What are cherubim and seraphim?

Question 8116.

Whatever else cherubim and seraphim are, they are not the plump winged infants of Renaissance ceilings, and the gap between the artistic tradition and the biblical description is one of the more comical failures in the history of Christian imagination. Scripture describes beings that make prophets fall on their faces. Art gave us babies with bows.

So let me set out what the Bible actually says about these two named orders, where each appears, how they differ, and why any of it should matter to a believer who is unlikely to meet one this side of glory.

Two named orders

Scripture gives us very few angelic categories by name. There are angels in general, there are archangels, there are the principalities and powers of Ephesians 6, and there are cherubim and seraphim. That is close to the whole list, which should make us cautious about the elaborate nine-fold hierarchies that circulate in Christian tradition and owe more to a sixth-century writer than to the Bible.

Both words are Hebrew plurals. One cherub, many kerubim. One saraph, many seraphim. Adding an s to either, as English speakers habitually do, is a small solecism that betrays how unfamiliar we are with the material.

The two orders are never mentioned together in a single passage. That has led some readers to wonder whether cherubim and seraphim are two names for one group. I do not think so, since the descriptions differ and the settings differ, but the caution is fair and I would not be dogmatic.

Cherubim: the guardians

The first appearance is at the worst moment in human history. Adam and Eve are driven out, and God places cherubim at the east of the garden with a flaming sword turning every way to guard the way to the tree of life. Their first recorded function is to keep sinners away from what is holy.

That function then runs right through the Old Testament. Two cherubim of hammered gold are made for the mercy seat, facing each other with wings overshadowing it, and God tells Moses he will speak with him from between them. Cherubim are woven into the curtains of the tabernacle and carved into the walls and doors of Solomon’s temple. Wherever the presence of God is localised, cherubim are around it.

Ezekiel gives us the fullest description, and he identifies the four living creatures of his opening vision as cherubim in chapter 10. Four faces, four wings, human hands, wheels full of eyes. I have worked through that vision in detail in what the living creatures in Ezekiel and Revelation are.

Seraphim: the burning ones

The seraphim appear once, in Isaiah 6, and the passage is short enough that we know very little and vivid enough that we do not forget it. Isaiah sees the Lord high and lifted up, his robe filling the temple, and above him stand the seraphim, each with six wings. Two cover the face, two cover the feet, and with two they fly.

The name means burning ones, from a root used elsewhere of fire and of burning. Whether that describes their appearance, their function in purging, or the intensity of their existence near the throne, Isaiah does not say. What he records is their cry, which they call to one another antiphonally: holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory.

The detail I find most arresting is the wings. Four of the six are used for covering. These are unfallen beings, sinless, in the immediate presence of God, and they still veil themselves. If they cover their faces, our casualness about the presence of God begins to look rather odd.

How cherubim and seraphim differ

The differences are real, though the evidence is thin enough that I would hold conclusions lightly. Cherubim have four wings in Ezekiel; seraphim have six. Cherubim are consistently associated with guarding the holy, with the ark, and with the mobile throne. Seraphim are associated with the throne room, with proclamation, and with cleansing.

The one action a seraph performs is instructive. He takes a burning coal from the altar with tongs, touches Isaiah’s mouth with it, and declares his guilt taken away and his sin atoned for. That is the only time in Scripture an angelic being is described applying cleansing to a man, and it is done with fire from the altar rather than on the seraph’s own authority.

So a rough distinction would be that cherubim guard the holiness of God and seraphim proclaim it. Both are wrong when treated as a hierarchy of importance, which is exactly what later tradition did with them. Scripture is not interested in ranking cherubim and seraphim. It is interested in what they show us about the one they surround.

What they are not

They are not human beings who have died. The persistent folk belief that people become angels is not taught anywhere in Scripture and cuts against a great deal that is. Angels are a separate order of created being, and our destiny is a resurrected body rather than a promotion into the angelic ranks.

They are not to be prayed to, venerated, or invoked. The apostle John twice falls at the feet of an angel in Revelation and is twice told to stop and to worship God instead. If cherubim and seraphim exist to direct attention away from themselves, a devotion aimed at them has misunderstood them completely.

And they are not cherubs in the artistic sense. The word cherub in English has drifted so far that it now means a rosy toddler. The biblical cherub carries a flaming sword. I labour this because the sentimental picture quietly teaches people that the heavenly realm is charming, and nothing in Ezekiel or Isaiah supports that.

Satan and the covering cherub

Ezekiel 28 addresses the prince of Tyre in language that outgrows any human king, speaking of one who was in Eden, the anointed guardian cherub, blameless in his ways until unrighteousness was found in him. I take this, along with the parallel passage about the king of Babylon, as addressing the human ruler while giving us the fuller reality standing behind him.

If that reading is right, then Satan belonged to the highest order we know of. The being who guarded holiness became the one who assaults it, and the being closest to the throne became its enemy. That is a sobering thought about proximity to God being no guarantee of anything at all.

I hold the dual reference without forcing an either-or, and I have set out the passage more fully in what the covering cherub in Ezekiel 28 is. What it establishes for our purposes is that cherubim and seraphim are creatures, with wills, capable of falling.

Why the imagery was commanded

Here is something worth pausing over. God forbade Israel to make carved images, and then commanded them to make cherubim in gold and to weave them into the curtains. The prohibition and the command sit a few chapters apart in the same book.

The difference is that the cherubim were never objects of worship. They were furniture of the meeting place, marking out the space where God would speak. Nobody bowed to them. They faced each other and looked down at the mercy seat, which is to say they were looking at the place where blood was sprinkled.

