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0:01 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The heaven in the first line of the Bible isn't the sky. The sky doesn't exist yet. [music] It gets made on the second day when God stretches out the firmament in the middle of the waters and gives it a name. He calls the firmament heaven. So, the word heaven ends up covering two different but related things in the same chapter. One of them is the sky and it shows up on the second day. The other was already there on day one before any sky existed at all. The heaven of the first verse is that older one, the one God makes before the world has any shape at all. The Hebrew word for heaven is shamayim >> [music] >> and it's plural, the heights. When scripture wants to speak of the highest
0:47 heaven, the heaven of day one, it doubles the word, shameh ha shamayim, the heaven of heavens, the same way we say holy of holies or king of kings, the highest of every high place. When Solomon finishes the temple, the most glorious building in the world, he stands in front of it and prays that even the heaven of heavens cannot contain God. That's where the Bible begins, in the dwelling place of God himself. And the moment God has created a dwelling, he fills it. He doesn't live there alone. The book of Job looks all the way back to the laying of the foundations of the world and tells us what was going on while God built. The morning stars were singing together and all the sons of God were shouting for joy. Before the first man opens his eyes,
1:34 before the sun is lit, there's a choir in the highest heaven. There's a gathering. This is the divine council. You can open the Bible and watch the divine council meet. The prophet Micaiah is taken up and sees the Lord sitting on his throne with the whole host of heaven standing beside him, on his right hand and on his left, and he watches them take counsel together. The book of Job opens with the sons of God coming to present themselves before the throne. Isaiah is pulled into the same throne room, hears the burning ones, the seraphim, calling out, and then hears a question come down from the throne. "Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?" Us. God is asking his court, and joining his activity with theirs. God treats
2:22 them as real partners in the ongoing creation of his world. God doesn't sit alone at the top and rule by force. He builds a house, and he fills it with living creatures, and he takes counsel with them. He sends them out, and he hands them his own work to do. When the time comes to make the human race, this becomes clear. "Let us make man in our image." That's the three persons of the Trinity speaking to one another. It can also be read as a king turning to his council. The two readings sit together without contradicting each other. And under the council reading, we learn that the God who needs nothing, who could do all of it alone in a single instant, chooses to share instead. He could have spoken the whole thing into being with no witnesses and no helpers. Instead, he
3:08 surrounds himself with servants and lets them carry his will. There's a humility built into the foundation of everything. A God who would rather work through and with others than work alone. So, who are these creatures standing in the throne room? We call them angels. The word we translate as angel, malak in Hebrew, angelos in Greek, describes what they do. It means messenger, one who is sent. An angel is named for motion, for being sent out from the throne and coming back to it. The word itself is about the living dynamism between heaven and earth. And that's the work the whole host of heaven was made for. We've said said that the entire story of scripture, from the first page to the last, is for
3:54 God to come down and live inside his own creation. For the highest heaven and the lowest dust to become one house, with God filling every floor of it. No gap left between heaven and earth. God at home in his creation, and the creation at home in God. The whole Bible is a single movement running two ways at once. Heaven comes down, earth is lifted up to meet it. The angels have an important role in that movement. They carry heaven down, and they help earth climb. When an angel shows up anywhere in scripture, we see this happening. An angel shows Hagar the well that saves her son. An angel calls out to stop Abraham's knife over Isaac. An angel feeds Elijah in the desert on the day he wants to die.
