R.C. Sproul

Now at the very beginning of this series,

I told the story of the rescue of miners that were underground for several days and how they testified that they had been ministered to by angels, and that's how they explained their survival.

You'll remember that story that I told you, and how the press automatically assumed that they were hallucinating, and the assumption in the secular worldview in which we live

is that anybody who sees an angel, by definition, must be subject to hallucinations.

And a hallucination occurs when somebody sees things that aren't really there.

And I mentioned Rudolf Bultmann was saying that you can't live in our sophisticated society and still be believing in ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night and in invisible realities such as angels.

But at the heart of Judeo-Christianity is an uncompromised supernaturalism.

that says that there is much more to reality than meets the eye, that God Himself is invisible, and yet there's nothing more central to Christianity than the reality of the existence of God.

And the thing that makes it so difficult for us to be faithful, I believe, to God is because He's invisible.

And it's hard to worship that which you do not see and obey one with whom you've never spoken, and so on.

But the same thing may be true of angels.

They're invisible most of the time.

There are times throughout biblical history, as we read in the case of the visitors to Sodom and elsewhere, when the angels manifest themselves, usually in human garb,

But under ordinary circumstances, they are spirit beings, they're real, they're creatures, they're spirit beings who are invisible.

And if we really do believe in the message of the Christian faith, we have to understand this as part and parcel of that message, that the reality in which we live contains much more

than meets the eye.

Now that should not be that much of a stretch to us living on this side of the Enlightenment, living on this side of the invention of the telescope, living on this side of the invention of the microscope because the scientific revolution of the modern era took place

when our perception of reality was increased and enhanced by instruments that enabled us to see things that could not be seen by the naked eye.

You know, one of the crises in the time of Galileo was the scientists of his day, as well as the bishops of his day, refused to put their eye on the telescope because they didn't want to believe the evidence that the telescope was revealing about how the heavens really are structured and how the orbits of the planets and so on really take place.

And the whole revolution that we call the Copernican Revolution was a revolution in science that was provoked by a sudden ability to see what previously was unseen.