he’s got to die in such a way that the chariot will be filled with blood; and there’s an arrow up in the air clinging in the battlefield, and here’s a man in a chariot that’s not standing still, he’s ripping along and the angel just directs that arrow right into his shoulder blade. Can you see the angel doing that? See, that’s the way the angels work; they want him to die of loss of blood and it hit him as we read there ‘in the joints of the harness’ and he told them ‘carry me out of the host for I am wounded. And the king was stayed up in his chariot’ in verse 35, ‘and he died at even from loss of blood’. The blood was running out of the chariot, but that’s how the angels work, isn’t it? That was the thing that God required for the destruction of Ahab, but the thing we want to take from this is the way God let the angels use their initiative; He didn’t just say, ‘right, this is the way we’re going to do it’, and He laid it all out. No, He said this is the task, what do you think! and they were allowed to offer suggestions; in the end, the one with the right idea got the job. God invited their contributions, and that’s a fascinating insight into the way that heaven works.
You know if the prophet hadn’t seen this, he would be alive; he had actually been given a vision of what went on in heaven, that he might put it before the king. See, that’s a really important element, isn’t it? the way that God deals with His companions. He’s chosen to include them in His work, but they are not robots; you know, sometimes we think about the angels as merely being dispassionate robots, but these are feeling creatures. They have tremendous emotions, we’re going to see the tremendous joy of the angels, the sadness of the angels and the love of the angels. You know, when the angel came to Daniel he said, ‘Oh, man greatly beloved‘. He hadn’t been told to say that, that’s the way the angels thought about Daniel. That’s why the angel said to John, ‘John don’t worship me, I’m one of your brethren, and we love the prophets, we’re your fellow servants’. See, there was great feeling from the angels towards Daniel; ‘Oh, man greatly beloved, I am come to your words’. We’re going to see the feelings and the initiative of the angels as we go through these things.
It is a wonderful picture that God is going to constantly educate us and increase our understanding of things, and we’ll be in the kingdom, encouraged to use our intelligence. We won’t always be told how things will work out, we’ll be given a task to do, but we’ll be expected to use the application of the divine principles we’ve learnt, and to use our initiative. What God will not do is to let us fail! and God will never let an angel fail to accomplish the task to which they’ve been given. They might have some trouble with it, but God will never let them fail! And you know, sometimes they’ll have to try different things to work out which one will work.
And we’re just going to draw our final exhortation from this fact that angels don’t know everything, they’re expected to use their initiative and that when it actually works, is a source of great enjoyment for them. You know, angels are mighty beings so that when the woman came to David and said that ‘your wisdom is such that it’s almost like an angels’ so the angels were a simile of great wisdom. Tremendously vast knowledge but compared to God, the angels don’t know very much at all, in fact, there’s a verse in Job which says if you were comparing God with these angels, Job 4:18 says ‘Behold, He put no trust in His servants; and His angels He charged with folly’. So if you were making an comparison with angels, they would look rather stupid alongside God, because He knows everything, they don’t know everything. I want you to come with me to Daniel chapter 10, and let’s just draw from that reading that we had, some very important lessons about the limitations of angelic knowledge, and why that is! Because the angels do not know everything! In Daniel chapter 10 we have the appearance of Gabriel to the man Daniel, (and we’ll go into his appearance later on in another study). It was Gabriel that came to him as we can pick up from chapter 9 (I want you to notice what is actually going on here), we come to verse 21, this is Gabriel speaking, ‘I will show thee that which is noted in the scripture of truth: and there is none that holdeth with me in these things, but Michael your prince’. Now we know Michael is an archangel, we’re told that in Jude verse 9, that Michael is an archangel, that is, a chief angel; the word ‘prince’ there means ‘a chief angel’ (and we’ll talk about Michael in our next study), but there were two angels in the bible that appeared to have extremely important roles i.e. Michael and Gabriel. And we know more about them than all the other angels, because these are the two angels that shared the control over the divine calendar. When it came to how nations needed to be moved and when, there were only two, he says, there’s only myself and Michael who would understand these things. There’s no one else in the host of heaven that really knows all the times and the movements that have to be made, except myself and Michael. So the two of them shared the time band, they were the two angels that saw the big picture. You find on a couple of occasions in the book of Daniel, other angels asking them for information. How long? when’s this going to be? what does that mean? and there are seemingly these two mighty angels for information! But only two of them had the big picture of the time plan of God, but even those two angels didn’t know everything!
