Do You Believe in Angels?
Do you believe in Angels?
If you are religious, I’m assuming you do (or if you don’t, may I humbly suggest you haven’t been paying enough attention to what you are supposed to be reading). We know there are Angels in the Bible: or, at the least, angelic beings. There is also clear reference to such beings in the writings of the Islamic and Bahá'í Faiths: two other Abrahamic religions.
Angels aren’t just for the religious, of course, given their regular appearance in popular culture (City of Angels comes straight to mind, even if it is mainly because of that Goo Goo Dolls song). One might even suggest a fundamental part of the human condition is inclined towards the belief that there are angelic beings, or spirits, who are available to assist us in our lives. While for some this might be in a metaphorical sense, for others — often those who follow religious scriptures — it is held in a very real, more tangible sense: Angels exist, and they are there to help us.
But do we have to believe in them first?
What historical scriptural evidence do we have for the existence of Angels? It would seem unfair to start anywhere except the Bible, given it has been the gateway drug for so many to the existence of an angelic force in the world.
To understand the Biblical perspective of Angels, we must first understand a related term: Elohim. As explained by Dr. Michael Heiser (whose books The Unseen Realm and Supernatural give a thorough account of the supernatural aspects of the Bible) Elohim is a term used in the original Hebrew version to mean any being that does not occupy an earthly plane. You can get the full rundown of the term and its relation to the supernatural world here and here.
So, the TL;DR then (something I need to work on). Typical church doctrine, according to Heiser, is that there is one God — The God, typically referred to directly as Yahweh — reigning in His entirety over Earth. Yet in passages such as Psalm 82, which include ‘plural exhortations’ of the word Elohim, we have clear evidence of more gods — maybe even many gods! — who reside in this spiritual realm.
“God [Elohim] stands in the divine assembly; he administers judgement in the midst of the gods [Elohim]” (Lexham English Bible).
These Elohim can be of many types — occupying different stations, serving different roles, and being designated varying degrees of morality. ‘Angels’ can be understood as a particular subset of all Elohim, based on these different characteristics — although perhaps not always the ones we might think. For example, we would probably associate Angels as having a higher station than other pleb supernaturals, but this is not always the case. Strictly speaking, Angels are those Elohim who are given the fairly mundane duty of passing on messages from the spiritual to the earthly world: Angel literally translates to messenger. In this way, they might be seen as divine delegates on Earth: faithfully carrying out various tasks and errands that ensure a sense of order to God’s governance of humans.
There are several other juicy tidbits that can be drawn out, and drawn out by Heiser they are, given he literally wrote the book about Angels in the Bible (called ‘Angels’, in case you were wondering). This is my favourite tidbit: Angels are not strictly defined as being ‘holy’. Angel in the original Hebrew context actually had no moral value — that is, an Angel was neither inherently good or bad. In the New Testament context and beyond, however, it has come to be associated exclusively as those spiritual beings acting under the will of the Divine. While such divine Angels are the focus of his book, Heiser has also written a separate compilation on less-holy demonic beings: handy for my upcoming exploration of Satan and comrades.
Thus, while the main defining quality of Angels (remembering that they are ultimately a type of Elohim) is that they are of the spiritual world occupied by God, that does not mean they are in any way at the same station as God. Rather, they remain imperfect spiritual beings, subject to choose the way of the Creator, or to fall in the same way we are — case in point being the events of Genesis 6 elaborated on in the Book of Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This is, when you think about it, an impressively New Age view; just as in this archetype card, the Bible also agrees that Angels have their shadow side.
Another worthy contribution Heiser makes is providing a rundown of the most notable angels that appear throughout the Bible text, even if there isn’t much of a rundown to provide.
In a bit of a head scratcher, the aforementioned singular God Yahweh — who many of us would imagine as an entity so inscrutable as to be beyond anthropomorphism — appears on several occasions as an Angel in material form. This is the first hint that there is more to the figure of Yahweh than we might assume, but that topic is also for another time.
We do have some familiar faces: the archangels Gabriel and Michael. Despite their notoriety, they are disappointingly only given cameo roles at best. Both appear in the book of Daniel, where they are in fact the only two angels (aside from Yahweh) mentioned in the Bible.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little let down by what we can learn about Angels from the Bible, although perhaps it had more pressing spiritual issues to go into depth on. Nonetheless, with the help of diligent commentators like Heiser, there are still some valuable takeaways to be had.
One thing I appreciate about Heiser’s analysis, when he isn’t getting bogged down in nitty gritty literalism, is how he always brings things back to a practical, material world context. And in this way, perhaps the key takeaway from his book is that Angels are actually not that different to us: sure, they occupy a spiritual world rather than a material one, but they inevitably operate under and serve the Creator in the same imperfect way we do.
