Can Angels Fall in Love With Humans? No: What the Bible Says About Guardian Angels and Love

The Bible never shows a holy angel loving a person romantically, and Jesus tells us that the risen “neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). Angels do care for people, as God’s servants. And if Genesis 6 tells of angels desiring women, as some read it, those were angels who sinned.

One angel told John what he is to us. When John fell at his feet to worship him, the angel stopped him: “See thou do it not: for I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: worship God” (Revelation 22:9). He calls himself our fellow servant, and whatever care an angel has for us turns our faces toward God.

They do, in the way a good servant cares for those his master loves. Hebrews asks of the angels, “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14), and the word angel itself points the same way. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Augustine on it: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’” (Catechism 329).

Angels feel joy too, and Scripture shows us what moves them. At creation “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7). Jesus says “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:10), and Peter writes that the good news of Christ holds things “the angels desire to look into” (1 Peter 1:12). Each time it is God’s work that gladdens them, and a sinner turning back to him.

Some ask whether God loves the angels more than us. Hebrews answers by pointing to what Christ did for people and not for angels: “he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). The Son of God did not become an angel; he became one of us.

Jesus answered this himself, when the Sadducees, “which say that there is no resurrection,” brought him a puzzle. A woman had married seven brothers in turn, each of them dying childless, and they asked him, “in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven?” (Matthew 22:23–28). He told them, “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). Mark has the same words, “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven” (Mark 12:25), and Luke adds the reason: the risen cannot “die any more: for they are equal unto the angels” (Luke 20:36).

Marriage belongs to life on earth, where people die and children are born. Angels do not die and do not marry, and Jesus speaks of it as something everyone knew. Nothing in Scripture shows angels pairing with each other either. The Catechism calls them “purely spiritual creatures” with “intelligence and will” (Catechism 330), and Hebrews calls them “spirits.” Romance as we know it, with bodies and longing and the hope of a shared life and children, belongs to creatures who have bodies, and that means it belongs to us.

Your guardian angel will not fall in love with you, because of the work he is given. He keeps a person close to God, and that is a different love from romance. Jesus spoke of children this way: “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 18:10). The psalm promises, “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways” (Psalm 91:11). And when Peter, freed from prison, knocked at the door, the disciples inside said, “It is his angel” (Acts 12:15).

Catholic teaching puts the belief plainly: “From infancy to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession.” The Catechism then quotes Saint Basil: “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life” (Catechism 336). The Orthodox Church in America keeps a prayer to the guardian angel among its morning prayers. It begins, “O Holy Angel, keeping guard over my wretched soul and my passionate life, do not forsake me.” In that prayer “passionate” means ruled by the passions, not romantic. And the prayer ends by asking the angel for one thing: “Pray to the Lord for me, that He may confirm me in His fear and prove me a worthy servant of His goodness.”

John Calvin, the Reformer, was more cautious about one angel for each person. “Whether or not each believer has a single angel assigned to him for his defence, I dare not positively affirm,” he wrote. But of the larger promise he was sure: “each of us is cared for, not by one angel merely, but that all with one consent watch for our safety” (Institutes 1.14.7).

Every one of them speaks of protection and guidance, and none of romance. Our guardian is a fellow servant, like the angel who stopped John, and his care is meant to bring us to God.

The question comes from four verses at the start of the flood story: “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose,” and “There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown” (Genesis 6:2–4). Genesis does not say who “the sons of God” were, and readers have answered in three ways.

Reading	Who the sons of God were	Witnesses
Angels	Angels who left heaven for women	1 Enoch 6–7; Justin Martyr
Line of Seth	Godly men, descendants of Seth	Augustine, City of God 15.23
Rulers	Sons of princes and rulers	Rashi, Jewish commentary

Those who read them as angels take the phrase as it is used elsewhere in the Old Testament, where “the sons of God” are angels: “there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them” (Job 1:6). The Book of Enoch tells the story this way. It is a Jewish book, and its oldest copies, found at Qumran, are dated to the second century before Christ. In R. H. Charles’s translation, “the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them,” and “they were in all two hundred” (1 Enoch 6:2, 6). Justin Martyr, the early Christian apologist, held the same view when he wrote in the second century that the angels “were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons” (Second Apology 5).

