On Angels: A Series of Meditations

III. The Catastrophe Before Man: Why the Angels Fell

Farewel happy Fields, where Joy for ever dwells:

Hail horrours, hail infernal world,

and thou profoundest Hell receive thy new Possessor.

Milton places those words in the mouth of the fallen archangel, lying on the burning lake with his legions around him, “thunder-struck and astonished,” the light of heaven fading on him even as the darkness closes in. It is one of the most stunning moments in English prose. Milton had studied the subject deeply and put into words what the rest of us could not. These were not always monsters. They were, as he says elsewhere, “the flower of Heaven,” the brightest of God’s creatures, beautiful beyond description, standing nearest the throne, the first to behold the glory of God.^¹

And then they fell.

In the full weight of that word. A catastrophic, irreversible plunge from the highest dignity, into an estate from which there is no recovery, no repentance, no Mediator to undo what was done. Whatever else we say about the fall of the angels, we need to feel the staggering distance between what they were and what they are now.

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We have already established, earlier in this series, what the angels are. They are the first creatures, made on the first day, before the sun and stars existed, “Let there be light.” They are the host of heaven, ordered and ranked, created by the will of God before He ever spoke of man. They are senior to us in every way a creature can be senior to another: created first, possessed of greater knowledge, greater power, a nature unencumbered by three-dimensional space and time, standing in direct apprehension of the glory of God. Whatever majesty we ascribe to the unfallen angels who remain, we must understand that the ones who fell once had that same majesty. Satan did not begin as a monster. He began as one of the most glorious beings God ever made.

The underlying question remains. What could move a creature of that intelligence and majesty, standing in the very presence of an all-wise and all-good God, to rebel against Him?

Augustine’s answer is pride. Superbia. The will, capable of standing, choosing instead to exalt itself, to love itself rather than God, to prefer its own glory to the glory of the One who made them. This is correct as far as it goes, and it is without question the root explanation. But pride has an occasion. A creature does not simply decide, for no reason, to hate his Maker. Something was shown to him, something was commanded of him, some purpose of God was disclosed, and in that disclosure, pride found its provocation, and broke into open rebellion.²

Many have been told that Satan wanted absolute supremacy. That he became jealous of his Maker and wanted to take His place. This is a stretch. It imports into the event a heavenly competition between two nearly equal powers, which is neither good theology nor good exegesis. Satan knew perfectly well that he was a mere speck before the Triune God. However glorious he was, even he hid his face before that glory. Augustine diagnoses it differently. He proposes that it was Satan’s ambition to become like God, a refusal to remain a creature. That is a more defensible reading, and better than the popular one.

Increase Mather offers a possibility that deserves serious attention. He passes over it rather quickly, but the weight of it is considerable. He suggests that the occasion of the fall was the disclosure to the angels of God’s purpose for man: specifically, that they would be ministering spirits to this small, flesh-bound creature, and that this creature, by every heavenly standard the weaker, would be made after the very image of God Himself. The purpose of all creation, heaven and earth together, belonged to this little race. The angels, senior, glorious, mighty and wonderful, the first creation by every measure, were shown that the inferior race, made of dust, formed last, lower than themselves in every created respect, would be the race the eternal Son would join to His own Person. And the angelic host, for all its dignity, would be appointed to serve them. “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14).³

What they were not shown was the full mystery. Paul tells us that “none of the princes of this world knew” the hidden wisdom of God, for “had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). The demonic powers did not understand what the cross would accomplish. They saw the Son take flesh. They did not see what that flesh, dead and raised, would mean for the race they despised and for themselves. They moved Judas. They moved Pilate. They moved the crowd. And in doing so, they walked straight into their own trap. The revelation that provoked their pride was real. The mystery that sealed their doom was hidden from them. Until it was too late.⁴

For a creature already capable of pride, that revelation is unbearable. Servanthood to an inferior race, chosen by God, is the precise wound that pride cannot handle. Mather’s thoughts on the fall are most helpful here.

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Lest we make more of this than we should, Scripture does not recount the fall of the angels. It simply affirms it. Jude tells us they “kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation” (Jude 6). Peter tells us God cast them down and delivered them into chains of darkness (2 Peter 2:4). Many other passages drop secondary hints about their condition. But the event itself, the exact reason of the temptation, the timing relative to the six days, none of this is given to us directly, nor does the silence bear any eternal weight. Mather is reasoning. He is doing what good theologians do with the data Scripture gives: following the implications of what is revealed into territory Scripture leaves blank, while being honest that this is exactly what he is doing. So am I, I suppose. But we have such a low grade understanding regarding these things that a bit of corrective thought might be helpful.⁵

Now follow the implication for a moment, because if Mather is right, it explains things that are otherwise difficult to account for.

It explains, for instance, the particular character of the enmity. The demonic hatred of mankind is personal, sustained, and aimed with peculiar intensity at the very things that mark humanity as the object of God’s special purpose. The serpent does not simply try to kill Adam and Eve outright. He is far too intelligent for that. He attacks the image of God in them, which results in the death of body and soul. If Mather’s thought is correct, the fall of the angels and the ruin of mankind are connected at the root. The angels’ rebellion was provoked, at least in part, by God’s intention for man.

