The Ministry Of Angels - Apst. Gideon Odoma

ANGELS, OUR SPIRIT ALLIES - Part 1

I was preaching somewhere some years back, and on my final night at the meeting, I began a biblical survey of the ministry of angels. Because of how much I know about that environment, I wasn’t surprised when I sensed hesitation in the spirit. I am coming short of calling what was in the air resistance. There was a reluctance to accept the block of my message about angels.

Talking about angels must always be a careful exercise in balancing. My studied opinion is that much of the Evangelical world revel in a cultivated indifference to, and pious ignorance of the angelic order. The result is: a lot of Christians are unschooled in matters angelic. Responses from honest surprise, to unease, all the way to undisguised resistance is to be expected whenever the angelic formation is taught in most mainline Christian assemblies.

True, angels are not to be a Christian’s focal obsession. They are created errand beings, servants, ministering spirits. Apart from their direct service to God, they are also sent to, in the language of scripture, minister for those who are heirs of salvation. By that designation, they are meant to attend to us. Point is, God remains the eternal focus and locus of all genuine spiritual enterprise. It is the Lord we seek. Angels are a part of His show and must never be painted as sharing in that glory or story befitting alone for the Great Monarch of the worlds, worlds visible and invisible.

Nevertheless, we should not shy away from talking and teaching about angels if only for the fact that the bible has a lot to say about them. Angels are part of the detailed architecture of the spiritual realm, a realm that all believers are called to be privileged stakeholders in. The spirit landscape that hosts Angels and other spirit beasts and beings is the same turf to which we were freely admitted as bona fide players, at conversion. It is neither biblical nor commonsensical to be ignorant of our spirit allies, for by His Majesty’s decree, angels are our spirit allies.

Believers, in negotiating their posture towards angels, usually fall into one of two extreme categories. There are those who out of legitimate fear of over-emphasizing the relevance of angels and possibly worshipping them, recoil wholesale from any consideration, even if not contemplation of angels, in God’s spirit ecosystem. On the other hand, there are those who interpret the repeated reference to angels in scripture to mean an invitation to Angel-obsession. Both camps are misleading. While we must not be oblivious to this fraternal legion in the spirit world called angels, we also must not patronize them. There is a healthy balance.

ANGELS, OUR SPIRIT ALLIES — Part 2

As believers, what we know for a fact is: Angels are an integral part of the worlds we inhabit. That is, the physical and the invisible worlds. We may not see them all the time, but our blindness to their presence does nothing to the stubborn fact of their existence. They are not human-mind dependent; their existence does not depend on our intelligence or awareness.

Angels are everywhere around us. The thirty-fourth Psalms asserts in part that, the angel of the Lord surrounds those who fear Him. In the grammar of the New Testament, the spiritual ecosystem within which the believer lives is populated in part by “an innumerable company of angels.” But our penchant for the mundane, acquired at the fall, makes us naturally apprehensive if not scared of the blazing realm angels call home.

Yet, our ongoing spiritual experience as Christians is a spectacular motif being procured by a curious interface of an array of spirit entities: Thrones, Elders, Demons, Angels, and sundry Angel-like categories (Watchers, Seraphim, Wheels, Cherubim, Archangels, etc) all under the sovereign government of the Godhead. The unseen world of the spirit is a colossally dynamic arena, bustling with schemes, counter-schemes, combats, covert missions, and intrigues. We miss out on a lot of the intended grandeur of the Christian experience if we localize our strides to this broken world of touch, taste, and everything natural. The thrills and burdens of the spirit world where angels are domiciled are profound, and we are meant to profit by them. There is a disposition that enhances the possibility of that realm and its holy actors invading our consciousness. And by such invasion, our spiritual senses, activated at the new birth, are trained to maximize the profundities of that luminous spirit landscape.

ISSUES…
I have hinted at a certain propensity of believers to congregate at extremes of either Angel-obsession or gross indifference to the reality of the angelic order. The subject of the authority structure in the spirit realm is hugely important too. By that I mean, can a believer command angels into action? Do these Instruments of God’s providence look up to saints for instruction? Some Christians would say an unconditional Yes. Others would say a confident No. And I guess a significant demographic would be undecided. While there is no section of the bible devoted to a systematics on angels, we can make crucial conclusions from the largely descriptive data we have. Let’s explore.

COMMANDING YOUR ANGELS?
To the question: do angels take instructions from believers? The simple answer is No. There is no record in scripture of anybody sending angels on errands; not even the Lord Jesus Himself during His earthly sojourn. I guess, and it is an informed guess, that we may have been able to do so (send angels on errand), if humanity, in Adam and Eve never fell. But we fell.

Daniel, explaining how he happened to remain alive, after spending a night with untamed lions in their underground cafeteria, said “MY GOD SENT His angels and they shut the lions’ mouth.” Father Abraham, in Genesis twenty four, assured the servant he sent to seek out a wife for Isaac, that the project would be successful. He was confident that the “Lord would send His angel” ahead of the servant to lead him to the right lady for Isaac. During the arrest of Jesus in Matthew twenty six, He chided Peter for attempting to go physical in His defence. Jesus said “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and HE WILL AT ONCE SEND me more than twelve legions of angels?”

