One of God’s titles in the Old Testament is
יְהוָ֣ה
צְבָא֣וֹת/YHWH
Chevaót. It first appears in 1 Samuel 1.3; it’s what God was called when the Israelis were still under judges, when his tabernacle was at Shiloh. Chevaót (also transliterated tsevaóth or sabaóth) is plural for cháva, an organized unit of soldiers. An “army,” or what the KJV called a “host”—and therefore he’s the “LORD of hosts.”
In Eugene Peterson’s 2018 translation of the bible, The Message, he interpreted YHWH Chevaót as “GOD of the angel armies.” 1Sa 1.3 MSG He’s not the first guy to translate it that way, but Peterson definitely helped make the phrase popular. As did popular worship-song writer Chris Tomlin, who published “Whom Shall I Fear (God of Angel Armies)” in 2012, and pastor Tim Sheets, who in 2015 started writing books on angel armies and how to invoke ’em in prayer.
Lemme point out the obvious: The Hebrew word for angel is
מַלְאָךְ/malákh,
“messenger, angel.” The Hebrew scriptures do not refer to God as YHWH Chevaót haMalakhím. They don’t say what the LORD’s armies consist of.
They could be angels; an great army of angels shows up to announce Jesus to the shepherds, Lk 2.13 so there’s that. The head angel Michael did lead an undefined number of angels against the devil and its angels, and threw them to the earth. Rv 12.7-9 We’ve no idea how many angels were in this fight. Could’ve been dozens; could’ve been billions. There’s nothing in the scriptures which describes how many angels exist. Those who believe in guardian angels usually presume there are at least as many angels as there are humans… so 8 billion and counting, I suppose. But did God create that many angels?—does he even need them to match our number?
The other reasonable possibility is “God of armies” refers to human armies. And no, I don’t necessarily mean soldiers who fight, kill, pillage, and rape. Some teach that God co-opts human armies to achieve his will, like when he used the Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Romans to smite Israel. I should point out God judged all those invading armies for the atrocities they committed against Israel and their other foes; I wouldn’t say he co-opted them so much as removed his hedge of protection around Israel and allowed their enemies to have at ’em. God can use human armies to achieve his objectives, such as when he had Gideon, David, and the Maccabees defend their homeland. But I think of God’s human armies more like the Salvation Army: You don’t need to achieve God’s objectives through war, but through peace and good deeds.
Problem is, you know how humans are. We love to play war, and if we can find some way to make it devout and holy, we’ll do that. Hence the human fascination with God’s armor, angel armies, and prayer warriors. We’ll take the very little the scriptures say about any of these things, extrapolate them into a whole deranged spiritual-battle mentality against our perceived foes, and forget all about peace and good deeds. Forget about loving our enemies; Mt 5.44, Lk 6.27, 35 let’s inflict maximum damage on ’em.
God’s peacekeeping forces.
From time to time, our politicians might refer to our military as a “peacekeeping force,” and send ’em to dangerous places in order to stop a war, or stop the fighting, or stop a particular brigade which wants to make things worse. They get varying results. Sometimes they actually do bring about peace, and sometimes they escalate things into a full-on war. It all depends on how serious the leaders are about making peace. Some of ’em aren’t serious at all.
Jesus is the prince of peace, Is 9.6 so if there are any armies at his command, we should be absolutely certain he really does want peace. Not Roman-style peace, where everyone who might disrupt the peace is caught and nailed to crosses. Actual peace, where attitudes are corrected, sins are forgiven, and relationships are restored. God’s armies are sent in to achieve this kind of peace, not the vengeful smitey murdery kind we too often have in mind.
True of the culture-war stuff too. When Christians are praying for those angel armies to swoop down and fight our enemies, they’re not praying for relationships to be restored. They might say those words, but they’re not talking about the relationships between them and their enemies—they don’t want those relationships restored. They’re only talking about the people their enemies are supposedly oppressing or corrupting; they want those folks to be reconciled to their families. But anyone who tempts them and leads them astray?—they seldom ask the Holy Spirit to convict those wayward souls to repent. They want ’em punished. They want their enemies to go to hell.
Yep, it’s the entirely wrong attitude for Christians to have. A lot of “spiritual warfare” gets like that. Proper spiritual warfare is about resisting temptation, but “prayer warriors” don’t always resist the temptation to hate their enemies. Even though Jesus tells his followers not to.
Put the hypothetical angel stuff aside: As a Christian, you are part of God’s army. You are one of the “hosts” whom the LORD of hosts commands. And he wants you, and me, and all of us, to be like Jesus. So… how’re we doing? When we ask God to call down his armies to help us, or help others: How’re we doing? Are we his peacekeeping force in this fallen world? Or are we no help at all?
