Do angels make mistakes?

[RachelKH]

My 6yoDD asked Do Angels Make Mistakes?? At first I answered her No, angels are so close to God that they must be in communion with Him and therefore know truth and be unable to choose wrongly. But then I said but satan was an angel that made a big mistake in choosing to turn against God, and the same for all his follower angels. But that was all sp long ago. Do angels still turn away? Wouldn’t any who were going to turn have done so already? So wouldn’t that mean that no angels were making mistakes anymore? A little help here? Thoughts? Sources?

 

[Bluegoat]

It depends on what you mean by mistake.

Angels are, like God, immaterial and eternal - they are outside of time. They cannot comprehend God, who is infinite, fully, but their comprehension is in many ways greater than ours, because they can observe how all the things God has done, is doing, will do, fit together and are connected.

So angels are not likely to make some of the kinds of mistakes humans make, which stem from not seeing the whole picture of creation and being limited by time and space.

When the fallen angels choose to turn away from God, they did it in full knowledge of what that meant, unlike many, perhaps even most, human sins. It was a matter of fully willing not-God - they were not confused but attempting to replace God with self.

Because angels exist outside of time, we can’t talk about them still turning away, or what they will do in the future. Each angel, at the moment of its creation, would have made its free choice, and it would be the same choice eternally. So the number of fallen and unfallen angels will never change.