A Baffle of Angels

 

A pride of lions, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls … a "baffle" of angels?  We humans love to categorize and name things, and the names we give them reflect our very human impressions of them.  “Pride” for a group of lions reflects the air of nobility and power we see in them, even when they’re lazing in the shade.  The “murder” of crows reflects their ancient habit of flocking to our battlefields after the fighting but before the tasty bodies were cleared.  And “parliament” works quite well for those lordly, wise-looking owls.

So why do I say a “baffle” of angels?  What's baffling about them, and what am I suggesting?

I’ll tell you.  But hold on to your wings, Clarence.

 

WHAT ANGELS AREN’T

First, though, let’s clear up some things we thought we knew about angels.  Those who have read a few of my posts know I always like to get our misconceptions out of the way first.  (Those misconceptions are called cognitive biases in the world of informal logical fallacies, and they’re the sorts of baggage we carry with us whenever we approach the Scriptures.)

 

ANGELS DON’T HAVE WINGS

Whenever scripture speaks of the mal’akim (Hebrew) or the ayyeloi (Greek), those angels have a very human appearance.  They may make impressive entrances at times (Matthew 28:2-5), and they might even flash with lightning when behaving apocalyptically (Daniel 10:5-6), but most of their appearances in scripture are either as normal-looking humans (as when a couple of them met with Abraham in Genesis 18:2) or as nondescript messengers in dreams.  The Bible never mentions angels having wings.

 

ANGELS AREN’T CHERUBS

Cherubs (also called cherubim) are biblical entities.  There are many human traditions that classify cherubs as a type of angel.  However, not a single one of those "cherubs = angels" traditions is scriptural.

We humans, basic creatures that we are, tend to oversimplify information.  We hear a hymn about cherubim, and we’re convinced we’ve got those beings defined.   With all due respect to Christmas carols, however, there is never a place in scripture where cherubs are called angels.  They are a different class of spiritual being.

We meet our first cherubim in Scripture before we see any angels at all.  They’re beings posted at the way into Eden (Genesis 3:24) along with a swinging, flaming sword meant to cut down anyone who’d dare try to reenter paradise.  Oddly, the cherubim don’t seem to be swinging that sword; it’s just hanging out there with them, swinging itself, guarding the path.

The next time we see cherubs is in Exodus 25, where they’re represented in statue form, stationed at Israel’s Ark of the Covenant.  This is where we see wings for the first time – a count of four rather than the two we’d expect.  Since the cherubs are “facing” one another, we can assume they have faces.  That’s all the description we get in Exodus, though.

Ezekiel gives us our best visual details about the cherubim.  Piecing together chapters 1 and 10, we see that these “living beings” had calves’ hooves instead of feet and at least one pair of hands.  They had four faces: human, eagle, lion, and either an ox (if you take chapter 1 literally) or a cherub (if chapter 10 is more to your taste and you can handle the circularity of learning that a cherub has a “cherub face.” )

In English, the word “cherubic” has come to mean a round-faced, childlike appearance of innocence.  But when we’re talking about real biblical cherubs ... well, I wouldn’t advise sending a picture of one in your next Valentine’s Day card.  Cherubs are weird at best, scary at worst, and not particularly romantic.

 

ANGELS AREN’T SERAPHS

You probably saw this one coming.  Like cherubim, the seraphim are never identified in scripture as mal’akhim, angels.  In fact, they are snakes.  Cooler still, they’re fiery snakes, as shown in translations of the word seraph in Numbers 21:6 and Deuteronomy 8:15, where the word refers to actual flaming snakes.  As celestial beings, however, the seraphim make only a single appearance in all of scripture: Isaiah 6:1-7.  These celestial beings have six wings (take that, you lower-order, four-wings-only cherubs!)  They also have faces and “feet,” but those remain undescribed, since four of the six wings are used to cover them, evidently out of humility and modesty.

A word-nerd side note: The Hebrew text will sometimes use the term raglayim, “feet,” as a modest stand-in for genitals.  Isaiah himself does that in Isaiah 7:20, and we see it employed in Ruth 3:7-8, 2 Samuel 11:8-11, and elsewhere.  Biblical scholars John M. Oswalt and Marvin Sweeney mention that that meaning might apply here, which would display an even deeper seraphic homage to the Lord: one set of wings hiding their eyes from God’s glory, another set hiding their own shame.

And a motherly side note: What parent would give their beloved child a name like “Marvin Sweeney?”  C’mon, people.

