2. As to their number and organization.
(a) They are of great multitude.
Deut. 33:2—“Jehovah ... came from the ten thousands of holy ones”; Ps. 68:17—“The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands upon thousands”; Dan. 7:10—“thousands of thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him”; Rev. 5:11—“I heard a voice of many angels ... and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands.” Anselm thought that the number of lost angels was filled up by the number of elect men. Savage, Life after Death, 61—The Pharisees held very exaggerated notions of the number of angelic spirits. They “said that a man, if he threw a stone over his shoulder or cast away a broken piece of pottery, asked pardon of any spirit that he might possibly have hit in so doing.” So in W. H. H. Murray's time it was said to be dangerous in the Adirondack to fire a gun,—you might hit a man.
(b) They constitute a company, as distinguished from a race.
Mat. 22:30—“they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven”; Luke 20:36—“neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are sons of God.” We are called “sons of men,” but angels are never called “sons of angels,” but only “sons of God.” They are not developed from one original stock, and no such common nature binds them together as binds together the race of man. They have no common character and history. Each was created separately, and each apostate angel fell by himself. Humanity fell all at [pg 448]once in its first father. Cut down a tree, and you cut down its branches. But angels were so many separate trees. Some lapsed into sin, but some remained holy. See Godet, Bib. Studies O. T., 1-29. This may be one reason why salvation was provided for fallen man, but not for fallen angels. Christ could join himself to humanity by taking the common nature of all. There was no common nature of angels which he could take. See Heb. 2:16—“not to angels doth he give help.” The angels are “sons of God,” as having no earthly parentage and no parentage at all except the divine. Eph. 3:14, 15—“the Father, of whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named,”—not “every family,” as in R. V., for there are no families among the angels. The marginal rendering “fatherhood” is better than “family,”—all the πατριαί are named from the πατήρ. Dodge, Christian Theology, 172—“The bond between angels is simply a mental and moral one. They can gain nothing by inheritance, nothing through domestic and family life, nothing through a society held together by a bond of blood.... Belonging to two worlds and not simply to one, the human soul has in it the springs of a deeper and wider experience than angels can have.... God comes nearer to man than to his angels.” Newman Smyth, Through Science to Faith, 191—“In the resurrection life of man, the species has died; man the individual lives on. Sex shall be no more needed for the sake of life; they shall no more marry, but men and women, the children of marriage, shall be as the angels. Through the death of the human species shall be gained, as the consummation of all, the immortality of the individuals.”
(c) They are of various ranks and endowments.
Col. 1:16—“thrones or dominions or principalities or powers”; 1 Thess. 4:16—“the voice of the archangel”; Jude 9—“Michael the archangel.” Michael (= who is like God?) is the only one expressly called an archangel in Scripture, although Gabriel (= God's hero) has been called an archangel by Milton. In Scripture, Michael seems the messenger of law and judgment; Gabriel, the messenger of mercy and promise. The fact that Scripture has but one archangel is proof that its doctrine of angels was not, as has sometimes been charged, derived from Babylonian and Persian sources; for there we find seven archangels instead of one. There, moreover, we find the evil spirit enthroned as a god, while in Scripture he is represented as a trembling slave.
Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:51—“The devout and trustful consciousness of the immediate nearness of God, which is expressed in so many beautiful utterances of the Psalmist, appears to be supplanted in later Judaism by a belief in angels, which is closely analogous to the superstitious belief in the saints on the part of the Romish church. It is very significant that the Jews in the time of Jesus could no longer conceive of the promulgation of the law on Sinai, which was to them the foundation of their whole religion, as an immediate revelation of Jehovah to Moses, except as instituted through the mediation of angels (Acts 7:38, 53; Gal. 3:19; Heb. 2:2; Josephus, Ant. 15:5, 3).”
(d) They have an organization.