What Are Angels

The Jewish belief in angels goes as far back as the Book of Genesis, where we read about angels calling out to Abraham at the binding of Isaac, angels appearing in Jacob's dream, Jacob fighting with an angel, and many more accounts of angelic activity.

No, but it might give you a warm fuzzy feeling to believe God is responsible for your falling short of His glory and thus 'not your fault that you don't believe on Him Whom God sent.'

As witnessed for years at FR now, You play these mental games trying to avoid doing what God seeks from you, which is so simple even a dunce can do it, and Jesus explicitly stated that ONE work God desires of you in your free will when the legalists (who argued kinfd of like you, trying to entrap Him) demanded to know what God required for salvation from the nature they inherited.

To acquire God's life in your human spirit, all you need do is believe on Him Whom God sent for your salvation. That's it! God has promised to do the rest ... and as millions of humble Christians will tell you, He really does do the rest, including changing the desires of your heart so that you are gradually (usually) transformed into the image of His Son in your behavior mechanism. The Son is The Word made flesh Who dwelt among us. The Word was in the beginning with God and was God n the beginning, yet He made Himself a little lower than the angels even, for a season, so that He can redeem your being from the inherited nature passed to you from Adam. If you will not believe on Him Whom God sent, then you are exercising your free will and will not have God's Life enter into your human spirit. That is not God's fault, it is yours. He has promised to be responsible for your salvation/transformation. He is not responsible for your rejection of His Grace in Christ Jesus.

“Of the many called, why are so few chosen? ... Because God honors our free will, and so few will let Him do ‘it’ (save them from their inherited self).”

I believe that G-d does know everything. It’s His Divine Plan, after all.

My personal struggles with faith are not for His edification. They’re for MINE. He knows that my soul needed to go through the ups and downs to ‘get it.’

When my son was a baby, I knew that eventually he’d learn how to read. My knowledge that he’d learn this didn’t remove his free will. It just meant that I saw it coming.

I knew what he was capable of. I knew how to teach. I knew what materials to expose him to in order to set him up for success. I knew his psyche well enough to understand the best way to challenge him.

But, in the end, he still had the free will to refuse to learn the skill.

Hashem is our divine parent. He knew us before we were born. He knows how to guide us to get the result that He wants. And He is all-knowing enough to foresee all outcomes for all of time.

Thanks for the clear analogy. It is a common error to equate knowing with causing. This ploy is used by the evil one to infer that God is responsible for not stopping us from being what we inherited from Adam, therefore God is responsible for our damnation. God didn't prevent satan from rebelling, so satan wants to drag as many away from God's Grace as that evil one can before he is permanently squelched out of God's Universe prepared for us as God's children.

I find it interesting that the Copenhagen gaggle discovered that the observation of a wave/particle duality causes the collapse of the wave function, yet scientists who believe that do not comprehend how one choses to believe or not believe and thereby 'collapse' their destiny as one or another fate.

Thank you.

The best way I can think of it (in my limited capacity of a human being) is that I allow my children to fail for their own growth and edification. I allow the natural consequences for their actions to be their best teacher. (And it is!)

Sometimes, bad things happen to them through no fault of their own. With those things, my children get stronger and learn how to cope better with life.

Hashem will not protect us from every little thing. We need to learn. And He knows exactly what lessons to teach us and how to teach them.

It’s up to US to shorten the learning curve and lessen our own pain! lol!

(Right now, I’m working on learning how to have Grace in the face of tragedy. Tragedy will happen, but I need to preserve a calm faith through the storms.)

On the Cross, Jesus refutes your assertion that God's life is in eberyone. When Jesus died, He died as a man without God's Life in His human spirit else He would not have been able to die, and die in our stead. God made humankind to have a spirit, but we have inherited from Adam a human spirit without God's life in it. Jesus IS the cure for that, in that He is the 'last Adam and thus the Being from whom we may inherit a new Life via our will turned to believe on Him. While Jesus walked the Earth with His disciples, he was 'in' a human body with a human behavior mechanism (a human soul), but His human soul was unique in that His human soul also had God's Spirit Life in His human spirit. It was when that Life left Him on the Cross that He cried out, 'Eloi Eloi, lama sabakthani' ... the human of Jesus, not The Word made flesh, died on that cross and was buried in a borrowed tomb. The Life of God came back to Jesus the human body as The Word made flesh became yet again a quickening Spirit.

