God Will Give His Angels Charge Over You

Does the thought of angels watching over you give you comfort? It should, as long as the right kinds of angels are doing the watching. Some angels are fallen, and you don’t want anything to do with them. Since they’re fallen, they like it when you fall, too.

“For He shall give His angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways.” —Psalm 91:11 (NKJV).

Does the thought of angels watching over you give you comfort? It should, as long as the right kinds of angels are doing the watching. Some angels are fallen, and you don’t want anything to do with them. Since they’re fallen, they like it when you fall, too.

Angels are popular icons in our culture. Human imagination has created many visual depictions of them and ascribed different functions and abilities to them. Most depictions show them as winged, sweet, peaceful, human-like creatures that watch over us and keep us happy. This might be enough if the world was at peace, and if angels could easily sweep aside the minimal threats we faced. Unfortunately, neither the state of the world nor the severity of the threats we face can be characterized as “easily” dealt with. Psalm 91 is a good starting point for clearing up misconceptions about angels. Two words will guide us to the truth: trust and war. This combination of words may feel odd or uncomfortable. Let’s see how they fit together.

Trust

The psalmist writes that if you trust in the Lord, He will give His angels charge over you and keep a whole list of scary things from affecting you: terror, arrows, pestilence, harm, disaster, and evil (Psalm 91:1-10). But if trust is the key to angelic protection, and if this protection can guard against all of these things, we should know exactly what this trust looks like. Like freedom, fear, and rest, there are different types of trust. The difference is vital, and hinges on our relationship with God. Trusting that He rules the universe and will one day deliver on His promise to restore it to its intended glory, and free it from sin and death, is not sufficient by itself. The Bible tells us that even demons trust in this way (James 2:14-19), although it brings them no comfort!

Now that demons have crept into our discussion, we’d better shift gears and talk about . . .

War

Like it or not, we are at war. God did not intend for us to be at war. The Bible teaches that when God completed His creation of heaven and earth and all that each contained, He looked at it and saw that it was good (Genesis 1:31). God’s creation included amazingly powerful creatures in heaven called angels (Job 33:4-7, Psalm 33:6). And they were good. There was no sin and no death.

The Bible also tells us that things got botched up in heaven when Lucifer, an angel of great power, thought things would be better if He were in charge. He convinced a third of the angels in heaven to rebel with him—and the war began. God tossed Lucifer and his cohorts out of heaven and down to earth (Revelation 12:1-4). We know them as Satan and his demons. Satan started a similar rebellion on earth by convincing Adam and Eve that it would be better if they were in charge of the garden instead of God (Genesis 3:1-6). How discouraging is this? We’ve got a big mess. And we’ve got war.

Thankfully, there’s more. When Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for the sins Satan introduced into the world, Satan’s fate was sealed. With the payment of death no longer required of us, Satan lost his only chance at victory. God revealed the great and glorious victory He will win in the future to the apostle John (Revelation 20:10). It comes down to this: though the battle still rages, the outcome of the war has already been determined. God wins. Satan loses. Angels win. Demons lose.

Back to Trust

The type of trust that God’s enemies have is “trust that.” They trust that God will ultimately deliver on His promise to restore the earth to its sinless, no-evil state. And they shudder. They trust that they are fighting a losing battle. But God’s allies “trust in.” They trust in God to deliver on His promises. And they rejoice! They trust in God to give His angels charge over them, to keep them in all their ways. This trust in God is not a passive trust. Trusting that God will take care of everything while we sit on the sidelines and watch is “trust that”—and it is basically the same as the trust of demons! But there are no spectators in the spiritual war between God and Evil. We must choose a side. We do so by choosing which type of trust we will have.

If we trust in God, Satan’s demons will attack us.  But God will give His mighty, powerful, warrior angels charge over us.

If we trust in God, Satan’s demons will try to deceive us into passivity and apathy concerning the war at hand. But God will give His mighty, powerful, warrior angels charge over us.

If we trust in God, Satan’s demons will try to convince us that evil will win the war in the end. But God will give His mighty, powerful, warrior angels charge over us. That’s the truth.

God will give His mighty, powerful, warrior angels charge over you. They will keep you from harm as you fight the good fight to its glorious end.

That’s the YouTruth. God will give His angels charge over you.

© 2009, 2011 Dan Buckhout