Transcript

ANNOUNCER: There has been a lot of concern lately about unidentified aerial phenomena. Are these drones or aliens, or could they be angels? We’re going to think about these things today here on Grace in Focus. So glad that you are joining us. This is the ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society, and you can find us at faithalone.org. On that website, information about our conference ministry, our magazine, our free online seminary, and in our bookstore, you’ll find Bob Wilkin’s latest book, “The Gospel Is Still Under Siege”. Once again, it’s faithalone.org.

Well, let’s get to our discussion today. Here is Bob Wilkin, along with Philippe Sterling.

BOB: Philippe, we’ve called this one a very alliterative title, “Are Aliens Angels?” Say what? Are aliens angels? You know, there’s a lot about UFOs. They’re not called UFOs anymore, are they?

PHILIPPE: Oh, no, it’s been rebranded. It used to be UFO’s, unidentified flying objects, but now it’s been rebranded to unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs. And of course, that’s much in the news now.

BOB: Right, even the government’s talking about it.

PHILIPPE: Oh, yeah, an official previously classified report was released in 2021, talking about all the categories of unidentified aerial phenomena. And some of those, you know, were actually images captured by fighter pilots that were able to lock in to these objects that were traveling at incredible speeds and doing maneuvers that contrary to physics, sudden turns and acceleration to thousands of miles per hour, and not identifiable too.

So agnosticism in essence is ultimately, concerning some of those, but you remember some of the great movies, you know, of the 70s or 80s, you know, Encounters of the Third Kind, you know, that was, I think in 1977. And an astronomer of the time that developed the categories of encounters—encounters of the first kind, of the second kind, of the third kind. And the third kind is where there’s actual action that’s occurring between beings that are flying, flying saucers and, you know, of course there was ET the extraterrestrial, you know, too, and how does it go, you know, ET phone home. But of course, much was interest in those types of encounters with beings were part of the popular imagination.

But among theologians of the time, such as Norman Geisler and others, you know, saying that perhaps some of these experiences that people were saying that they were having and even the objects that they were seeing, you know, were they angelic beings?

BOB: Now, we say angelic beings, this could be fallen or unfallen.

PHILIPPE: Possibly. And did they use some kind of transport mode on that, or just materializing certain things that are unusual.

BOB: Well, when I was at Dallas Seminary, one of my professors was Dr. Fred Howe, who was a free grace guy and really nice man. And his brother worked for NASA, and his brother was privy to a lot of these reports that were unpublished reports. And his brother convinced Dr. Fred Howe that these were actually angelic appearances, that these weren’t aliens from some other planet or something, but these were actually angels. But of course, if you think about it, we do know from the Bible that there are created beings other than humans, right?

PHILIPPE: Absolutely.

BOB: And we call them angels. And so if you want to call those aliens, fine, they’re not human, right? So when you spoke on this at the conference, was your view then that these UAPs or UFOs are always angels or sometimes angels, what’s your view?

PHILIPPE: I will not use a term always, because some of them may just be that, unidentified aerial phenomena of some kind, you know different category. But I don’t think we can rule out, you know, the encounters with angelic beings. Now, I don’t think we can directly support that from Scripture, but we are given glimpses of the angelic realm enough. Some of these angels having unusual appearances in there too. So and then we go to Ezekiel 1 and even to Revelation 4 about the living creatures with eyes around wheel-like structures. And they move distinctly in one of four directions, but it’s not a movement like we do when we turn, but sudden turns that are occurring. So is it possible that both fallen angels and holy angels are capable of such interactions in our world?

BOB: Well, we know lots of examples. Like in Genesis 18, we already talked about this. There are three angels that appeared to Abraham and he eats food with them. And we know from Hebrews 13:1, beware of entertaining angels unaware.

PHILIPPE: Well, not to beware, but “some have entertained angels”, you know, unaware, implying definitely that Abraham did that or the possibility of believers in the church age, you know, that could occur.

BOB: At least in the first century, it was still happening. And when he says that some have entertained angels unaware, he’s not talking about fallen angels there, right? He’s talking about unfallen angels. And so if that was going on in the first century, couldn’t that go on today? I mean, isn’t it possible you or I have interacted with unfallen angels and we didn’t know it?

PHILIPPE: Absolutely. And I think that’s the import of Hebrews 13:1.

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BOB: It’s quite possible that not only are these unexplainable appearances quite probably angels, at least, some may be weather balloons or something or somebody may be some just lights.

PHILIPPE: Also some experimental military.

