Angels-Servents of God: Interesting facts

An angel is a supernatural being or spirit found in various religions and mythologies. In Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism, angels are often depicted as benevolent celestial beings who act as intermediaries between God or Heaven and Earth, or as guardian spirits or a guiding influence. Other roles of angels include protecting and guiding human beings, and carrying out God's tasks.The term "angel" has also been expanded to various notions of spirits found in many other religious traditions. The theological study of angels is known as "angelology".

In art, angels are often depicted with bird-like wings on their back, a halo, robes and various forms of glowing light.

History of Angels:

The angels are two days and two nights older than we: the Lord created them on the fourth day, and from their high balcony between the recently invented sun and the first moon they scanned the infant earth, barely more than a few wheat fields and some orchards beside the waters. These primitive angels were stars. For the Hebrews, the concepts of angel and star merged effortlessly: I will select, from among many, the passage of the Book of Job (38:7) in which the Lord spoke out of the whirlwind and recalled the beginning of the world, "When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." Quite apparently, these sons of God and singing stars are the same as the angels. Isaiah, too (14:12), calls the fallen angel "the morning star", a phrase Quevedo did not forget when he called him "lucero inobediente, ángel amotinado" [defiant star, rebel angel]. This equivalency between stars and angels (those populators of nighttime solitudes) strikes me as beautiful; it is among the distinctions of the Hebrews that they vitalized the astral bodies with souls, exalting their brilliance into life. 

From the beginning to the end, the Old Testament throngs with angels. There are ambiguous angels who come along the straight paths of the plain and whose superhuman nature cannot immediately be divined; there are angels brawny as farmhands, like the one who fought with Jacob a whole night until the breaking of the day; there are regimental angels, like the captain of the Lord's host who appeared to Joshua; there are angels who threaten cities and others who are like expert guides through solitude; the angels in God's engine of war number two thousand times a thousand. The best-equipped angelary, or arsenal of angels, is the Revelation of St. John: there are the strong angels, who cast out the dragon; those who stand at the four corners of the earth so that it does not blow away; those who gather up the clusters of the vine of the earth and cast them into the great winepress of the wrath of God; those who are implements of wrath; those who are bound in the great river Euphrates and let loose like tempests; those who are a mixture of eagle and man.

Islam, too, knows of angels. The Muslims of Cairo live blotted out by angels, the real world virtually deluged by the angelic, for according to Edward William Lane, each follower of the Prophet is assigned two guardian angels, or five, or sixty, or one hundred and sixty.

The Celestial Hierarchy, erroneously attributed to the Greek convert Dionysius and composed around the fifth century of our era, is a highly documented ranking of angelic order that distinguishes, for example, between the cherubim and the seraphim, allocating to the first the full, perfect, and overflowing vision of God and to the second an eternal ascension toward Him in a gesture both ecstatic and trembling, like a sudden blaze rushing upward. Twelve hundred years later, Alexander Pope, archetype of the learned poet, would recall this distinction when he penned his famous line: "As the rapt seraph, that adores and burns..."

Theologians, admirable in their intellectualism, did not shrink from angels and tried to penetrate this world of wings and mirages with their reasoning minds. This was no uncomplicated matter, for angels had to be defined as beings superior to man but necessarily inferior to divinity. The German speculative theologian Rothe records numerous examples of the push and pull of this dialectic. His list of angelic attributes include intellectual force; free will; immateriality (capable, however, of accidentally uniting itself with matter); aspatiality (neither taking up any space nor being enclosed by it); lasting duration, with a beginning but without end; invisibility, and even immutability, an attribute that harbors them in the eternal. As for the faculties they exercise, they are granted the utmost suppleness, the power of conversing amongst themselves instantaneously without words or signs, and that of working wonders, but not miracles. They cannot create from nothing or raise the dead. The angelic zone that lies halfway between God and man is, it would seem, highly regulated.

