Entertaining Angels

Remember that song? Entertaining Angels?

C'mon girls, don't deny it. You were all in love with Phil.

I was reading through Job this afternoon, and he talks about how God can't even trust His own angels. How can He trust those He has made from clay? (Job 4:18) It got me to thinking about angels... weird, right? But to be perfectly and brutally honest, I had forgotten about angels. Judge me all you want, that is fine. But it's the truth, I had.

That thought lead me to thinking about this song. I remember listening to this song as a preteen and contemplating what it meant to "entertain angels". There is so much speculation about this. TV Shows (I'm sure you all remember "Touched By An Angel"), we here stories from missionaries, have little figurines on our bookshelves, the cherubs on our key chains or pictured on our bookmarks that we use in our Bibles. We here of warrior angels who protected the missionaries from danger. My mom used to say that when we pray it gave strength to the angels to fight the battle for us, kind of like how we need to eat our vegetables to make us strong. People claim to have a guardian angel that protected them from being hit by that car, or cured from a disease. There is the image of the angel on one shoulder giving us righteous guidance, and the little devil on the other shoulder encouraging naughty behaviour. I'm sure we've all said, "The devil made me do it."

Our world has taken the idea of angels and distorted it. We have taken it and made up our own ideas of angels, and the devil too.We tells stories of how they turn their wings in to experience pain, fall in love and hav an opportunity to be human. Angels have turned into an image of funny, helpful sidekicks, the good side, and even sexual.

In the Bible we read of these amazing angels that appear and speak to people. I would say most popular is the host of angels that came to the shepherds at night from the Christmas story (Luke 2:8-14). We also know that the angel spoke to Joseph (Matthew 1:20-23), the angel Gabriel also appeared to Mary to tell of the Good News (Luke 1:28-38).

The truth is angels are this incredible mystery.

Do they really walk among us?

Do we really entertain angels?