Thoughts on Acts 1

Today’s reading: Joshua 12; Acts 1

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but angels don’t have wings…

I know that this is probably a silly thing to fixate on out of these chapters, but it has come up recently with my kids so it’s fresh in my mind, but can we please stop putting wings on every spiritual or angelic being that shows up in Scripture??? They don’t have wings!

This is legitimately what I wanted to talk about this morning. Recently I came across the the Bible App for Kids and it’s amazingly well done. The Bible stories they include in the app are well picked, they do a good job holding to the text and not sugar coating too much (one of my main gripes with a lot of children’s bibles is how much they get stories wrong at times in the name of making a lesson or sugar coating something important). The app will read a bit of the story out loud and then have interactive illustrations, and then includes comprehension questions along the way. They also gamified it so that to get three starts on a story you have to go through it 10 times, a there are gems to find and challenges to beat by reading different sets of stories together. My kids are obsessed with it and it’s great because I can let my oldest “read” stories to the others and they really are learning a lot from it.

Anyway… we read the story of Jesus’ ascension in it the other day (as we see in Acts 1 this morning) and when the two men in white robes appeared to the disciples, they had giant angel wings. Naturally my kids were asking about the wings and I was trying to explain to them why everyone seems to think angels have wings even though the Bible never says that, and I think it’s worth noting because it just shows how easily we absorb and latch onto ideas that don’t come from the text of Scripture at all and then hold on to them as though they were directly Scriptural. Just because it appears in medieval and renaissance art doesn’t make it accurate, but it’s what we have all grown up seeing of biblical art and so it is how we have internalized and picture these ideas.

In terms of spiritual beings with wings, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this, but I believe the only spiritual beings that we are explicitly told have wings are the four throne guardians, each of which has six wings and who are covered in eyes (thematically because part of their role, in such close proximity to the throne, is to see all that goes on across the world and report it to the Lord), and the cherubim (which are not described as having wings directly, but are said to have wings when carved, so I’ll assume they had wings). Nowhere does it say that all spiritual beings have wings, or that all are covered in eyes, it is just these four throne guardians with both traits and the cherubim that are carved with wings. 

In fact, most of the time when various spiritual beings show up, they are described as men. In our chapter today Luke doesn’t say, “And two angels appears,” but rather, “two men stood by them…” Luke does use the language of angels at the beginning of his gospel account in talking to Zechariah, Mary, and then the shepherds after Jesus’ birth, but in none of those places are the angels said to have wings. In fact, Luke tells us that it is the angel Gabriel that appeared to Mary, and when we meet Gabriel in the book of Daniel, Daniel refers to him as “the man Gabriel.” We also have examples like the two angels who were sent into Sodom and Gomorrah who clearly didn’t stand out among them because of their massive wings, but just looked like men coming into the city. And in Hebrews 13 we are told not to neglect to show hospitality to strangers because, in so doing, some have entertained angels without knowing it. Did they just fail to notice the giant wings growing out of the strangers’ backs when they were showing hospitality to them? Of course not!

All this to say that while art and literature can be great and helpful, they are not Scripture, and it’s worth paying attention at times to where these things don’t actually line up with the Word so that we are letting the Lord shape how we think about His Scriptures more than some renaissance painters. And while it may not seem all that important whether or not we slap some wings on some spiritual beings that didn’t have them, this idea goes far beyond just pictures of angels, but there are traditional doctrines, interpretations, etc that come more from paintings, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante’s Inferno than they do from the Bible, but people have so latched onto them as to make them unquestioned truth.

This is a big part of why we are doing this plan and why I am doing this blog, to help immerse ourselves enough in the Word that we can start to separate truth from speculation and have a more rooted, informed, and unshakable faith in our Lord.