That detail repays thought. The golden cherubim of the ark spend the entire Old Testament staring at the spot where atonement is made. Peter says angels long to look into these things, and the tabernacle furniture had already said it in gold.

What Scripture does not tell us

We are not told how many cherubim and seraphim there are, whether the two orders interact, whether either can appear in human form as other angels do, or what they were doing before the events Scripture records. We are not told their names, and the named angels of Scripture, Michael and Gabriel, are not identified as belonging to either order.

A great deal of extra-biblical literature fills those gaps confidently, and there is a whole industry of angel books doing the same today. I have no objection to reading such material with the understanding that it carries no authority whatever, though I notice that people who read it tend not to keep that understanding for long.

Silence in Scripture is not an invitation. It is usually a mercy, sparing us information we would misuse. What we have been given about cherubim and seraphim is enough to produce awe, and awe is what it was given for.

The point of the whole subject

Every appearance of these beings has the same centre of gravity. Isaiah does not describe the seraphim and stop; he describes them and then collapses, crying woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips. Ezekiel falls on his face. John, in Revelation, sees the living creatures and then watches them lead the whole of heaven in worship.

The angelic orders exist, among other things, to show us the scale of the God they serve. If beings like these cover their faces before him, then the God we approach so easily in prayer is not the manageable figure of much modern piety.

And yet Isaiah’s story does not end in terror. The coal is brought, the guilt is taken away, and the man who was undone is sent. That order matters more than any detail about wings. Awe, then cleansing, then usefulness.

Cherubim and seraphim in the New Testament

Neither word appears in the New Testament in its Hebrew form, which surprises people. Hebrews mentions the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat, and then the writer declines to expand on them, saying that of these things he cannot now speak in detail. It is a small moment and I find it instructive. Even the inspired writers treat the subject as one to be passed over rather than dwelt upon.

What we do have is Revelation, where the four living creatures around the throne combine features of both orders. They have the six wings and the ceaseless cry of Isaiah’s seraphim and the four faces of Ezekiel’s cherubim. Whether John is seeing one order, the other, or something that makes our neat separation of cherubim and seraphim look rather human, I would not want to say.

The New Testament’s reticence should shape ours. The apostles knew this material thoroughly, being Jews who had read Isaiah and Ezekiel all their lives, and they wrote almost nothing about it. Their letters are full of Jesus. Any treatment of cherubim and seraphim that leaves a reader more absorbed in angels than in him has inverted the priorities of the book it claims to be expounding.

Are cherubim and seraphim active now?

Scripture presents angelic beings as active throughout the present age. They minister to those who are to inherit salvation, they observe the church, and they will accompany Jesus at his return. Whether cherubim and seraphim specifically are involved in that ordinary traffic, or whether they remain at the throne, we are not told.

What I would rule out firmly is any practice that treats these beings as available to us. There is no biblical warrant for summoning them, commanding them, assigning them to guard a house, or naming them in prayer. The believer’s dealings are with God directly, through one mediator, and the introduction of cherubim and seraphim into that relationship is a step backwards into something the New Testament worked hard to leave behind.

Paul warned the Colossians against a religion of angel worship practised by people going on in detail about visions. The problem was not that they believed angels existed. It was that fascination had displaced the head, who is Jesus. That warning is as current as anything in the letter.

How to read the passages well

If you want to study cherubim and seraphim properly, I would suggest three habits. Read the passages whole rather than in fragments, because the descriptions always sit inside a larger scene and the scene is the point. Isaiah 6 is not about seraphim; it is about a prophet meeting God and being sent.

Notice what the text identifies and stop where it stops. Ezekiel tells us the living creatures are cherubim. He does not tell us what the four faces mean, so a confident explanation of the faces is somebody’s inference rather than revelation, however old and respectable it may be.

And read the throne-room passages devotionally as well as analytically. Revelation 4 is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a door left ajar. The right response to cherubim and seraphim crying holy without ceasing is not a diagram but a quieter opinion of oneself.

One practical note before I finish. If you want to teach this material to a congregation or a young people’s group, resist the temptation to lead with the strangeness. Start with Isaiah’s reaction rather than with the wings, because the reaction is the part that transfers. A room full of teenagers will happily discuss four faces for an hour and go home unchanged.

The same applies to private reading. I would take Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1 alongside Revelation 4 and read all three in one sitting, slowly, without a commentary the first time through. Commentaries have their place and I use them constantly, but the first reading should be allowed to do to you what the vision did to the men who received it. Analysis afterwards is fine. Analysis instead is a way of keeping a safe distance from a text designed to remove one.

So, now what?

So what should you take away? First, correct the mental picture. Read Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1 slowly, and let the biblical description displace the greetings-card version. It will change how you pray more than a book on prayer would.

Second, resist the fascination. Interest in cherubim and seraphim becomes unhealthy the moment it becomes an interest in them rather than in God, and the market in angel literature exists precisely to feed that. Scripture tells us enough and then closes the subject.

And third, notice that the being who covers his face before God is the same being who carries the coal to a guilty man’s lips. Holiness and mercy are not in tension in that room, and they are not in tension in the gospel either.

And one called to another and said: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!

Isaiah 6:3 (ESV)

For Further Study

Charles Ryrie and Lewis Sperry Chafer provide the standard dispensational treatments of angelology and are careful to stay within what Scripture states. Millard Erickson surveys the wider evangelical discussion of angelic beings, including the question of whether the categories are distinct orders. J. Dwight Pentecost and John Walvoord are worth reading on the throne-room passages in their prophetic setting, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum is helpful on the Hebrew background of the tabernacle and temple imagery in which the cherubim appear.