The Hum of Angels: Listening for the Messengers of God Around Us - Softcover

McKnight, Scot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1601426321 ISBN 13: 9781601426321

Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Would You Recognize an Angel if You Saw One?

The majority of earth’s inhabitants believe in Angels. Yet so few of us can claim to have seen one. Why? 
 
Perhaps it’s because in order to encounter one, we first have to learn what to look for and how to look!  We live in a world where the natural and supernatural overlap. Angels are constantly on mission from God and constantly at work in this world.
 
From the Garden of Eden to the Book of Revelation, Scripture is filled with hundreds of references to these wondrous creatures. In this creative work, Scot McKnight explores what the Bible says – and doesn’t say – about these majestic beings. And that’s deeply important because angels are still on mission today. They express God’s love, confirm His presence, and even lead humans in redemptive worship. 
 
Don’t just believe in angels. Learn how to recognize these messengers of God that are all around us and know how God might be using them to affect our lives. 
 
Now available in a convenient paperback edition, The Hum of Angels illuminates what the Bible says about these heavenly beings; and it helps you to understand the deepest truths about one of God’s most magnificent and yet misunderstood creations.


Most People Believe in Angels. 
It’s What we Believe About them that Matters. 

Believing in angels is one thing. But how can we know what angels are really like – especially when our preconceived notions have been mostly shape by sensationalized misinterpretations of these wondrous beings? 

To help sort things out, Scot McKnight untangles fact from fiction on topics such as:
* Do loved ones become angels when they die?
* Can we hear from angels?
* Is there a hierarchy of angels?
* Do we have a specific guardian angel?
* Should we be scared of angels?
* Are cherubs and seraphs different creatures than angels?
* Do angels have wings?
* Are angels worship leaders?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Scot McKnight (PhD, University of Nottingham) is professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary in Lisle, Illinois. He is the acclaimed author of more than sixty books, including The Jesus Creed, The Heaven Promise, and Open to the Spirit. He regularly speaks at venues such as Catalyst, the Q Conference, and churches throughout the world. Scot and his wife, Kris, live in the Chicago suburbs.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

I was visiting a bird-supplies store when I mentioned to the owner that my wife and I had owned a hummingbird feeder but had never once seen a hummer at the feeder, so we tossed it out. I concluded that there were no hummers near our home.

The shop owner asked where we lived, I told him, and then he said, “They are there. Not only do some of your neighbors have hummers on their feeders, but hummers are all over the village.” What he said next was the take-home line: “You just have to have eyes to see them. Once you do, you will see them everywhere. They are small and fast and camouflaged, but they are not that hard to spot.”

Eventually we bought a new feeder, filled it, and waited until our eyes got accustomed to the sight of hummers. Kris and I now see them everywhere. When other people go on a walk with us, we often observe a hummer— but it is rare that our friends spot one. It takes experience. You need to learn to spot them out of the side of your eyes and acclimate to their habits of zooming and darting and taking shelter on obscure branches and even on telephone lines. But once you’ve learned to spot a hummer you will see them everywhere because they are everywhere.

Like angels. They, too, are all around us. Few of us have seen one because we first have to learn what we are looking for. In a good book about angels, Martin Israel, quoting a friend, wrote this: “Eternity lies all round us and only a veil prevents us seeing it.”1 The hum of angels surrounds us, and we only need ears to hear it or eyes to see them. Or perhaps a special sense for them. After all, the Bible tells us that Balaam’s donkey could see an angel that Balaam himself could not see. The passage suggests that Balaam was so insensitive to God that he failed to notice.* At the end of her survey of angels, Jane Williams, author of an important book on angels, invites us to hear and join in the chorus:

Behind, around, underneath, and through the day-to-day world that we inhabit is the song of the angels. It is beautiful, endless, joyful, and terrible. It will be sung whether we join in with it or not, but imagine the sensation of stepping into that angelic harmony and being caught up in its power and majesty. This is what the angels invite us to do. They long to teach us their song, so that we, with them, can sing a hymn of praise to the glorious universe and its maker.2

It should not bother us that dimensions of reality exist that we cannot see. Dogs can hear sounds we cannot hear; birds can migrate up and down the globe with a sense of direction that far exceeds our own; those little hummingbirds somehow know when to head north and when to head south, and all of a sudden they disappear from our summer feeders. Their sense of timing is unerring. Squirrels can somehow smell or feel nuts planted underground for winter storage; and bees . . . well, bees are a world unto themselves.