It explains why we are never told the angels who fell are offered redemption. Hebrews is explicit, and startling once it lands: Christ “took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). There was no plan of redemption for the angels who sinned, because the entire economy of redemption was, from before the foundation of the world, fitted to mankind only. We have a Mediator who shares our nature. They have none who shares theirs. We were given a reprieve purchased at infinite cost. They were given nothing. No provision was made for their kind of creature. They sinned once, and the judgment fell at once and finally.⁶

It explains what Satan and his host hate most about us. We bear the image of God and carry His own breath (Genesis 2:7). God never breathed into angels. That distinction cuts deeply. Angels were first. They are more beautiful, more powerful, more brilliant, exceeding mankind in every natural way. But they do not carry His breath. We do. Our souls do. And if Mather’s idea holds, the fallen angels understood, from the very moment of their rebellion, that this lesser creature, this race of red dust, was being given something they themselves were never given: the image of the very God they were rejecting (Genesis 1:26–27). The separation of light from darkness on the first day may well mark the very moment the lines were drawn in heaven.⁷

It explains, perhaps most movingly, the peculiar grief that must have attended the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

When Satan stood before the incarnate Son, he was testing the creature part of Him. But he was also standing face to face with his Creator, and with the very purpose he had once rebelled against. The kingdoms he offered Christ were offered in full knowledge that this was the race he had refused to serve, the flesh he had despised, when he first heard of it in heaven. Every word out of his mouth stunk of the bitterness of a being who had surrendered everything, glory, blessedness, habitation, estate, rather than bow before the One he was now looking at in flesh he despised.

Let me offer you a thought on what that bitterness was made of. Satan was not created bitter. Created in the light of God, he was made for felicity, oriented by nature toward the good. What the fall did was corrupt it. And this is the thing that popular treatments of Satan almost always miss: the opposite of love is not hate. It is pride. Hate is the fruit of pride. Pride is love rotting inward, the will curving back upon itself, refusing to move outward toward God and toward the other. What comes out the other side of that inward rot is a hot, ancient, purposeful bile that we call hatred. Luther saw this. He described the condition of fallen man as the soul turned in upon itself (incurvatus in se), and what he said of man is likely true of the angels. The same energy made for worship, when turned inward by pride, sours. It curdles. It becomes the most concentrated toxin the universe has ever known.⁸

Satan is a creature in whom love has been rotting for millennia, and getting worse. Every assault the demonic host has ever made upon the human race, elect or reprobate, flows from that source: pride that became hatred, hatred that has had all of history to deepen, in a creature who knows, with the full clarity of an angelic mind, exactly what he lost and exactly why he lost it.

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This brings us to a question that troubles many sincere believers, and we will pass through it directly.

Genesis 6 tells us that “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” Many readers, ancient and modern, have taken “the sons of God” to mean fallen angels conjoining with human women and producing the Nephilim, a race of giants, before the Flood. The reading has real antiquity behind it, present in some Second Temple Jewish literature and early patristic sources. It is not invented out of nothing.⁹

But it cannot be right. Wilhelmus à Brakel states the reason with characteristic clarity in his treatment of angels in The Christian’s Reasonable Service. Angels cannot reproduce. That simple. They have no bodies. No biological apparatus. They were not endowed with the capacity for procreation, because they are spirits. Christ himself says as much when the Sadducees question him about the resurrection: in the resurrection, the redeemed “neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). The point of that comparison only works if angels, as a matter of their fixed nature, do not marry and do not generate offspring. Whatever the sons of God in Genesis 6 were, dynastic rulers exalting themselves to divine status, or as I believe, the godly line of Seth intermarrying with the corrupted line of Cain, they were not angels fathering giant men with human women.¹⁰

There is a deeper reason to reject it, and it follows directly from everything Mather’s thought has shown us. If the angels fell once, decisively, in a single rebellion on day one, there is no room in that account for a second fall. A second rebellion centuries later, brought on by an entirely different temptation, lust for human women rather than contempt for God’s purposes, would mean the angels fell twice, for two unrelated reasons, at two different points in history. That is not what Jude or Peter describe. Both speak of a single, completed apostasy, angels who “kept not their first estate,” already “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6). The fall was total and final at its first occurrence. The Nephilim of Genesis 6 remain a difficult text. But they are not evidence of angels behaving as men, and whatever explanation they require, it is not one that demands a second angelic fall.¹¹

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What remains, after all of this, is a picture far more sobering than the cartoon devil of fork-tail and red horn fame.

The demonic host arrayed against us is the wreckage of the most glorious creatures God ever made. They were offered no reprieve. They bear no image of God. They carry His breath in no sense whatsoever. And to crown their misery, they watched the Word become flesh, not as an angel, but as the seed of Abraham, and they have hated that above all else. They have exchanged everlasting glory for everlasting darkness, and they know, every day, without the mercy of forgetting, exactly what they lost.

No wonder Peter tells us to be sober and vigilant. Our adversary, once the flower of heaven, walks about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8). He does not hunt us out of mindless instinct. He hunts the race that took the place he would not stoop to occupy.¹²

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Now, what should all of this do in the child of God?

