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March 10th 2009
I’ve just finished reading a fascinating manuscript from a lady in our church. She is Indian-Fijian by birth and was married to a man who was chosen by her parents. He was from a prominent Fijian family, so came with good credentials.
But within a month after the wedding, the husband began to slap my friend around. Over the fourteen years that followed, indescribable physical and emotional abuse continued and even increased. She lived a hellish nightmare, until her husband died in a way strangely similar to the way he’d tried to kill her.
On a dark night in Fiji, the husband took my friend to the ocean. He forced her to the end of a long jetty, and after a thorough beating, threw her over the railing into shark-infested water. To save herself from the sharks who were circling around her, she held onto the bottom of the railing. The husband continued to kick her mercilessly, while taunting her to scream for help. The more she screamed, the more he got off on the cruelty. After all, it was late and there was nobody around.
But suddenly out of nowhere, a man appeared. He talked to the husband and the beating stopped. The man then disappeared. The husband meekly retreated to his car and my friend was saved. She credits her salvation to an angelic appearance.
The Bible asserts that more often than we realize, we encounter angels, who look and act like humans. Angels are a different creation than humans—their stated purpose is to serve God by caring for humans. We do not become angels when we die. It seems we will be given a new body in heaven (one that won’t grow old like those we have now), but angels will continue to serve us in the next world.
Angels are spirit-beings. They can take on human form or may appear in an other-worldly form of light. In the Bible, there are many angelic visits recorded.
A couple of angels came to visit Abraham one day. They talked together. He described them as men and even served them a meal. Jacob saw angels in a dream that he had—they were ascending and descending between heaven and earth.
It was angel who appeared to Mary’s cousin Elizabeth and announced that she was going to have a baby in her old age. The same angel, whose name was Gabriel, came to the teenager Mary to tell her she would give birth to Jesus. Neither of the women seemed surprised by the angelic messenger—they were perplexed by his announcement, but not by his appearance.
Many paintings and movies portray the angelic visitors as having wings, but as far as the descriptions in the Bible, none of the messenger angels have wings—only the cherubim and the seraphim that I described last week had wings.
Next week, I’ll write about what we know about fallen angels. Meanwhile, keep your eyes open. Who knows when you might meet an angel. He may be there when you least expect him.
- Barry Buzza
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