Do humans become angels when they die?

[MB]

Do you have outbursts like this at church when you hear something you don't like or understand?

What specifically has no Biblical support, Martin Luther's doctrine of soul sleep or N. T. Wright's assertion that the Acts of the Apostles equates departed spirits with angels?

I think that Martin Luther and N. T. Wright both had Bible-based arguments for their respective positions, whether or not we agree with them.

What makes you think that Saved by Grace doesn't understand or even read. Peter was not dead. No where does it say he was this is conjecture purely on your part Peter was just let out of prison.I 'm sure you didn't read it.
MBr

 

[Alcott]

Do humans become angels when they die?

I think the 3 Stooges did a couple of times.

 

[John I Morris]

This is one of the most outrageously un-Scriptural posts. Of course they do not! Neither do children! Angels are created beings, we will judge the angels one day. How could a Bible believing person even entertain such a foolish thought?

 

[Yeshua1]

More conjecture, that has ZERO Bible support!

Jesus stated that we would be like the Angels as in no sexual activities in Heaven, but does NOT mean would become angels! We seem to be higher then them once glorified in the Lord Jesus!

 

[timtofly]

Why would I have a hard time understanding these scriptures? They are crystal clear and plain as DAY.

I like studying scriptures in their very important contexts.

Matthew 18:10 all by itself has NOTHING to do with what happens to people when they die, let alone humans turning into angels. In context of several verses before and a few after this is about:

• coming to Christ humble and as a little child, welcoming those who come to Christ as a little child, not offending the little ones [new in Christ] nor causing them to sin, "cutting off/out" your hand or eye before causing them to sin, woe to the offenders, and protecting them as the shepherd leave the 99 to save the 1 lost.
• It also teaches that God has angels watching over Christians from the get-go when they are "little ones".
• There is NOTHING in this chapter or verse that speaks of death, let alone human turning into angels after death. In FACT, the opposite is true. This passage DISTINGUISHES humans and angels.

Acts 12:15 has nothing to do with people turning into angels. These people were praying FOR Peter and they thought it was "his angel" knocking at the door. "His" = ownership, not personage. They were dead wrong - there was no angel at the door. It was Peter. This does NOT teach that people turn into angels. Nor that those people believed it. "His" angel. Again, this DISTINGUISHES humans and angels.


Acts 23:8 again has NOTHING to do with humans turning into angels when they die. It's not even teaching about death, period. Paul has been brought before the Sanhedrin - the Pharisees and Sadducees [The Supreme Court of God's people]. He is about to be in very BIG trouble. He devises a ploy to escape. He knows the left and the right [like Democrats and Republicans today] of this court did not believe the same thing nor did they get along. Since he used to be a Pharisee and knew how they argued with each other, he cleverly yelled out, "I'm being persecuted because I am a Pharisee and believe in the Resurrection!!!" The Pharisees who were against him, now wanted to defend him and, the Sadducees did not and a big bru-ha-ha broke out. The Bible says a great argument rose up in the Sanhedrin and Paul escaped.. This is not about death. It is not about people turning into angels.

In Matthew the word angel is used in the form of messenger. This word angel carries the form messenger. Being a literal angel is the wrong interpretation. One's messenger is not a guardian angel. This verse in not about guardian angels at all. Another wrong interpretation.

10 `Beware! -- ye may not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you, that their messengers in the heavens do always behold the face of my Father who is in the heavens,

This verse does not convey protection. It conveys the point God is recording and viewing all that is done to every human. There is the thought that a book of actions are recorded in heaven. Not just what is done to a person, but what that person does. This messenger is not a created angel. This is each person's spirit. In modern lingo the spirit is the "cloud computing" before God keeping track of all a soul does or experiences on earth. These spirits (messengers) are shown in 2 Chronicles 18:18-22. Hebrews 12:1

"So then, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses."


