Shownotes
Welcome to Day 1541 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
The Word, The Name, and The Angel – Worldview Wednesday
Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek! Where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. Today is Day 1541 of our Trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical Worldview is essential to have a proper perspective on today’s current events. To establish a Biblical Worldview, you must have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week, we will expand on the past course work as we continue reviewing the book from Dr. Michael S Heiser titled “Supernatural.” The book is an abbreviated version of his more comprehensive book, “The Unseen Realm.” I highly recommend both of these books. Creating a Biblical Worldview based on how the Old and New Testaments connect with God’s overall plan for humanity is essential. This book review will help us understand what the Bible teaches about the unseen world, and why it matters.
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 (Deuteronomy 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. 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 visited him.
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. That isn’t what happened with Abraham. God did something more dramatic. He came as a man and talked with Abraham face-to-face.
We get a hint of this in Genesis 12:6–7. The Bible says God appeared to Abraham. Three chapters later, God appears again (Genesis 15:1–6). This time God comes to Abraham as “the word of the Lord” in a vision. This vision 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 (Genesis 15:5).
God appeared to Abraham as a man on other occasions (Genesis 18). He did the same to Isaac (Genesis 26:1–5), the son God had promised, and Jacob, the son of Isaac (Genesis 28:10–22; 31:11–12; 32:24–30).
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 1 Samuel 3:10, God came back to Samuel: Then Yahweh came and stood there and called out as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, because your servant is listening.” (LEB). We know this was God in human form because the description has him standing, and because the end of the chapter (1 Samuel 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 (Jeremiah 1:1–9).
God in Human Form
God, appearing as a man, is 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 God’s true essence, the true glory-presence, and live. When Bible characters physically encountered God, they expected to die (Genesis 32:30; Deuteronomy 5:24; Judges 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 (Exodus 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 (Genesis 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 (Genesis 31:11–12).
Many Bible teachers hesitate to identify this Angel as God himself. But there are several specific 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. (Exodus 23:20–22)
This appearance is no ordinary 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:
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;
his breath is like an overflowing stream.
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 (Judges 2:1–3). But so did the Lord (Joshua 24:17–18) and God’s own presence (Deuteronomy 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 (Genesis 48:15–16):
Then he blessed Joseph and said,
“May the God before whom my grandfather Abraham
and my father, Isaac, walked—
the God who has been my shepherd
all my life, to this very day,
the Angel who has redeemed me from all harm—
may he bless these boys.
May they preserve my name
and the names of Abraham and Isaac.
And may their descendants multiply greatly
throughout the earth.”
Notice, incredibly, in verse 16, he prays, “May he bless these boys” 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 (Judges 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 the Word already existed.
The Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
In John 1:14, John says this “So the Word became human and made his home 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. 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. 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” (Jude 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: “And now, 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. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your Word…I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” (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 (Ephesians 6:11; Colossians 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. That’s what happened. God sent his people into exile.
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 Corinthians 2:6–8; Ephesians 3:10; 6:12). That’s because it was a mystery, intentionally hidden from all by the Most High.[1]
That will finish our study for this week’s worldview Wednesday. Join us again next week as we continue building our Biblical Worldview. Tomorrow we will enjoy our 3-minute Humor nugget that will provide you with a bit of cheer, which will help you to lighten up and live a rich and satisfying life. So encourage your friends and family to join us and then come along with us tomorrow for another day of ‘Wisdom-Trek, Creating a Legacy.’
If you would like to listen to any of our past 1540 treks or read the Wisdom Journal, they are available at Wisdom-Trek.com. I encourage you to subscribe to Wisdom-Trek on your favorite podcast player so that each day’s trek will be downloaded automatically.
Thank you so much for allowing me to be your guide, mentor, and, most of all, your friend as I serve you through this Wisdom-Trek podcast and journal.
As we take this Trek together, let us always:
- Live Abundantly (Fully)
- Love Unconditionally
- Listen Intentionally
- Learn Continuously
- Lend to others Generously
- Lead with Integrity
- Leave a Living Legacy Each Day
I am Guthrie Chamberlain….reminding you to ’Keep Moving Forward,’ ‘Enjoy your Journey,’ and ‘Create a Great Day…Everyday’! See you Tomorrow!
[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.