Each of us may have that same Life imparted to our 'dead' human spirit, by believing on Him Whom God sent for our new birth into a new man. When we do what God requires, we are immediately made a new creation. As we walk thereafter, if we will allow Him to do it, we will be transformed along the alignment with this New Life in our before dead human spirit now alive in Christ, just as He told Philip that He is in God and God is in Him.

Great question. It’s a lot different than in Christianity.
I can look up if there is a connection between the two (Lucifer/Satan) but Satan is a nominal from the Hebrew verb meaning “to turn away [from a path]” So in Judaism “the Satan” is an influence to turn away from what G-d wants us to do (ask your local Orthodox rabbi what you should “do” if you’re Jewish, or, see my previous posts on noahide.org)

Here is an analogy, I believe from the Zohar (one of the Kabbalistic or “mystical” books of Judaism) about the Satan. First we understand the Satan to be a creation of G-d’s, like everything in existence. So there is no grand adversarial conflict...G-d wins. But the Satan, being of G-d, has to be explained somehow—how can there be an evil influence in the world if the influencer comes from G-d? So he is likened to a prostitute that a king commissions to “tempt my son to stray.” (in order to test the prince) She knows the king, knows the prince—doesn’t want him to stray, but has to accept her mission. But she can’t go through with it so she sub-contracts to a friend of hers who knows of the king and vaguely that he has a son, etc...and the last (the 4th—since there are four ‘worlds’ in the created state—go ask your local Orthodox kabbalist) in this sub-contracting daisy chain never heard of the king or his son—she just takes the job and intends to do it.

If your eyes haven’t glazed over, I will say that Jews believe we have an animalistic ‘soul’ (really an enlivening force—like the energy between a living being and that which is missing in a corpse with all of its faculties) and there is a G-dly soul, a part of G-d within each person. The Satan usually tries to appeal to our base, animalistic desires (worse than an animal, who eats or ruts until it needs to no more-—we have a tendancy to overdo it just for the sake of pleasure) and even worse—can appeal to our intellectual faculties, telling us how great we are, how holy, how much more refined than so-and-so... the Satan is called the wise and foolish king... he knows exactly how to temp someone. So there are philosophies in Judaism of denying one’s self pleasure (or more than is needed for consumption/procreation, etc.

Anyway....I hope that was mildly interesting...even if (ahem) the thread has strayed from the Jewish conceptualization of angels. C’mon you hard-core evangelicals!!! I’ll have to keep posting stuff...

Phinneous

God knows all that CAN be known. He does not know that which cannot be known. He is omniscient.

I stopped struggling with the concept of God's omniscience when I realized that understanding such a concept was impossible for finite beings to understand. I heard a phrase that stuck with me and may help. It's:

Time is an island in the sea of God's eternity.

An eternal "being" would not be bound by time because He is outside of time and, in fact, God created time in the first place. So, though God already knows the end from the beginning - He "sees" all time simultaneously - He does not move everyone around like marionettes on a playhouse stage. Somehow - and this is the part that I don't think we can "get" - He knew everything before there was even anything. People ask all the time, if God knew how it all would turn out, why did he STILL go through with it? And the answer is partly found in Ephesians 2:7, "That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus." It pleased God to STILL go through with it and ALL things work to HIS glory.

As to God only knowing what "can" be known, I disagree, I think His omniscience even goes as far as also knowing all the "what ifs" and I think when we face Christ at the judgment seat, we will also be shown those "what ifs". In spite of our free will choices, God's will WILL still be done on earth as it is in heaven. That part is the mystery that, among other things, we can only accept by faith. One day, however, it will make sense - when we have the mind of Christ - and we will "know even as we are known".

As God is omniscient, and cannot be wrong, doesn’t that mean that what He knows will happen, must happen?

I don't think it is a matter of God's omniscience being "wrong", but that He has already seen what will be - He is outside of time. Scripture says He knows the end from the beginning and, before there was anything, He knew everything that would be. We can't get our minds around that kind of knowledge, nor what it would be like to know all the what if's as well as the what will be's even the what CAN be. Everything He knows will happen WILL happen because He is already there. When people hear God knows what will happen and that all things work together to accomplish His will, they conclude that it means God makes all things happen according to His plan and, by default, toss out our understanding of free will. But, I don't think we should do that.

