Intro.
to Angels and the Angelic Conflict; Rev. 5:9
We have seen in this section a fantastic worship scene as the Lamb of
God comes forward to take up the scroll which represents the title deed, the
contractual basis for divine ownership of planet earth. That ownership was
bequeathed to man in the garden of Eden. Man was to rule and reign over the
planet but he gave that up to Satan, Satan has been operating as the prince of
the power of the air and the god of this age all throughout history since
Adam’s fall. Now at the end of history we see that God is going to finally make
things right. There is going to be a time when justice is going to be enacted
and all injustices throughout all history made right. Man has been waiting for
this. Why, the psalmist asks, do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?
What happens in the Tribulation period is that God is finally going to bring
all things to a conclusion, but it is not simply a conclusion in human history,
it is the conclusion in the history of all of God’s creation, including that of
the angels. Human history, as we have seen in the past, fits within a greater
framework of an angelic conflict, a war that broke out among the angels at some
time in the past.
Rev 5:9 And
they sang a new song, saying,
“Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals; for You were slain,
and purchased for God with Your blood {men} from every tribe and tongue and
people and nation. [10] You have made them {to be} a kingdom and priests to our
God; and they will reign upon the earth. [11] Then I looked, and I heard
the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the
elders; and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of
thousands.”
The first thing we should not is the introduction of the fact that for
the first time there is a greater number of people around the throne who have
not been identified before called “many angels.” There are three groups: the
angels, the living creatures, and the twenty-four elders. Then we read “the
number of the.” The question is: does this “them,” the pronoun simply refer to
the last mentioned, which would be the elders, or does it refer to the entire
group? The difficulty grammatically is that these other nouns are all masculine
nouns and masculine genitive plurals, they all have the same ending, so
grammatically it is impossible to identify whether he is speaking of one of
those groups or to the entire group. It is most likely from context that he is
referring to the whole group composed of three different sets of creatures. The
entire crowd that surrounds the throne is innumerable, it is expressed in a
hyperbolic way in the text to indicate a vast uncountable number.
This reveals to us again the role of the angels in the book of
Revelation. So we will digress a little bit to talk about this doctrine of the
angelic conflict and the role of angels in Revelation. This is one of those
doctrine that we hear from people again and again and again that once they have
heard it everything begins to make sense. It just helps organize all the
different bits and pieces of history and doctrine and theology, and suddenly
there is an umbrella doctrine that helps to make everything else make sense and
come together.
In Old Testament times there were people who did see and hear angels and
they had a specific role in history. So we often ask a number of questions,
like who are the angels? How many are there? What do they look like? What are
their powers? What about people in this age who claim that angels have appeared
to them and have given them revelation? That should bring two groups to mind,
the Muslims and the Mormons. Are there good and bad angels, and how do we know
the difference? When were angels created? When did Satan fall? What
relationship does Satan’s fall and the rebelliousness of the angels have to do
with human history? Who are the fallen angels? Who are the demons, also called
evil spirits? What can they do to us? Can Christians be demon possessed? What
is demon influence? Finally we have to ask” What does human history have to do
with the angels, if anything? It has a lot to do with the angels and to the
angelic conflict, which is why when we come to the book of Revelation we find
numerous references to angels. There are, depending on which text we look at,
between 63-72 references. That is out of a total of about 175 references in the
New Testament. That should tell us something right there. In fact, if we
analyse the use of the word “angels” in the book of Revelation approximately 50
of those occur in Revelation 4-21:9. Up to that time we are talking about
events before the Millennium occurs. So just on statistical evidence alone we
recognize that we can’t really comprehend the whats, the whys and the
wherefores of the Tribulation if we don’t understand this within a broader
context of God’s purpose and rile for the angels in history.
Summary
of the basic doctrine of the angelic conflict
1) What do we mean by
angelic conflict? There are different terms that are used to refer to this: the
angelic rebellion, spiritual warfare, spiritual conflict, etc., all of which
refer to the fact that there is an ongoing war, and ongoing rebellion that
occurs in the invisible heavenly sphere between two groups of creatures known
as angels. They were all originally created by God holy and righteous and just
but at some time in eternity past there was a rebellion that occurred and that
this was the first introduction of sin and evil into God’s universe. So a
definition of the angelic conflict is the invisible spiritual warfare between
the forces of Satan and the forces of God. Ephesians 6:10-18.