Augustine, writing in the early fifth century, could not accept it. He “could by no means believe that God’s holy angels could at that time have so fallen,” and he pointed to the next verse, where God calls them flesh, so that Scripture “unambiguously declares that they were men.” He read them as godly men, “according to the flesh the sons of Seth,” who went astray “when they forsook righteousness” (City of God 15.23). Later rabbinic tradition, as Rashi records it, takes the phrase as “The sons of princes and rulers,” because the word for God in it, elohim, “signifies authority.” Rashi gives a second explanation too: “princely angels who came as messengers from God.”

Whichever reading is right, none of them tells of a holy angel falling in love, and the one that does speak of angels gives a dark answer to the question. On that reading, the beings who did this rebelled against God; Enoch calls their desire lust, and the book goes on to condemn them. Those angels and their number are covered in how many angels fell with Satan, and the giants of Genesis 6 in the Nephilim in the Bible.

Scripture names no angel of love, but in the Book of Tobit an angel helps a marriage begin. Raphael, “one of the seven, who stand before the Lord” (Tobit 12:15), guides a young man, Tobias, on a journey that ends in his marriage to Sara. He first appears as “a beautiful young man, standing girded, and as it were ready to walk” (Tobit 5:5, Douay-Rheims). Sara had prayed, and so had Tobias’s father, Tobit, and “the holy angel of the Lord, Raphael was sent to heal them both” (Tobit 3:25). A devil, the book says, had ended Sara’s seven earlier marriages (Tobit 3:8). On her wedding night with Tobias, in her father Raguel’s house, Raphael “took the devil, and bound him in the desert of upper Egypt” (Tobit 8:3), and the couple began their marriage in prayer: “Sara, arise, and let us pray to God to day, and to morrow, and the next day” (Tobit 8:4).

Raphael never falls in love himself. He serves the love of two people, and at the end he points them away from himself: “when I was with you, I was there by the will of God: bless ye him, and sing praises to him” (Tobit 12:18). Catholic Bibles include Tobit as Scripture (Catechism 120). The Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles list “The Book of Tobias” among the books the Church reads “for example of life and instruction of manners” but does not use “to establish any doctrine” (Article VI).

Angels in Scripture sometimes appear as men, for a short time and for a task. Abraham “looked, and, lo, three men stood by him” (Genesis 18:2), and in the next chapter “there came two angels to Sodom at even” (Genesis 19:1). Hebrews draws the lesson for us: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). Augustine noted that Scripture “testifies that angels have appeared to men in such bodies as could not only be seen, but also touched.” Yet none of these visitors stays to marry or to live a human life.

Nor do people become angels, in this life or the next. Jesus says the risen are “equal unto the angels” because they cannot die, and in the same sentence he calls them “the children of God, being the children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36). They are raised, and they stay human. When we call someone kind an “earth angel,” it is a figure of speech. The Greek word for angel means messenger, and Augustine pointed out that in Scripture “even godly men have been called angels,” giving John the Baptist as his example, and John was still a man.

The modern romantic angel stories come from film. In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, watch over a divided Berlin, and Damiel falls in love with a trapeze artist he has been watching and becomes human to be with her. Its loose American remake, City of Angels (1998), with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan, follows an angel who gives up his immortality for a heart surgeon. Both films borrow angels to ask what it means to be human, and their angels are inventions.

Sometimes this question comes from fear. Someone may feel watched, or may have been told that a “spirit husband” or “spirit wife” is bound to them, and Scripture gives no teaching about spirit spouses. If you feel pursued or troubled by a spirit, talk to a pastor or priest you trust, someone who knows you and will pray with you. If you see or hear things that frighten you, see a doctor as well. The Catholic Church says the same of its own ministry of exorcism: “Illness, especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science” (Catechism 1673). What the churches teach about deliverance, and what Scripture means by it, is set out in deliverance in the Bible.

James gives us one short instruction: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). And Paul tells us that nothing God has made, spirits included, can separate a person who belongs to Christ from God’s love. He names the angels in his list and leaves them powerless: “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

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• Why the Book of Enoch isn’t in the Christian canon
• Do angels have free will?
• Can angels read your mind?
• Traditional prayers to your guardian angel
• Will there be marriage in heaven?
• Bible verses about angels and protection