Notes on Angels

 

Angels

 

 (Latin angelus; Greek aggelos; from the Hebrew for "one going" or "one sent"; messenger). The word is used in Hebrew to denote either a divine or human messenger.   It is the spirit-messenger

 

      The angels are represented throughout the Bible as a body of spiritual beings intermediate between God and men: "You have made him (man) a little less than the angels" (Psalm 8:6) They are spirits; the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says: "Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to minister to them who shall receive the inheritance of salvation?" (Heb. I, 14).

 

 Attendants at God's throne it is as messengers that they most often figure in the Bible.

 

 This function of the angelic host is expressed by the word "assistance" (Job, i, 6: ii, 1), and our More than once we are told of seven angels whose special function it is thus to "stand before God's throne" The same thought may be intended by "the angel of His presence"  

 

 God's messengers to mankind

 

 ‘These glimpses of life beyond the veil are only occasional’. The angels of the Bible generally appear in the role of God's messengers to mankind. They are His instruments by whom He communicates His will to men, and in Jacob's vision they are depicted as ascending and descending the ladder which stretches from earth to heaven while the Eternal Father gazes upon the wanderer below. It was an angel who found Agar in the wilderness (Gen., xvi); angels drew Lot out of Sodom; an angel announces to Gideon that he is to save his people; an angel foretells the birth of Samson (Judges, xiii), and the angel Gabriel instructs Daniel (Dan.,viii, 16), though he is not called an angel in either of these passages, but "the man Gabriel" (9:21). The same heavenly spirit announced the birth of St. John the Baptist and the Incarnation of the Redeemer, while tradition ascribes to him both the message to the shepherds (Luke, ii, 9), and the most glorious mission of all, that of strengthening the King of Angels in His Agony (Luke 22:43). The spiritual nature of the angels is manifested very clearly in the account, which Zacharias gives of the revelations bestowed upon him by the ministry of an angel. The prophet depicts the angel as speaking "in him". He seems to imply that he was

 Conscious of an interior voice, which was not that of God but of His messenger. 

 

 Such appearances of angels generally last only so long as the delivery of their message

 Requires, but frequently their mission is prolonged, and they are represented as the constituted guardians of the nations at some particular crisis, e.g. during the Exodus

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 Personal guardians

 

 Throughout the Bible we find it repeatedly implied that each individual soul has its tutelary angel. Thus Abraham, when sending his steward to seek a wife for Isaac, says: "He will send His angel before thee" (Genesis 24:7). The words of the ninetieth Psalm which the devil quoted to our Lord (Matt., iv, 6) are well known, and Judith accounts for her heroic deed by saying: "As the Lord liveth, His angel hath been my keeper" (xiii, 20).

   St. Jerome in his commentary on the above words of our Lord says: "The dignity of a soul is so great, that each has a guardian angel from its birth." The general doctrine that the angels are our appointed guardians is considered to be a point of faith, but that each individual member of the human race has his own individual guardian angel is not of faith (de fide); the view has, however, such strong support from the Doctors of the Church that it would be rash to deny it.

 

 

 

 Hierarchical organization

 

After Adam's fall Paradise is guarded against our First Parents by cherubim who are clearly God's ministers, though nothing is said of their nature. St. Paul has furnished us with two other lists of names of the heavenly cohorts. He tells us (Ephes., i, 21) that Christ is raised up "above all principality, and power, and virtue, and dominion"; and, writing to the Colossians he says: "In Him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominations, or principalities or powers." It is to be noted that he uses two of these names of the powers of darkness when (ii, 15) he talks of Christ as "despoiling the principalities and powers . . . triumphing over them in Himself". And it is not a little remarkable those only two verses later he warns his readers not to be seduced into any "religion of angels". He seems to put his seal upon a certain lawful angelology. We have a hint of such excesses in the Book of Enoch, wherein, as already stated, the angels play a quite disproportionate part. Similarly Josephus tells us (Be. Jud. II, viii, 7) that the Essences had to take a vow to preserve the names of the angels.  We have already seen how (Daniel 10:12-21) various districts are allotted to various angels who are termed their princes, and the same feature reappears still more markedly in the Apocalyptic "angels of the seven churches", though it is impossible to decide what is the precise signification of the term. These seven Angels of the Churches are generally regarded as being the Bishops occupying these sees.

 

 The treatise "De Coelesti Hierarchia", which is ascribed to St. Denis the Areopagite, and which exercised so strong an influence upon the Scholastics, treats at great length of the hierarchies and orders of the angels. It is generally conceded that this work was not due to St.Denis, but must date some centuries later. Though the doctrine it contains regarding the choirs of angels has been received in the Church with extraordinary unanimity, no proposition touching the angelic hierarchies is binding on our faith. The following passages from St. Gregory the Great will give us a clear idea of the view of the Church's doctors on the point:

 

  We know on the authority of Scripture that there are nine orders of angels,

      Angels, Archangels, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Dominations, Throne,

      Cherubim and Seraphim. That there are Angels and Archangels nearly every

      Page of the Bible tell us, and the books of the Prophets talk of Cherubim and

      Seraphim. St. Paul, too, writing to the Ephesians enumerates four orders when

      He says: 'above all Principality, and Power, and Virtue, and Domination'; and

      Again, writing to the Colossians he says: 'whether Thrones, or Dominations, or

      Principalities, or Powers'.

 

 St. Thomas (Summa Theologica I:108), following St. Denis (De Coelesti Hierarchia, vi, vii), divides the angels into three hierarchies each of which contains three orders. Their proximity to the Supreme Being serves as the basis of this division. In the first hierarchy he places the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; in the second, the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; in the third, the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The only Scriptural names furnished of individual angels are Raphael, Michael, and Gabriel, names, which signify their respective attributes. Apocryphal Jewish books, such as the Book of Enoch, supply those of Uriel and Jeremiel, while many are found in other apocryphal sources, like those Milton names in "Paradise Lost".