Think about a game of chess. I used to play it as a teenager and even one time beat my teacher, but I never got to the point of being anywhere near a novice much less an expert at it. Those that are experts, use intelligent "strategy" - they think ahead based on their opponent's moves and responses to their moves. The greatest players could have the game won after the first two moves! They could "see" it all as it unfolded. So, if God already "saw" the whole game from beginning to end, then already knowing how it would end allows Him to work it all out to BE his will. Knowing everything that will happen also means knowing all that MUST happen because it, in truth, already HAS happened. Like I said, it's one of those mysteries that, one day, we will also know - but not with the minds we have now.

Great question. It’s a lot different than in Christianity. I can look up if there is a connection between the two (Lucifer/Satan) but Satan is a nominal from the Hebrew verb meaning “to turn away [from a path]” So in Judaism “the Satan” is an influence to turn away from what G-d wants us to do (ask your local Orthodox rabbi what you should “do” if you’re Jewish, or, see my previous posts on noahide.org)

Thanks for taking the time to answer me. When you say you believe the Satan is a "nominal", an "influence" that turns us away from God's will for us, are you saying that Satan is an angel in the sense of the context of this thread? In Genesis 3 is where we are first introduced to an evil personage that seeks to tempt our first parents to disobey God's command. He is presented as a serpent and then later is called "Satan", the deceiver, that God would put at enmity with Eve's descendants:

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

There are other passages that tie Satan to the "anointed cherub" (Ezekiel 28) - the angel that stood over the throne of God:

13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.
14 Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.
15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.

16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

So there is a narrative about this "special" angel who, through pride, rebelled against God and drew a third of the angels to rebel with him. Satan and his angels were cast out of heaven and to the earth by the faithful angels of God.

So, on the subject of angels, does Judaism teach that there is a real spirit being, an evil angel, called Satan (as well as other things) and that he is at enmity with God and His creation? I agree that, as a created being, he has NO chance of besting Almighty God and, at times, God has even used Satan to accomplish God's will (i.e.; Job, Joseph). Just curious if Judaism understands angels in the same way as Christians do. Much of what we know about angels comes from the Old Testament, too. Thanks again.

If you don’t mind me posting to you, I have an observation I would like to share with you regarding one of your posts..

It is in regards to *Faith* you say within Judaism faith is not needed, because what you have is what you know...The truth of GOD.. I suppose you are conveying that school of thought from the belief in (Torah*) okay that I get that, however you were not born with that *Knowing* it was learned either taught to you by your parents, rabbi or holy books, so if you accepted that was it not by faith that you came to believe what you know???

Abraham, Moses even the Apostle Paul knew what they knew however when GOD called them out, they came to a total different understanding of what there role and relationship to GOD would be going forward....

I believe GOD calls people out wether Jew or Gentile and the ones who respond to the *Call* by Faith learn the truth which you call *Knowing*

An Atheist has no faith, so how could GOD ever call them out?

As one scripture in the Bible I think applies to the world is:

*Many are called but few are chosen*

Just wasn’t sure what you meant when you said you did not need faith...

Hang on there. God DOES know the end from the beginning, does he not? Before he even created the world, he already knew all those who would come to Him as well as all those who would reject him - this is because God is omniscient which means having complete, infinite or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding; perceiving all things. However, this is not the same thing as saying God predestines who will or who won't be saved. Why God chose to do it all anyway is a mystery that I don't think our finite minds are all that capable of grasping. It doesn't change, however, that God certainly DOES know the "number". If he didn't, then he would be just as subject to time as we are and he would not be eternal or infinite. He would not be the I AM - the self-existant one and he would not be the only, true Almighty GOD.

Do you really believe that when the devil was placed over the 'mercy seat' as described in Ezekiel 28 before he rebelled that God knew he was going to rebel. That is not omniscient if the sole purpose was to 'create' something full well knowing it would turn evil just so it would be destroyed. Love is not an emotion that can be ordered, bought, sold, or commanded. AND the purpose of this flesh age was to give all souls the opportunity to pass through this flesh journey as the first requirement to 'see' the kingdom of God. John 3.