For example, the Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘of that day and hour (that is, the day of His coming) knoweth no man, no not the angels which are in heaven; neither the Son but the Father’. So the day in which the Lord Jesus Christ leaves heaven, is not known to anyone except God, (maybe Christ knows it now that He’s gone to heaven), but the angels, even these two mighty angels that knew all the other time plans of God, do not know the day when Christ will leave heaven. So you see, their knowledge has been limited in some areas. The other angels who work at their command and under their direction know even less, and even Gabriel did not know exactly what things would work and what things would not work. Look at verse 13, now he’s trying to explain to Daniel why he took three weeks to respond to Daniel’s prayer. God doesn’t ignore prayers, the angel had taken three week’s to respond to Daniel. He said, ‘I heard your words, from the first day you started praying, I heard your prayer; and I’m come for your words’, but here’s why I didn’t get here for 3 weeks. It’s really funny isn’t it? here is a mighty angel explaining to a man why he took so long! ‘But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia’. You see, Gabriel had been given the task to move the king of Persia in a certain direction, and he had a deadline; but for 3 weeks whatever he tried had not worked, until in the end as the deadline was approaching, Michael came along and said, ‘Why don’t you try this’. In fact, we know that Michael on many occasions, is perhaps greater than Gabriel because he directs Gabriel. He says, ‘make this man to understand the vision’, Gabriel, go there! See, Michael is known in the bible as ‘the commander’, in the end, Gabriel had to get Michael to help him and then to move the kingdom of Persia in accordance with the will of God. And the point we want to take from that is, he didn’t know exactly what would work; in the end he had to get some help from Michael to accomplish that work. But when things had moved, the kingdom of Persia had gone this way, and he says now, ‘I remained there with the kings of Persia’. And, of course, the Persian kingdom was made up, of course, of both Medes and Persians; there were two kings of Persia and you see, the coming to power in the world of the Persian empire was very much a work of God!.
Look at chapter 11 and verse 1 (forget the chapter division, it shouldn’t be there), he says, ‘look I’m going to explain to you, Daniel, what’s going on in the world. I’m trying to explain why I was late; He says, there’s a lot of things happening out there. The kingdom of Greece held me up for three weeks and now I’m working on the kings of Persia; and it’s been a hard job. They’re not dumb and they’re not responding like I thought they should, and in the end Michael had to come and help me. And only Michael and I know what’s really going on here; but he says, look at this, and I’ll read the Hebrew in chapter 11 and verse 1 as it should be because it’s very emphatic in the Hebrew, it says, ‘also I, in the first year of Darius the Mede, even I stood to confirm him and to strengthen him’, in other words, the Persians are there now in power in the world, and it’s my work that’s been accomplished, and there’s a real sense of triumph in those words. I, in the first year of Darius, even I, was behind the throne of the Persians. You see, he’d been given the job of organizing the Persians and the Greeks and the handover of the power from the Persians to the Greeks, but he’s behind it. He said, I’m holding that throne together, and there’s a sense of triumph and achievement in his words, because the initiative, the things that he had tried had borne fruit, and he was now rejoicing in the fact, and now will I show you the truth.
And then he goes on to explain the rest of the plan; ‘there’s going to be 3 kings of Persia, and the 4th will be richer’ and he goes on to outline it, but here’s an angel that’s in control of the divine calendar, but he’s got a sense of personal triumph in there. You know, brethren and sisters and young people, in the kingdom of God for us, there’s going to be very similar experiences; we know what the work is that God has for us to do, and that is to bring the whole world to understand His purpose; to educate the whole world that survives, that in the end there might be a total world giving glory to God.
And we might be given the task of going to one city or two cities or five cities, that we might educate them in divine things; that we might change their hearts so they might grow to be like God. And you won’t be given all the answers, it won’t be like a textbook case where if you do this, this, and this it will work in every case. We’re going to go out to people who’ve been living for years in ignorance, all of them given a nature, even the following generation, given the same human nature that we’ve been contending with. And we’ll have great powers to heal and do miracles, we’ll have great knowledge to understand divine things, not as we struggle today to get our minds around it. Then we’ll be able to clearly see divine things, we’ll even have the ability to read people’s minds, we’ll have some degree of foreknowledge of what’s lying ahead; but we won’t know everything! See even Gabriel didn’t know exactly what would work on the king of Persia; but we’re required by God to apply principles and to use our initiative, and God will make sure that we never fail, but in the process He’ll provide lots of triumphs for us! as we see the work eventually coming to pass.
Ahead of us, as it was for the angels, interesting and exciting times, why do you think the angels sang their hearts out over the hills of Bethlehem? because 4,000 years of work had now come to its fruition! and to be given all sorts of jobs to go out and fill up beds with people; they didn’t understand why they were filling up beds with people, stacking up every bed with people so there were no beds, so just like Joseph they ended up in a stable. They turned the whole world upside down, everybody had to go to their home village to get one couple to Bethlehem at the right time, just when she was about to deliver a child. They’d been moving stars about in the heavenly bodies; can you imagine the angels sent out and someone saying, ‘I want that star to go over these men in the east to show them the way’? And there’s an angel pushing a star into place, and all of a sudden it all comes together; why do you thing they sang their hearts out? because at last, they saw the big picture, they saw how all there little contributions over the years, had all been working towards this end. And that’s what our experience will be like in the kingdom, a chance to use our initiative; God will make it an interesting and exciting experience for us and extremely rewarding, and ours will be like David saying, ‘See those people there going up to the temple, that’s my work’! and we’ll be allowed by God to rejoice in that, as he rejoiced in the things that he accomplished for God there!
So, b&s, we have in the angels tremendous inspiration for the future role that we have. And God willing as we get to the camp at Hebron, we’ll be able to talk more about the mighty archangels. There are many things that the angels can teach us about our relationship to God; let’s just go away tonight and try and ponder upon the great fact that God has chosen to include us in eternity, and to thank God that we’re not living without hope, but we are living connected to an eternal family of sons in heaven and in earth.
Study 1: Introduction