Friday, November 22, 2024
Angels Deflect Praise
I, John, am the one who heard and saw all these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me. But he said, “No, don’t worship me. I am a servant of God, just like you and your brothers the prophets, as well as all who obey what is written in this book. Worship only God!” (Revelation 22:8-9 NLT)
Virtual reality and artificial intelligence are starting to make people question what’s real. Facebook changed its name to Meta to emphasize the metaverse, the virtual world. AR-enabled smart glasses allow us to see other worlds that don’t actually exist. I’ve tried them a few times. And I’ve determined that there’s no way you can look cool, or even normal, when you’re wearing them to fight imaginary battles or whatever. The point is that there are many different universes we can explore that aren’t real.
On the other hand, the supernatural world, the spiritual realm where angels dwell, is very real. It’s as real as our natural world. We just can’t see it. If we could peel away the veil that separates our world from the supernatural world, I believe that what we would see there would blow our minds. If an angel of the Lord were to appear to us right now, we’d be blown away. Or, as the Australians say, we’d be gobsmacked.
In fact, we might be so overwhelmed by the angel’s appearance—and by the fact that it’s so unlike anything we’ve ever encountered before—that we might even be tempted to worship it. That’s the situation the apostle John found himself in in the last chapter of the Bible.
In John’s defense, he was seeing things that no one else had ever seen before. The glory of Heaven. The horror of the Tribulation. The spectacle of God judging the world from His throne. John’s senses must have been close to overload.
So, as he stared at the angel who was revealing these unimaginable things to him, John fell down to worship at his feet. You can almost sense the angel’s alarm at being worshipped. He said to John, in effect, “Stop that! We’re on the same pay grade. I’m a servant, just like you.”
There are several occasions in the Bible where people who encountered angels were not just overwhelmed but terrified. When an angel appeared to a woman to tell her she would give birth to Samson, she told her husband, “A man of God appeared to me! He looked like one of God’s angels, terrifying to see” (Judges 13:6 nlt). The prophet Daniel “became so terrified” that he fell facedown and then fainted when the angel Gabriel approached him and spoke to him (Daniel 8:17–18 nlt). When an angel of the Lord announced the birth of Jesus to shepherds out in the fields, “they were terrified” (Luke 2:9 NLT).
No matter how awesome, powerful, or intimidating angels may seem, they are servants of God, just as we are. They don’t act on their own accord. They do only what God commands them to do. They don’t seek glory or praise. And when they receive it, they deflect it immediately to God.
When the devil attempted to get Jesus to worship him, Jesus answered, “The Scriptures say, ‘You must worship the Lord your God and serve only him’” (Luke 4:8). And all the angels of Heaven say, “Amen.”
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