What Are Angels In The Bible?

This clip is part of the sermon “The Annunciation" delivered by Kevin DeYoung at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC on December 7, 2025

By one count, there are 273 references to angels in the Bible. So, not on every single page, in every single chapter, but not bit players in this drama either. 273 references and we know that they play an important role in the Christmas story.

What are angels in the Bible?

Well, angels are sometimes guardians. You think of the angel in the Garden of Eden or the cherubim on the lid of the ark of the covenant. The angels guard the presence of God. They guard what is holy. Think of angels are a bridge between two different worlds. You think about the visions of angels ascending and descending. Angels are intermediaries. Angels are servants. We can say most fundamentally angels are messengers. That’s what the word in Hebrew and the word in Greek means. The word in Greek, you already know it – angelos – so this is the transliteration. “Angels” simply means “a messenger.”

There are two named angels in the Bible. Other books not in the canonical scriptures will name a couple of other angels, but there are just two angels who are given names in the Bible. One is Michael. He’s called, in Jude 9, an archangel, which suggests that he has authority, under God, over other angels. And in fact, we read in Revelation 12:7 about Michael fighting the devil – Michael and his angels – so, it seems that he has some company of heavenly hosts at his charge. Gabriel is, by tradition, considered the other archangel, though he’s not named as such, but he is the other named angel. If Michael is the warrior angel – and that’s what we have the picture in Revelation or in Daniel, as he is fighting in the heavenly spiritual realm the kind of battle that we are fighting here against Satan in the earthly realm. If he’s the warrior angel, then Gabriel is the communicating angel.

We have Gabriel mentioned – you may not have realized, or you may have forgotten – two times in the book of Daniel, chapter 8 and Daniel chapter 9, where he explains the meaning of a vision to Daniel. And here in Luke 1, he is the messenger to Zechariah and now to Mary.

Just think about that for a moment, that Gabriel is named in the book of Daniel. So about 500 years apart, which tells us that angelic beings are spiritual beings who live and don’t die. So, we have 500 years – you think of all that Gabriel had seen and heard in those 500 years, or Michael with him. And then you think about that word that Peter gives us: “these things into which angels long to look.” Of all the privileges that the angels had, all of the things that they had seen for centuries and for millennia, and yet the one thing that they longed to see. Not that they didn’t know the gospel. He’s announcing the gospel, but they could not know what it was to be a human being filled with sin, forgiven by God, saved by his Son. Things into which angels long to look.

This Gabriel we met 500 years ago in Daniel and now shows up and gives a message to Zachariah and to Mary. Notice what it says – where he comes from and where he goes. In the sixth month, verse 26, Gabriel was sent. Now this is quite a trip. Some of you may go on a trip over Christmas. Many of us will travel somewhere by planes, trains, or automobiles, and you will make it there, Lord willing, and make it back, and some will be a great journey, but none as great as this. He starts from God. However we understand that, and we don’t quite know what the heavenly realm is – it doesn’t have a mailing address that gets you there, except by prayer – but this spiritual realm before the presence of God. He was sent. He’s there from God, and he goes to a city of Galilee named Nazareth. You and I have a hard time remembering that this physical world that we inhabit, of material things, of sequence, of time, of history, that there is, at this same moment, a heavenly realm of unseen things. And in God’s economy, those things are just as real or in some ways even more real than the hard, physical things we can see and touch. Gabriel comes from this unseen realm, from God to a real place.

Remember what Luke says in the very first paragraph of his gospel: “Many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished.” And he talks about eyewitnesses and an orderly account that he has followed all things closely. So, remember, this is not in the realm of make-believe. This is not legend. This is not myth. Luke, at the very beginning, says, I’m a historian, and I’m gathering my sources. I’m talking to people. I’m getting authoritative eyewitnesses. I’m compiling the accounts. I’m laying it all out. I have notes, and I’m writing an orderly account for this Theophilus, who is likely some kind of high-ranking official in the Roman apparatus – maybe a young Christian, maybe an almost-Christian. So Luke is very deliberately telling us fact and history. And he says, “Here’s a fact: an angel came from the presence of God down to earth to this little town called Nazareth.” And Gabriel, who had just spoken in the previous narrative to Zechariah in the temple, now speaks to Mary in Nazareth. Two very different settings: from the grandeur of Jerusalem and the temple and the priest carrying out the most significant priestly act of his entire life, that he was chosen by lot to offer at the altar of incense. Gabriel met him there, and now he meets the virgin in Nazareth. Gabriel is, as it were, straddling the two worlds – connected, but different epochs of the Old and the New Testaments.

And perhaps it’s significant that the message to Zechariah happens in the temple, the heart of Israel’s worship in the Old Testament. And just as Zechariah departed the temple, we are having a foreshadowing that the religion of God’s people will not be focused on an earthly place in the same way. What is the temple? The temple is the symbolic place where the dwelling of God resides. It was there in the tabernacle as they moved through the wilderness. Then when they had a permanent home, it was there in the holy of holies in the temple. The temple is the place. It’s the incubator for the presence of God. We have moved from a structural temple to a virgin temple. The presence of God from this man-made temple now finding residence in the womb of this young woman. The divine presence, and not just the divine presence in a cloud or in a symbolic box, but actually in human form, flesh and blood, fully divine, fully human. That’s what Gabriel is announcing. What a privilege. I wonder if Gabriel put up his hand or his many wings and, “I’ll take that one. Let me go and do that one.” As Michael was fighting, Gabriel said, “Let me go and give the message here.” And he did. What a message it was.