We mustn’t limit ourselves only to the conventional Christian perspective on the angelic archetype. Angels are also in the Qurʾān, with both parallels between and some interesting contrasts to the Bible.
Perhaps the most interesting difference between the two texts is to do with the morality of Angels. Whereas in the Bible (and elaborated on in the Dead Sea Scrolls) Angels clearly demonstrate their ability to exercise personal agency and ‘fall’ away from God’s will, Angels have no such leeway in the Qurʾān; they are strictly obedient to God and his commands.
While this seems on face value like a fairly heinous whitewashing of free will, perhaps it is more a matter of distinction rather than a profound spiritual anomaly between the texts. As well as these dedicated light walkers, we do also have entities that might be compared to the Biblical fallen angels: the mysterious ‘djinn’, which would be best discussed in more detail alongside negative Biblical archetypes like demons, the devil and satan.
So, as per before, let’s focus just on the good guys (and, sorry ladies, they do still appear to be all guys #notfeminism). We have Gabriel (clearly the chief Angel, being responsible for communication between Allah and His prophets) and Michael (given the more cryptic role of managing ‘rainfall and sustenance’). We also get a few more mentioned by name: notably Raphael, who gets the fortunate if likely nerve-racking, bugle-player-on-ANZAC-Day job of blowing the infamous trumpet that signals the end of the world. We also get a couple of Angels with more ominous roles: Azrael (also known as Malak Am-Maut) as the Angel of Death, and Malik as the guardian of Hell.
Gabriel is worth elaborating on. As suggested above, Gabriel is framed as the Archangel of the Qurʾān, given his role as messenger (that term again) between God and His prophets — most notably the Prophet Muhammad. His real name (Jibreel) can be translated literally to Holy Spirit, giving him essentially the same station as the third pillar of the Christian trinity along side God and Jesus. The presence of Gabriel, revealed only to a lucky few throughout history, therefore represents the closest the earthly world gets to the presence of God.
Finally we get to the Bahá'í Writings, which also make extensive mention of Angels. While the vibe often comes across as more metaphorical than literal, it still seems clear that Angels are indeed real beings.
One of the central texts of the Faith — The Kitáb-i-Íqán — provides an interpretation of the meaning of Angels as mentioned by Muhammad: those individuals who have purified their souls to such an extent that they, to all intents and purposes, transitioned into the spiritual world entirely. On frequent occasions, often in prayers, Bahá'í believers are reassured of the over-presence of angelic beings — a concourse or company on high — ready and waiting to aid those seeking to forward God’s will on Earth. This assistance need not be in physical form, but more simply in the form of divine ‘confirmations’ that God always has our back.
A theme of many Bahá'í prayers is the transformation of our souls into angelic souls. Here we make a nice circle back to the Bible, in the realisation that perhaps we really aren’t so fundamentally different than Angels as we might think. If we are instead to believe these texts, we all have the potential to be Angels ourselves one day, destined for the same spiritual world that they now occupy. Perhaps this is the best way to understand heaven: not floating around passively in the clouds, passing the time until eternity, but still getting our hands dirty in the spiritual war of good vs evil — this time from a higher vantage point and a broadened perspective on the true nature of the battle we are engaged in.
All because of you
I believe in Angels
Not the kind with wings
No, not the kind with halos
The kind that bring you home
When home becomes a strange place
I’ll follow your voice.
This quote is from one of my favourite songs from my past emo life, by a band called Rise Against. It is, I would wager, not about real Angels, but probably about a ‘girl’. Despite (or perhaps because of) this fact, it describes my thoughts on Angels almost perfectly.
Few of us, unless a sudden supernatural awakening occurs, will know Angels in any physical form. Such literal angelic beings therefore really shouldn’t be what we are focused on, lest we miss the obvious signs. Angels will work in less tangible ways, or whatever obvious-to-subtle way is required: they will do whatever it takes to get the job done.
We know them, and we can tell them, by the way their purpose, their mission, manifests in our lives. And again, we get back to the Bible at its most straightforward: an Angel is a Messenger. But of what?
While a variety of messages are needed for every individual person on their own unique life path, perhaps Angels ultimately serve to communicate one profound thing: the existence of a divine strand that runs through the chaotic tapestry of life. Every life. The message will always be there: whether we choose to accept that message and the spiritual assistance it offers is entirely our choice.
And this last point is really important. You can’t help people who do not want to help themselves — similarly, you can’t point people in the direction of the divine if they haven’t first chosen to believe in its existence. Free will is absolute, and no-one gets a free pass if they choose to see only that which leads to darkness.
Angels then most certainly exist all around us, patiently waiting to be of service. Waiting, perhaps, for us to be sufficiently detached from the transitory things of this life, and to put enough attention towards the spiritual so that we can begin to see them with our own eyes, in whatever form that takes.
For those who have decided that this material world is not our true home, Angels wait to help us to this home. But only once we believe in them.