Can angels fly in heaven

Answer 1

The asker of the question has fallen into the trap of assuming that angels have wings. Nowhere, where an angel is mentioned in scripture, does it say that he/she has wings. Nowhere does it even intimate slightly that Gabriel had wings when he visited Mary. The angels in the tomb at the resurrection of Christ are described as 'men' wearing dazzling white robes. The word 'angell' simply means 'messenger' and not 'flying messenger'. So nowhere in scripture does it suggest that these messengers 'fly'. The stereotypical 'angel' of literature and art - the blue-eyed, blonde-haired man with wings - is a medieval invention which has no substance in scripture whatsoever. More to the point, in the asension of Jesus we are simply told that he and his disciples climbed a mountain, a 'cloud' covered him and he was gone. Now, I live on a hill near the coast, and, even at this low altitude (compared with a mountain) we get low-lying cloud which renders visibility very poor. Thus in the ascension of Jesus there is really no need to believe in his being carried into the 'sky' whether he was or not.

That said, another misconception is the great misconception about heaven. Far from being a physical place, scripture has always made it clear that God himself is spirit-based and heaven is a spiritual existence; heaven can be defined as being in the close presence of God, with hell being defined as the complete absence of God. So angels would not 'fly' in heaven. For one thing they are spiritual rather than physical beings, they do not have 'wings' as we would know them, and, in ant case, heaven is not a physical, spacially-constrained place where flying about is necessary, but an existence, not constrained by time and space, in the close proximity, goodness and love of God.

Answer 2

Where is heaven? This was an easy question for the ancients to answer. They thought that heaven was just above the clouds, and they could imagine Elijah riding bodily up into heaven. They could perceive Jesus being taken bodily up, through a cloud into heaven (Acts 1:9). So, they could easily imagine angels flying in heaven. This would be how to move around if there was no earth to walk on.

Now, scientists can peer into the farthest reaches of space and tell us that there is no heaven in the sky. Theologians now must fall back on heaven being a spiritual state, not a physical place. And if flying is something physical done in order to move around a physical place, there would seem to be no explanation for flying in a different, spiritual state. This is to say that, if angels exist, they do not fly while in heaven.

Answer 3

Four words are commonly associated with angels - malak and angelos simply refer to messengers of God and are translated as angels. The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of The Bible shows the words 'cherubim' (Strong's Hebrew [H] number 3742) and 'seraphim (H8314) refer to powerful winged creatures that serve God.