 

SATAN ISN’T A FALLEN ANGEL

You may find this more surprising.  The idea that the Satan was once an angel of God comes from an early collection of Jewish and Christian writings called Apocalypse of Moses, sometimes called Life of Adam and Eve.  It’s not a book of the Bible.  It’s a fanciful, imaginative expansion of the story of creation, the very first time the idea appears that the Satan might have been one of the heavenly angelic host.  That idea percolated in the back of Christian minds until the English poet John Milton immortalized the "Satan was an angel" concept in his Paradise Lost epic.

But didn’t I read that Satan got cast from heaven in Isaiah 14?  No, you didn’t.  In that passage, you read about King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (see Isaiah 14:4) being cast down from his high place of glory.  The king is the one called helel (“shining one”) in that text, a word later translated to Latin as lucifer and inexplicably turned into a name that was never meant to be used for the Satan.  The Apocalypse of Moses text borrowed Isaiah's imagery of a shining king falling from glory and applied it to the Satan, spinning a new, nonbiblical tale.

Okay, but didn’t I read about Satan leading an army of fallen angels?  You did!  You’ve also read about Jesus leading an army of angels.  Leading that army didn’t make Jesus a mere angel.  The Satan, leading his own army of them, also doesn’t turn into an angel.  He is never called an angel, fallen or otherwise, in scripture.  (Hang in there.  We’ll see what he is eventually, but I like taking this step by step.)

Fine, if he leads all the demonic fallen angels, why isn’t he one of them?  Oh, dear.  Someone told you that demons are fallen angels.  Since this is a blog post about angels, I’d better clarify that for you.

 

FALLEN ANGELS AREN’T DEMONS

I know you think you read that somewhere.  In fact, you probably did.  The problem is, the Bible isn’t where you read it.

To state this simply and directly: scripture never identifies demons as fallen angels.  Don't be too hard on yourself for not knowing that, though – even Billy Graham, in his 1975 book Angels: God’s Secret Agents, is wooed away from the biblical text by the traditions that humans developed outside the text of the Bible.  He states, without scriptural evidence, that all demons were once angels.  He even has a whole chapter devoted to “Lucifer and the Angelic Rebellion,” making the nonbiblical claim that the Satan had been an archangel who became too proud and was cast from heaven with other fallen angels to become demons.

The text of the Bible makes it clear that, yes, the Satan was driven from heaven, "fallen"  (noted by Jesus in Luke 10:18 and dramatized as a symbolic dragon in Revelation 12:7-9).  But no scripture text ever refers to him as having been an angel (particularly not an archangel, a title scripture only gives to Michael).  Like many of us before him and after, Graham assumed the traditions he’d heard about the Satan were scriptural.  He also assumed that misinterpretations of Isaiah 14 were reliable.

There are fallen angels.  They're not here on Earth, busily tempting souls and possessing people.  We know exactly where they are, thanks to the epistles of Jude and 2 Peter:

“… God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into Tartaros and committed them to pits of gloomy darkness to be kept until judgment” (2 Peter 2:4)

“And the angels who did not stay within their own positions of authority, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6)

 

Fallen angels are not roaming the Earth as demons.  They’re locked away in darkness.  Demons, on the other hand, stand separately as yet another class of spiritual beings.  Fallen angels: locked up.  Demons: at large.  The Satan doesn't belong to either one of those classes of beings, and no scripture claims any overlap between the two groups themselves.

(I realize I keep repeating "No scripture says X, Y, or Z," but there's no easy way to prove a negative by citing anything.  If the Bible doesn't mention, let's say, "leprechauns," my only way of asserting that point is to write, "There is no scripture about leprechauns.") 

THEN WHAT IS SATAN?

Not an angel, not a demon, not even that slithery snake in the Garden of Eden (you can read my explanation of that here) … what is this Satan creature?  And why do I keep calling him the Satan?

The Book of Job introduces him.  He is one of the B’nai ha-elohim, which translates as “the sons of the God[s],” a divine council in the heights of heaven who assemble with God.  That's the Satan's group ID; he's one of them.  These "sons of Elohim" are yet another non-angel class of spiritual entity, and the Satan is numbered among them.  His name isn’t really a name – it’s actually a title in Hebrew, “the Adversary,” a legal term like “the prosecuting attorney.”  As the Adversary, he works for God, still in the heavens at the time of Job and not yet fallen.  In concert with God, he’s sent out to test Job’s faithfulness, a trial in which Job, a clearly innocent and righteous man, is tested as if he is not at all righteous but deserving of horrific punishment.  The Satan delivers that punishment, killing people and sickening Job as part of the God-approved test.

So … not an angel.  And in Job’s time, not quite the devil yet, but used by God for some pretty nasty torment.

 

AND WHAT ABOUT ANGELS?