I think in Acts 12:15 they thought it was his spirit as well. Why would they think a spirit had a human form? In most cases a spirit or demon would possess the mind of a human. I do not think the Bible teaches what we call today Ghost. Even when Saul had the witch bring up the "spirit" of Samuel, she recognized it was Samuel. So the true form of a spirit is like a garment that covers the physical form. Revelation 6:11

11 Each of them was given a white robe; and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow-servants should be reached, of their brothers who would be killed, just as they had been.

The thought was that a spirit was the form recognizable. It was not the physical body, but would not ruin the way the physical form looks if the spirit was attached to the body like a robe of white. The spirit is not an inner "force", unless it is a different spirit than ones own. The inner force pneuma is the air we breath. The Holy Spirit is recognized as being air or wind, or the unseen interaction of the physical atoms of creation. Genesis 1:2

"the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water."

Acts 23:8

8 For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both.

There is a distinction between angel and spirit. The word messenger has to be distinguished between a created angel and the spirit of each human. Spirit or spiritual is the catch all phrase of distinguishing between earth and heaven. I do not think it is that simple. The earth has a spiritual battle going on all around us all the time. We cannot see it. Paul says our fight is not with other humans, but is spiritual. In Heaven, Paradise is a physical place with physical bodies. They can see all that is physical and spiritual in all of creation. They in Paradise are normal humans with an incorruptible physical body. They do not have the corruptible body of sin that blinds them to the spiritual. In fact many accept Hebrews 12:1 as solely those in Paradise. Yet Jesus claims a spirit or messenger (angel) has always been a witness before Abraham's bosom was transfered to Paradise after the Cross and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most people of that day agreed in theory that there were spirits who kept track of life on earth. The Sadducees denied this. More than likely because it is not explicitly declared in Scripture. It is one of those comparing Scripture with Scripture and discernment of the Holy Spirit. The Pharisees teaching it did not make it a truth. It was revealed at some point, they continued the teaching, even if there was no Scripture to back it up.

It is like the Trinity, free will, what does John 3:16 really mean. Many different theologies on each muddles the truth. What our spirit actually is or does was never put into doctrine nor theology. Probably to distance the early church from the teachings of the Pharisees.

That should not negate the distinction pointed out in this verse. A spirit is a messenger distinct from an angel being a messenger. An angel cannot possess a human. There are demonic spirits used by Satan an angel to possess humans. Satan cannot possess a human because Satan is a created angel. Angels were not created in the image of God with a body, soul, and spirit. Angels do have the ability to think and reason. I do not think that is having a soul. I think all demonic spirits are from reprobate humans, even those sons of God created on Day 6. While Adam was placed in Paradise for his family, there were many sons of God like Adam. They were all destroyed in the Flood. God only allowed Noah a direct descendant of Adam to populate the earth after the Flood. I don't know if any of the sons of God were unaffected, but removed before the Flood. All that is known is that only Adam's family were on the earth after the Flood.

 

[Baptist Believer]

…the possibility that humans become angels when they die.

I have never understood how anyone who has read the New Testament as a whole would be led to believe that a human being becomes an angel after death. In the context of the teaching of Jesus, the Acts of the apostles, the epistles, and Revelation, it is clear that the redeemed members of humankind will be physically resurrected in the full glory of humanity (like Jesus) to live on a redeemed earth and the heavens.

However, because of the de-emphasis of physical resurrection in the theology of the last 50-75 years, and the mistaken belief that the present earth will be destroyed, the angel narrative in the popular culture has intruded into popular theology.

So passages like Matthew 22:30 (“For in the resurrection they neither marry or are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven”) are ripped from their context and are cited to claim that human beings become angels, somehow before human beings are resurrected.

No. Read 1 Corinthians 15:12-58 carefully (don’t worry about understanding all of it immediately) and you will see that everything Paul teaches is focused on the resurrection of our physical bodies. Since I am not currently an angel, and I suspect you are not either, we will be resurrected as human beings at the end of the age.

