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Are There Angels Among Us?

It happened so quickly. Deep in thought and oblivious to her surroundings, Marilynn strolled onto the railroad tracks. Suddenly, she heard a loud rumbling. She looked up, only to discover that she stood directly in the path of an oncoming train! Marilynn froze, paralyzed with fear. The train was so close that she could see the blue eyes and terror-struck face of the conductor. Marilynn never forgot what happened next. “It was as if a giant pushed me from behind,” she said. “I went flying off the tracks and fell down on the cinders just beyond.” Slightly bruised, Marilynn got up to thank her rescuer​—but no one was in sight! Her conclusion? “My guardian angel saved my life,” Marilynn says. “Who else could it have been?”

A SKEPTICAL world seems suddenly obsessed with angels. In recent years, heavenly beings have been the subject of television shows, movies, and even a Broadway play. Books about angels are high on the list of religious best-sellers. There are angel clubs, seminars, and newsletters. Workshops have been formed to help you​—as one article puts it—​to unleash “your ‘inner angel.’”

Conveniently grabbing the coattails of the angel movement are opportunist merchants touting an endless stream of consumer products. “Anything with angels on it is hot stuff,” says a shop co-owner in the United States. In addition to a flood of books, she lists “angel statues, pins, dolls, T-shirts, posters and greeting cards”​—all racking up what one journalist calls “heavenly profits.”

But this is not just a fad, insist the angel advocates. To back up their claim, they present one testimonial after another​—“true-life” encounters with angels. Some say that they saw an angel in human form. Others saw a light, heard a voice, sensed a presence, or felt an urge that was, they believe, angelic. Many, like Marilynn, say that an angel saved their life.

What is happening? “I think there’s a resurgence of spirituality,” says Joan Wester Anderson, who has written two books on “supernatural” encounters. Alma Daniel, who helped to author another book, takes it a step further. She says that angels are “under instruction now to make themselves known so that more and more people can be touched. The reason we’re seeing so much about them is because they want it that way. They’re doing it.”

Is this really so? Or is something else behind the current fascination with angels? To find out, we must examine God’s Word. The Bible contains the truth about angels, as we will see.

[Picture Credit Line on page 2]

Pages 3 and 4: The New Testament: A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources, by Don Rice/​Dover Publications, Inc.