Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8009. Can angels and demons read our minds? The question matters more than it might first appear, because a great deal of anxious teaching about spiritual warfare quietly assumes that they can, and builds practices on the assumption. My answer is no. Scripture reserves the knowledge of the human heart to God alone, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8008. Angelic emotions are more visible in Scripture than most readers expect, and once you start looking for them they are difficult to miss. Angels shout, sing, rejoice, long, marvel, and worship, and none of those verbs describe a passionless mechanism carrying out instructions. I think the assumption that angels are cold comes from…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8007. Can angels die? Jesus answered part of this question directly, and His answer is the natural place to begin. Speaking of the resurrection in Luke 20:36, He says the redeemed cannot die anymore, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God. So the deathlessness of angels is used as a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8006. Angelic free will is one of those doctrines that seems abstract until you realise it is the only way to explain how evil entered a universe made entirely good. Something went wrong before Genesis 3, and it went wrong among creatures who were not deceived by a serpent, because they were the serpent….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8005. Whether angels eat looks like a curiosity question until you notice how much rests on it. Scripture calls angels spirits, and Scripture also describes a meal in Genesis 18 in which Abraham serves curds, milk, a prepared calf and fresh bread, and his visitors sit under a tree and eat it. If angels…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8004. Angelic bodies have puzzled thoughtful readers of the Bible for a very long time, and the reason is simple. Scripture calls angels spirits, and Scripture also shows them eating a meal, taking a man by the hand, and wrestling until daybreak. Both descriptions are in the text, and neither one can be quietly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8003. Female angels are everywhere in our culture and almost nowhere in our Bibles, and that gap is worth examining rather than glossing over. Every angel who takes human form in Scripture and is described in any detail is described as a man. Every angel given a personal name, Michael and Gabriel, carries a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8002. Do angels have wings? The question sounds trivial until you go looking for the answer, and then you discover that the Bible is remarkably selective about which heavenly beings it gives wings to. Some do. Most, when they appear to people, do not. And the pattern is not random. I enjoy this question…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8001. Angelic appearance is one of those subjects where our imagination has done far more work than our Bible reading. Ask most people to picture an angel and you will get soft robes, a halo, feathered wings, and a face somewhere between a toddler and a Renaissance model. Ask Scripture and you get something…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8000. Angels and demons are two of the most talked about subjects in our culture and two of the least carefully studied in our churches, which is a strange combination when you think about it. Angelology is the study of angels, and demonology is the study of the fallen angels who followed Satan into…