Angels are answerable to God alone. We cannot command them. Not because we cannot articulate commands intended for them to execute, but because if we do so, we would be breaking the spirit protocol for angelic operation. Such violation of protocol must at least be unfruitful (occasionally, violations of the protocols of angelic activity attract chastisement). Saying or praying “I command angels to go and do so and so”, may tickle our emotion, and make us feel good, but has no legitimacy  in the target-realm – of the spirit. We are neither to command angels nor contact God through them. Praying to and/or praying through them are unbiblical practices. There are no descriptive or prescriptive precedences in scripture to validate such acts.

CASE STUDIES
Angels operate under strict, specific orders. Their missions are delineated for them by God – with unambiguous particularity – so that while they may have discretion and latitude in how much of their delegated powers they wield in the realization of a commanded objective, the objective is usually inelastic. They cannot add to it or detract from it. They don’t go around exercising their powers as they deem fit.

JESUS
Consider Jesus during His time in the desert, following His baptism at the Jordan River. The list of categories and entities that converged during those forty days of temptation is fascinating. The Markan account, in chapter one, verse thirteen says: “And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.” Here, we have
The Lord Himself,
Satan,
Wild beasts, and
Angels
sharing the same space in a profound formation. My focus in that schema however, is the angelic class.

Surely, the angels could have prevented Satan from tempting Jesus at all. They didn’t, obviously because Jesus was there principally to be tempted. And angels would not work against the purposes of God. So, we can easily see how that the angels didn’t engage Satan; but, what of the wild beasts? The angels also conveniently ignored them. If the Master of the Universe was coming into that terrain for such a sensitive spiritual exercise, would it be out of place for His attending angels to fumigate the area and rid it of every untamed beast? I guess not. But the angels did nothing to the wild beasts. Why?

Here is why. The specific assignment of the angels was ‘To keep Jesus; to sustain Him through that season; to minister to Him.’ HE was the focus of their mission; not Satan, not the wild beasts. The sublimities of the ordered world of the spirit hit us in the face here. The angels were present to make sure Jesus was fine, not so that the beasts be taken out. In the midst of those ferocious beasts therefore, Jesus was preserved, because angels attended to Him.

Imagine for a moment, if someone were to walk into that spiritually charged plot of land. She would see Jesus, and she would see wild beasts. It might be incomprehensible to her, if she is told that angels are present, ministering to Jesus. A natural mind might ask “If there are angels here, Jesus, why don’t they do something about the beasts; why don’t they ward them far off from here?” Well, if the angels have been sent to minister to Jesus, that’s what they will do. They will not chase the brutes away, but they will make sure Jesus is unharmed. Yes, the scene looks like a contradiction (Jesus, Satan, beasts and angels), but here we have it, and the eternal Son of God is in the middle of it all.

OTHERS
Let me speak to Apostle Paul for a moment: Sir, angelic operation may be the reason you inexplicably came out of that sea accident alive. If God sent angels to make sure you don’t die, their mission may not cover protecting the ship. If it does cover the ship, then, the vessel too will be attended to, otherwise, the ship may be lost, but all lives will be preserved – as ordered by His Majesty.

Angels work with clinical accuracy. Once, I’ve been miraculously delivered in a horrible car wreck. The car was so damaged it could not be fixed. But no one in the car had even a minor bruise. I suspect angels had orders over our lives. Friend, Angelic operation may be the reason you didn’t lose your mind, when you lost the promising contract bid. Angelic rounds might be the behind-the-scene-arrangement employed by God to keep you alive though surrounded by a multitude and diversity of ‘wild beasts.’

The Angel sent by God into the lions’ den where Daniel was thrown had instruction: to shut the mouth of the lions. He could have brought Daniel out, but that would be going against the order of His Majesty for that specific operation. The lions were incapacitated, but Daniel spent the night in their midst. The lions will not kill Daniel, but perhaps, hunger might have, if the king’s men didn’t pulley him out of that feline populated pit.

The angel sent to Apostle Peter’s prison cell in Acts of the Apostles chapter twelve, had a more elaborate assignment. First, he ensured the guards slept on while he operated. Then, he discharged Peter from his chains, led him out of the jail cell, and remotely operated the Iron Gate leading to the city (the fortified Iron Gate recognized him from afar and flung itself open). Angel got Peter out; Job done. Once out, but before Peter arrived at his destination, the angel left. He didn’t stay to help Peter open the gate at John-Mark’s house. It took persistent knocking for the faithless prayer team at John-Mark’s to eventually let the Apostle in.

There are many more such stories to be told, but these are sufficient to make the point that Angels are usually sent on definite assignments. They take their orders from God. They cannot revise their mandate midway; neither can we invent adventures for them. When we pray, we pray to God, and in response to our prayers, angels may be sent to deliver or facilitate our answers.

We don’t pray through angels.
We don’t pray to angels.
We don’t directly send angels on errands.
We don’t worship them.