Angels are usually unseen. When Scripture does record them appearing, though, what it describes bears almost no resemblance to the images our culture has settled on.
That gap is worth taking seriously — not as pedantry about art, but because what we picture the messenger to be quietly shapes what we imagine about the sender.
Angels of God are fearsome figures of inherent divine authority.
Sometimes They Look Like Anyone
In Scripture, angelic appearance sometimes took male human form — and of an ordinariness such that the fact they were angels went unrecognised for a while by the people receiving them (Gen 18:2, 16, 22; 19:1-22; Judg 13:3-21; cf. Heb 13:2).
Two features of that repay attention.
The first is the form: masculine and human. The second is the ordinariness — unremarkable enough that those who received these visitors didn’t, for some time, realise what they were dealing with. Abraham entertained them. Lot pressed hospitality on them. Manoah and his wife conversed at length before understanding arrived.
Now, that angelic appearance invariably took masculine human form sits awkwardly against the almost entirely infantile and feminine representation of angels in popular art and culture. The chubby cherub of greetings cards and the soft-featured female figure of devotional painting have no warrant in the text whatsoever. They’re inventions.
And the invention isn’t harmless. Angels of God are fearsome figures of inherent divine authority, so their contemporary taming and trivialisation is most unwise and entirely unwarranted.1‘The modern perception is romantic and attractive, but the biblical revelation is more likely to be one of fiery spiritual beings who are figures of terror and judgment’ (Bray, God is Love, 253).
Consider what the taming actually accomplishes. It converts a creature carrying the authority of God into a decorative ornament. It replaces awe with sentiment. And in doing so it quietly obscures the God whose emissaries these creatures are.
When They Appear As They Are
When angels do become visible according to their nature — rather than in human disguise — their appearance is not tame. It is awesome, overwhelming, tremendous, terrifying, spectacular (Num 22:31; 2 Ki 6:17; Dan 10:4-9; Matt 28:3; Luke 2:9; Rev 10:1-3).
Look at the pattern across those references.
Balaam sees the angel of the LORD and falls on his face. Elisha’s servant, his eyes opened, sees the mountain filled. Daniel is left without strength. The women at the tomb meet an appearance like lightning. The shepherds are filled with great fear. John sees a mighty angel wrapped in cloud with a face like the sun.
The consistent human response isn’t delight. It’s dread — the reaction of creatures suddenly confronted with something belonging to an order above their own.
Small wonder that John was twice tempted to worship at the feet of an angel.
Small wonder, then, that John was twice tempted to ‘worship at the feet of the angel’ who brought God’s revelation to him, though this is expressly prohibited (Rev 19:10; 22:8).2‘Surely, since the splendour of the divine majesty shines in them, nothing is easier for us than to fall down, stupefied, in adoration of them, and then even to attribute to them everything that is owed to God alone’ (Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.10; 170).
That detail rewards a second look. The temptation to worship arose not from confusion or weakness of character but from the sheer impressiveness of what stood in front of him. The splendour was real. The response was nonetheless wrong, and it was corrected both times.
Whatever glory angels display is borrowed glory. To stop at the messenger is to miss the one who sent him.
A Genuinely Difficult Passage
There’s a passage describing how, with accelerating perversion in the run-up to the flood, ‘the sons of God’ were attracted to and mated with earthly women, ‘daughters of men,’ and produced children (Gen 6:1-4).
Identifying ‘the sons of God’ here is genuinely problematic, with several possibilities supported by the Hebrew grammar and wider use of the term. Three main options are offered: Sethites, descendants of Adam and Eve’s third son (Gen 4:25; 5:4-8); a tyrannical dynasty of kings succeeding Lamech who engaged in coercive polygamy; or angels.
Each reading faces difficulties.
Sexual activity by angels runs against the logic of Jesus’ teaching about their being ungendered (Matt 22:30) — though his remark concerns angelic existence in heaven, not appearance on earth, which isn’t quite the same question.
The angel interpretation is the oldest, accepted in the earliest Jewish and Christian sources. But the Hebrew word ben generally means ‘son, child or descendant.’ It doesn’t specify ‘angel’ as such. It’s the context that points to a supernatural understanding of ben, and interpreting it with the more ambivalent term ‘spirit’ offers help.3Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word, 1987), 140. Indeed, Job 1 and 2 depicts the Satan appearing before the Lord as one among the sons of God. That the ‘sons of God’ refers to superhuman spiritual beings is the view of many recent commentators.4Wenham, Genesis 1-15, 139-43, 146.
It may be possible that demons inhabiting men, or demons in human form, copulated with mortals during this period. No single interpretation is entirely satisfactory — but gross sexual immorality under some form of strong demonic influence seems most likely.
‘The best solution is to combine the “angelic” interpretation with the “divine king” view. The tyrants were demon possessed. … “The text presents us with men who are controlled by fallen angels.” Their perverted psyches allowed this entrance of the demonic.’5Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 117.
That combined reading has the merit of doing justice to both strands of evidence rather than forcing a choice between them — the human tyranny the text describes, and the supernatural dimension its language implies.
Ending Where Honesty Requires
It’s worth closing this one where honest interpretation has to close: with an acknowledged limit.
The passage resists confident resolution. And the appropriate response is neither dogmatism about a favoured reading nor the pretence that the difficulty doesn’t exist.
Which is, in its own way, the theme of the whole subject. What Scripture gives us about angels is enough to correct our sentimentality, enough to provoke appropriate awe, and enough to keep our attention where it belongs. It simply isn’t enough to satisfy our curiosity — and the restraint is deliberate.
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- 1‘The modern perception is romantic and attractive, but the biblical revelation is more likely to be one of fiery spiritual beings who are figures of terror and judgment’ (Bray, God is Love, 253). ↩︎
- 2‘Surely, since the splendour of the divine majesty shines in them, nothing is easier for us than to fall down, stupefied, in adoration of them, and then even to attribute to them everything that is owed to God alone’ (Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.10; 170). ↩︎
- 3Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word, 1987), 140. ↩︎
- 4Wenham, Genesis 1-15, 139-43, 146. ↩︎
- 5Bruce Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 117. ↩︎