What do Guardian Angels know about our future?

Angels sometimes deliver messages about the future to people, preaching events that are about to happen both in people's lives and in world history. Religious texts such as the Bible and the Qur'an mention angels such as the archangel Gabriel who transmit prophetic messages about future events. Today, people sometimes report receiving premonitions about the future from angels through dreams.

But how much do angels of the future really know? Do they know everything that will happen or just the information that God chooses to reveal to them?

Just what God tells them
Many believers say that angels only know what God chooses to tell them about the future. “Do angels know the future? No, unless God tells them. Only God knows the future: (1) because God is omniscient and (2) because only the Author, the Creator, knows the whole drama before it is performed and (3) because only God is out of time, so that all things and events over time are present to him at once, "writes Peter Kreeft in his book Angels and Demons: what do we really know about them?

Religious texts show the limits of future knowledge of angels. In the biblical book of the Catholic Bible, the archangel Raphael tells a man named Tobias that if he marries a woman named Sarah: "I assume you have children by her". (Tobias 6:18). This shows that Raphael is making a polite hypothesis rather than stating that he knows for sure whether or not they will have children in the future.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus Christ says that only God knows when the end of the world will come and the time will come for him to return to Earth. In Matthew 24:36 he says: "But for that day or hour nobody knows, not even the angels in paradise ...". James L. Garlow and Keith Wall comment in their book Encountering Heaven and the Afterlife 404: “Angels may know more than we do, but they are not omniscient. When they know the future, it is because God instructs them to deliver messages If the angels knew everything, they would not want to learn (1 Peter 1:12), Jesus also indicates that they do not know everything about the future, he will return to earth with power and glory, and while the angels will announce it, they don't know when it will happen… “.

Hypotheses formed
Since angels are smarter than humans, they can often make reasonably accurate assumptions about what will happen in the future, some believers say. "When it comes to knowing the future, we can make distinctions," writes Marianne Lorraine Trouve in her book "Angels: Help from on High: Stories and Prayers". “It is possible for us to know for certain that some things will happen in the future, for example that the sun will rise tomorrow. We can know because we have a certain understanding of how the physical world works ... Angels can also know them because their minds are very acute, much more than ours, but when it comes to knowing future events or exactly how things will unfold, only God knows for sure, because everything is eternally present to God, who knows everything. Despite their acute minds, angels cannot know the free future. God may choose to reveal it to them, but this is outside of our experience. "

The fact that angels lived much longer than humans gives them great wisdom through experience, and that wisdom helps them formulate plausible assumptions about what could happen in the future, say some believers. Ron Rhodes writes in Angels Among Us: Separating Fact From Fiction that “angels acquire ever-growing knowledge through long observation of human activities. Unlike people, angels don't have to study the past, they have experienced it. people have acted and reacted in certain situations and therefore can predict with a high degree of accuracy how we can act in similar circumstances: longevity experiences give angels greater knowledge ".

Two ways of looking to the future
In his book Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas writes that angels, as created beings, see the future differently from how God sees it. "The future can be known in two ways," he writes. "First, it can be known in its cause and therefore, the future events that necessarily derive from their causes are known with certainty, how the sun will rise tomorrow, but the events that proceed from their causes in most cases are not known. for sure, but in a conjectural way, so the doctor knows in advance the health of the patient.This way of knowing the future events exists in angels and much more than it does in us, since they understand the causes of things both more universally and more perfectly. "

Men cannot know future things except for their causes or for the revelation of God. Angels know the future in the same way, but much more distinctly. "