Holy katz!  I’m near the maximum word count I allow myself for these blogs, and I haven’t even gotten to what angels are yet!   I’ve only covered how

• They’re not cherubim
• They’re not seraphim
• Satan was never one of them
• Fallen ones never became demons

And here I was planning on explaining that there’s no Angel of Death, either (it’s a different scary beastie on God’s team).  So many misconceptions to clear up before I get to the main points!  It isn’t a baffle of angels after all.  It’s a baffle of human traditions and storytelling that has clouded over the actual information we find in the Bible.

We shouldn’t be surprised that there are so many biblical categories of spiritual beings, or that so many of them are scary.  It’s a big universe out there, and an awful waste of space if there aren’t trillions upon trillions of other beings, including the spirit kinds.  It was Paul the Apostle who noted in Ephesians 6:12 that we have invisible company (not of the flesh, he emphasizes) that he categorizes as:

• Rulers
• Authorities
• Cosmic powers
• Spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places

and in Colossians 1:16 as:

• Thrones
• Dominions
• Rulers
• Authorities

I’m glad there’s more of them, more types of spiritual beings, than I can wrap my mind around.  I’m blessed by Christ’s grace that I have an eternity to grow in understanding of them and of so much more in this universe.  It’s a … well, a whole baffle of entities!

 

UH, YOYO … THE ANGELS?

Yes, yes … so what are angels?  That’s a topic I’ll be more than happy to explore scripturally in my next posting, teasingly titled: “Touched By An Angel?  D.O.A.”

Before you leave, however, I’d like to explain what this post, this lead-in exercise, is all about.

Do I really care what might be the fine distinctions between a spirit called a “Throne” and a spirit called a “Dominion”?  Not particularly.  In fact, getting too far into the weeds on such topics is probably less than spiritually healthy (see Colossians 2:18-19).

The real point of this month’s post is to make us start thinking about what Bible facts we really know and what things we just think we know because somebody claimed it once or because it was summarized for us by a very smart-sounding person.

Love those people, fellowship with those people, but test those people.  And most of all, test yourself.  Test me.  We’re all learning these things together.  The moment we claim we know something without being able to back it up with evidence, we’re no longer free agents.  We’re just parrots on playback.  We’re complacent and wise in our own eyes.

And Proverbs 26:12 says that kind of thinking makes fools better off than us. 

I'll be back next time with my better angels.  Until then -- 

Mara Natha / Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx, a.k.a. YoYo Rez

Why You Don't Read the Bible

 

I’ve never read the novel Moby Dick, but, boy, do I have strong opinions about it.  And Shakespeare’s Hamlet?  Never read that, either.  I’ve had the “To be or not to be” soliloquy read to me a couple times in classes, though, so I can assure you that Hamlet is the greatest play of all time.

Wait a second.  Am I delusional?  Am I arrogant and lazy at the same time?  Am I simply a liar?

No.  I am a metaphor.  I am you, and the book I’m really referencing is your Bible, a book you claim to love but which you won’t read, preferring to have it read to you while you sit and spectate at church.  It’s a book you’d rather have filtered through your pastor’s established beliefs.  A book you demand should be taught in public schools but which you can’t be bothered to leaf through for yourself, no less study in depth.

***

Do the above paragraphs sound aggressive?  Probably.  They’d sound more engaging if I’d written them using the first person “I” rather than the second person “you” – “a book I’d rather have filtered through my pastor’s established beliefs.”  See?  That sounds more inviting, a bit like soul-searching on a journey we’re sharing together.

But to all things there is a season.  Sometimes it’s time to gently caress your feelings, and other times – for example, now – it’s a time to refrain from that embracing.  So, strap in; we are in the Season of You.

 

The Least-Read Bestseller

Most U.S. Christians – most of you – do not bother to crack open their Bibles even once a week.  Forget “studying to show yourself approved” (2 Tim. 2:15) or “searching the scriptures to see if things are true” (Acts 17:11).  You, American Christian, don’t even break out the Swiffer to dust off the cover of that book you claim to believe with all your heart.

It’s tough to get absolute numbers, but most major research groups (e.g., Barna, Pew, Lifeway, American Bible Society) indicate that less than a third of Christians report bothering to read Scripture during any given week.    To make matters worse, all those surveys are based on self-reporting, so we don’t know which of you are lying to make yourselves sound better to those researchers.  None of the surveys follow up the question “How frequently do you read the Bible?” with better questions like “What is the book of Zephaniah about?” or “What is your favorite verse in Two Corinthians?”

Have you wondered why you don’t read and study the Bible more on your own?  Then you’re in luck.  I’ve searched the Scriptures and I’ve found a few answers for you.

