This began one service, which had to be broken up because of its size, importance, and complexity. This is the second part of a series consisting of:
I quoted two very famous songs from other books: "Immortal, Invisible ..." is the first line of a song; "I ask no dream ..." is an often-omitted verse from "Spirit of God, Descend Upon My Heart."
Although I have noticed many allusions to the visions in Revelation 15 and 19, I have not found any songs that use them for both foundation and "argument." "Ye Servants of God" is more directly based on a psalm text. In view of the wide hymnic use of Revelation 4, 5, and 7, I do not understand this neglect.
The visions in this plan are in described as being in or of the sky. This may be to indicate the cosmic or transcendental importance of the subject matter; it may be because the sky was associated with God as the source of revelation; or there may be some other reason for the location of the apparition. I suspect that the place of the vision would not have been given if it were not significant. Perhaps the significance is merely that it attests the genuineness of the vision account, by firmly embedding it in a particular historical context. But I would not hastily dismiss the significance of anything that helps us associate revelation with experience. The sky is always there: it can promise us consolation, warn us of danger, challenge us to duty--if only we will be prepared, through these recorded visions, to hear it.
The nature of visions is shrouded in mystery. Of course, accounts of visions appear in the Bible as well as in non-Biblical or even anti-Biblical records. A Christian will tend to be skeptical of post-New-Testament visions, but it is important to remember that a vision may be of a genuine physical phenomenon that another person present might also see -- but without having perceived the vision. This is specifically attested both in the Bible (Acts 22:9; cf. 9:7), and in other ancient and modern accounts.
It can be interesting to speculate as to the actual physical phenomena involved. For instance, Klaus Koch suggests that the uninspired man standing beside Isaiah might have seen "merely" the smoke of the sacrifices rising from the temple at an annual feast, perhaps back-lit by the flames or by the rising sun (The Prophets, I: The Assyrian Period, p. 109). Bruce Malina attempts to identify various figures in the Revelation of John with specific constellations and other celestial phenomena. (On the Genre and Message of Revelation). Although certainty is impossible, by such speculation we may better recognize our uncertainty and ignorance. And by facing these questions (even though they may remain unanswered or unanswerable), we may avoid the delusion of seeing these accounts as merely literary effusions rather than as the consequence of genuine, overwhelming experiences. (And anyone, obscurantist or atheist, is susceptible to this oversight.)
Sometimes, as in a dream, the seers see things that have no physical reality. Jacob saw a stairway--but there was no real stairway. He saw God--but what he saw was not God's physical body. And he saw angels. Clearly, Jacob woke up 1) believing in God, and 2) not believing in stairways to heaven. I don't see how we can know whether he then believed in angels.
And, finally, we must admit that we cannot always exclude the possibility that, like Balaam's donkey, the seer saw what was really there.
In the end, though, what matters is the "God-breathed" interpretation of the visions. This may be why there is often insufficient detail to satisfy our curiosity.
I have heard people in a Bible class seriously address the question of the existance and number of angels by reading about the vision of horses and chariots of fire that Elisha's servant saw. Without pausing to ask whether the angels had taken the form of horses or of chariots (neither of which has scriptural support), or to discuss the total absence of "angels" or any semantically related term in this account, I proceed to emphasize that this was a vision. The servant, who was impressed by a large army, received a true message (God's present power was greater than the Syrians') in a most effective medium. If we maintain a healthy sense of our own ignorance of visionary experience, we must be content not to know what was "really there." And any information about angels from this chapter is founded solely on our perfect ignorance of that.
"We ought to be very careful reading between the lines until we have mastered reading the lines themselves." A vision account is true if it describes a genuine historical perception; the vision itself is true if it is recognizable as a (possibly illusory) vision and it conveys a true message. Whether the perception is illusory or not is irrelevant to the truth of either the vision itself or any account of it.
Further, if the content and the object of the message adequately account for the form of the vision, it is simply not possible to logically deduce anything else from that form. We have to be content to know that we do not know any more.
Other vision accounts have caused speculation about the pneumato-zoology of the Cherubim, and their position in the taxonomy of angels. In fact, such chimaeric creatures are known as guardians, or symbols of guardians, of "holy" places, Greece, Egypt, Babylonia, and other ancient cultures. They are mentioned only once in the Bible outside the context of visions or images, and even that use makes sense as symbolic of an inaccessable holy place. So I do not see how we can be sure that such creatures even exist. As symbols, they functioned perfectly well even for people who had never seen such a creature and could not know whether they existed. Neither the Kerubi, nor the "shining ones" nor the "life-forms," nor any other of the winged creatures of vision, are ever called angels or messengers by anyone who was in a position to know. The Bible never describes them as carrying messages -- the definitive function of angels. But even if such creatures really exist, the Bible still avoids satisfying our curiosity about their nature -- which is the only similarity between them and angels.
Angels (that is, "messengers"--it's the same word in Greek) are never described as animal-shaped, or as winged, or as appearing in any form distinguishable from men. Only occasionally are they represented as having the potential to fight -- and never in a context that can't be plausibly understood as metaphorical. No images or representations of them are mentioned -- or even permitted under the Law.
Is there any limit to this agnosticsm? Can one know anything about spiritual creatures? How can we know angels exist, if their appearance in visions and metaphors is not conclusive? There are several possible lines of reasoning, but to my mind the simplest is Jesus' passing allusion to the "angels in heaven that do not marry." That reference is the foundation of an argument, and to have any effect, must therefore have been either an axiom or a postulate. That is, either it was a fact which Jesus is asserting on his own authority, or it was a cultural assumption that his hearers would have accepted as a valid basis for a counterargument.
(The latter possibility is exemplified by Jesus' question, "By whom do your sons cast out demons?" He was not acknowledging them as real exorcists -- merely pointing out that as the Jews believed in non-Satanic exorcists, they could not logically prove him to be Satanic from his exorcisms. Whenever Jesus was faced with a challenge to his own authority, he might reasonably base a counterargument on his hearers' own possibly false preconceptions rather than on an authority which they would not have accepted. We need to recognize when Jesus might have been doing this, or we will be found giving his opponents' false doctrines the weight of his authority!)
In this case, we can easily eliminate that possibility. Luke says the Sadducees (to whom Jesus made this argument) did not believe in angels at all! And even Jews who did believe in angels, often believed that they did marry: as indicated in the apocryphal books of Tobit and I Enoch as well as traditional interpretation of Genesis 6. Since Jesus' statement shockingly contradicted current beliefs, it could only have been true: angels actually exist and do not marry.