What if EVERYONE thought buffalos had wings? Some do! Someone I know did not realize chicken nuggets were made from chicken meat, for a long time! 😉
Are you content to perpetuate falsehoods? Most people are. Are you content to ignore the reality of Scripture, and the truth that God’s Word purveys? Most people are.
“Angels” do not have wings! Yet so many people who profess to believe the Bible have bought off on the idea that they do, and that when you go to heaven you have either ‘earned’ your wings, to become an angel, or you have not.
People are paying big money for statuary and other art that depict “angels” as having wings, when they do not know that what they are buying into is the superimposition of Nike and Victory on the masses, instead of the truth of God’s spiritual realm.
In the scriptures, there are no winged angels! Even the ‘creatures’ that Elijah saw that had six wings were not ‘angels’; and, the “Keruvim”, what most people call “cherubs”, are the only winged beings, but they are not ‘angels’.
So, what is a Biblical “angel”, and where did the idea of winged angels come from?
In the Bible, an ‘angel’ is a מלאך, a “malakh”, or a “messenger”. It is a good practice to go back to the source to see what that means. Three of the earliest uses of this concept of a messenger from heaven should suffice to give us a ‘definition’ of the kind of being we are seeing, IN SCRIPTURE.
The very first person to meet a “messenger” was actually Hagar, the mother of Abraham’s first child, Ishmael. She was found by the well called Be’er L’khai Roi, on the run, getting away from Sarah.
7And the Malakh יהוה found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur. 8And he said, “Hagar, Sarai’s handmaid, from where did you come, and where do you go?” And she said, “I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.” 9And the Malakh יהוה said unto her, “Return to your mistress, and submit yourself under her hands.” 10And the Malakh יהוה said unto her, “I will greatly multiply your seed, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.”
This is a very specific “messenger”, called “The Malakh יהוה “, or, “The Angel of the LORD”, where the all-caps word stands in the place of the Name יהוה . There is nothing to indicate the nature of this messenger, except that Hagar perceives Him to be a perfect representation of GOD: 13And she called the Name of יהוה that spoke unto her, “You are El Ro’i” [The God Who Sees]; for she said, “Have I also seen Him that sees Me?”
The next place we see any ‘messengers’ from God is when Abraham is sitting in the door of his tent in the heat of the day, and he looks up and sees three men above him. Most people know the story, so I will just point out what is necessary here:
Abraham saw them as men, even though that when the writer introduces them, we read that יהוה appeared to him! [Gen 18:1]
Abraham fed the three men human food, and they dined with him for hours; so, they are not only anthropomorphic, but they can eat as well. Abraham treated them with hospitality. They can be touched, as Abraham washed their feet. But, he recognized one of them as special, because over and over that one called Himself “יהוה”:
Two of them left and went on to Sodom, to destroy it, and one of them stayed. This one, Abraham recognizes as the same being that spoke to Hagar, because He named Himself by God’s Name. And we read, “Abraham stood yet before יהוה ” [verse 22], showing that the one of these men was special. All three of them get up to leave, going toward Sodom, as the one tells Abraham He is going to destroy the city, and over and over Abraham asks “Shall Adonai [My Master] destroy the city….?” treating Him as his clear superior, understanding who this really is. It is not until the next chapter that we find out they were all “Messengers” and not “men”, as the two that left and went to Sodom are called “Malakhim”/”Messengers” in the first verse of 19.
1And the two messengers [malakhim] came to S’dom at evening; and Lot sat in the gate of S’dom;
So, the appearance of these guys was that they were MEN. There were no wings! In the rest of chapter 19, they are called men. The inhabitants of the city see them as men.
Next, Jacob meets someone. A man. And that ‘man’ picks a fight with him! And they wrestle all night long!
25“And Ya’akov was left alone; and there, a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.” [Gen 32]
And Jacob recognizes that there was something special about this man. He keeps asking him to bless him. In the scriptures, an ancient Hebrew will only ask a blessing of someone spiritually superior to them. This man asked Jacob, “Why is it that you ask after my name?” And Jacob then seems to realize who he is talking to, because he then says, “For I have seen GOD face to face, and my life is preserved.” But, this ‘man’ is not here called an angel.
So, who is he? He is The Angel of יהוה . Most theologians call this a ‘theophany”, an appearance of God in an angelic body. An ‘instantiation’, an ‘extension’ of His Presence. And it is! [Yet people deny that God can appear however He wants, and still be on His throne].
This SAME being appears to Jacob’s descendant, Mano’akh, to foretell of Samson. And there, He is called a “Messenger”, an angel:
3“And The Malakh יהוה appeared unto the woman, and said unto her, “Behold now, you are barren, and have not borne; but you shall conceive, and bear a son.” [Judges 13]
But she tells her husband, “A man of God came unto me, and his countenance was like the countenance of The Messenger of God, very terrible; and I asked him not from whence he was, neither did he tell me his name; 7but he said unto me…” [vs. 6-7]
And so Mano’akh, her husband, asks God to send the same man. He does. And after their conversation, affirming what the messenger said to his wife, Mano’akh asks the same question, “What is your name?” And the man, the Malakh/messenger, answered very similarly to the way He answered Jacob: “Why do you ask of me My Name?” And then he and his wife make an offering to the messenger, the man, and then,
The Malakh יהוה ascended in the flame of the altar; and MaNo’akh and his wife looked on; and they fell on their faces to the ground. 21But The Malakh יהוה did no more appear to MaNo’akh or to his wife. Then MaNo’akh knew that he was The Malakh יהוה . And22MaNo’akh said unto his wife, “We shall surely die, because we have seen Elohim.”