AND according to Paul some were chosen/elected before the foundation of this flesh age. AND by Paul's own life story he was NOT allow to follow his free will of ending Christianity.... Stephen was stoned because of describing the Christian 'history'!!!

God knows the minute of each persons death, but He doesn’t know who will find Him? Isn’t God all-knowing?

Pure perfect love is what the Heavenly Father requires. Pure perfect love cannot be ordered, bought, sold, guilt, just look at liberals. Those that stood against the devil when he decided he was god and rebelled are the chosen/elect that Paul describes in Ephesians 1:4. They have already demonstrated that pure perfect love of the Heavenly Father. Yet they have to still come through this flesh journey because they have duties to fulfill. How many stood against the devil, before the foundation of this flesh age, I have no clue, nor do I worry about it.

There is only one unforgivable sin and only those of the very elect can commit that sin. AND until that appointed time arrives I do not believe any can claim they are of the very elect. No one knows with certainty if their flesh will be alive when that appointed time comes.

Some are given the 'spirit of slumber' Romans 11 whole chapter explains much that was already foretold by the holy prophets... those holy prophets would be the elect, that had already demonstrated their perfect love, and it was foreknown they could be counted upon to follow instructions.

People with 'freewill' unless they personally seek the Heavenly Father's attention are not going to get a visit like Paul did on his way to Damascus... That is not to say IF their ways interfere with THE Plan they won't be moved/pushed out of the WAY.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God, and the WORD was God.... The Heavenly Father always gave a 'warning' of what to expect and even still the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants on this earth are ignorant. BUT they are the children of God and only He knows their heart/mind. God is the judge, and He judges based upon the whole picture not what some flesh supreme being sets as precedence.

Perhaps ‘freewill’ is really just a belief? After all, even though what is believed to be ‘freewill’ is exercised continuesly, how would anyone prove that that exercise of ‘freewill’ wasn’t just part of God’s plan or destiny, and had to happen that way?

People believe many things, but if it is not of God or from God it is basically a vanity. We have the instruction manual and sometimes it cuts us all right to the bone. Some of Paul's writings leave me lower than low knowing that of myself and by myself I am/have been a miserable failure.... These flesh bodies have always given the soul a big hurdle to overcome. I take it day by day, knowing when that last soul left in heaven is conceived this flesh age is about to wrap up and then the real teaching of the WORD will begin.

I agree with what I think is your bottom line on the subject— we cannot understand everything about God, but perhaps one day it will all be revealed. I don’t dwell on these things because there is enough to dwell on daily.

I do believe that all of creation was made for God’s glory, not ours. Too many of us, too often, want to fashion God after OUR image. I hear comments such as: “I could never believe in a God who... (let’s bad things happen in some way or another)” God is who God is, not who we believe Him to be. In the Sunday School class I teach, I liken it to our roles as parents. We have children as much for us as we do for them. We want them to love us, but it something we cannot, nor should we want to, force them to do. An unsolicited statement of love from your child is among the greatest gifts one can receive. I can’t help but think God is the same way. He wants us to love Him, but won’t force the issue. And when we can express our love for God in the darkest times (see Job, for example), that is a great gift we can give to Him.

It is not about us.

If I said “not needed” I was a little too cheeky, however it is true that we ‘know’ our Torah and its observance to be true—we don’t rely on faith that it is true.

BUT, since one doesn’t hear G-d literally, like those at Sinai, or the prophets, or our sages (literally until the 18th century*) who had divine inspiration (a form of prophecy,) we do have a concept of faith in that which we can derive intellectually but not experience sensually. An analogy is having someone tell you all about what makes a 50,000 lb airplane fly, but not believing it until you see it with your own eyes.

So sorry to have let you ponder for a day or two a thought that Jews don’t have faith. It is an essential part of Judaism.

*The first rabbi of the Lubavitch chassidic dynasty (Rabbi Shneur Zalman ZT’L) said that our commentators up to the 18th century, had “ruach hakodesh” (heh, holy spirit...if you pardon the exact translation similarities to a non-Jewish concept) which they used to write their commentany on Torah and Jewish law.

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