What is the role of angels in answered prayer?

Question 8027.

The connection between angels and answered prayer is one of the quieter themes of Scripture, and it is easy to miss because the Bible almost never draws attention to it. God answers, and sometimes the answer walks in through a locked door wearing the appearance of a man.

I want to trace what the text actually gives us, because there is a real and encouraging pattern here, and also because the subject has attracted a good deal of nonsense that needs clearing away first.

Daniel and the delayed answer

The clearest window we are given is Daniel 10:12-13. Daniel has been mourning and fasting for three weeks when a messenger arrives and says, “Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words.”

Then comes the detail that has occupied readers ever since. “The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me.” The answer was dispatched immediately. Its delivery met resistance.

I hold this passage carefully. It does not teach that every unanswered prayer is stuck in an angelic traffic jam, and it certainly does not teach that our persistence forces a breakthrough. But it does show that answered prayer can involve a chain of causes we cannot see, and that the timing we experience is not always the timing of the decision in heaven.

Peter in prison

Acts 12 is the most vivid example of answered prayer arriving by angelic hand. Herod has executed James and arrested Peter. The church is praying earnestly. On the last night an angel of the Lord appears in the cell, strikes Peter on the side, tells him to dress, and leads him past two guard posts and through an iron gate that opens of its own accord.

The comedy of what follows has always delighted me. Peter knocks at the door of the house where they are praying, the servant girl Rhoda is so excited she leaves him standing in the street, and the praying church tells her she is out of her mind. When they finally open the door they are amazed. They had prayed for Peter and were astonished to get Peter.

That story is a gift to anyone who prays with a mixture of faith and doubt, which is to say all of us. God gave answered prayer to people who could hardly believe it had happened.

The angel in Gethsemane

Luke 22:43 records that an angel from heaven appeared to Jesus in the garden and strengthened Him. He had been praying that the cup might pass, and the answer was not removal but strength to go on.

This is one of the most important things Scripture says about answered prayer. The response was real, immediate, and delivered by an angel, and it did not consist of getting what was asked for. If the Son of God received that kind of answer, we should stop assuming that a request declined is a prayer unheard.

Angels who brought bread and water

Elijah under the broom tree asked to die. What he received was an angel, twice, with a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water, and the instruction to eat because the journey was too great for him. It is one of the most tender passages in the Old Testament and worth reading slowly in 1 Kings 19:5-8.

Sometimes answered prayer looks like food and a sleep. God did not rebuke the prophet for his despair; He fed him. There is a pastoral theology in that which many of us need more than we need another teaching series.

What angels do not do in answered prayer

Here I need to be plain. Angels do not receive our prayers, do not carry our petitions to God as if He needed a courier, and do not decide what happens. The Hebrew malak and the Greek angelos both mean messenger, and a messenger works in one direction here.

The imagery in Revelation 8 of an angel with a golden censer offering incense with the prayers of all the saints is sometimes pressed into service for the opposite view. But the picture is of prayers already before God being presented in worship, not of an angel acting as a postal service. I have set out the wider issue in whether we can pray to angels.

Nor should we imagine we can enlist angelic help directly. The pattern in every case of answered prayer in Scripture is that the request goes to God and the response comes from God, sometimes by angelic hand. See also whether we can command angels.

Why God involves them at all

It is a fair question. God needs no help. He spoke galaxies into being and He could open a prison door without assistance. Why route answered prayer through created servants?

The same question could be asked about preaching, and the answer is probably similar. God delights to work through what He has made. He uses ordinary people to carry the gospel and extraordinary beings to carry out His purposes, and in both cases the glory returns to Him while the servant is dignified by the errand.

There may also be something in this for the angels themselves. Peter says these are things into which angels long to look, and Paul says the manifold wisdom of God is made known through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. If the redemption of sinners is the great exhibition of God’s character, then being sent to serve the heirs of salvation is a privileged assignment rather than a chore.

How this should shape our praying

It should make us bolder and less anxious. Bolder, because the resources behind a simple request are considerably larger than the request. Less anxious, because we do not have to manage the mechanism. Nobody in Acts 12 planned the route through the iron gate.

It should also make us patient. Daniel prayed for three weeks without visible movement while a great deal was happening. If your answered prayer seems slow, the delay is not evidence of divine indifference, and it is certainly not a signal to try some technique for accelerating heaven.

It should make us specific as well. Vague prayers are difficult to recognise when they are answered, and a great deal of discouragement comes from asking for nothing in particular and then failing to notice that we received it. Daniel set his heart to understand a specific thing. Peter’s friends prayed about a specific prisoner. Specific requests give God the chance to give specific answers, and give us the chance to see them.

The armies at Dothan

Elisha’s servant woke to find the city ringed by Syrian cavalry, and Elisha prayed a very short prayer: open his eyes that he may see. The young man then saw the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire all round Elisha. The angelic force had not been summoned; it was already deployed.

That is a useful corrective to a common assumption about answered prayer. We tend to picture God responding to a request by setting something in motion. Dothan suggests that a good deal is already in motion, and that what we sometimes receive is not a new intervention but the grace to perceive an old one.

When no angel appears at all

I would be doing you no favours if I left the impression that angelic rescue is the normal pattern. Herod killed James with the sword in Acts 12, and no angel came. The church was almost certainly praying for him too.

Hebrews 11 is honest about this in a way that modern teaching rarely is. Some through faith stopped the mouths of lions, and others were sawn in two. Both lists are described as faith. Answered prayer sometimes means deliverance from the fire and sometimes means grace in the middle of it, and only one of those makes a good testimony evening.

What I hold on to is that the God who did not spare His own Son is not stingy. If He withholds the rescue, it is not because He was unwilling or unable, and one day the accounting will be plain.

So, now what?

Pray simply and keep praying. Ask God, not His servants. And when the answer comes in a form you did not expect, whether that is an open door or a plate of food or the strength to stay in the garden, receive it as answered prayer rather than arguing about the packaging.

You may never know how many times the response came by a hand you could not see. That is rather the point. What would you ask for today if you really believed the King had messengers to spare?

“Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words.”

Daniel 10:12, ESV