ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #29 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Ah, now here is a question I've wanted to ask for a while whenever I read about similar messengers in the Old Testament: How should we understand the messenger of the Lord or angel that is mentioned in Verse 2? Who is he? >> Well, David, this question of the messenger of Yahweh or the angel of Yahweh -- the Hebrew phrase, by the way, is ***malak Yahweh. This is an important theological construct in the Old Testament. And it's one that is somewhat difficult to handle because the problem is that when this phrase occurs, it doesn't always mean the same thing. You can't simply say that, you know, here is the phrase malak Yahweh, so I know what that means because everywhere it occurs, it means one thing. For example, in the book of Haggai we read in Chapter 1 Verse 13, "Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord's message." Then he goes on with the message. So here in Verse 13 the messenger is without any doubt at all Haggai himself. Just a normal man who is a prophet. Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people. The same is also true in Malachi. There in Chapter 2 Verse 7 we read the following: "For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge. And the people should seek instruction from his mouth. For he is the malak Yahweh, the messenger of the Lord." So what do we have here? In Haggai and in Malachi we've seen in each case the messenger of the Lord is just a man, either a prophet or in the case of Malachi, the lips of a priest. So a priest is the messenger of Yahweh. But here in Exodus 3 we have something that's very different. Here we read in Verse 2, "The malak Yahweh," the angel of the Lord we might translate here, "appeared to him in a flame out of fire." And then we skip to Verse 4. "When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush." And then continuing with the quotation. So in this case, as in many others in the Old Testament, the messenger turns out to be Yahweh himself. Whereas it was a man, a prophet and a priest in Haggai and Malachi. Here in Exodus, there's no doubt that what we have is Yahweh himself being spoken of as the malak Yahweh, the messenger of Yahweh. So how should we understand this? Well, the messenger when it's used of God himself as it is here in Exodus represents the active presence of God as he reveals himself to the world. In literary terms, what happens is this: As a story unfolds, a character in the story, in this case Moses, meets someone else. And Moses doesn't know that the someone that he meets is, in fact, God. And so we're not told, either. But we're given a hint that the person that Moses meets isn't not just any old person. He is a malak Yahweh, a messenger of the Lord. And so as the story unfolds, we learn with Moses that this messenger is, in fact, God himself. So here we have a kind of literary device for keeping the reader in a certain level of suspense along with Moses in the story until God is ready to reveal himself both to Moses and to the reader. Now, there are other places, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, where a third thing happens. Where the messenger is not a person and it's not Yahweh. But it's that being that we commonly refer to when we translate this angel. In other words, as in the angel Gabriel appearing and telling someone something. So this word malak can sometimes refer also to that intermediate being that we typically call an angel. But in the Old Testament, most often what we have is either a person or God himself. And that's about as much as we can say about the malak Yahweh just based on the Old Testament. But of course, God has given us the New Testament, as well. And so from the New Testament we learn a little more about the way that God's presence is active in the world. In the New Testament we get a much fuller understanding of God as a triune being, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And as our Trinitarian understanding of who God is grows, we see that the active presence of God in the world, in the New Testament, is actually that part of the Trinity that we call the ***logos or the Son of God. So in this way we begin to understand that when the Old Testament presents a malak Yahweh who is -- who is really God himself, this is the Old Testament way of talking about the fact that the Son of God, who is the active presence of God in the world, is appearing and is speaking or is acting. And that's why in many commentaries, obviously conservative commentaries -- you wouldn't find this in liberal commentaries. But in conservative commentaries it's quite common to see the malak Yahweh described as the preincarnate Christ. Now, usually they use that term, the preincarnate Christ, or something like it. But they don't it explain in detail why you should understand the malak Yahweh as that preincarnate Christ. And that's what I've been trying to do here. So we can see from these passages that while they are not prophesies, per se, they are messianic. They are christological in nature. Because they point us to Christ as the active presence of God in the world. And especially in cases like the one here in Exodus 3 where the message that the messenger delivers is a message about the redemptive work of God. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***