2) The course of the angelic
conflict. It began at some time in the past when a creature name Lucifer
rebelled against God, expressing the desire of his heart to be worshipped as
God, to be elevated above all the other creatures because he thought that he
could rule and reign the cosmos better than God could. He wanted all of the
glory for himself. In that rebellion he recruited approximately one third of
all the angels to his side and this revolt occurred some time prior to the
creation of man in Genesis chapter one. On the basis on Matthew 25:41 because
there is a past tense there, these angels were recruited and condemned to the
lake of fire. At the time of Christ the lake of fire was already in existence
and had been created and prepared for the devil and his angels. But for some
reason they aren’t there. So the question is: Why not? What has lead to this
postponement? By theological deduction and from a number of passages Satan
accused God of injustice related to the sentence: something along the lines of
how could a just God send His creatures to the lake of fire? Along the same
lines Satan may have accused God of not allowing him to show that he could do
just as good as God, that he could be God and run the universe. There may be a
number of ways to articulate these ideas but it seems that when we go through
the whole of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation there are certain themes that
dominate in relationship to creatureliness and leadership. What God is
demonstrating throughout all of history, and why He allows Satan to continue,
is that the creature can never do that which only the creator can do, and that
the creature doesn’t have those infinite capabilities—omnipresence,
omnipotence, omniscience—to do what he wants to do, and the only way there can
be order, truth, stability and happiness in the creation is for the creatures
to be oriented to the authority of God.
What we learn from Scripture is that the creatures consistently repeat
the same error that Satan began with: they desire to operate independently of
God, autonomously from God, to make life work on their own terms, and so they
suppress the truth in unrighteousness People come up with all kinds of
rationales and self-justifications and self-lies, and they say that next week
they will start getting serious about their Christian life. We don’t realize
that the decisions we make today, that are decisions in carnality based on our
own self-centred orientations to life and to the world, can come back to haunt
us with major negative consequences down the road. The only basis for
happiness, stability and meaning in life is to obedient and committed to God’s
plan.
This angelic conflict that began sometime in early Genesis, that impacts
all of human history all of the way up to Revelation, comes to a resolution and
conclusion with the defeat of Satan, the Antichrist and the false prophet at
the end of Revelation 19. The false prophet and the Antichrist are cast into
the lake of fire, Satan is put into a holding cell for a thousand years where
he is chained, and then human history continues in the almost perfect
environment of the Millennial kingdom. It is almost perfect because the earth
is still going to be populated by a lot of sinners. The Millennial kingdom is
going to show that it is not just Satan’s fall, it is our own sin nature that
is the problem, and there will be a rebellion at the end of the Millennial
kingdom organizing all those human beings with their sin natures who decided to
reject Christ, even in that perfect environment of the Millennium. Satan will be
released for a short time at the end of that period and will lead them in a
rebellion against God, and at that time God is going to destroy them in a fiery
judgment.
So we see that the whole panorama of history fits within a broader
framework of the judicial activity of God towards Satan and the fallen angels,
and it is only when we look at both of these at these at the same time—God’s
dealing with the angels and His dealing with the human race—that we can come to
understand the purpose of history. God is going to bring to a head His plan of
judgment and resolution of all of the injustices in history related to all of
His creatures, and this is what comes to a conclusion at the end of the
Tribulation period.
How do we know that angels exist? We only know things four different
ways. The first three operate independently of God: rationalism, empiricism,
mysticism. Then there is revelation. God has given us the objective source of
revelation and we can know it. Revelation, the Bible, the 66 books of the canon
of Scripture, are the final, complete and proficient source of knowledge and
the foundation and framework for all knowledge. This is the only way we can
know anything definitely about angels and that they exist, and we can only know
it because God has communicated it to us. There is a tremendous amount of
biblical evidence related to the existence of angels. For example, 34 of the 56
books of the Bible mention angels specifically and referred to by that name.
The basic terms that are used for angels are malak in the Old Testament and angelos
[a)ggeloj] in the New Testament, and both of these have the same core meaning,
which is a messenger. We see that this has the idea related to being a servant.
They serve God by carrying out His commands throughout the universe; that is
their function. These terms are found over three hundred times in the Bible and
of those a quarter are in Revelation. The are also other terms for angels, e.g.
cherubim, seraphs, princes, sons of God, the power of the air, principalities,
rulers of the darkness of this world, etc. They are referred to many times by
Jesus Christ as real creatures. If Jesus affirms the existence of angels and
treats them as real creatures with real ability then to deny the existence of
angels is to deny the veracity of Jesus Christ. To the believer the only source
of authority about angels, demons, Satan, what they can do, what their
limitations are, what their powers are, is the Bible.