It should produce a sober and settled realism. The world is not what the news says it is, a stage for political theater or economic forces doing battle for supremacy. It is a contested place, yes, but a contest older than Eden. The demonic host that moves against you is older, smarter, far more powerful, and personally invested in your ruin. It hates you with a hatred that has been curdling since before you were born.

It should also produce a piercing gratitude. You have what they do not. You bear the image of God. You carry His breath. You have a Mediator who shares your nature, who took not the nature of angels but the seed of Abraham, and who went to a cross the principalities did not understand until it was too late. They sinned once and heard the door close forever. You have sinned ten thousand times, and the door is still open, because the Son became what you are so that you might become what He is. If that does not break something in you, nothing will.¹³

It should produce vigilance without obsession. Peter does not tell us to study the devil. He tells us to be sober and watchful, and then points us straight back to God: “the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you” (1 Peter 5:10). The answer to a roaring lion is not to spend your life analyzing his roar. It is to know who holds the chain around his neck.¹⁴

And it should produce wonder at the mercy of God. That He looked upon this frail, dust-born, breath-sustained race, this junior creature that the angels thought beneath them, and set His love upon it from before the foundation of the world. That the fall of the highest creatures He ever made did not alter His purpose for the lowest. That out of the wreckage of that first catastrophe before history, God was already moving toward a cross. The angels who fell despise grace. You are its recipient. Do not treat that lightly. Do not treat that casually. It cost more than we can possibly imagine.

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Next: The Elect Angels — Their Vocation and Their Joy

Notes

1. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I. The description of the fallen host as “the flowr of Heav’n” appears in Book I, line 315. Milton is a poet and a theologian; his demonology should be read as serious imaginative engagement with Scripture, not as doctrine.

2. Augustine’s fullest treatment of the angelic fall is in City of God, Books XI–XII, especially XI.9–17. The root is pride: the refusal to remain creature, to love God above self. This is the theological anchor from which all other explanations must hang.

3. Mather’s treatment of the occasion of the fall is brief. See The Ministry of Angels Sermon II. He does not develop it at length, but the implication is weighty and worth following.

4. The hiddenness of God’s redemptive purpose from the demonic powers is one of the most theologically remarkable facts in the New Testament. See also Ephesians 3:9–10, where Paul speaks of “the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God.” The principalities and powers are learning the manifold wisdom of God through the church, not in advance of it.

5. This is not a counsel of agnosticism. Theological reasoning from scriptural data is necessary and legitimate. The honest acknowledgment that it is reasoning, rather than direct exegesis, is simply intellectual integrity.

6. The precision of Hebrews 2:16 is remarkable. The Son does not assist angels; He assists the seed of Abraham. The word translated “take on” (epilambanetai) means to take hold of, to lay hold of with intention. He reached past the angels and took hold of mankind.

7. Genesis 1:26–27 establishes the image; Genesis 2:7 establishes the breath. Together they describe a dignity given to man alone among all created beings. The angels are not described as bearing the imago Dei anywhere in Scripture.

8. Luther’s phrase incurvatus in se appears in his Lectures on Romans (1515–1516), commenting on Romans 5. The soul curved in upon itself is the anthropological consequence of the fall, and it is the precise inversion of the love to which all rational creatures were made. See also Augustine, Confessions I.1: “our heart is restless, until it rests in Thee.” Restlessness is the experience of a soul curved inward that was made to rest in something outside itself.

9. The angelic interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4 appears in 1 Enoch and in Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian, among others. It is a serious reading with ancient pedigree and should not be dismissed without argument. The argument against it is that it is exegetically, biologically, and logically untenable given what Christ teaches about angelic nature.

10. Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 1, Chapter 9, “Concerning Angels.” à Brakel favors the Sethite interpretation of Genesis 6, for reasons consistent with what is argued here. Matthew 22:30 is the Dominical authority that settles the question of angelic procreation.

11. This is, I believe, the strongest internal argument against the angelic reading of Genesis 6: it requires a second fall that Scripture neither records nor implies, and that contradicts the finality of the angelic judgment described in Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4.

12. The image of the devil as a roaring lion should not be domesticated like many do today. But neither should it be allowed to dominate the imagination. Peter’s response to the lion is not exorcism or direct confrontation but sobriety, watchfulness, resistance in the faith, and the assurance of God’s sustaining grace (1 Peter 5:8–10).

13. The participatory dimension of salvation, that the redeemed share in the exaltation of the incarnate Son, is developed most fully in Hebrews 2:10–18 and 2 Peter 1:4. The angels who fell rejected this before it was offered to man. That they could have known it would end there, in the sonship addoption of the human race by grace, staggers the mind.

14. The chain around the lion’s neck is a metaphor Bunyan gives in Pilgrim’s Progress. It is implied in the whole biblical picture of the devil’s constrained activity: Job 1–2, where Satan must ask permission; Luke 22:31, where Satan must sift only as far as Christ allows; Revelation 20:2, where he is bound. The roar is real. The chain is real. Know both.