By Garry J. Moes

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Henry Smart’s 1867 Christmas hymn “Angels from the Realms of Glory” contains a curious phrase in its first stanza:

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Angels from the realms of glory,

Wing your flight o’er all the earth;

Ye who sang creation’s story,

Now proclaim Messiah’s birth.

 

We’ve sung that worshipful hymn so many times, we may have never stopped to consider the familiar but odd line, “Ye who sang creation’s story.” What’s that all about? And where did Mr. Smart get the idea that angels witnessed the creation of the cosmos and sang because of what they witnessed?

 

If they did, we may have at least a hint of an answer to the age-old question of when angels were created. The creation account in Genesis makes no specific mention of the creation of angels, indeed no mention at all. The only reference to a spirit-being is in Genesis 1:2, but that is “the Spirit of God,” the third person of the Divine Trinity, Who is hovering over the waters. We understand from Scripture that angels are spirits, but in the creation story there is no mention of any other spirits.

 

Seemingly, the only reference in Scripture connecting creation and angels is Job 38:4-7, where God is challenging a questioning Job by comparing God’s own immense intellect and power to the suffering, finite Job in response to the latter’s complaint and his plight in the face of his innocence:

 

4“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
   Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
   Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk,
   or who laid its cornerstone,
7 when the morning stars sang together
   and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

 

The key reference to angels is in verse 7: “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” This is a piece of Hebrew poetry, where parallelisms are characteristic in the first and second lines. As a commentator for the web site “Got Questions: Your Questions, Biblical Answers” wrote:

 

In the parallelism of the Hebrew poetry, the “morning stars” are equated with the “angels,” and the singing is paralleled by the joyful shouts. It seems fairly straightforward: the angels sing. However, the Hebrew word translated “sang” doesn’t always denote music. It can also be translated as “joyfully shouted,” “resoundingly cried,” or “rejoiced.” Also, the word translated “angels” in the NIV literally means “sons of God.”

 

The commentator goes on to note that our familiar notion of angels singing and making music is largely questionable when the passages that hint at that can’t reliably mean only singing and making music. Most actually say only that the angels spoke or shouted praise.

 

But back to the question of when where angels created? From the Job passage, it seems that angels were joyful witnesses of God’s laying out the foundations of earth, determining its measurements and shape. If they witnessed that, may we assume that these spirit beings had already been created at the time God began to speak cosmic matter into existence? If so, we still wouldn’t know exactly when in the sequence of divine creating, the angelic spirit creatures came into existence, accept to assume it was “before” the other stuff.

 

In any event, it is amazing to know that the hosts of heaven not only rejoiced and shouted in massive multitudes at the creation of all things, but also did so in proclaiming Messiah’s birth, the launch of the new creation. What would the sky have looked and sounded like during that proclamation? Well, whatever the case may have been, it was enough to make the shepherds “sore afraid.”

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That was nearly always the reaction of mortals when visited by these immortals. Mortal beings were consistently terrified by the appearance of angels in some assumed material form. They sometimes appear as men, though usually so dazzling that they emanate blinding light, at which the angels would have to tell their mortal witnesses to “fear not.”

 

Other descriptions of angelic beings in Scripture, though rare, do indeed paint mind-blowing pictures, such as we find in Ezekiel 1, where the prophet received a vision of detailed description, revealing “living creatures” with appearances and flight characteristics far more overwhelming and bewildering than the weird UFO’s we hear about today.

 

These are not the fair-haired androgenous beings with white robes and golden sashes that we generally see on Christmas cards and in Sunday school nativity pageants.

 

Perhaps the crucial takeaway from the story of Christ’s birth night is that whatever these magnificent creatures may be like, the Bible is clear that their focus is always pleasing God, ministering on His behalf, serving as His messengers to mankind, and most of all praising and worshipping Him continually with thundering voices. (How it is that spirits have "voices," I cannot say.)

 

Commenting on the Job passage, C. Bradley notes the occasion for the angelic rejoicing: It was called forth by the creation of the world. “The joy of these angels was a joy of admiration. They sang together, because they were struck together with the beauty of the world. It was a song of praise. Because the world discovered to them in every part of it the perfections of God.”

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As the “Got Questions” commentator concludes:

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In short, the Bible does not give a definitive answer as to whether the angels sing. God has created humanity with an innate connection to music and singing, especially in regard to worship (Ephesians 5:19). We often use singing when we praise the Lord. The fact that the words of the angels in Revelation 5 and Luke 2 are words of praise, expressed in a poetic form, argues for the idea that the angels are singing. And it would seem logical that God created the angels with the same propensity for singing as humans have. But we cannot be dogmatic. Whether the angels were singing or speaking in the Bible, they were worshiping and praising God. May we follow their example!

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