Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08112. Whether angels exist is a question I am asked far more often by Christians than by unbelievers, which tells you something about the state of our teaching. Most believers have absorbed the idea that angels belong to the decorative edges of the faith, somewhere near Christmas cards and children’s talks, rather than to…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08126. Whether angels rebel again is one of those questions that sounds like idle speculation until you notice what is sitting underneath it, because the person asking is rarely curious about angelic politics. They are asking whether heaven is safe. If a vast company of angelic beings could fall once, what stops the same…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08095 The idea that a third of the angelic host became fallen angels is so widely repeated that most Christians assume it is stated somewhere in plain terms. It is not. It rests on a single symbolic image in Revelation 12, and the inference drawn from it is reasonable without being certain. I hold…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08074 The phrase territorial spirits refers to fallen angelic beings thought to exercise influence over particular nations, regions or cities. The idea has become so embedded in some circles that it is assumed rather than argued, and so foreign to others that it is dismissed without a hearing. I sit between the two. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8030. Reports of angel encounters during near-death experiences have become a publishing industry of their own, and I am asked about them more often than almost any other question in this area. Someone has read a book, or a relative has described a light and a figure and a sense of overwhelming peace, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8029. The place of angels in evangelism is one of the most encouraging themes in the book of Acts, and one of the most consistently overlooked. Luke keeps showing us angelic activity around the spread of the gospel, and yet he never once has an angel preach it. That combination is deliberate, and once…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8028. The question of angels in worship sounds either startling or sentimental, depending on what you already assume about Sunday mornings. I want to argue that it is neither, and that Scripture treats the presence of the unseen host at our gatherings as a settled fact rather than a special occasion. It is not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8026. Paul says that we will judge angels, and he says it in the middle of telling off a church for suing one another. “Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life!” It is one of the great throwaway lines of the New…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8025. The idea that we become angels when we die is everywhere, and I have heard it spoken at gravesides by people who meant every word of it kindly. Films use it, greeting cards use it, and well-meaning relatives tell grieving children that Grandma has her wings now. Scripture teaches something different and, I…