Читать книгу Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations. In Three Parts онлайн

72 страница из 220

Though this may fully satisfy us that angels excel in strength, yet the Scripture suggests another consideration relating to the office and employment of angels, where their commission shews not only a liberty for the exercise of this power, but also doth imply such a power as is fit to be commissionated to such acts. These invisible beings are called thrones, dominions, principalities, powers, Col. i. 16. It is indeed a task beyond a sober undertaking to distinguish these words, and to set their true bounds and marks of difference. This Augustine acknowledged;79 yet may we hence conclude, [1.] That these words imply a very great authority in angels; [2.] A power and strength suitable to their employment, and that God furnished them with power answerable to the work which he intended for them, in his moving the heavens, and governing the world, &c. However, in some cases, God works by instruments every way disproportionable to the service, ‘that the excellency of the power might be of God,’ [2 Cor. iv. 7;] yet, in the ordinary way of his working, he puts an innate, suitable force in creatures, for the acts to be done by them; as there is an innate power in the wind to blow, in the fire to burn, in herbs and plants for medicinal uses. Thus may we conceive of angels, that God using them as his host, his ‘ministers to do his pleasure,’ he hath endowed them with an innate natural power for those great things which he doth by them, which must not be supposed in the least derogatory to the power of God, in his ways of mercies or judgments, seeing all the strength of angels is originally from God. Hence is it that all the names of angels which we read of in Scripture carry this acknowledgment in their signification; Michael thus unfolds itself, ‘Who is like God;’ Gabriel thus, ‘The glory of God and therefore may we suppose them not so much the proper names of angels, but, as Calvin noteth, Nomina ad captum nostrum indita, Names implying God’s great power in them.80