THE DESTROYER

Angels are messengers and servants. The Bible also reports that angels carry out God judgment… always justly and often harshly.  

God’s judgment upon the disobedient Egyptians came in the form of ten plagues. The tenth plague was the death of the firstborn. On the dark night of the first Passover, “the destroyer” (Exodus 12:23) visited every home except those marked by the blood of the substitutionary Passover lamb. The New Living Translation calls “the destroyer” (CSB) the “death angel” (NLT). The seventy-eighth Psalm recounts the tenth plague: God “let loose on them his burning anger, wrath, indignation, and distress, a company of destroying angels. He made a path for his anger; he did not spare them from death, but gave their lives over to the plague” (Psalm 78:49–50, ESV). God deployed angels to carry out His judgment.

That’s not the only reference to angelic destroyers or death angels.

When David sinned by numbering the people in his kingdom, “the Lord sent a plague on Israel… and seventy thousand men died. Then the angel extended his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it…” (2 Samuel 24:15-16).

Also, the Assyrians who attacked Jerusalem during Hezekiah's reign met an angel of death: "That night the angel of the Lord went out and struck down one hundred eighty-five thousand in the camp of the Assyrians” (2 Kings 19:35).

As a final example, when Herod refused to humble himself, “an angel of the Lord struck him because he did not give the glory to God, and he was eaten by worms and died” (Acts 12:22).

The image of an angel as a cute little cherub isn’t always accurate … sometimes they’re seen fiercely administering God’s just judgments.

“… think on these things” (Philippians 4:8, KJV).