When the believers thought that Peter had died, they said it must have been his angel waiting at the door…

Regarding this passage in Acts, as I understand it, there is a very ancient tradition that the believers in Acts are referencing. The tradition is that, in some circumstances, angels appear to people in the form of a friend to aid or assist, so as not to terrify the person who is troubled. (Note that every time an angel appears to someone not in disguised form, mere mortals are terrified.)

I first learned of this back in college when there were some of us believers who started praying for and witnessing to teens and young adults in a local self-styled satanist cult. We faced a LOT of spiritual blow-back and attacks for it and I learned firsthand the power of Jesus over evil. One evening. one of my college professors was led to go confront the entire group during a ritual we knew about, and I offered to go with him. He asked me not to go with him but to keep him in prayer. So I prayed as I drove in the opposite end of town to keep a date with a young woman. On the way, my labored prayer gave way to ease and joy, and I knew it had been answered.

The next morning, I was confronted on my way to breakfast by a young woman who was tangentially part of the satanic group. She was furious with me because she claimed the professor and I had gone to the meeting and somehow “scared” everyone where they were vomiting and fainting. I told her that I wasn’t there, I was on a date, but she didn’t believe me, since she and everyone else could clearly see me with the professor.

I went immediately over to the professor’s office (I knew he prayed for all his students from 6:30-7:30am), and knocked on his door.he seemed to be expecting me. I asked him what happened and he said he was nervous about going out there, but the Lord have him courage on the way. He said he stepped out of his car and people came pouring out of the house where they were meeting and running into the woods behind the house to hide. He said “the Lord gave them a show” and he preached to them about renouncing the works of darkness and coming into the light of Jesus. Then, he left.

i asked, who was with you? He said, “God was with me, but I left by myself.” I told him how it had been reported to me that I had been with him, and he said, “Oh!,” smiling, “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that they saw someone.” I pressed him on that point, wanting to know what he meant by that and what he saw. He refused to talk about it.

It was later, when I told a patristics scholar friend about it that he mentioned the tradition of angels in the disguise of friend. I suspect that the professor thought that I might become obsessed with signs, miracles, angels, etc., or consider him a greater man than he was (he was/is a great man), so he decided to model humility and keep the secret.

 

[Scarlett O.]

Hebrews 12:1

"So then, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.".

The witnesses named in Hebrews 12:1 are not spirits or angels. These witnesses are the faithful people listed in Hebrews 11. They do no see us. We see them in the Word and their stories.

We are witnesses of THEM and their faithfulness to God.

 

[Reynolds]

For me, the most compelling reason to question Martin Luther’s doctrine of soul sleep is the possibility that humans become angels when they die.

When the believers thought that Peter had died, they said it must have been his angel waiting at the door:



Also, Jesus may have suggested that children become angels when they die:


Acts 12:15 and Matthew 18:10 might refer to humans having guardian angels, rather than becoming angels. But here's another interesting passage:



Is Acts 23:8 distinguishing angels and spirits from each other or saying that they are two ways of describing a departed human?

The Sadducees only accepted the Books of Moses as their Old Testament canon, which include references to the angels that pre-existed the creation of man. So when Acts 23:8 says that the Sadducees denied the existence of angels, it might have meant the angels of departed humans.

No. Humans don't become angels.

 

[Baptist Believer]

The witnesses named in Hebrews 12:1 are not spirits or angels.

I agree.

These witnesses are the faithful people listed in Hebrews 11. They do no see us.

What is your biblical reference for this belief? I have always understood it to mean that ALL righteous people who have gone before are cheering us on to virtue and good works.

The only reasoning that I have ever heard to claim that the mass of righteous humanity that has gone before does not see us is based on the opinion that righteous people would not want to look upon the fallen world. Those that have cited a verse, use a bad translation of Habakkuk 1:13, that says of God, "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity..." Of course, if that were a good translation/interpretation of that verse, then God would be blind to most things happening on the earth.