So, three times we have seen this same “angel”, and every single time, he looks like a man.
Just for assurances, and clarification, this same being stood IN the bush that was burning, and Moses saw Him; and this same man told Moses, “I will be who/whatever I will be: יהוה , THIS is My Name FOREVER.”
Every other messenger that appears to anyone in the scripture appears as a man; many times, the messenger is mistakenly identified as a man. This is why Paul says,
1Let brotherly love remain in you. 2And forget not hospitality toward strangers; for thereby some have been worthy to entertain Malakhim [angels], not knowing it!
You will not mistake a chicken-man for a human being accidentally. They appear as men, when they appear to us, whether in dreams/visions, or in reality.
Just because they are often airborne, does not mean they have wings. Yeshua ascended into heaven live in real time in front of 500 men, without wings. And then two messengers appeared to those 500, as men, to explain what just happened:
10And while they looked steadfastly toward the heavens as He went up, behold two men stood by them in white robes; 11and they said to them, “Men of the Galil, why do you stand gazing up into the heavens? This same Yeshua who has ascended from you into the heavens shall so come in like manner as you have seen Him ascend into the heavens.”
So, a biblical ‘angel’ is a messenger, that is identifiable as a man, until one learns better, either by their telling, or by their terror. They are fierce beings.
So where did the idea of winged beings as angels come from, such that now everyone assumes angels have wings, and humans earn wings and become angels when they die?
The ideas were imposed on the papist world in the fourth century, but the seed of the idea was a century before, shortly after the papist takeover of the western realm of faith:
In fifth century [400s A.D.] the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore, winged angels appear around a Christ figure on a throne, inspiring the iconography of angels for coming generations. Perhaps the idea came from the Roman church of Santa Pudenziana, where a century before, Yeshua’s Talmid, the Levite, Matthew, is depicted in a mosaic, with wings, looking to all intents and purposes like an angel as the whole world now expects them to look.
Before the idea really took root, early papists seemed actually to understand what a biblical ‘angel was. In the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, an artist from the middle of the third century painted what is believed to be the first New Testament era depiction of an angel, the archangel Gabriel, without wings and, even as late as the mid-fourth century, the Roman sarcophagus of Junius Bassus still depicts the angel from the story of the sacrifice of Isaac without wings.
From that time on, however, the ideas of ‘saints’, which papists began to worship along with Christ, emerged, and soon after, the notion of their gaining wings to fly to heaven became nearly commonplace.
What inspired this idea, among people who supposedly followed the scriptures? The pagan culture around them. The greeks worshipped and believed in and called upon “Nike”, which is the same root of the “Nicolaitans”, where someone subdues or conquers the “laity”. It is likely that one of the reasons that Yeshua hates Nicolaitans is because of their angel worship. Angel worship was already going on in greek circles among the earliest believers:
18Let no man, by pretense of sincerity, doom you so that you worship Messengers [Malakhim/angels]; for he is bold about the things he has not seen, and foolishly he is proud of his intellectual powers.
Paul wrote those words to those in Colossae a full thirty years or more before Yeshua reprimanded the congregations at Ephesus and Pergamos in the Revelation for “nicolaitanism”. It can be clearly seen when one studies history how all the congregations ignored all of Yeshua’s warnings for their sins, not the least of which is a likely association with Nike and ‘angel’ worship.
Nike is a lesser deity, meaning she intervenes between zeus and humanity. She is winged. And her mother is the nymph, “Styx”, the attendant of the river between the world of the living and that of the dead. Nike is thus an escort across the river. There is no doubt that this is the influence for later christian writings where ‘saints’ are seen being escorted, and gaining their ‘wings’, and becoming ‘angelic’ on the other side, which began to manifest in papist lore and created the mythology of angels today.
The above image is NOT intended by the artist as an ‘angel’, but is in fact the deliberate and intentional depiction of Nike. Nike is called “Victoria” in the Roman pantheon. Papists are famous for taking from the local pagan cultures and blending customs into that of their church. Sadly, their influence on the world is far heavier than many ‘protestants’ and believers actually realize.
Today, many people are watching new movies, buying jewelry, statuary, and other art that depicts angels with wings. People are deceiving themselves into ‘seeing’ angels with wings. As the world falls more and more into moral decay and the chaos of godless living, people who are trying to understand God are being deceived by the very people who should be teaching them the truth.
Paul told us that the worship of angels will DOOM us. Worship is not just ‘calling on’ a being, or trusting in a thing for luck. It is giving ‘worth’ to. To purchase something is to give ‘worth’ to it. The word “worship” is derived from the Old English word “weorþscipe,” meaning worthiness or meritoriousness, which signifies giving something or someone the recognition it/he deserves. People are attributing God-like qualities to lesser beings, not realizing that it is worship. Messengers from God do not want our accolades and praise. They will not permit it. Neither will any follower of Messiah who went on before us.
Yokhanan, John, was in heaven in his body, viewing end time events, and he fell down and worshipped the Messenger, the man speaking with him.
8And I, Yokhanan, heard and saw these things, and when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship before the feet of the Malakh who showed these things to me. 9And he said to me, “Do not do that; I am your fellow servant of you and your brethren, the prophets, and of those who keep the words of this Book. Worship God.”
Rethink your understanding about angels. The errors in this world are getting almost too numerous to count.