He sees every believer at every moment, and He alone knows when one of us needs the intervention of an angel. The active duty or oversight seems, then, to come more from God than from the angels, which makes perfect sense because God alone is omniscient. The angels in this passage do not seem to be guarding a person so much as being attentive to the Father in heaven. These angels are pictured as “always” watching the face of God so as to hear His command to them to help a believer when it is needed. To return to Matthew 18:10, the word “their” is a collective pronoun in the Greek and refers to the fact that believers are served by angels in general. The belief in guardian angels has been around for a long time, but there is no explicit scriptural basis for it. Some early church fathers believed that each person had not only a good angel assigned to him/her, but a demon as well. The Jews fully developed the belief in guardian angels during the time between the Old and New Testament periods. In the Old Testament, the nation of Israel had the archangel (Michael) assigned to it (Daniel 10:21 12:1), but Scripture nowhere states that an angel is “assigned” to an individual (angels were sometimes sent to individuals, but there is no mention of permanent assignment). The question is whether each person-or each believer-has an angel assigned to him/her.
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