| |
March 2nd 2009
When I was a boy, we used to send cereal box tops away to get free gifts from Kellogg’s or Post cereals. One of my most prized gifts was a Dick Tracy decoder. Dick Tracy could send cryptic messages on cereal boxes and in special letters to his junior detectives, but only those who had the secret decoder could understand what was being written. It was invisible to all outsiders.
Of course, the decoder was actually just a piece of red cellophane paper, which when placed over the invisible message, made it legible—but I was one of those privileged few who got to peer into his secret world.
Dick Tracy was just a fantasy character, but the truth is, there really is an invisible world that we cannot see with our human eyes. Over the past three weeks, I’ve been describing what the Bible tells us about various types and ranks of angels. The cherubim, seraphim and messenger angels I wrote about were all good angels. Unless they wanted us to see them, they remained invisible to us earthlings. We are told that there are billions of invisible angels whom God has created to serve him and us.
Alongside of those heavenly creatures are hellish angels. They are also invisible, unless they choose to be seen; and similarly, bad angels come in various ranks.
It wasn’t that God created evil angels; but rather that they were once good angels, who chose to rebel. The story goes like this:
Eons ago, in heaven there were five cherubim who surrounded the throne of God. The leader of the five was named Lucifer, which means “Light Bearer”. One day Lucifer, thinking he was the most beautiful and magnificent of all creatures, decided that he didn’t want to serve God any longer. He wanted to run his own life and be master of his own destiny. In his simplistic arrogance, he wanted to overthrow God and take over heaven.
Of course the very idea was absurd. God, alone, is the all-powerful, all-knowing, omni-present Creator of all that exists; so immediately Lucifer was thrown out of heaven. From that day forward, he was referred to not as Lucifer, but as Satan or the devil. Which simply means adversary.
When Satan fell from haven, he took with him a third of all of the trillions of angels and they, from that terrible day onward, became his malevolent slaves. We call them demons. That left two times as many good angels and evil angels.
But God had a purpose, even for those fallen angels and the devil. Rather than send them to their final abode called hell, God sent them to a place called earth, where he was about to create a new species called mankind. The purpose of the now evil spirits would be to oppose men and women. God made us in such a way that we would grow stronger through adversity than through comfort, so the demons where allowed to oppose us. Of course we still would have free access to our Creator’s authority over them, in addition to his trillions of good angels.
- Barry Buzza
|
