Angels? Demons?
Dan Brown’s latest story, Angels & Demons, was released in theaters on May 15. Many people, through absorption of popular culture, have unbiblical ideas about who both angels and demons are.
Angels
Contrary to films like It’s a Wonderful Life, angels are not good people who’ve died. (This is the same mistake the believers make when they see Peter in Acts 12.) Angels are actually a separate class of being created by God, whose basic nature is spirit, although they will sometimes reveal themselves to us in physical form. According to the Book of Revelation there are many thousands of angels, all existing in some kind of organizational structure. Gabriel and Michael are two angels named in the Bible.
What do angels do? We know that they minister to us, and worship God. We however should not worship angels; when the apostle John tried to worship an angel, he was rebuked for doing so, because God is the only appropriate object of worship. We are told that angels can guard us at times, and it may be possible that each of us has a “guardian angel”, but there is no proof of such an idea in the Bible. “Spiritual warfare” can refer to many things, but can often refer to the battles occurring between angels & demons. Which brings us to …
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Demons
Although we may imagine demons (or “devils”) as little red horned fellows holding pitchforks, the biblical picture is that demons are angels who have sinned and fallen away from God. A recent Barna survey found that “59 per cent of believers either strongly agree or somewhat agree that Satan “is not a living being but is a symbol of evil”.” However, this is not the biblical description of Satan (also called Lucifer). How can a symbol of evil have a conversation with Jesus as Satan tempts Him in the desert? Jesus referred to Satan and demons repeatedly as real yet nonphysical beings.
Although Satan is the “great deceiver”, we should not blame our sin on him, since we still have the ability to choose who we will follow: God, or anyone else. How should we respond to the reality of demons? C. S. Lewis, in his preface to his book The Screwtape Letters, gives us some wise counsel:
There are two equal and opposite errors into which [we] can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
This is merely a brief summary of a very interesting topic. For more information on these topics, please consult Probe.org’s resources on angels & demons. This is also a subject which requires much careful study of the biblical text itself, as there is a lot of unbiblical teaching on about the spiritual realm.
If you feel you need prayer on an issue related to angels, demons, or spiritual warfare, please contact us. For questions about the Angels & Demons movie, see www.TruthAboutAngelsandDemons.com.
Image credit: “Christ Comforted by an Angel”, Paul Troger, 1730
Tags: angels, darren hewer, demons, heaven, hell, Men, spiritual struggle, spiritual warfare, Talk, theology, Women
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