The Kabbalists also made use of angels. Dr. Erich Bischoff, in his German book entitled The Elements of the Kabbalah, published in Berlin in 1920, enumerates the ten sefiroth, or eternal emanations of divinity, and makes each correspond to one of the regions of the sky, one of the names of God, one of the Ten Commandments, one part of the human body, and one class of angels. Stehelin, in his Rabbinical Literature, links the first ten letters of the aleph-beth, or alphabet of the Hebrews, to these ten lofty worlds. Thus the letter aleph corresponds to the brain, the First Commandment, the sky of fire, the divine name "I Am That I Am," and the seraphim known as the Sacred Beasts. Those who accuse the Kabbalists of imprecision are clearly mistaken. They were, instead, fanatics of reason, and they delineated a world of deification by installments that was nevertheless as rigorous and causal as the one we feel now...

Such a swarm of angels cannot have avoided meddling in literature. The examples are inexhaustible. In the sonnet by Juan de Jáuregui to Ignatius Loyola, the angel retains his biblical strength, his combative seriousness:

Ved sobre el mar, porque su golfo encienda

El ángel fuerte, de pureza armado.

[Look to the sea, for its gulf is set aflame/by the strong angel, armed with purity]

For Luis de Góngora, the angel is a valuable decorative trinket, good for gratifying ladies and children:

¿Cuándo será aquel día que por yerro

oh, Serafin, desates, bien nacido,

Con manos de Cristal nudos de Hierro?

[When will the day be that in error/oh, Seraph, you unloose, well-born/Knots of Iron with your Crystalline hands?]

In a sonnet by Lope de Vega, I ran across the agreeable and very twentieth-century metaphor:

Cuelgan racimos de ángeles

[Clusters of angels dangle]

And these angels, with a whiff of the countryside about them, are from Juan Ramón Jiménez:

Vagos ángeles malvas

apagaban las verdes estrellas

[Vague angels, mauve as mallows,/were putting out the green stars]

Here we arrive at the near miracle that is the true motive for this writing: what we might call the survival of the angel. The human imagination has pictured a horde of monsters (tritons, hippogriffs, chimeras, sea serpents, unicorns, devils, dragons, werewolves, cyclopes, fauns, basilisks, demigods, leviathans, and a legion of others) and all have disappeared, except angels. Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.

FACTS ABOUT ANGELS

1. Angels are created and unlike the believer, they are not born of God. “Praise Him, all His angels, praise Him, all His Heavenly hosts... Let them praise the name of the Lord, for He commanded and they were created ” Psalm 148:1-5.
2. The word ‘Angel’ is from the Greek ‘angelos’ which means messenger. Angels, therefore, carry messages from God.
3. Angels are spirit beings. They are invisible but have the ability to manifest in the physical realm.
4. Angels look like human beings and can appear as strangers (Genesis 19:1-3; Hebrews 13:2 which says: “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.”).
5. Angels often manifest in dreams and visions. “One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!” Acts 10:3 and Acts 27:23 “Last night an angel of the God whose I am and whom I serve stood beside me...”
6. Angels are limited in their speech (Jude 9). They can only say what God has told them to say.
7. Angels are always referred to as Masculine. There are no references in the Bible to angels of a feminine or child-like description.
8. Angels are not Omnipotent (all powerful). Only God is.
9. Angels are not Omnipresent (all present). Only God is.
10. Angels are not Omniscient (all knowing) “It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the Gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from Heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.” 1 Pet 1:12
11. Angels are incapable of dying “... and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels...” Luke 20:36
12. Angels do not rest (Rev 4:8)
13. Angels work in the lives of both Christians and non-believers. Their purpose is ultimately to bring glory to God and they do this through helping people see God’s hand at work in their lives.
14. Angels have a language distinct from any earthly language. Angels can, however, speak earthly language. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal..” 1 Cor 13:1
15. Angels do not marry or reproduce (Luke 20:35-36; Matt 22:30).
16. There are so many angels that they cannot be counted by human understanding (Heb 12:22; Rev 5:11)
17. Angels travel between Heaven and earth in a split second (Ezek 1:14). Remember that there is no time or distance in the Spirit world.
18. Angels are powerful beings, mighty in strength (2 Thess 1:7; Rev 10:1; 20:1-3). They are more powerful than satan and his cohorts.
19. When angels speak we can receive their message as from God (Heb 2:2).Their words cannot be broken. “We must pay more careful attention...to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation...received its just punishment...”
20. Angels are not to be worshipped (Rev 22:8-9). They are our fellow servants.
21. We will one day judge the fallen angels (1 Cor 6:3). 

Here is a documentary video that gives an account of History of Angels.