Ask Pastor Mike Live

Mike Fabarez: Another question on the list that's been written in is: who is the Angel of the Lord? That's a great question. Here's why we struggle with the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament. Some people say this is God. They call it a theophany. Theophany means the appearance of God, or a Christophany, which is an appearance of Christ in the Old Testament.

The reason we say that is because sometimes someone like the Angel of the Lord, say in the beginning of the book of Exodus when he's speaking through this burning bush to Moses and commissioning him to go and tell Pharaoh to let the people go, is speaking in the first person as God.

So the question is whether "Angel," which is "Malak" in Hebrew, is a word describing a messenger who is speaking for God, or if this is divine. If it's divine, it seems like this is some conversation being had on Earth in time and space. Maybe this is the pre-incarnate Christ. Maybe this is Christ before he was brought into the world in Nazareth by conception and Bethlehem by birth.

I'm not overwhelmed that this is the pre-incarnate Christ. I'm not constrained by anything in Scripture to say that, although it may be. But I am saying it is curious that there's a speaking in the first person. If you're going to say, "If you're speaking in the first person for God, then you apparently are claiming the qualities of divinity," and the only person that ever spoke on Earth with qualities of divinity is Christ, I can see why the argument is made.

But then again, if you're relaying a message, let's just think about the old town criers coming with a scroll in their hands. They're going to say, "Hear ye, hear ye," sound the trumpet in their funny outfit, and then they're going to unroll the scroll and read the scroll. The scroll is going to be written in the first person from the king.

If that's the case, I can understand maybe the pronoun gymnastics. Why in the world are we speaking in the first person for God if you're not God, you're just the Angel of the Lord? We often forget that the passages are often set up as the Angel of the Lord, and then we have the conversation like "the Lord spoke to Moses out of the burning bush."

The Lord did speak to Moses out of the burning bush. The question is: is the Angel of the Lord the Lord? Is it Christ, the second person of the Godhead, or is it just an angel speaking and delivering a message? That's the challenge of these passages on the Angel of the Lord. It seems like if we're saying this person is speaking in the first person as divinity and saying, "I am God," which in several of these passages that's exactly what happens grammatically, then maybe this is the pre-incarnate Christ.

Maybe it is a theophany, a manifestation of God in some way. Just like Moses, God himself says, "I'm having conversations with Moses." So, it's not a messenger, and that's the problem with the concept. "Angel," by the way, is just a transliterated word from Greek, which is "angelos." "Angelos" means a messenger, just like the Old Testament word.