4:40 Heaven has reached down and touched the ground. You can see it most clearly in a man on a rock. Jacob is running for his life. He lies down in an open country with a stone under his head, and he dreams. He sees the ladder, its foot planted on the earth, and its top reaching up into heaven, and the angels of God going up and coming down on it. He wakes up shaking and says, "This is the house of God. This is the gate of heaven." Hundreds of years later, Jesus says to Nathanael, "You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." Jesus Christ is Jacob's ladder, the one who finally and fully connects heaven and earth. "I am the ladder," he says. "I am the gate. I am the one place where
5:26 heaven comes all the way down and earth goes all the way up. Where the two finally meet in a single person. And that's why in the Old Testament, the pre-incarnate Christ is so often called the angel of the Lord. He's the highest heavenly messenger, the one who, unlike any other angel, will one day unite himself fully with the Earth. And the angels have a second job, and it rarely shows up in the popular picture of angels. In scripture, we learn that the angels were given the task of raising us, of guiding the human race to maturity the way you would raise a child. But why would God hand his own image over to servants? For the same reason any father puts his son under a tutor. The boy isn't ready to rule yet, and he has to be trained by someone older
6:13 before the inheritance is safe in his hands. So, picture them less as harp players on a cloud and more as a strict tutor put in charge of a young heir. St. Paul says the law of Moses was put in place through angels, delivered by their hands. He describes the whole human race across that long age as a child who will one day inherit everything, but who for now is kept under guardians and managers until the date his father has set. While the heir is small, Paul says, he's no better off than a servant. He's watched. He's corrected. He's disciplined. There's a word Paul uses here, paidagogos. In a Roman household, the paidagogos was the slave who marched the boy to school and home again, who disciplined him and kept him in line. Strict and only for a time. That's what
6:59 the angels were to us in the childhood of the world. They ran the training. They held us to the law, like drill sergeants guiding a young and reckless human race. And paradoxically, a tutor like that has one aim, to work himself out of a job. You don't raise a child to stay a child. You raise him so that one day he outgrows his youth and becomes greater than the one who trained him. The angels were never set over us forever. They were set over us to raise us and then to step aside. The angels are, like God, humble beings. Their whole purpose is kenotic, a self-giving by which they glorify humanity as the image of God. And the kenotic descent of the angels reaches its highest form in a room in a town called Nazareth, where an
7:47 angel named Gabriel is sent to a young girl. He brings her the news that heaven is coming all the way down into her. [music] When she answers, "Let it be to me according to your word," God himself takes on flesh inside a creature he had made. The whole movement of the cosmos arrives at its purpose in that one room, and an angel is right there to deliver it. >> If you want to read the church fathers, you've probably encountered some problems. The texts are scattered, out of print, or never translated into English at all. And that's why we built Theoria. Hundreds of patristic texts in one place, including first-ever English translations you won't find anywhere else. Ask any question, and our search tool will scan the entire library and pull up the most relevant passages for you. And this is just version one. Go to
8:34 readtheoria.com and join us. >> And the girl in that room is lifted higher than the angels standing in front of her. The church sings that Mary is more honorable than the cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim. A human being raised above the highest creatures who stand closest to the throne. In the Orthodox tradition, it was an angel who first taught the church to sing these words about the mother of God. The messenger hands over the very song that lifts the human being above the messenger. This is a hidden glory of the angels. They give up the top of the ladder so that we can climb past them. For the whole history of the world, they stood above us, closer to God, brighter and stronger and older. And the entire point of their nearness was to lift a lower creature up past
9:21 them, and they were glad to do it. In this, they are imitating their own master, the son of God, who refused to grasp at his equality with God, who emptied himself, came down, and was laid in a manger and, in time, a tomb. The same choir that sang over the foundations of the world is heard again over the manger in Bethlehem and again at the empty tomb of the creator. So, that's what an angel is, a messenger who carries heaven down, a servant who lifts the earth into the heaven of heavens, a tutor who guides a child and then bows out so that the child can pass him. The whole glory of an angel is in the descent, in the self-emptying and the humility. The highest heaven is a community of creatures whose joy is to come down. And yet, scripture calls them
10:06 more than messengers and tutors. It calls them an army. One of God's most common titles in the whole Old Testament is the Lord of hosts, the Lord of armies. Right under God, the one who leads that army is Michael. He's a prince with soldiers under his command and he has a war on his hands. If the highest heaven is a choir and a court and a school for raising children, why does it come with an army? Why does the best and highest part of all of creation need soldiers and a battle commander? An army means there's a war and a war means there's an enemy. Listen to the captain's name, Michael. In Hebrew, it's a question, Mikael, who is like God? It's a challenge and you only throw a challenge like that at someone who has claimed the opposite. Somewhere
10:54 up in those heights, somewhere inside that singing community whose whole glory was to come down and give way, a voice said the opposite thing, I will ascend. I will raise my throne above the stars. I will make myself like the most high. The same descent that makes an angel glorious can be refused. The same high place an angel was meant to hand over, an angel can decide to seize and keep for himself. And when the messengers turn rebel, when the tutors mutiny, when the one sent to come down and serve reach up instead to grab the throne, the choir becomes a battlefield. There's a war in the highest heaven. We'll see what that's all about in the next video. You can watch it right now on Patreon or by becoming a YouTube member.
