Angels All Around Us
The Devil has his demons, God has his angels; and while we hear a lot about demons these days, we’re not hearing as much about angels.
We know the number of God's angels is at least twice the size as the number of the Devil's demons. So how many angels are there?
We’ll, we really don’t know. No surprise there, because that’s true about a lot of things.
Thomas Edison said we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything.
Mark Twain added, “The trouble with the world is not that people know so little about anything, it’s that what they do know ain’t so!”
Scripture does provide some numbers on this angel-issue, numbers that help us get a little more understanding about the size of God’s angelic forces.
For example, Jesus said at the cross that the Father could have released more than 12 legions of angels. So how many would that be?
Because this was said in the presence of Roman soldiers, we can fairly deduce the number of angels on hand would be at least 72,000, given that a legion in the Roman army was 6,000 soldiers.
So, 12 times that equals 72,000. But we must also keep in mind Jesus said, “more than.”
Revelation 5:11 surfaces another figure for us to consider when it quotes the Apostle John: “Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne … and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.”
So how many is that?
Well, ten thousand times ten thousand equals 100 million. But even that number isn’t high enough, since John added the phrase “and thousands of thousands.” These are the same numbers found in Daniel 7:10.
One hundred million is certainly more than 72 thousand, right? Moreover, just as David was both a singer and a warrior, we can imagine that would be true of these angelic members in the choir.
Scripture says that every believer has at least one guardian angel (Matthew 18:10), perhaps more since Jesus used a plural noun, “their angels.”
Further speculating, we can wonder that if the estimate of Christians in our world is anywhere near correct (and that would be between 2.3 and 2.6 billion people), then that would increase the number of angels exponentially.
Adding to this speculation is the observation that both the angels and the stars are spoken of as “hosts,” so if each angel has a star, that leads us to ask how many stars are there?
Christopher Conselice, a professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester in England, said there are about 100 million stars in the average galaxy.
To estimate the number of stars, you would need to estimate the number of galaxies and multiply that number by the average number of stars per galaxy.
David Kornreich, a professor at Ithaca College in New York, used a very rough estimate of 10 trillion galaxies in the universe. This calculation, fluid though it is, would leave us with a number at least 100 million times 10 trillion. An exceedingly large number!
And really, that’s all we need to know! Hebrews 12:22, intending no precision, simply states these angels are an “innumerable company.” John Milton noted this fact long before these modern days when he said, “There are millions of spiritual beings who inhabit the earth unseen.”
Are you beginning to think that the number of demons existing doesn’t come anywhere close to the number of angels? And is it also dawning on you that the strength of these demons—now defeated, and under judgment, and said to flee from a single believer—is also nowhere close to that of an angel?
We are hearing a lot of talk these days about Christians being delivered from demons. There is a lot wrong with that, not the least of which is almost nothing is being said about angels.
How frequently does the Bible talk about demons? In the Old Testament: demons, 8 times, evil spirit, 3 times; in the New Testament: both terms combined, a little more than 80 times.
And how frequently does the Bible refer to angels? To be exact, 273 times! So why aren’t we focusing more on angels?
Good question. So we will say more in upcoming posts.