BOB: But some of them probably are angels. And we shouldn’t be surprised with the fact that it’s at least possible that not only are these phenomena angels, but we may have come into contact with angels in our lifetimes and we don’t know it. In other words, I wonder, I’ve had several major car accidents and I’ve walked away from them and very thankful that I did. And I wonder if angels might have been there and protected me.

PHILIPPE: Likewise for me. In fact, when I was giving that workshop, I talked about a particular incident I had in the, when I was with Campus Crusade staff, at the University of Delaware, in the middle of the winter, I was driving down a major road. And I came to a portion where a portion of it was entirely blocked off. So you could only have one lane going on. And I was going down that lane when all of a sudden in front of me, a little bit before me, this truck was coming straight to me and there was—I had nowhere to go. But all of a sudden, I found myself in the blocked-off portion of the road and with the truck speeding by. And I went home and when I walked in the door, Brenda looked at me and said, “What’s wrong?” And she told me I was entirely white, in a state of shock. And I look back upon that is, I don’t know what happened. But I…

BOB: You mean you were driving along and it’s one lane. And there’s a big truck coming right at you and you didn’t remember veering or anything else. But somehow, the truck misses you and you go off to the side?

PHILIPPE: I’m on the blocked-off portion of the road to the side. On the lane, that had been blocked off. And I can’t account for what happened there.

BOB: Well, if it was blocked off, wouldn’t you have hit barriers or things?

PHILIPPE: I would have hit… Yeah, exactly. There was no sign of swerving for me or knocking off, you know, blocked things that were in the way.

BOB: And then you suddenly got back on the road.

PHILIPPE: Well, no, I was able to find a spot, you know, to…

BOB: Oh, you do remember coming back in. But you don’t remember going out there. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I had, when I was on staff with Campus Crusade, this is a familiar theme. I was a, we were going to, a staff woman and I were going to look at a new college in Arkansas that we were considering going to. And I’m driving down the road. And there was a light, a red light, maybe 20 feet off the ground, you know, not your normal 10 feet or something. It was way up there and I didn’t see it. And I went right through a red light. And a guy coming the other way hit me doing about 40 miles an hour. And just wiped out my Ford Maverick, which today there’s a Ford Maverick truck. This was like a Gremlin or something, an odd little car. But anyway, I got hit from the side and I walked away from it. I wasn’t hurt at all. The staff woman wasn’t hurt at all. And even the man that hit me who was in his 70s, he was okay. I was amazed at the whole thing and I wonder if an angel helped me there.

But you know, we need to realize that angels exist and that the unfallen angels are there. If we’re walking in fellowship with Christ, they’re there to help us. And we don’t know how often they help us, but probably a lot more than we realize.

PHILIPPE: And we do know angels interact somehow with us unaware at times. And they definitely observe what’s going on and are very interested. That might be a topic for one of the things about the angels as witnesses, as observers.

BOB: Well they’re called watchers too, right?

PHILIPPE: Yes, in Daniel, there’s a couple of passages in Daniel, that talks about the watchers.

BOB: And there have been TV shows, these sci-fi shows that talk about the watchers and they don’t make them angels, but they got them as some kind of different kind of beings that are watching humanity or whatever.

Well, people may think all of this is just sanctified speculation, but it’s more than that. It’s clearly, angels are taught in Scripture and we need to study the topic of angels, the holy angels, the fallen angels, demons, and all of that in order to understand the world in which we live, there’s more to this world than what we see. And Heiser calls it the unseen realm, but the truth is there is an unseen realm. And Paul says, we walk by faith, not by sight, 2 Corinthians 5:7, because the kingdom to come is not yet here, but we can see it by faith, and the unseen realm is here, but we don’t see it.

PHILIPPE: We’ll talk about it perhaps another time, but Hebrews 12 talks about the heavenly Jerusalem and the myriads of angels, and it seems to be talking about our times, and the heavenly Jerusalem is somehow involved when we pray and come to the throne of grace and all of that.

BOB: Well, that’s fantastic. We’ll end this series by doing a biblical theology of angels. By that, I mean, we’ll look at particular books of the Bible to see, do they add something special about angels that we find, let’s say, in Genesis, or that we find in the book of Revelation, or maybe that we find in the book of Daniel, because this is where the rubber meets the road when we look at particular texts, and so we’ll do some of that in the upcoming episodes. In the meantime, let’s keep grace in focus.

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On our next episode: How many names does Satan have? Come back and join us, and in the meantime, let’s keep grace in focus.