 

REASON 1: You Prefer McNuggets

“A sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not even bother to bring it back to his mouth.” (Proverbs 19:24).

 

You are a member of a faster-food generation.  Forget full-course meals (“from soup to nuts,” as 19^th century Americans would say); you won’t even go out for your fast food anymore, since Door Dash delivers.  You’ve grown that lazy and you'll soon wonder why you even have to go to the trouble of lifting the food all the way to your mouth.

For your McScriptures nutrition, you’d prefer to have kindly Reverend Spoonfeeder dish it out every Sunday.  When the Pew researcher calls, you’re happy to count that as your “I read Scripture once a week” answer.  Or, heck, if you can’t make it to church this week, you’ll gladly indulge in a video from Dr. BlurtTube, an influencer thrilled to get your monetized click in exchange for what is most certainly an inerrant biblical perspective on voting Libertarian or dieting with Ancient Recipes of God’s Word.

 

REASON 2: You Like Being an Opinionated Fool

“Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions.” (Proverbs 18:2)

 

You know this Gospel message stuff inside and out.  In fact, just last week you told Cousin Annabelle that she needs to get right with God, and you’re constantly telling your neighbor you’re praying for him and his tobacco-smokin’, Budweiser-chuggin’ ways.

While he chugs Bud, you sip baby milk like a new believer.  Or, to switch metaphors, you never get past the surface messages of Scripture.  I’m not saying you haven’t spun some bizarre web of hidden Scripture messages into a new, ear-tingling belief system.  That would be its own problem.  I’m simply saying you have lots and lots of opinions that you’re pretty sure come from the Bible, except you can’t remember the last time you checked to make sure.  You know all the right things to say, all the opinions you should loudly express, but you’d be at a loss to demonstrate where those ideas come from.  After all, why pursue deeper understanding when you’ve already got your fully formed opinions?

Quick questions: Where in the Bible does God talk about having two wives whom He sends off to be raped and killed?  Where does God order a prophet to marry a prostitute?  Where does the Apostle Paul fantasize about cutting off other men’s private parts?  I bet it’s your opinion that the Bible wouldn’t say such things.

You need to read.

 

REASON 3: You’re a Lazy Sluggard

“The slacker does not plow in season; at harvest time he looks, but there is nothing there.” (Proverbs 20:4)

Okay, I know saying “lazy sluggard” in my subhead is repetitive (what we language people call a “pleonasm”), but I really wanted to stress how much of a lazy, sluggardly, lethargically indolent slacker you are.   Instead of re-reading the Gospels, you sit around watching The Chosen.  Instead of humbly and gently explaining the reason for your hopes and beliefs (see 2 Peter 3:15), you slap links into online comment sections to argue you’re right because you found a headline that agrees with you.  (You don’t actually read the article behind the link.  You liked the headline, so that was enough).

And laziest of all, you expect your pastor to do the Bible thinking for you.

I have more bad news about our generation: Your pastor might be just as lazy as you are.  Lately I’ve tripped over several preachers whose sermons are crafted by ChatGTP or who take pre-written sermons from online and read them off dramatically without attributing them to the real authors or sources.  I’ve listened to preachers besmirch “people who dig into all that Greek,” mocking those who work with the very language of the New Testament.  I’ve even had one tell me, defensively, that he’s so busy with other stuff, he can’t make time to create his own sermons.

Yup.  Your pastor might be as lazy as you.

To circle back to the proverb above: You have a field.  That field is your mind.  All of that mind needs to love the Lord, the way you claim all of your heart does.  You need to plow your field and end your sluggard ways.  Awake, O sleeper, arise from sloth, and the Word will shine through you. 

 

REASON 4: Or, You Know, Maybe I’m Wrong

“Instruct the wise and they will be wiser still; teach the righteous and they will add to their learning.” (Proverbs 9:9)

 

You’re still reading!  By now, most believers who started reading this post have hit a TL;DR moment and wandered off to feel offended, maybe grabbing some popcorn and watching a trailer for a Left Behind spinoff.  But you came this far, you stuck with the words, and that means … I might be wrong about you.  You may not be the “you” I’ve been addressing.

But if you’re like me, you probably feel you don’t give nearly enough time to understanding Scripture to its most beautiful depths, its most painful correctives, or its most useful insights about human nature.  You read it, but you have a nagging feeling you don’t read it enough.

Since you stuck with this to the end, let me close with suggestions that might help you get deeper into the Word more regularly.  These are tips; only you can make them realities, and only committing to one behavior at one level will help move you forward.

