Supernatural Session 9

The Word, the Name, and the Angel

In the last chapter we learned about the cosmic geography of the Bible. In response to human rebellion at the Tower of Babel, God forsook the nations. He assigned them to members of his heavenly council, the sons of God (Deut. 32:8–9). To replace the now-forsaken nations, he would create a new people, a nation of his own. They would be his agents to renew his kingdom on earth. But that task would prove to be an awful struggle, as the other gods and the people of their domains would become fierce enemies of Israel and God.

God’s new people would begin with a man named Abram, whose name he would later change to Abraham. Soon after the judgment at Babel, God paid him a visit.

Abraham Meets the Word

Most Christians are familiar with God’s visit to Abraham in Genesis 12. God tells Abraham to leave his home and go to a place he’s never seen. God promises to guide him. He tells Abraham he will be his God and gives him special covenant promises. He’ll enable Abraham and Sarah to have a son, though they are both elderly. From that son will come multitudes of people—people who will form the new earthly family of God. Through them the nations will be blessed.

We tend to think Abraham’s encounters with God were a voice from heaven or in Abraham’s head. Or perhaps God came in a dream. The Bible is clear that God did that sort of thing with the prophets and other people. But that isn’t what happened with Abraham. God did something more dramatic. He came as a man. He and Abraham talked face-to-face.

We get a hint of this in Genesis 12:6–7.

Genesis 12:6–7 ESV

6 Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.

The Bible says God appeared to Abraham. Three chapters later, God appears again (Gen. 15:1–6).

Genesis 15:1–6 ESV

1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” 2 But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 And Abram said, “Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a member of my household will be my heir.” 4 And behold, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man shall not be your heir; your very own son shall be your heir.” 5 And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” 6 And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.

This time God comes to Abraham as “the word of the Lord” in a vision. This wasn’t a voice in the head, since the “word” brought Abraham outside and showed him the stars to make the point that his offspring would be uncountable (Gen. 15:5).

God appeared to Abraham as a man on other occasions (Gen. 18). He did the same to Isaac (Gen. 26:1–5), the son God had promised, and Jacob, the son of Isaac (Gen. 28:10–22; 31:11–12; 32:24–30).

“word”

The “word” or voice of God as a way of expressing God in human form shows up in unexpected places. One of my favorite instances is found in 1 Samuel 3. The boy Samuel kept hearing a voice calling him at night while he was trying to sleep. Eventually Eli, the priest with whom Samuel lived and for whom he worked, figured out it was God. In verse 10, God came back to Samuel: “The Lord came and stood there, and called out as he had before, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ ” (gnt). We know this was God in human form because the description has him standing, and because the end of the chapter (1 Sam. 3:19) says “the word of the Lord” made a habit of appearing to Samuel.

Another prophet to whom the “word of the Lord” came in physical human form was Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 1, where he is called to be a prophet, Jeremiah says the “word” came to him. Jeremiah identified the “word” as God himself. The Lord touched him with his hand (Jer. 1:1–9).

God in Human Form

God appearing as a man is actually a pattern in the Old Testament, long before his arrival as Jesus of Nazareth. When you think about it, it makes sense. God is utterly unlike us. The Bible hints that no human can see the true essence of God, the true glory-presence, and live. When Bible characters physically encountered God they expected to die (Gen. 32:30; Deut. 5:24; Judg. 6:22–24). They didn’t, because God filtered his presence through something the human mind could process—a fire, a cloud, and more often than many Christians realize, a man.

In many instances, God’s appearance in human form is described as an encounter with “the Angel of the Lord.” This Angel is a familiar character. For example, he appears to Moses in the burning bush (Ex. 3:1–3). The God in the bush promised to use Moses to lead his people out of Egypt. God had appeared to Jacob visibly in a dream at Bethel (Gen. 28:10–22), where he was identified as the Lord (Yahweh). Later the Angel of God came to Jacob in another dream and told him point-blank that he was the same God who met him at Bethel earlier (Gen. 31:11–12).

Many Bible teachers hesitate to identify this Angel as God himself. But there are several secure indications that he is. Perhaps the most important happens shortly after God gives the Law to Moses. As the Israelites prepare to journey on to the Promised Land, God tells Moses:

Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him.

But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. (Ex. 23:20–22)

This is no normal angel. This Angel can forgive sins (or not). This Angel has the name of God in him. That expression is odd but significant. The “name” was an Old Testament way of referring to God himself, God’s very presence or essence. For example, Isaiah 30:27–28 casts the name of the Lord as a person—as God himself:

Isaiah 30:27–28 ESV

27 Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar, burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke; his lips are full of fury, and his tongue is like a devouring fire; 28 his breath is like an overflowing stream that reaches up to the neck; to sift the nations with the sieve of destruction, and to place on the jaws of the peoples a bridle that leads astray.