And those examples are just a few of the creatures living on earth. God knows vastly more than we do; God sees and senses vastly deeper than do we. So why should we think that only what we see, hear, or sense is all there is? There is a popular conviction that we can believe only in what we see and feel. The best word for this posture is arrogance. Bold and not beautiful.

Kris was driving through a wooded area the other day on the way to her office when a deer, seeming to suddenly notice her, stopped just before running into her lane of traffic. Had it continued on its initial path, Kris could have been in a serious accident. The timing was right for it to have happened. But she called me later and said the deer’s moves were so unusual she wondered if she had been protected by an angel.

As it is with spotting hummingbirds, experience is our teacher. Kris’s story reminds me of another one. At the time of this previous experience, we did not consider the involvement of an angel. But on further reflection perhaps we should have. (Jet lag might have prevented us from thinking this way at the time.)

We were on vacation in Italy. After landing in Milan in the north, we drove east toward Venice and had as our first night a stop in Verona. Having arrived in Verona, we quickly realized the city seemed like circles inside circles. We asked someone for help, and he pointed us forward, but after just one curve we were lost again. And jet-lagged.

Suddenly a kind man appeared at our car window. I showed him the name of our hotel, and he said, “Can I get in your car? I’ll direct you to the hotel.” Which he did, and we were overjoyed. We got out of our car and turned to thank him, but he seemed to disappear with a shuffle of his feet and a walk down the street. Was that man the hum of an angel? Perhaps so. Angels are everywhere, but you have to have an ear tuned to their hum, an ear sensitive enough to be surprised by angels.

Here are a few more things we learned from the gentleman at the bird-supplies store, who is a walking hummingbird encyclopedia. These brilliantly designed birds can fly in all directions and they consume thirty times their weight each day. They get into aerial combat with one another over who controls which feeders in the neighborhood. The man at the shop has studied data accumulated over centuries, and he speaks authoritatively and accurately.

The same can be said about those who seek to accumulate knowledge about angels. One angel passage in the Bible will give us something, a bit like Kris’s and my limited experience with ruby-throated hummingbirds at our backyard feeder. (We’ve never seen any other kind of hummer there, but dozens of kinds of hummers populate the world.) The same is true with learning about angels. But if we look carefully at all the passages in the Bible that speak of or about angels and then read up on what theologians and historians have said, we can know plenty about them.

Belief in God, Belief in Angels

The hum of angels has been heard by theologians and pastors and priests, to be sure, but far more often by ordinary lay folks. Angels have been spotted by men and women and old folks and young adults. Doctors and lawyers and scientists and mechanics and landscapers and truck drivers all have seen them. Angels are no respecter of persons in their disclosures. Some people experience angels at a birth, others around the time of a loved one’s death. Sometimes angels are seen by a dying person and other times by loved ones who attend to the dying. Sometimes people experience an angel at the moment their loved one dies a great distance away. Bible readers know that some angels appear during a person’s sleep— and this, too, is common today.

Most people who experience angels don’t tell anyone, or if they do, they tell only a person or two. And in light of the skepticism of our scientific world, those who spot angels often make it clear they are not “that kind of person.” But even so they do think they saw an angel. The irony of our scientific age is that many people claim to have been visited by an angel in a hospital, and often enough it is a physician or nurse who reports the event.3

The most scientifically trained people in our world encounter angels. And speaking of scientists, no one is more scientific than astronauts who occupy a world of cold, mathematical calculations. They reside at the edge of harnessing immense energies, and some of them claim to have seen angels in space.4 But many other people in this scientific age are afraid to talk about their experiences, thinking they won’t be believed. One man has seen angels hovering every Sunday during services at his church, but when he told his priest about it, the priest ridiculed him.5 Some believe, some don’t. Back and forth the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1601426321
• ISBN 13: 9781601426321
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 225
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: SC; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/; ; CL MODESTO LAFUENTE 41; Madrid; Madrid; Spanien