In times past, angels were consistently involved in God’s dealings with the nation Israel, largely charged with the safety and well-being of Israel.

One time a single angel killed 185,000 enemies of Israel in a night!

In Psalm 91 (a Messianic psalm speaking about Israel in Christ as well as Christ in Israel), are these words of assurance, “There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.”

Likewise, in Psalm 34: 6-7, it says, “This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.”

Now just think about applying either one of these passages to yourself today as a Christian, which is exactly what preachers and theologians who study the Bible non-dispensationally—and therefore simply allegorically—would have you to do.

“Somebody will have some miraculous deliverance from some auto accident or other calamity in life and they’ll say, ‘God sent His angel to deliver you,’ ” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church, Rolling Meadows, Ill. (www.graceimpact.org) , in a study I have on tape. “But haven’t you ever seen a Believer suffer through some calamitous tragedy? Have you yourself ever been through a tragic experience? What is that? Was God not delivering you in that experience? Were the angels on R&R?—‘Wait a minute; I’m on a break time’? ”

The big question for these supposed “men of God,” is that if angels are watching and guarding over us as ministering spirits, as they were repeatedly shown to have done in the Old Testament, why are there so many horrible things happening to Believers today?

“What they’ll say is, ‘It’s because you’re not right,’ and that certainly was the case with Israel, but in Christ, when can’t you be right?!” reasons Jordan. “You see you and I as Believers are always right in Christ, aren’t we? All of a sudden, you’ve got to begin to doubt the finality of the Cross and the completeness of who you are in Christ.

“I’ve told you many times that if you getting rid of all the sin in your life, and you doing everything right—never having any secret grudges in your heart or anything—is what it took for you to get blessings from God, you wouldn’t see a blessing come, much less smell one or experience one.

“It’s on the basis of the blood of Christ that we have our standing and that’s a much different kind of deal than Israel had in her program.”

When Daniel was thrown into the lion’s den, for one example, the Bible says an angel went in ahead of him and gave the lion lockjaw. Daniel was actually able to make a pillow out of the lion and go to sleep that night all warm and comfy, safe in the knowledge that the ferocious beast wouldn’t bother him at all because an angel was encamped around him to safe keep him.

But in Paul’s epistles, which outline the change in program in God’s dealings with mankind as a result of Israel’s fall, angels are never once said to have ministered to a member of the Body of Christ.

“There’s only one verse in Paul’s epistles that talks about angels ministering to us and it’s at the Rapture ‘with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God’ (I Thes. 4:16),” confirms Jordan. “The commander and chief of the heavenly army will then be involved in our exodus out through the universe because we’re going out there into the heavens to invade that place.”

So why is it that when you come to the Body of Christ there’s no indication at all from Scripture that angels minister to us? The simple answer is we don’t need them!

“We have the sufficiency of who we are in Christ, and the sufficiency of the Word of God to meet our every need, and so we don’t need some other outside external intervention,” explains Jordan. “We have a complete total sufficiency by the grace of God in Jesus Christ revealed to us, ministered to us and communicated to us through the written Word of God. There’s simply NO need of angels at all. Now, I didn’t say it wouldn’t be a tantalizing idea to someone or something they desired to have; I said you don’t need them.

“Somebody says, ‘Well, wouldn’t you like to be an angel?’ No, I wouldn’t want to be an angel. I wouldn’t want to step down to a second-class position. As a member of the Body of Christ, I’m going to have a glorified body. Flying will be too slow for me.”

About his prison experience, Daniel writes in Dan. 9: 21-22, “Yea, whiles I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation.

“And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, O Daniel, I am now come forth to give thee skill and understanding.”

When God wanted to communicate some particular wisdom to Daniel, He sent an angel, but today we don’t need any angel to tell us what we need to know because it’s all be revealed to us in the pages of God’s finished Book.

Romans 8:26-28 says that when we’re in any situation common to Daniel’s where we don’t understand what to do, “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
”And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

Jordan explains, “We’ve got something far better than an angel; we’ve got the indwelling resident presence of God the Holy Ghost! Through the Word of God, the Holy Spirit is the teacher and the one who helps in our prayers. He gives us the wisdom. We don’t need an angel.”

To the many Christians today who swear they’ve had an encounter with an angel, Paul says it’s only the trickery and beguiling of the Adversary that causes anyone to think they’ve seen an angel.

He writes in Col. 2:18, “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind.”

Obviously there’s a huge difference between “not seen” and “hath seen.”

The amazing reality we learn from Paul is that rather than angels ministering to us today, we minister to them and they actually learn the details about the manifold wisdom of God today as they observe the grace of God living and working in the lives of Believers! Paul says they learn when they see “what is the fellowship of the mystery” working in our midst.

Just as amazing, Paul informs in I Cor. 6:2, “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?”

“What were going to be doing in eternity future is ruling over and administering the angelic creation,” says Jordan. “We’re going to minister to angels out there, but that ministry begins now!”

Paul tells us that the manifold grace of God, as laid out in Romans through Philemon, is something the angels greatly desire to look into and can only do so by observing how it lives in us.

“So instead of them ministering to us today, the roles have been reversed and we literally minister to them rather than the other way around!” says Jordan. “We have a ministry to the angels today and it’s the religious system out there wants to reverse those roles and have them ministering to us.

“We manifest the manifold wisdom of God in a mystery, and as the ‘fellowship of the mystery’ is carried on in our midst, and we understand what exactly this program is that God has in operation today—called the secret program, the forming of the Church the Body of Christ in which there’s this sharing in common of what we have in Christ and there’s this oneness and new identity we have in Christ that is to live in us—the angelic ministry is given a glimpse into the manifold wisdom of God.”