Even today observant Jews refer to God by saying

ha-shem (“the name”)

Another way of knowing this Angel was God in human form is to compare Exodus 23:20–22 with other passages. The Angel who had met Moses in the burning bush, the Angel with God’s name inside him, did indeed bring the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land (Judg. 2:1–3). But so did the Lord (Josh. 24:17–18) and God’s own presence (Deut. 4:37–38). The Lord, the presence, and the Angel of the Lord are different ways of pointing to the same figure: God. But the Angel is human in form.

One of the passages in the Bible that makes this point most compellingly is also very obscure. Few people ever notice it. It’s a deathbed scene. Before he dies, Jacob wants to bless Joseph’s children. In his blessing he recollects episodes in his life—some of his encounters with God. He begins his blessing this way (Gen. 48:15–16):

The New International Version Chapter 48

Then he blessed Joseph and said,

“May the God before whom my fathers

Abraham and Isaac walked faithfully,

the God who has been my shepherd

all my life to this day,

16 the Angel who has delivered me from all harm

—may he bless these boys.

May they be called by my name

and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,

and may they increase greatly

on the earth.”

Then, incredibly, in verse 16 he prays, “May he bless these boys” (niv, emphasis added). He doesn’t say, “May they bless these boys,” as though speaking of two different persons, God and the Angel. He fuses them together in the prayer: may he bless these boys.

Even more mind-bending is Judges 6, the call of Gideon. There both the Lord and the Angel of the Lord are found in the same scene (Judg. 6:22–23). Even in the Old Testament, God was more than one person, and one of those persons came as a man.

Jesus: the Word, the Name, and the Angel

The descriptions of God we’ve covered up to this point should sound familiar—they’re all Old Testament versions of how the New Testament talks about Jesus.

Abraham met the word, God in human form. In John 1:1, the apostle writes: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In verse 14, John says this Word “became flesh and dwelt among us.” When a first-century Jew read the gospel of John, his or her mind would be taken back to God himself, coming as the Word. In fact, Jesus even claimed that Abraham had “seen his day,” and that he had been around before Abraham (John 8:56–58).

Moses met the Angel of the Lord, God in human form, in the burning bush and afterward. The Angel brought Israel out of Egypt into the Promised Land. But Jude wrote in his short letter, “Now I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe” (1:5). The Angel was God in human form. The Angel was the second person of the Trinity—who would later be born to the Virgin Mary.

The presence of God, the name, made this Angel distinct from all others. At times, in the New Testament, Jesus talks about God the Father as the name. In his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, just before being captured for the trial that would lead to his crucifixion, Jesus prayed: “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.… I made known to them your name” (John 17:5–6, 26). What did he mean in that last statement? Jesus wasn’t saying he let people know what God’s name was. They were Jews. They knew what God’s name was—it was Yahweh. They had the Old Testament. They could look up God’s name in thousands of verses. When Jesus said he had manifested God’s name to the people, he meant he had manifested God himself to the people. He was God before their very eyes. He was the name made flesh.

Why This Matters

We’ve come far enough in our study to get the biblical lay of the land. All the Bible stories you know take place within the context of the overarching spiritual conflict in the unseen world. It’s a winner-take-all clash of the gods.

In the biblical view of the unseen world, God has serious enemies, other gods he created who were once loyal to him but who went their own way. These rebel gods are the ones Paul describes as dark powers, the rulers, authorities, and thrones of the unseen world (Eph. 6:11; Col. 1:16). They’re still here. Nothing in the New Testament tells us they went away. They live to oppose God’s rule—and to deprive him of everlasting reunion with his beloved human family through the gospel.

One of these dark powers is the lord of the dead. He has rightful claim to humanity, since his deception of Adam and Eve resulted in the loss of immortality. And that was his goal—the extermination of Yahweh’s people. It’s what the spawn of the rival sons of God had in mind when the Israelites entered Canaan: kill or be killed to prevent God’s people from possessing the land. Once Israel entered the land, the dark powers’ goal remained the same, but their strategy changed: seduce God’s people into worshipping other gods, and then Yahweh will get rid of them for us. And that’s what happened. God sent his people into exile.

But the powers of darkness knew something else: Yahweh wouldn’t give up on his plan. The curse on the original rebel foretold that, one day, a descendant of Eve, who would undo the effects of human failure in Eden, would come. They knew that at some point the Promised One would appear—although, as Paul told us, they didn’t know precisely what God was planning (1 Cor. 2:6–8; Eph. 3:10; 6:12). That’s because it was a mystery, intentionally hidden from all by the Most High.[1]

[1] Heiser, M. S. (2015). Supernatural: What the Bible Teaches about the Unseen World—And Why It Matters. (D. Lambert, Ed.) (pp. 57–65). Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.