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Chapter 5

RECONCILIATION FOR ANGELS

I am now a reconciled angel! thought Little A.

No you are not! thundered a particularly aggressive looking pedant, who seemed to have strayed into the Celestial Land by mistake.

Wanting to say, How did you get here ? This is not where you belong! yet Little A did not do so. How could he be sure where people were supposed to be ? and perhaps this man was simply lost and needed redirection.

Can I help you, sir ? instead he asked. Then he proceeded to observe, I did not know that humans ever came to this celestial sphere: since it is certainly not heaven, but a place for preliminary learning, and subsequent service, and it is not earth, since it is ethereal.

Get here ? By research of course, said the professor, since that is what he was on earth.

Did the Lord permit you ?

Oh yes, I can do anything I like, for I am a Liberal: do anything you like so long as you call it a Christian school of thought or something like that.

I should have thought that thought without God was thoughtless, being unbased, merely subject to diverse bias, and ignorant of the foundation and fountain of all things, hence unreliable and perilous to the possessor, said Little A, marvelling even as he spoke, at his boldness.

Yes, we do have problems, said the professor, but let me tell you about your own.

What is that ? asked Little A, feeling a kind of pity for someone who knew so much and understood so little.

You as an angel CANNOT be reconciled, for there are only good and bad angels. Good ones do not need it and bad ones cannot get it.

That is the way some people on earth think, is it, asked Little A ?

Of course it is, said the professor good naturedly, since he was beginning to like Little A for his guilelessness.

Many of us are quite sure that we are, if you like, angels, that we cannot REALLY sin enough to have anyone die for us, and we are really all too good at heart, so that we are spiritual agents, just needing someone to be sensible enough to hire us; and since no-one else seems to be around for the job as yet, we just go where we please. We even have homosexuals for preachers in some places still oddly called churches, despite I Timothy 1:10 and I Corinthians 6:9. It seems to give us a sort of kick to kick at the goads, and ignoring God, yet use His own name, even the name of Jesus Christ.

You are very frank! remarked the Little A; but do you not know that when God speaks, the wise man listens, and when he listens, he sees himself as he is and repents and using the redemption in Christ's sacrifice, receives salvation by faith!

I know it of course, but it always seems somehow beneath me! smiled the professor. You know, being up here seems to affect my vision, for things are becoming clearer to me as we speak. It begins to remind me that doing anything we like, if we feel we can call it question, and leading like that since no one else seems to be around is ignoring the fact that … Christ was and is, and continues to be. You cannot harass eternity in time. You know I never thought of that before.

There is in the book of revelation, talk of an angel preaching the everlasting Gospel, at Ch. 14,  and so I suppose I can speak of it, said Little A.

You look as if you know God! said the professor wistfully, and to be sure it would be better to be in some such celestial realm as this, than fogging about in philosophy down there.

Would you like to know God also ? asked the Little A ?

Assuredly I would! said the professor for I have spent 40 long years in the spiritual wilderness; for you see, down there on earth we DO have a spiritual side.

I know, said Little A. In fact, I have not told anyone this before, but I used to think I could never be reconciled to God, because I was an angel, and this always stopped me taking it seriously, although it was not quite a conscious thought for a long time; but it was something that Vesa - that is the most senior Angel, probably knew, and perhaps that is why he left me at one time, to think some more, because you see I think he would know my problem, and that I had the Bible to check. If he had simply told me, I think at that time I should have resisted, but later, I realised its truth.

It seems to me that I have been having a somewhat similar problem, wheezed the professor, for the celestial atmosphere was beginning to show that it was not meant for his lungs; for I have been thinking myself almost like an angel, and not seeing that without the personal knowledge of God, I am but a spiritual atom in a universe where the molecular aggregations matter. That’s just figurative:  I mean, it is more than that isn't it, the spiritual is in design, not in atoms of any kind, or parts! Spirits don’t have flesh and blood, I seem to have been told, and of course they don’t, so they could not be resurrected, being never buried.

For my part, alas, it has been a wilful sort of atomicity of self-conceit that I have been trying to live, and it is called spiritual autonomy, and of this I repent NOW! said the professor, with an enormous scowl of determination.

