Sent Forth: Meditations on the Angels of God
I. Prolegomena: What I Had Lost Without Knowing It
I used to read Frank Peretti.
All of it. This Present Darkness, Piercing the Darkness, The Visitation, the whole world he built, where angels and demons clashed over souls in the air above small-town America, and the oblivious humans below, praying or failing to pray, held the balance of power in their hands. I was in my early and late teens, deep in charismatic Christianity, and Peretti felt like he was unlocking a secret door. I also listened to Bob Larson on the radio (so embarrassing!), with his theatrical voice cataloguing demonic activity with the confidence of a man who clearly had the devil’s number. He was afraid of no devil! I was fascinated by the supernatural, genuinely so, and the fascination was not entirely wrong. But mostly. There is a real world behind the visible one. Scripture says so.
But the framework I was given to understand the supernatural was a jumbled mess. It was mostly subjective sensationalism, salted and peppered with isolated scripture texts. The invisible world was mainly interesting insofar as it could be felt, or seen, or manipulated directly by us! Regular life was boring. And who does not like to be involved in secret earth-changing things? To be ‘an insider’ in the outcome of a cosmic battle? Spiritual warfare was dramatic. Demons spoke to people. Angels manifested. Everything was alive and present and electric. But the problem was that almost none of it was biblical.
Once I left for college, things began to change. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. To save time, let me just say that I believe the Lord saved me. He opened my heart, and then my spiritual eyes to my sinful heart, and the depravity of my fallen mind, and the powerful beauty of Jesus’ atonement. Eventually, my new bride and I left the mainstream charismania, and became Reformed in our Christian convictions.
The beauty of the Reformed tradition was that it gave me the footing I desperately needed: the sovereignty of God, sinfulness of man in Adam, the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, the closed canon, the covenant of grace, and especially the blessedness of the ordinary means of grace. This meant that all experiential and sensational elements of the Christian life were subjected to the Word of God, and rightly so. The charismatic circus lost its hold on both my wife and me. We are deeply grateful to God for that to this day, thirty years later.
Yet what I did not take into account, for decades, was what I had unwittingly discarded along with evangelical-charismaticism.
Ephesians 6:12 remained. I read it often. I preached from it occasionally. But somewhere in the settling of my Reformed convictions, this whole idea had been imperceptibly relocated. The text, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” had practically become a description of phenomena that strictly belonged to the Old and New Testaments and apostolic age. The canon was closed. The extraordinary gifts had ceased. All direct and dramatic encounters with the supernatural were behind us now that the Church had been given all things pertaining to life and godliness in the Scriptures.1 And in that entirely correct set of convictions, I had without meaning to, put the subject of angels behind us. Angels were real, obviously, but detached from us in practice since we have the Word of God and the indwelling Holy Spirit. My world became, functionally, Sadduceeical (Mather’s idea). I lived in a two-storied house in which the upper floor was all but empty.
I did not know this about myself until I read Increase Mather.2 It’s rather troubling, and at the same time encouraging, that in the later stages of my Christian walk, I am learning something new in my own experience.
The Angelographia, published in Boston in 1696 (I read the North Hampton Press reprint: The Ministry of Angels), is a collection of sermons on the nature and ministry of holy spirits, with an appended discourse on angelical apparitions.3 Mather was a careful, learned, thoroughly Reformed Puritan divine, president of Harvard, and a man deeply suspicious of fanaticism in all its forms. He was, in fact, a principal reason the Salem witch-trial panic began to come to its senses.4 Mather would be a prime candidate to relegate the subject of the supernatural to the confines of the apostolic and post-apostolic age or crypto-romanism. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History has descriptions of supernatural events that occurred in the early church that leave the naturalistic modern Reformed Christian scratching his head!5
But Mather’s opening words stopped me: “Angels, both the good and evil ones, have a greater influence on this world than men are generally aware of.”6 I realized at that moment, meditating on that thought, that if it was true, I was probably guilty of it.
The Reformed tradition has never been shy about angels. Calvin treats them carefully in the Institutes, steering between scholastic rationalistic dismissal, and what Scripture says about them.7 Wilhelmus à Brakel devotes a nice section of The Christian’s Reasonable Service to the angelic host and writes with pastoral warmth about their ministry to the heirs of salvation.8 The Westminster Standards state clearly that God executes his providence through angels.9 The new (old) tradition I had come to love always had a solid doctrine of the celestial realm. Why did I never see it? I had received the tradition and somehow missed that part. It’s not a major subject. It’s not a salvation issue whatsoever. But living at a time that stands far closer to Antioch in Acts than Geneva10, it seems quite relevant in a world that seems to be teaming with evil.
Augustine prepared the way.