 

[AVL1984]

Humans in no way, shape or form become angels. I have tried to impress this on my family members, especially my nephew and his fiance, who just lost a baby that she gave birth to at 4 1/2 months that wasn't fully formed. He died within an hour after being delivered. They kept writing and telling people he had become a "little angel" in the sky, and was there to protect them. I stayed quiet about it for a few days, but it was hard after that point. It seemed their line of thought was totally unscriptural, and they know better from having been in church for several years.

 

[Baptist Believer]

They kept writing and telling people he had become a "little angel" in the sky, and was there to protect them.

A 'little angel in the sky' is no substitute for the LORD looking over them. Their child is whole and healed, enjoying the goodness of God, even now. That's a much better reality.

 

[Reynolds]

Humans in no way, shape or form become angels. I have tried to impress this on my family members, especially my nephew and his fiance, who just lost a baby that she gave birth to at 4 1/2 months that wasn't fully formed. He died within an hour after being delivered. They kept writing and telling people he had become a "little angel" in the sky, and was there to protect them. I stayed quiet about it for a few days, but it was hard after that point. It seemed their line of thought was totally unscriptural, and they know better from having been in church for several years.

Bad thing is some goofy preacher probably told them that. I have heard that junk preached at countless funerals.

 

[Ziggy]

Or they probably got it from the children's book "The Littlest Angel" or from watching "It's a wonderful life" one too many times.

 

[Humble Disciple]

The Anabaptists, our historical forefathers in the Baptist faith, taught the doctrine of soul sleep:

"Thnetopsychism" – A possibly contrasting phrase is thnetopsychism (from Greek thnetos [mortal] + psyche [soul, mind]).[33] The term has its origin in the descriptions of Eusebius of Caesarea and John of Damascus of mortalist views among Arab Christians,[34][35] In the 1600s also this phrase was applied also to the views of Tyndale, Luther and other mortalists, from awareness that Calvin's term Psychopannychia originally described his own belief, not the belief he was calling error.[36] The term is also used of the view of the Anabaptists. Their view is that the soul dies, with the body to be recalled to life at the resurrection of the dead, or that the soul is not separate from the body and so there is no "spiritual" self to survive bodily death. In both cases, the deceased does not begin to enjoy a reward or suffer a punishment until Judgment Day.
Christian mortalism - Wikipedia

It's kind of sad when those who claim to be Baptists take the side of Calvin against the Anabaptists:

‘Those Satanic Anabaptists’:
Calvin, Soul Sleep, and the Search for an Anabaptist Nemesis
That John Calvin did not favor the Anabaptists is evident to any cursory read-ing of his works. From several treatises, three of which were devoted to his perception of the theology of their radical movement,1 to multiple references and colorful flourishes through his various editions of the Institutes, Calvin appears to have hardly published a single positive word about them...
Chapter 8 ‘Those Satanic Anabaptists’: Calvin, Soul Sleep, and the Search for an Anabaptist Nemesis in: Calvin and the Early Reformation

Though I admire Calvin as a Reformer, he wasn't right about everything.

John Calvin: Not a Calvinist

N. T. Wright didn't literally say that humans become angels when they die but only that, for the first-century Christians, the intermediate state between our death and our resurrection on the last day was not as clear and settled as we'd like to think it is today.

The important thing to remember is that we were created in order to have glorified bodies on the last day, not to spend eternity as disembodied spirits in a Platonist world of forms, which would be contrary to ancient Jewish thought.

Theory of forms - Wikipedia

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL - JewishEncyclopedia.com

Not only did the Anabaptists believe in soul sleep, but Martin Luther did as well, as did ancient Arab Christians.

Martin Luther’s doctrine of soul sleep

If you were to die tomorrow and then be raised again on the last day, you would perceive no sense of time whatsoever in the intermediate state. This was exactly the point of Luther, based on the many passages of scripture which suggest that soul sleep is true.

Luther quoted Ecclesiastes 9:5, “The dead know nothing,” among other scriptures, partly in order to defend his rejection of purgatory and of praying to Mary and the saints.