 

 The number of angels

 

 The number of the angels is frequently stated as prodigious (Daniel 7:10; Apocalypse 5:11; Psalm 67:18; Matthew 26:53). From the use of the word host (sabaoth) as a synonym for the heavenly army it is hard to resist the impression that the term "Lord of Hosts" refers to God's Supreme command of the angelic multitude (cf. Deuteronomy 33:2; 32:43; Septuagint).

 

 

 The evil angels

 

 The distinction of good and bad angels constantly appears in the Bible, but it is instructive to note that there is no sign of any dualism or conflict between two equal principles, one good and the other evil. The conflict depicted is rather that waged on earth between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the Evil One, but the latter's inferiority is always supposed. The existence, then, of this inferior, and therefore created, spirit, has to be explained. The gradual development of Hebrew consciousness on this point is very clearly marked in the inspired writings. The account of the fall of our First Parents (Gen., iii) is couched in such terms that it is impossible to see in it anything more than the acknowledgment of the existence of a principle of evil that was jealous of the human race.  It should moreover be noted that the Hebrew word nephilim rendered gigantes, in 6:4, may mean "fallen ones". The Fathers generally refer it to the sons of Seth.

 

 The picture afforded us in Job, i and ii, is equally imaginative; but Satan, perhaps the earliest individualization of the fallen Angel, is presented as an intruder who is jealous of Job.  In Job. iv, 18, we seem to find a definite declaration of the fall: "In His angels He found wickedness." The Septuagint of Job contains some instructive passages regarding avenging angels in whom we are perhaps to see fallen spirits. xxi, 15: "The riches unjustly accumulated shall be vomited up, an angel shall drag him out of his house;"

 

. In some of these passages, it is true; the angels may be regarded as avengers of God's justice without therefore being evil spirits.  In New Testament times the idea of the two spiritual kingdoms is clearly established. The devil is a fallen angel who in his fall has drawn multitudes of the heavenly host in his train. Our Lord terms him "the Prince of this world" (John xiv, 30); he is the tempter of the human race and tries to involve them in his fall. Christian imagery of the devil as the dragon is mainly derived from the Apocalypse (ix, 11-15; xii, 7-9), where he is termed "the angel of the bottomless pit", "the dragon", "the old serpent", etc., and is represented as having actually been in combat with Archangel Michael. The similarity between scenes such as these and the early Babylonian accounts of the struggle between Merodach and the dragon Tiamat is very striking.

 

rank is intended, as in Is., lxiii, 9 (cf. Tobias, xii, 15)? May not this be what is meant by "the angel of God" (cf. Num., xx, 16)?

 

 That a process of evolution in theological thought accompanied the gradual unfolding of God's revelation need hardly be said.

Incarnation; as the Word of God the sublime character in which He is one day to reveal Himself to men.

 

 But the great Latins, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory the Great, held the clearly styles Christ the 'Angel of great Counsel.'"   He concludes: "It is the name of the indweller, not of the temple."

 

Angels In Babylonian Literature

 

 The Bible has shown us that a belief in angels, or spirits intermediate between God and man, is a characteristic of the Semitic people. It is therefore interesting to trace this belief in the Semites of Babylonia. According to Sayce (The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, Gifford Lectures, 1901), the engrafting of Semitic beliefs on the earliest Sumerian religion of Babylonia is marked by the entrance of angels or sukallin in their theosophy. Thus we find an interesting parallel to "the angels of the Lord" in Nebo, "the minister of Merodach" (ibid. 355). He is also termed the "angel" or interpreter of the will or Merodach (ibid., 456),

 

  Suffice it to say that not everything in the Bible is revelation, and that the object of the inspired writings is not merely to tell us new truths but also to make clearer certain truths taught us by nature. The modern view, which tends to regard everything Babylonian as absolutely primitive and which seems to think that because critics affix a late date to the Biblical writings the religion therein contained must also be late, may be seen in Haag,"Theologie Biblique" (339). This writer sees in the Biblical angels only primitive deities debased into demi-gods by the triumphant progress of Monotheism.

 

Some notes on the common angels:

 

Each Archangel has legions of angles to answer his call. Angels can be looked upon as those who endeavor to awaken our inner consciousness.

The term angel is a term used to describe all dwellers of heaven.

 

Archangel Michael – ‘Who is like God’ – ‘ the great Prince’, ‘ Above all’. He is known as the Defender of all of God’s people. Scripture tells us is Michael who kicked Lucifer and his rebellious fallen angels our of heaven. All sacred scriptures recognize Michael. It is Michael who is believed to have rescued Daniel from the lion’s den and also appeared as the fire of the burning bush to Moses.

 

Archangel Gabriel – God’s spiritual messenger who brings good news. It was Gabriel who informed the Virgin Mary that she would bring forth a son and would call him the name Jesus. It was Gabriel is the messenger angel who appeared and brought a revelation to Muhammad on the “Night of the Power and Glory”. In Islam Gabriel is the Angel of Humanity.

 

Archangel Raphael – Known as the divine healer, interested in God’s pilgrim travelers, his names means God Has Healed. This high archangel is responsible for the healing of the earth

 

Archangel Uriel – His name means the “Light of God” According to the Book of Enoch id was Uriel who was sent by God to warn Noah of the impending flood. One of his many titles is Preside Over Hades; another is The Archangel of Salvation.

 

“All that I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen” – Ralph Waldo Emerson