Reading the City of God is a true education in how large the world actually is. The Bishop of Hippo sees the whole of history as a drama played out between two cities, the foundations of which began before Adam and Eve. As we will see, the fall of the angels precedes the fall of man. The elect angels who maintained their first estate, and the reprobate angels who fell by their own will, these two companies represent the first and most fundamental division in all of creation. The church militant on earth is caught up in an ancient conflict, vaster than any man-made dynasty, empire, or political history, and moving toward a consummation in which angels and saints together will inhabit the City of God forever. That is the frame within which Augustine reads everything.11
Luther is much the same. His world was dense with spiritual presence, and his sense of the demonic was personal. He had a doctrine for it. He preached about it. He fought it from within, and without.12 But I digress.
I came to see that I had exchanged the evangelico-charismatic abuse for something cleaner and truer. But in cleaning house, I had also thrown out the furniture that belonged there.
This series of meditations is an attempt at recovery.
The subject deserves careful handling because for every mile of road, there are two miles of ditches. On one side is the ditch I came from: angels and demons as a species of special spiritual experiences, virtually detached from Scripture, feeding the appetite for the supernatural. Mather saw the same danger and wrote his Disquisition Concerning Angelical Apparitions as a warning against it. The Bible itself is severe on the point. An angel who preaches another gospel is accursed (Galatians 1:8). John fell at an angel’s feet in worship and was rebuked for it (Revelation 22:8,9).13 The ditch is very real.
The other ditch is an atrophied practical theology of angels. I had settled into this without knowing it. A Christianity in which the invisible world is real, and given the nod on paper, but generally ignored. The spiritual warfare of Ephesians 6 and the ministering spirits of Hebrews 1:14 were doctrinal categories with no practical weight for the Christian life.14 That ditch is less steep. It certainly feels more respectable, more rational. But a theology that formally confesses something, and practically forgets it, has lost something meaningful.
What I am after in this series is the angelic world as Scripture actually describes it. A world in which the providence of God is carried out by intelligent, manifestly holy, personal, powerful beings whose assignment is the welfare of the heirs of salvation. A world in which the fall of Satan and the ruin of the demonic host is the darkness against which the mercy of God in Christ toward sinners blazes. A world in which “are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14)15 is a living question with a living answer. It touches the way the believer understands his own life history, his own sufferings, his own safe keeping (because I would have gone lost long ago), and yes, his own death.
I am a Reformed minister. I subscribe to the Three Forms of Unity. I believe in the ordinary means of grace and the closed canon and the cessation of the apostolic gifts.16 That’s my house, the household of faith. None of that is at stake here. What is at stake is whether or not the historic faith I confess (and perhaps you as well) includes what Scripture describes. I want it to. I think I had simply stopped inhabiting the upstairs of that house.
These articles are an attempt to move back in.
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Next: The Nature of Angels: Created, Personal, Spirits
1 The allusion is to 2 Pet. 1:3. Sufficiency of Scripture regulates faith and practice; it does not cancel providence.
2 Increase Mather (1639-1723), New England Puritan and Harvard president, published Angelographia in Boston in 1696.
3 Mather’s Disquisition Concerning Angelical Apparitions is useful here because it joins belief in angels to warnings against credulity.
4 Mather was a significant moderating voice, especially through Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693), rather than the sole cause of Salem’s reversal.
5 Eusebius is a historical witness, not an authority equal to Scripture.
6 Increase Mather, Angelographia, or A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Power of the Holy Angels (Boston, 1696), opening sermon.
7 Calvin’s main treatment is Institutes I.xiv.3-12 on holy angels and I.xiv.13-19 on devils: careful, anti-speculative, and pastorally serious.
8 See Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, vol. 1, on angels as creatures, servants, and ministering spirits.
9 WLC Q. 19 says God employs angels in administrations of His power, mercy, and justice. WCF 5.3 also confesses God’s use of means in providence.
10 This is a cultural comparison, not a historical equivalence: missionary context in Acts, ordered Reformed commonwealth in Geneva.
11 See Augustine, City of God, books XI-XIV, on angels, the two cities, pride, love, and the division of rational creatures.
12 Luther’s demonology belongs to his pastoral theology of temptation, accusation, conscience, prayer, and the Word.
13 Gal. 1:8 and Rev. 22:8-9 fence the subject: angels serve Christ; they do not mediate another gospel or receive worship.
14 This is a diagnostic claim: formal supernaturalism can become pastorally weightless if it never helps shape Christian perception.
15 Heb. 1:14 is the constructive center: angelic ministry stands under the supremacy of the Son in Hebrews 1.
16 Cessationism rejects continuing revelatory gifts and apostolic signs as ordinary church possessions; it does not reject angels, demons, providence, or spiritual conflict. We also believe that the Holy Spirit is most free, and can and does perform miracles today as He pleases.