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 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 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 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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08113. Getting clear on what angels are is surprisingly difficult, because most of us learned the subject from Christmas plays, greetings cards and films before we ever opened a concordance. The popular version has wings, harps, halos and a distinct shortage of anything the Bible actually says. So let me take the popular picture…
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 08132. The phrase familial spirits gets used in two quite different ways, and separating them is the first job, because one usage points to something Scripture genuinely condemns and the other points to a teaching I do not think Scripture supports at all. In older Bibles you will meet familiar spirits, which is occult…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08111. What actually happens under hypnosis is less mysterious than most people assume, and getting that clear is the first step to answering whether it opens doors to demonic influence. The popular picture, borrowed almost entirely from stage shows and films, is of a person switched off and taken over. That is not what…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08128. Asking whether demons perform miracles usually follows something a person has witnessed or heard about, and the question behind it is a practical one. If something extraordinary happens in a meeting, does that settle whose power is at work? My answer is that demons perform miracles in a limited and derivative sense, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08110. Whether martial arts are spiritually dangerous depends almost entirely on which martial arts you mean and who is teaching them, which is why a blanket answer will always be wrong for somebody. The category covers everything from an Olympic combat sport to a discipline that opens with meditation before a shrine. So rather…