Can we pray to angels?

Question 8023.

Whether we may pray to angels is a question I want to answer with real clarity, because the stakes are higher than they first appear. Prayer is not a neutral activity. It is worship, and worship belongs to God alone.

Scripture nowhere invites us to pray to angels, records no example of anyone doing so with approval, and twice shows an angel refusing worship in the strongest terms. That is about as clear as biblical evidence gets on any subject.

Why prayer is worship and not conversation

Prayer in the Bible assumes things about the one being addressed. It assumes He can hear from anywhere, attend to many at once, understand the heart behind the words, and act on what He hears. Those are attributes of God. Nothing in the created order has them.

This is why the question of whether we can pray to angels is not really a question about etiquette. It is a question about attributes. To pray to angels is to credit a creature with omnipresence and omniscience, and to do that is to make him something he is not. The problem is not rudeness towards heaven; it is theological error at the point of worship.

The Greek word proskuneo, to bow before, is the word used for worship in the New Testament, and it is precisely the action John attempts twice in Revelation. Both times he is stopped mid-motion.

The two occasions an angel refused worship

In Revelation 19:10 John falls at the feet of the angel who has been showing him these things, and the angel says, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God.” Two chapters later, in Revelation 22:8-9, John does it again and receives the same rebuke.

I find the repetition instructive rather than embarrassing. If an apostle in the middle of the greatest revelation ever given could twice make this mistake, the instinct to pray to angels is not a strange failing of the ignorant. It is a natural human reflex in the presence of glory, and it needs to be resisted deliberately.

The angel’s reasoning is the key. He does not say John was insufficiently reverent or that he had misjudged the moment. He says, I am a fellow servant. The gap between angels and us is a gap of power and holiness. The gap between angels and God is a gap of category.

What Colossians warns about

Paul wrote to a church where something like this had taken root. Colossians 2:18 speaks of those who insist on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by a sensuous mind. His concern in the next verse is that such a person is not holding fast to the Head.

That phrase deserves attention. The danger of a devotional life that begins to pray to angels is not that it adds a harmless extra. It is that it loosens the grip on Jesus. Spiritual attention is finite, and whatever it is spent on is taken from somewhere else.

Is it different if we only ask, rather than pray to angels?

People sometimes propose a softer version. They are not worshipping, they say, only requesting. A quick word to a guardian angel is surely not the same as prayer.

I understand the instinct, but I do not think the distinction holds. A request made to someone who is not visibly present, in the expectation that he can hear and act, is a prayer in everything but name. And the moment it becomes habitual it will start to shape the heart, because the practice of asking creates the expectation of relationship. There is a reason Scripture never once models an appeal to angels, and I take that silence as instruction rather than oversight.

The better instinct is to ask God, who may well answer by sending an angel. Peter did not summon anyone in Acts 12. The church prayed, and an angel arrived. That is the biblical order and it works beautifully.

The Roman Catholic and folk-religion versions

I want to name the practices honestly. Devotion to Saint Michael, novenas addressed to angels, and the wider tradition of invoking heavenly figures all rest on the idea that those in glory can hear and relay our petitions. Some of my Roman Catholic friends distinguish carefully between veneration and worship. I respect the sincerity while remaining unpersuaded, because the distinction is one Scripture never draws and the New Testament shows an angel refusing the gesture outright.

Alongside that sits a large amount of folk religion, angel cards, angel numbers, the whole spiritual marketplace that invites people to pray to angels without any reference to the God who made them. That is not a milder version of Christian devotion. It is a different religion wearing borrowed vocabulary, and it leaves people exposed to whatever answers.

The access we already have

Here is what I find so unnecessary about the whole business. Hebrews 4:16 tells me to draw near with confidence to the throne of grace. Romans 8 tells me the Spirit intercedes for me with groanings too deep for words and that Jesus is at the right hand of God interceding. I have a mediator, an advocate, and a helper. What exactly would an angel add?

The old covenant used angels as intermediaries in ways the new covenant has made obsolete, and Hebrews spends its first two chapters arguing precisely that the Son is greater than the angels. To pray to angels after Calvary is to walk backwards through the very argument the letter was written to make. More on the biblical picture of them in this introduction to angelology and in whether we can speak to angels.

What the first commandment is protecting

You shall have no other gods before me is not the anxious rule of an insecure deity. It is the protection of a relationship. God knows that a heart which distributes its trust ends up with no trust worth the name, and He knows that creatures cannot bear the weight of the confidence we would place on them.

That is the deepest reason not to pray to angels. It is not that God is jealous in the small-minded sense. It is that He alone can carry what prayer entrusts. Every other recipient will eventually fail, and the failure will not be theirs but ours for having asked the impossible of them.

The angels themselves are worshippers

One of the loveliest details in Scripture is that angels are not spectators of worship but participants in it. Isaiah sees the seraphim calling to one another, Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts. Revelation shows myriads of myriads saying with a loud voice that the Lamb who was slain is worthy.

Picture the absurdity, then, of a Christian trying to pray to angels while the angels are on their faces before the throne. We would be addressing petitions to beings whose whole existence is oriented towards the very One we could have addressed directly. It is like tugging a chorister’s sleeve during the anthem to ask him to pass a message to the conductor.

There is real warmth in this. When we pray to God we are not intruding on heaven; we are joining it. The angels are already doing what we are invited to do, and our prayers rise alongside theirs to the same throne.

What to do with the impulse instead

The instinct that makes people pray to angels is not usually superstition. It is a sense that God is very high and very holy and that we are small, and that surely something ought to stand in between. That instinct is right about the distance and wrong about the remedy.

The remedy is a Person. Hebrews 4 tells us we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. The gap is real, and it has already been bridged from the other side, at enormous cost, by someone who knows exactly what it is to be tired and hungry and misunderstood.

So take the awe seriously. Then take the invitation seriously too. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

So, now what?

If you have prayed to an angel, or to a saint, or to a figure you were taught to approach, there is no reason for shame and every reason for a straightforward correction. Take the request you were making and bring it to the Father in the name of Jesus. He has been waiting for it.

And when help arrives in a form you cannot account for, thank God rather than the messenger. That is what the angel himself would want. Worship God, he said. It is hard to improve on that as an instruction.

“You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.”

Matthew 4:10, ESV