The diary of the Guardian Angels: July 5, 2020

3 considerations of John Paul II

Angels resemble man more than God and are closer to him.

We recognize first of all that providence, as loving Wisdom of God, was manifested precisely in creating purely spiritual beings, so that the likeness of God in them was better expressed, which from time to time exceeds all that is created in the visible world together with man , also an indelible image of God. God, who is absolutely perfect Spirit, is reflected above all in spiritual beings who by nature, that is, because of their spirituality, are much closer to him than material creatures. Sacred Scripture offers a fairly explicit testimony of this maximum closeness to God of the angels, of whom he speaks, in figurative language, as of the "throne" of God, of his "hosts", of his "heaven". It inspired the poetry and art of the Christian centuries which present angels to us as the "court of God".

God creates free angels, capable of making a choice.

In the perfection of their spiritual nature, angels are called, from the beginning, by virtue of their intelligence, to know the truth and to love the good that they know in truth in a much fuller and perfect way than is possible for man . This love is the act of a free will, whereby, even for angels, freedom means the possibility of making a choice for or against the Good that they know, that is, God himself. By creating free beings, God wanted that true love be realized in the world which is possible only on the basis of freedom. By creating pure spirits as free beings, God, in his providence, could not fail to foresee also the possibility of the sin of the angels.

God tested the spirits.

As Revelation clearly says, the world of pure spirits appears divided into good and bad. Well, this division was not made by the creation of God, but on the basis of the freedom proper to the spiritual nature of each of them. It was done through the choice that for purely spiritual beings it has an incomparably more radical character than that of man and is irreversible given the degree of intuitiveness and penetration of the good with which their intelligence is endowed. In this regard, it must also be said that pure spirits have undergone a moral test. It was a decisive choice concerning first of all God himself, a God known in a more essential and direct way than is possible for man, a God who had given these spiritual beings a gift, before man, to participate in his nature divine.