Angels

A topic that’s been on my mind a lot lately: angels.

In short, I’m not sure we think about angels enough. This came to mind as I was reading St. Augustine’s City Of God (which I just finished for the first time). He spends a ton of time, maybe more than a hundred pages, talking about angels. I find that striking. Additionally, the Bible Project Podcast recently had a month-long series on the book of Jude, and again, angels feature very heavily. Jude condemns those who don’t show proper respect for the angels, who “blaspheme the glorious ones” (ESV) / “heap abuse on celestial beings” (NIV) (Jude 8). But how much do think about much less respect angels today? I myself barely think about them. I occasionally pray for the protection of angels but I’m not entirely certain what I mean by that.

In contrast, in the Bible and early Christianity angels seem like a really big deal. If anything, the concern was that people gave too much attention to angels, not too little. Augustine talks about that quite a bit. The book of Hebrews starts with a long explanation that Jesus is superior to angels; apparently that was something that needed to be clarified. In Revelation there are two separate occasions where the angel needs to tell John not to worship him (Rev. 19:10, 22:9) – apparently that was some sort of knee-jerk response.

The sermon last week included the famous passage from Romans 8:38-39: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I’d read that many times but never really thought about why angels are included in there. Why are they? I think the point with everything is that angels are powerful beings and we should be mindful of that.

I have no idea what the application of that is, though. I guess I’ve been praying slightly differently. But yeah, angels, they’re a big deal.