Hard to believe in Christmas – Angels
This is the title of our current series at church. I started it off with my last talk for this year. The title was “It’s hard to believe in Christmas becuase of …angels”
The comments after were interesting. For almost everyone the presence and existence of angels didn’t pose much of a problem. Perhaps this is because angels feature so often in the ‘scenery’ of the bible that they stop standing out for Christians? Perhaps it’s their constant appearance (in their pop-culture form) every Christmas? I’m not sure…
Don’t you think that the existence of angels is just a little strange though? messengers from an invisible, other dimension?
In some ways the angel sightings in the Bible might be equated to alien sightings in our day…the difference seems to be that alien sightings seem mostly focussed on what the alien looks like, and what it did to it’s helpless victim. The ‘angel sightings’ of the bible instead are squarely focussed on where they’ve come from who has sent them (e.g. Lk 1:19) – the invisible God who reigns from heaven above accomplishing salvation for people in the world he has created.
Hey Reuben
I encountered this problem with one of the girls I’ve been following up from Jesus Week. We’ve been reading Luke’s gospel (all Pete’s talks came from Luke) and it’s chock full on angels. She tried to explain it away as a metaphor or a hallucination but had real difficulty believing in the supernatural.
She didn’t buy the modern day pop culture references to angels at all – they were just things that people like to believe in her mind. In fact, I think the pop culture stuff made it more difficult for her to believe the angels in the Bible story.
And the whole angels thing is a bit funny really – when we got to talking about the resurrection, there was more fodder for discussion but, as you say, proving or disproving the existence of angels is a bit of a sidetrack.
Reply to TamieInteresting!!
I’m glad she was honest with you…you’re right that proving their existence per se is a sidetrack but recognising that they appear to people as historical reality is relatively important I think. If you don’t live with a christian worldview, as your friend has noted, angels provide an unexpected piece of information about our world which we then have to make sense of.
There are angels!?? Perhaps what I can see then is not all that there is to this world…
They bring messages from someone who apparently has the future in their hands?!? Perhaps then there is more to the events in my life and world history than mere fate or chance.
Perhaps the invisible God really does dwell in heaven and yet his hand is active in this visible world bringing about his purposes.
Don’t you face the same problems with the resurrection? If jesus has been raised to life, where is he now? why can’t i see him?
As an aside the gospel writers all do something interesting with angels in their narratives. Angels function as ‘revealers’ or message bearers at only two places – Jesus birth and his resurrection. The writers seem to be making the point that during his earthly ministry Jesus replaces them. He has become THE mediator between God and men. He is uniquely qualified to reveal God to us after all! (Col 1:15)
Reply to reuben