You know, said Little A, gently, for he truly pitied the professor whose will still seemed in control of his ways, that when I came to Colossians 1:19ff., it was like light in the dark. WHETHER IN HEAVEN OR ON EARTH, ALL THINGS ... It was ALL THINGS, and Paul repeated the point, that God wanted to reconcile to Himself, or rather was pleased to reconcile to Himself. I am part of "all things" and so it was then that I realised that I was desired by God, and since I at last saw myself as sinful in the sight of the incandescent radiance of God as in I Timothy 6, I repented, believed, received and set my course by His word, whatever anyone says, and there it was. I was reconciled to God through the blood of Christ.

If you could be! then said the professor, how obviously easy it is for me to be, for whom the blood of this same Christ seems almost to flow into my own veins.

Little A was secretly horrified at this, since it almost sounded a tiny bit like pantheism, but instead proceeded tenderly.

It is actually what LEFT His veins and fell, which was the symbol and indeed part of the reality of His giving His life for you, said Little A; and He is in heaven, from where He is to return to this same earth which slaughtered Him, in a little while. You see that in John 6:60ff., as in Acts 3:19ff..  Elsewhere, it says, “Look, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him.”

You don't say ? replied the professor. Where does it say that ?

It says it in Revelation 1:7, and it also speaks of it in Matthew 24, where it declares that He will come in the clouds of glory and send His angels to gather His own people and it says it in I Thessalonians 4, where the dead in Christ rise first at His coming, to be joined by those still living on earth when He comes. In fact,  it is written in Acts 1, where the ascending resurrected Christ has this said of Him: He will come again in a way like the one in which He goes!

Then that is something to look forward to, said the Professor. Well, Little A, as I would like to call you, my dear young chap, it has been very good to see you and to know you, and I trust that I shall soon know God. Certainly, I now begin to realise the incredible spiritual oafishness of which I was guilty, in imagining that it did not deserve death to be willfully ignorant of God, and to tell Him that He did not really need to die for me, since I was too good. In fact, I was too good to be true, and not good enough to see my own place in perdition, or even to believe the Bible when it declared that … what was it ? without blood ?

Oh without blood there is no remission – that is in Hebrews 9:22, and it adds that He was offered to bear the sins of many, in Hebrews 9:28, and that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, in Romans 3:23, and that sin has wages, called ‘death’ and that to get life you receive it as a gift from the Redeemer (Romans 6:23).

You really are like a walking encyclopedia! grunted the Professor.

I have long loved the Bible, replied the angel, but I was not too practical about it!

Practical classes, eh! Smiled the Professor. Yes, you need to visit the lab, don’t you… and you need to do business with God. Oh I have felt at times, near to God, but I knew in my heart that there was a door, at which I simply did not knock.

Could I suggest, said Little A, that you call Him the Lord, since He is not only the one who made your spirit and invented your body, and occasioned your mind, but the One who, knowing all and making all, including liberty to love or to hate, in the first place; for He is also the very One on whom your life and future depends entirely.

The Lord ? responded the Professor (you will notice the capital beginning to come more at this time, as he is now changing).

Yes, said Little A, for it is His command which created, and it is His which will recreate you if, having repented, you come to be believing in Him, and so receive Him as Lord and Saviour and give up the reins of the government of your soul to Him, so that it becomes Lord that He is for you, and His word governs your goings.

The Professor's face suddenly changed, and began to emit a radiance so fierce that Little A did not care to look long, but remembering Vesa's ways, he said, Farewell and godspeed, and left the Professor, who at that time awakened on earth, and reaching for his Bible, confirmed his commitment to Christ.

It is wonderful, thought Little A, that perhaps I have in some obscure but definite way been involved in ministering to an heir of salvation.

It is one Gospel then for man and for the universe, and it is one reconciliation which touches the filth of sin and which covers the errors of all who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, whether in heaven or on earth, and indeed applies to all things wherever there is spirit and reality at all; for God is governor of all, Maker of all, redeemer of all who are His, and is open to all with a love which as Colossians 1 with John 3:16 shows, is so amazing that it becomes really easy to see the strength of human love and sacrifice. ALL THINGS! how lovely is that comprehensiveness in Colossians. What willingness! what thrust! and what gracious reticence as well.

Here is the very meaning of love, thought Little A, and the thought seemed almost too big for his littleness, which seemed to extend slightly to help as he pondered.

It is from that model that it comes, though it often loses its sight of the source and so comes to feel proud or meaningless, as the mood comes. He was lost in reverie at this point, and it seems discrete to leave him to his angelic thoughts.