What the Bible teaches about angels, demons, Satan, and spiritual warfare.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08119. Understanding what demons are is not an exercise in morbid curiosity. It is the difference between a believer who takes the enemy seriously without becoming obsessed and one who either dismisses the whole subject or sees a demon behind every difficulty. Scripture is measured on this, which is itself instructive. It tells us…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08139. Whether angels experience emotions sounds like a question for a slow afternoon, until you notice how much of the Bible’s angelic material is emotional in tone. They shout, they rejoice, they worship, they cover their faces, and in one case they shudder. I think the answer is plainly yes, and working out what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08138. The idea of angels at Sinai catches most readers by surprise, because Exodus 19 and 20 describe thunder, smoke, trumpet and the voice of God without mentioning an angelic host at all. Yet three New Testament writers refer to angelic involvement in the giving of the Law as though it were common knowledge….
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08118. The fall of Satan is one of those subjects where Scripture gives us real information without ever supplying a narrative, and the gap between those two things has been filled over the centuries with a great deal of confident material that the Bible never provided. There is no chapter headed The Fall of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08137. Whether Satan know Scripture is not really in doubt once you have read Matthew 4, because he quotes it there, quotes it accurately, and quotes it to the Son of God. The more useful question is how he uses it, because that is where the danger lies for us. A misquoted Bible is…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08117. Knowing who Satan is matters more than most Christians realise, because almost every error in this area comes from a false picture rather than from a false verse. Get his size wrong and you will either live in fear of him or ignore him altogether, and both mistakes suit him perfectly well. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08115. The idea of guardian angels is one of the most widely held beliefs in popular Christianity and one of the least carefully examined. It appears on nursery walls, in sympathy cards and in the confident assurances people give at funerals, usually without anyone asking what the Bible actually says. My answer is a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08136. Peter says that angels long to look into the things announced to us through the gospel, and it is one of those half-verses that people read past for years before it suddenly stops them. Why would beings who stand in the presence of God be craning to see something we hold in our…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08114. Scripture never gives us the number of angels, and I think that silence is deliberate. What it gives instead is a vocabulary of vastness, used repeatedly and by different writers, which is designed to leave you with an impression rather than a figure. That impression is worth having. A believer who grasps the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08135. Working out what angels know turns out to be a surprisingly practical exercise, because a great deal of bad teaching depends on assuming they know rather more than they do, and a great deal of needless fear depends on the same mistake. Scripture gives us a clear enough picture. Angels are intelligent, experienced…