Anonymous Asks (369)

“Is it possible for fallen angels to repent?”

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, Aslan never tells anyone any story but their own. When he walks with Edmund after his restoration, Lewis comments, “There is no need to tell you (and no one ever heard) what Aslan was saying.”

I’ve always thought those lines insightful. Scripture is silent about many things that inspire our curiosity, the status of spirit beings who “left their proper dwelling” among them.

Speculating in an Information Vacuum

In the almost complete information vacuum concerning the agency of spirits, it is both foolish and impossible to be dogmatic about their fate. I once read a novel whose writer had attempted to imagine the world from the perspective of a fallen angel. While occasionally perceptive about the pervasive nature of evil, he was unable to do anything more than speculate about the possibility of repentance for those who fell.

What seems evident from scripture is that love, wisdom, discernment, truth and all other qualities we call good originate in the character of God. He is not merely loving or truthful. He is himself the source and embodiment of those qualities. To live in the presence of grace and truth, yet to prefer self-will to both, seems an unlikely, doomed choice, and yet this is the road Lucifer and others have taken.

The Fate of the Unrepentant

The book of Revelation makes it evident Lucifer will never repent, even when all his schemes fail and God shuts him up in the abyss for a thousand years. Upon his very temporary release, he goes right back to a formula with which he has had no success. The scripture is abundantly clear that his destiny is the lake of fire and sulfur where, along with the beast and false prophet, he will be tormented day and night forever and ever. That story at least we do know.

So at least in the case of at least three individuals, the question of whether God has left any avenue of repentance open to them is moot: the word of God assures us they will not take it.

Concerning lesser spirit beings who fell, we have no knowledge of whether the Lord has left for them any possibility of a change of heart, or by what means he might make atonement for their sins. In comparatively short-lived men, sinfulness has a hardening effect over time that makes repentance almost impossible. What then might be the effect of centuries or millennia of rebellion on one’s capacity for a change of mind? The grace of God is great beyond my wildest imagination, but the prospect of course reversal for rebel spirits seems unlikely.

The Election of Angels

There is a line of argument that reads the words “elect angels” in 1 Timothy deterministically, suggesting that if God elected some angels to salvation, then he may have elected others to damnation, and therefore the fate of fallen angels is sealed. I find that sort of reasoning unpersuasive. As with the election of human beings, we must ask ourselves the question, “Elect to what?” The apostle simply does not say, and we have no reason to assume he had the matter of angelic salvation in view. It seems more likely to me that he was talking about a select group of elite spirit beings who enjoy the privilege of perpetual access to the presence of God, as do angels tasked with the protection of children.

Like Aslan’s words to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the fate of fallen spirits is a story the Great Author has not seen fit to share.