The angels (intemediate beings between us and God) have always intrigued me…they have immense power, and generally seem to want to help humans. However, since Biblical times, they seem to be rather scarce…what’s happened to them? Are they on assignment? Or, are they just not interested in humans anyway?
Angels arementioned in both the OT and the NT (although much more in the OT). Are they still around? And, why are they so indifferent to us these days? We could sure use Michael in Iraq, I can tell you!
Well, the skeptic is going to answer that they aren’t seen all that much today because they aren’t there and never were, just that we now have reasonable, natural explanations for many of the phenomena that may have been attributable to supernatural entities in the past.
And, alas, if they do exist, the only explanation for their quixotic behavior is that “God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.”
Why would a guardian angel save one person from a flood or fire…and leave another person to burn? Doesn’t that imply a measure of judgement?
(This is the sort of reasoning that leads to “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” so be warned…)
Put your faith in God…but wear a USCG-approved floatation device…
Trinopus
I think they’re all at the dance. It’s over there, on that pinhead…
I’m of the atheistic mind, but supposing they exist for the sake of discussion, I could speculate that simply whatever God wanted them to accomplish has been completed.
Who says they aren’t doing anything?
To use an example of something that just happened, my little one year old was standing on the bed falling backwards. I don’t know how he started, but the second time he was a bit twisted, and would have smacked the wall if I hadn’t moved him a bit. He may or may not have noticed, but he was moved none the less. Now that said, I don’t believe angels are there to protect us, as they have a specific job description. Not only that, but the Bible says when we help others, we can be helping angels and be unaware of it.
We might as well ask why a God who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent would need angels in the first place. That seems like the more difficult and essential question to me.
Personally, I like Svt4Him’s answer. (BTW, I just figured out what "Svt4Him means; d’oh :smack:).
Since life as we experience it–with events turning out in whatever is the one and only way they ultimately do–is the only guide we have to go by, we can never definitively prove if things are preordained or not, and whether we really have free will. We thinkwe choose to act as we do, but, given that each time we come to a fork in the road we can only take one path, and can only act in any one instant in one way and not several, how do we ever absolutely know that the actions we take aren’t the ones we had to take?
Similarly, we can’t judge how much of what happens that comes about without human intervention is the inevitable result of an equation of cause and effect, with each cause a purely mundane and natural force.
Maybe sometimes people act as they do not purely from their own choice or for purely impersonal forces, but because of a small voice whispering in their ear. And maybe events which are beyond human doing–winds, earthquakes, whatever, occaisionally are nudged by angels. I am inclined to think this is not the case, but I surely don’t know for a fact.
The Reverend Billy Graham wrote a book about angels in the 1970s in which he expressed a belief that they are actively involved in modern life. In particular, IIRC, he believed they had intervened in the course of wars.
He may have been influenced by the numerous legends coming out of World War I about “phantom soldiers” appearing at battles. In particular, there was a cluster of legends about how the British at Mons, Belgium were spared from a massacre by the appearance of bowmen. These stories apparently derived from a contemporary fantasy story by Arthur Machen called The Angels of Mons. Another story I remember reading about the war–which appears to have been first committed to print c long after it was supposed to have happened–told about how a medical corpsman “appeared out of nowhere” before a German gas attack and passed around an antidote for the soldiers to drink. There was, of course, no such antidote for poison gas.
More recently, there have circulated on The Internet pictures which appear to show vapor rising from American jets flying over Iraq taking on what appears to be the shape of “angel wings” Although these are circulated to demonstrate the presence of angelic intercession, the patterns formed are apparently a purely natural phenomena.
Stories of phantom hitchhikers–a very rich and complex field for study in their own right–also sometimes carry the suggestion that the mysterious traveler who vanished from a moving car was an angel or some other sort of heavenly messenger such as a saint. Such stories have a resonance with the story in The Acts of the Apostles about St. Philip and the eunuch of the King of Ethiopia.
Off to Great Debates.
DrMatrix - GQ Moderator
could it be because we now have direct access to God since Jesus died? or because we’re not looking for them? or don’t want to be bothered by them nowadays? i believe angels can still occasionally come around, but just not always visibly. also i know for a fact on the flipside that demons do come around visibly since i have a friend who sees (and sometimes hears) them; and i don’t think he’s crazy… although i sure would be after see just one of those suckers.
Well, they weren’t around all that much in the OT or NT anyway. Personally I don’t think they have that much to do with us.
it just seems like they did alot in ‘bible times’ if you think about it you have several THOUSAND years of history in there. I mean even if there are 50 stories that involve angels its 50 events in a few thousand years. hardly an every day thing even then.
Humankind has grown up. We don’t need babysitters anymore.
I’d give the same answer to “Why is Zeus nowhere to be seen nowadays?” and “Where’s Odin when you need him?”