Preacher: Pastor Andrew Richard | Series: Advent Midweek 2019 | The angels of God will usher the saints into paradise. This is the final point in our Advent midweek services. We already heard how angels protect the saints. Last week we heard how angels preach to the saints and teach us to worship God. And the angels do these things at God’s command, so that, at the end, they can bring us before the Lord to behold with them his face.
This is the great joy of angels: to see the salvation of man. As Jesus says in Luke 15, “there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents,” that is, one person who is sorry for his sins, trusts Christ for forgiveness, and is saved. And imagine the rejoicing of the angels when one sinner departs in faith from this valley of sorrow to God in heaven. Jubilant hymns must echo through the city of God! And indeed they do. In Revelation 7, as a whole stream of saints come out of the great tribulation of this world and enter into eternal life, the angels fall on their faces before the throne of God and worship him and sing, “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.” Nothing makes angels happier than when saints return to paradise.
Now, for a time, angels had blocked the way to paradise, as we heard in Genesis 3. The cherubim stood guard at the door, while a flaming sword turned every which way to keep man away from the tree of life. Certainly the angels did not do this duty grudgingly, as if they would rather not be doing what God commanded them. Far be it from them! It says in Psalm 103, “Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word! Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers who do his will.” The cherubim were glad to do what God had given them to do. But God was not rejoicing when he expelled man from paradise, and neither were the angels rejoicing to keep man out.
I suppose, then, it’s no surprise that on the night of Christ’s birth the angels rejoiced and sang as they had never sung before, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” The angels sang because the Son of God had come. At that very moment the Savior of the world was on earth, in human flesh, wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger. And that meant the flaming sword was extinguished. The cherubim were relieved of their posts and joined in the choir, singing of Jesus, “He is the key and He the door / To blessed paradise; / The angel bars the way no more. / To God our praises rise.”
And now the angels had a new charge, which was still in a sense keeping watch over the door to paradise: the Father charged them to protect and preserve Jesus until Jesus made it to the cross. So in Matthew 2 we hear how an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And then a while later when it was safe to return, the angel appeared to Joseph again and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.”
When Jesus was grown, he was in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights being tempted by the devil. And when Jesus had resisted every temptation and sent the devil away, we hear, “angels came and were ministering to him.” And then in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus was praying and preparing to die for us, it says, “there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him.” Up to the very moment of Jesus’ arrest, angels were guarding his life.
And then the Father called them off, “Avoid! Avoid! The time has come!” Peter drew a sword and sought to fend off those who came to take Jesus. But Jesus said to him, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then should the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must be so?” And so Peter stood back, as all the angels were doing, and together they watched as the Son of Man was taken away to his death for our salvation.
The angels watched as Jesus was crucified, as the door to paradise unhinged himself, as the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, as the Son of God opened wide the way for man to return to the delights of eternal life. In this they rejoiced, for Christ had taken away the sins of mankind. And the Father in heaven gave the angels a new charge.
The angels now have the duty and joy of ushering the saints back into paradise. They do this for the saints at the hour of death. We see this with Lazarus in Luke 16, where it says, “The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side.” It is one of man’s great fears to have to die alone, to have to face death by yourself. But God has given it to his angels to come to dying Christians and conduct their souls into the presence of God. In our final hymn we’re going to pray according to these words, “Lord, let at last Thine angels come, / To Abr’ham’s bosom bear me home, / That I may die unfearing.” This is a great comfort for us, that we shall not die alone, but shall have the company and help of God’s angels at the time of death. And this is a great joy for the angels, who rejoice to bring man back into paradise, after they formerly had to watch us depart.
So the angels usher the saints into paradise at the hour of death. The angels will also usher the saints into paradise on the Last Day. Jesus speaks several times of the role that angels will play at the end. You heard in the reading from Matthew, “The harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels.” So also Jesus says later in Matthew 13 that at the close of the age “the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous.”
Make no mistake: the angels don’t deal with the righteous only, but with the evil as well. Jesus said, “The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace.” Angels rejoice in the salvation of man, but just as they were perfectly willing to carry out God’s command and bar mankind from the Garden of Eden for a time, so also they are perfectly willing to carry out God’s wrath and justice on the evildoers. Great angel warriors will take sinners, who appeared powerful and impressive in this life, and grip them in their strong hands like rag dolls. And with the fire of God in their eyes, the angels will throw those wicked people into hell, the way a fisherman casts a bad fish onto the beach in disgust and leaves it there to perish.
But this day of wrath will also be a day of great joy for the angels, and a day of great joy for the saints. For we who believe in Jesus will once again enter into paradise, and we will join our voices with the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come.” Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.