NOTES for Tob 12:17-18

Everyone today has heard of angels, and every Christian believes in them. As for the Bible, angels are spoken of in it comparatively not very much. Much more information about them can be found in apocryphal literature, where whole chapters, and sometimes whole books, are devoted to the description of angels, angelic hierarchies, and the angelic world.

The Bible is very restrained in this respect. The biblical authors do not consider it necessary to give their readers much information about angels and the angelic world, perhaps because this information is practically useless for our spiritual life: we are not angels, our world is different, and knowledge of the structure of the angelic world will still give us nothing. Information for the sake of information is not the Bible's goal. The Bible tells us about angels only what concerns us ourselves and our relations with God.

As a rule, angels in the Bible are ministering spirits, as the apostle Paul calls them in one of his letters. They come to a person as messengers from God with a concrete message or assignment. The word "angel" is of Greek origin, and literally it means "messenger."

Yet, judging by the Book of Tobit, there are also special cases when such a messenger of God accompanies a person for a fairly long time. Usually, and the case of Tobit is a good example, such accompaniment is given to a person when he sets out to do God's work, with which he could not cope without God's direct help and direct intervention.

So it was with Tobit, who would simply have perished if not for the intervention in the situation of God's messenger. As for angelic names, they are most likely not their true names. We will hardly ever know how angels call one another when communicating among themselves, since even their manner of communication is very little like human communication. To a person an angel presents himself as determined by his task. Thus, in Tobit's case, to whom the angel gave the name Raphael, the issue is miraculous healing, and the angelic name accordingly means "God the healer." This is not deception, but the only way for an angel somehow to present himself to a person. The same applies to the outward appearance of God's messenger: we can only guess how angels see one another and how they see us, but they appear to us in such a form that we can see them.

Here too there is no deception: spirit is always higher than the form in which it is embodied. The laws of the spiritual world are the same everywhere; it is simply that in angels, beings that are purely spiritual, they are manifested more brightly than in our human world, where their manifestation is less obvious, though no less real.