 

For the Beginner

Listen at church to the main Bible passage addressed by your pastor/preacher/priest/prior.  The next day, read the chapter before that passage as well as the one after the passage.  Reread those three sections regularly (dare I say religiously?) once each day through the coming week.  Ask yourself what more your preacher could have said about the passage.  If you enjoy writing or journaling, even jot a few notes down about what could have been added, things you saw that your preacher didn't mention.

 

For the Advanced Beginner

Do the same as above but upgrade your Bible.  What do I mean by that?  If you have a Bible that’s light on explanations and footnotes, invest in a version that has strong historical, cultural, and language notes in teeny-tiny print at the bottom.  I won’t recommend a specific title, but I encourage you to continue the "beginner" practice, now incorporating the notes in your daily reading as well.  Continue limiting it to three chapters; remember, we’re trying to retrain our McNugget brains.

 

For the Intermediate Level

Time to grow.  Keep a Bible at your bedside.  When you wake up, read a chapter and its notes.  (If necessary, first kiss your spouse good morning and/or make a potty run.)  Do this with a paper Bible.  Child of the digital age that I am, I still realize my phone and computers have too many temptations to drag me from the Bible text.

You are now reading on your own, not basing your readings on your pastor.  The notes that go with the chapter are making you a better student of the Word.  But where to start?  You’ve heard countless people urge you to begin solo Bible reading in the Gospel of John.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re more fascinated by history, start with Luke or Judges.  If your mindset is more devotional, start in Psalms.  If you have a practical brain, dive into Proverbs.  But do not neglect the notes or study sections of the passages you choose.  You need input from a multitude of counselors (Proverbs 11:14).

 

For the Upper Intermediate

You’ve read all or most of the Bible.  So did Timothy, who learned as much of it as existed during his childhood (2 Tim. 3:15) but whom Paul still urged onward in his studies (2 Tim. 2:15).  You know it; now you need to know it.   So, now involve a friend to be a co-reader with you.  This is a partner to keep you accountable and with whom you can share insights.  Please note: It should not be your spouse.  You two are in love and are already accommodating each other’s imperfections, and this effort needs someone you’d feel a little embarrassed disappointing.  It should also not be a group Bible Study; those are fine, but you feel less accountable skipping out on a group or letting them do all the reading for you.  You and your study partner will be reading the same scripture sections, taking insight notes separately, and reporting to each other each week.  Regularly.  Like clockwork. The Lord “delights in people who are trustworthy” (Proverbs 12:22), so the two of you are turning each other into trustworthy delights.

 

For the Advanced

Heck, you know all this stuff.  You’ve done this for several years.  You’ve even looked up some of those Greek words online through Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.  You know it’s a righteous thing to keep reading Scripture, but what more is there to learn?

It’s time to stop reading the Bible to find what it means for you.  You need to learn what it meant to the original authors and the original audiences.  Step One is to stop using Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance,   It’s an 1890’s text suffering from errors, omissions, misrepresented word roots, and definitions that are woefully inaccurate when taken out of context.  This isn’t just me being a snotty linguist; Strong’s shortcomings are widely reported by numerous respectable researchers and institutions.

Step Two has a couple Bible-tool recommendations from me: You can try Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, compiled around the same time as Strong’s but more thoroughly edited, revised, and updated.  It compares usage of New Testament Greek words to other, nonbiblical Greek texts to ferret out true meaning at the time (very helpful for what we word nerds call hapax legomenon, words that only appear once in the entire New Testament and which therefore might have suspect translations in some Bible versions).  A less word-nerdy but slightly more expensive option is Danker’s The Concise Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, written in more accessible language but still thorough in pointing out meaning variations for deeper understanding of a Bible text.

The Hebrew language offers similar lexicons, but, having studied only Greek,  I’m not qualified to comment on which Hebrew guides have better quality.  You’re advanced, though; find yourself a pro. 😊

 

And For the Close …

You want to know the Bible better.  You wouldn’t have read this far if you didn’t.  You want to ponder prayerfully why Jephthah sacrificed his daughter to God, why Abram married his own half-sister, why God never changes but does change His mind, why there are offerings of golden hemorrhoids, why some Bible translations have dragons and unicorns ... numerous things you may never hear preached in your church.

You want this.  You want to understand the stories of different eras in a text written and edited over a period of 1,500 years.

You want to begin learning the culture – or, better said, the multiple cultures as you cross time and geography.

But to do that, you have to read.  Regularly.  Daily.

Start today.

“They received the word with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were true.” (Acts 17:11)

 

Marana Tha,

YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx

 

P.S.: I was kidding.  I have read Moby Dick and Hamlet.