After my recent article on angels (Editor’s Note: To read, scroll down to “Coverage Limitations,” dated Aug. 11), I received this appreciative email from a friend in Virginia:

“Good and important article on angels, Lisa. Thanks.  Boy, how true about how religion and the world have reversed the truth.  All the shows and movies about the wonderful ‘angels.’  ‘Touched by an angel,’  ‘Michael,’ (that was about an angel, wasn't it?  With J. Travolta?)  And wasn’t ‘Phenomenon’ about an angel?  That popular Demi Moore and P. Swayze movie--can't remember the name.  That was about an angel too, yes?  A guy at work was filled with incredulity that I had not seen it.  He really was. And ‘Highway to Heaven.’  I have to admit, I liked some of those episodes.  I am going to forward your article.”

Undoubtedly there will be tons more stuff about angels supposedly intervening in our lives as society is more thickly indoctrinated into New Age spirituality.

Just this past weekend I was in a Christian couple’s house and immediately noticed angel paraphernalia all through the living room and dining room. They even had a framed print of an old painting with the familiar images of naked and winged female baby angels.

First of all, in the Bible angels are always men and never have wings.

While angels had a special ministry to the nation Israel in times past as ministers of those who were to be heirs of salvation—providing physical protection and wisdom and acting as messengers from the Lord for Israel—today they have no such role in the lives of Believers, period.

“In today’s ‘dispensation of grace,’ they are no longer ministering spirits to us,” confirms my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill., (www.graceimpact.org) , in a study I have on tape. “We have no guardian angels. We’ve been sealed with the Holy Spirit of God and placed into Christ, given a perfect complete standing in Him, so what would an angel be able to accomplish for us? We don’t need angels to come as ministers—giving us wisdom and understanding as in times past—because we have the completed written Word of God.”

As I pointed out in my last piece on all this, the roles have actually been reversed today and Believers literally minister to angels rather than them ministering to us. Angels are always studying us and we have a ministry to them that the Satanically-controlled religious system out there doesn’t want us to be aware of.

What’s more, God’s angels can be taught false doctrine by duped Christians who don’t “rightly divide” the Bible to know what’s different about today than in the time of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry.

“Doctrine affects them and they go off and do just what you do—they sit down with their buddies and talk about doctrine,” says Jordan. “There’s constant dialogue going on and the only source they have of understanding grace and truth is from us. They can be misled just as a member of the Body of Christ can be misled.”

In heaven, lines have been drawn as a result of the Satanic rebellion up there and, consequently, there are separate alliances of the angels. Just as Michael and his angels represent the armies of God, Satan has his own troops—the fallen angels who act as his co-horts.

“Satan himself sits atop a great hierarchy of minions below him,” says Jordan. “He has a (heavenly) organization that comes down—this hierarchy that filters down—and his little minions get to know us because they, too, see us and watch what’s going on.”

As Jordan further describes this situation, “Satan sits on a kingdom that’s like a boiling pot and he sits there and holds the lid that’s jiggling, ready to blow. He can keep it like this because he’s smarter—meaning more devious, more scheming, more wily and tricky—than all the minions over whom he rules, and all the other creatures on the face of the earth except those who know ‘the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom’ (I Cor. 2:7) that he couldn’t figure out.

“You know, to me that’s one of the most amazing things in all the world, and when you really grasp that, you understand why it is Satan hates what we preach so much! He’ll let you be religious, he’ll let you talk about Jesus, he’ll let you study the Bible, but just don’t appreciate the wisdom of God in a mystery. Go mix it up some just to take the shame and the sting away from him—the open shame to which the Cross puts him.”

Bible scholar Keith Blades explains it this way his 1994 book, “Satan and His Policy of Evil”:

“Satan, indeed, has suffered great humiliation and embarrassment over ‘the revelation of the mystery.’ God ‘made a show of him and his co-horts’ and, therefore, the presumed dignity of his own self-importance has been struck a crushing blow. His grandiose plan of evil, which he founded upon nothing more than his own conceits and professed superior wisdom (over God), has been consigned to complete destruction. . .

“He has hatred for the very sound of the words which describe God’s ‘manifold wisdom,’ and it has not abated one bit since the day the ‘mystery of Christ’ was first revealed to Paul. In fact, if anything, it would have intensified. For God has designed for His ‘new creation,’ throughout this present dispensation, to impact the heavenly places with the knowledge of the glory of His ‘manifold wisdom,’ to the relentless irritation of Satan and his co-horts.”

To satisfy this hatred, Satan works to try and “turn the tables on God” by deluding Christians from “the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery” (Rom. 16:25), instead buying into false doctrine shoveled from church pulpits by his ministers who disguise themselves “as ministers of righteousness.” (II Cor. 11:15)

“(Satan) seeks most of all to drown the ‘hidden wisdom of God’ in a quagmire of doctrinal confusion, chaos and uncertainty of which he is the author,” writes Blades. “He desires to have members of the body of Christ, as Paul describes in Ephesians 4:14, ‘tossed to and fro, and carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ not even themselves knowing what is ‘the fellowship of the mystery’. . . keeping them ignorant of the very thing they need to know to make the impact in the heavenly places. . .

“Satan is able to convincingly slander, ridicule, and defame the ‘new creation’ in the heavenly places. In this Satan gloats and exults. He is able in all of this to display both to himself, and his own co-horts in the heavenly places, his manipulative powers. He shows them that he is able to successfully deceive and lead about the members of the Christ’s own body, as effectively as if they were still his own. Upon doing this his wounded pride comforts itself.”