The Quality of Angels

For the most part what we know as angel lore comes long after the canonization of the Hebrew Bible as well as the canonization of the Christian New testament.

Angel lore for the most part comes from the conjecture of apocryphal literature as is, the further development of doctrine split into many factions of belief within the belief structure itself and in, for the most part, a monotheistic structure.

Angelology is the study of this conjecture in a theological manner branched of in theology itself.

The word “angel” is an English word derived from the old English word “engal" as well as old French “angele" which comes from late Latin “angelus” which in turn is translated from the late Greek “angelos.”

Angelos is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew word mal'akh which means “messenger.”

In the Septuagint, when the word messenger applies to a human, its replaced with words like “nuntius" or “legatus" but, when it is a reference to an angel the word angelos appears and in this, is the core of this teaching, “the quality of angels.”

In the Bible, as well as in apocryphal literature, angels appear in two forms, material and immaterial.

The material quality is one of a fleshly nature where the immaterial quality can be that of light, a voice, or even a material depiction in an immaterial setting of other dimensionality based on material depiction as well.

Some titles given to angels: messengers of God, sons of God, the upper ones.

As far as literation goes, as it pertains to the Hebrew bible, a messenger of God could be a human messenger or a supernatural messenger.

A prophet or priest could be a human messenger, the name Malachi translates as “messenger of God”. The title “book of Malachi” translates as “by the hand of his messenger.”

A supernatural messenger would be etymological to phrase such as “messenger from God", it could be an aspect of God such as, the written word or the living word, or the messenger could be God.

In this case, examples of quality could be that of light, the still small voice.

Physical descriptions of God have even been given throughout the bible as well as that of messages from God written as….the Lord came to…. God spoke to…. Without physical depiction.

 

And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.

Genesis 22:11 KJV

 

And the angel of the Lord called unto Abraham out of heaven the second time,

Genesis 22:15 KJV

 

And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord , for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son:

Genesis 22:16 KJV

 

In this narrative of Abraham, set to offer his son Isaac, we have an example of an angel in the immaterial. This angel speaks as if God were speaking through the angel.

 

And the angel of the Lord found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur.  And he said, Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.

Genesis 16:7-8 KJV

 

In these two verses we have the suggestion of a material, physical appearance of an angel as well as a gender specification.

 

He “found her by the fountain” as if to either suggest he was looking for her or that he just happened to come across her in the wilderness.

 

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

Exodus 3:2 KJV

 

And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

Exodus 3:3 KJV

 

And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.

Exodus 3:4 KJV

 

Here is another example,  a very important piece of scripture at that,  where Moses is visited by an angel of the lord in the form of a flame in a bush and God spoke from the midst of it.

 

And God's anger was kindled because he went: and the angel of the Lord stood in the way for an adversary against him. Now he was riding upon his ass, and his two servants were with him.

Numbers 22:22 KJV

 

And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and the ass turned aside out of the way, and went into the field: and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into the way.

Numbers 22:23 KJV

 

But the angel of the Lord stood in a path of the vineyards, a wall being on this side, and a wall on that side.

Numbers 22:24 KJV

 

Here again a material description of an angel, sword drawn, though Balaam couldn’t see the angel right away, not till after his donkey spoke to him.

As for the title “the upper ones" I am inclined to lean toward upper dimensionality but, here in this verse of Enoch we see the watchers, the sons of God to become the fallen angels in a depiction of having descended to earth.

 

Then they swore all together, and all bound themselves by mutual execrations. There whole number was two hundred, who descended upon Ardis, which is the top of Mount Armon.

Enoch 7:7

 

Throughout the bible, as we read the words of the profits we find that they often switch from first person to third person point of view.

Now, in our time, which exists much fiction, when we hear third person in that of a historical document then it throws us a little but, I have heard it said that when these profits switch to third person its because they are no longer part of our world, or, since we are reading from a past tense perception, it means that the actions described are what took place say…. In the realm of God.

 

Daniel chapter 7 is a good example of this, it starts in third person laying down the introductory scene.

 

In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.

Daniel 7:1 KJV

 

Verse 2 passes the mantle to Daniel so that he may tell his vision.

 

Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.

Daniel 7:2 KJV

 

At this point though one would want to take into consideration the authorship. Which is not really known.

The switch to Daniel’s point of view could simply be that of the author recounting events as told.

With all that being said, I don’t believe that the writers of these scriptures would be without imagination.

Scripture can sometimes be vague to us so therefore we rely on interpretation and what our hearts tell us is right.

All this is pretty far away from the original topic but it was a point raised to further describe the quality of angels from my own point of view with much of my own conjecture, which I am quite fond of doing.

Back to “the upper ones.” As I said I am more inclined to lean toward higher dimensionality on this title where “upper" is replaced by “higher" in higher dimensionality.

I’ve covered this part before in another writing but,  I’ll go over it again. The first three dimensions: length, width, and depth. The fourth dimension: time.

We perceive time in a different quality than that of the first three dimensions. Ourselves, the material world,  we move through it. Science perceives it in wave and fields.

The fifth dimension: cause. In our three dimensional world we perceive effects but not cause.

So for us to perceive the quality of cause would be to have that dimension reveal itself to us or to become part of it(much as Daniel did in his vision per say)and, it would be in the error of a lack of imagination if we thought that higher dimensionality stopped at cause.

 

These next few verses from Genesis I believe probably give us our first historical glimpse of higher dimensionality.

 

And Jacob went out from Beer–sheba, and went toward Haran.

Genesis 28:10 KJV

 

And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.

Genesis 28:11 KJV

 

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

Genesis 28:12 KJV

 

And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;

Genesis 28:13 KJV

 

Consider this, time, the fourth dimension, immaterial but, imagine if time was made manifest within the realm of the first three dimensions which we perceive say, as a human.

Then time in human form could tell us everything we need to know about time provided that we could comprehend it.

Consider also, dreams. Dreams are a quality of the conscious in an unconscious setting.

They build pictures in the mind of an immaterial quality thus, becoming a doorway to things of an immaterial quality: time, causality, henceforth, angels, God.

People in the Bible who experienced dream visions of God or angels of the lord and even interpreted dreams: Joseph, son of Jacob, Daniel,  Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus.

 

I would like to wrap up here with a recap.

 

The word angel itself, is derived originally from the Hebrew word meaning messenger and in some instances we could easily replace the phrase “angel of the lord" with “messenger of the lord" or, “message of the lord" giving that the message of the lord sometimes comes directly from the voice God embodied through an angel.

The first time angels are spoken of by name in the bible is in the book of Daniel.

These “messages" or “Messengers” are of a different quality than the reality that we perceive but can take on a quality that we can perceive and when called upon by God, the righteous and holy can take on a different quality or, the quality of a higher dimensionality within the supernatural realm of God.

 

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

Genesis 5:24 KJV

 

And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha: and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet.

2 Kings 13:21 KJV

 

And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.

Luke 24:51 KJV

 

In closing, in a dimension beyond the thresholds of where we perceive is a quality of existence that speaks to us within our own perception. Our bodies and our minds can be opened to it so that we may know its presence.