We Evangelicals may be a bit too backward to make sex the prime topic of our conversation, but I will bet you that we don t say much about angels either. Angels are found in the margins of the Bible story. You may remember Jacob s habit of bumping into an angelic border guard when he fled from the Holy Land and again when he returned years later. Likewise Joshua was surprised on entering the Land to run into the captain of the LORD s host. The presence of angels frames the life and death of our Lord, from the Christmas angels to the angels at the empty tomb.
Angels are marginal.
For many modern Christians, this very marginality is a reason for neglecting them either by explaining them away with secular rationalizations, or by aestheticizing them into cute little cherubs to be found only in stain glass windows, or by simply ignoring them. Even for Evangelical Christians, it is all too easy to assume that we do not need angels when we have the great doctrines of justification and salvation in Christ. But, my brothers and sisters, we neglect the presence and ministry of the holy angels, at great risk. But obviously, too, we shall not be dealing with the work and revelation of God as attested in the Bible, with Jesus Christ, and therefore with God and man in the form in which they are normative for the Christian Church and its faith and proclamation. For where it is matter of God and man in this normative form .