Angels / Free Will / Humanity

Angels / Free Will / Humanity

Creation is the impetus of God’s Divine plan and within that entity we find the creatures that are spirits and human beings.  We look at Genesis and get the closest conception of humanity with the rise and fall of our essence and the never-ending forgiveness of God.  

It is an interesting reality that the creator of our substance would never reject his desire to breathe life into a creature and love him even more when he turns away from his maker.  Perhaps this becomes the deepest mystery of God when dealing with a created entity and becomes the very solution that corrects our failure.

As written before, free will is the perfection of our make-up since with it we shall seek to be with God forever on our own desire.  Without it we would not know how to find our way to heaven.  Depending on God to lead us home via a manipulating effort like a puppeteer we would never appreciate the new life.  We would take him and all the entities of a divine nature for granted.  So exists the gift of free will.

Now we need to examine angels, or spirits as Augustine calls them.  St. Augustine says:  Angel is the name of their office, not of their nature.  If you seek the name of their nature, it is “spirit”; if you seek the name of their office, it is “angel.”  (CCC 329).

When we interject free will into our study it brings us into the reality that both angels and human beings have that gift.  “Scripture speaks of a sin of the angels.  This “fall” consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign.  We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter’s words to our first parents:  “You will be like God.”  (Gen 3: 5).  The devil has sinned from the beginning, he is a liar and the father of lies.”  (CCC 392).  

“It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels’ sin unforgivable.  There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after their death.”  (CCC 393).  

“The power of Satan is, nonetheless, not infinite.  He is only a creature, powerful from the fact that he is pure spirit, but still a creature.  He cannot prevent the building up of God’s reign.  Although Satan may act in the world out of hatred for God and his kingdom in Christ Jesus, and although his action may cause grave injuries of a spiritual nature and indirectly, even in a physical nature, to each man and to society, the action is permitted by divine providence which with strength and gentleness guides human and cosmic history.  It is a great mystery that providence should permit diabolical activity, but we know that in everything God works for good with those who love him.”  (CCC 395).

Angels and human beings; both creatures of God and equally endowed with free will.  

Ralph B. Hathaway