Who spoke to Moses from the burning bush? Who called to Abraham on Mount Moriah? Who withstood Balaam on his way to curse the Israelites? Who met Hagar and Ishmael when Sarah drove them into the wilderness? If you answered, “The Lord,” you would be right. And if you answered, “The Angel of the Lord,” you would also be correct. The Angel of the Lord is a figure that appears at these points in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and elsewhere throughout the canon of Scripture.
The problem these appearances pose to the faithful reader of Scripture is that the Angel is at one and the same time identified with and distinguished from the Lord. Take, for example, Moses’ encounter at the burning bush:
And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. (Exo 3:2–6)
Here the angel of the Lord is presented as the Lord, the God of Moses’ ancestors. And yet, in his encounter with Hagar, he speaks of God: “The Lord hath heard thy affliction” (Gen 16:11), but also as God: “I will multiply thy seed exceedingly.” (Gen 16:10)
So, which is it? Is the angel a messenger speaking for God, or is he God? May we permit ourselves the simple answer, “yes”? In light of a fully developed theology of Christ and the Holy Trinity, in which we have three persons in one God and two natures in one Christ, this may not seem particularly difficult. Christ is fully God in nature and distinct from the Father and the Spirit in person. And yet what would the original readers of these accounts make of them before they had the Trinitarian recipe spelled out in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, before they even had the Trinitarian ingredients laid out in the accounts of the four Gospels and the apostolic letters?
Geerhardus Vos offers us a characteristically profound answer in his Biblical Theology.[i] He suggests that as much as we can see the Trinity in hindsight when looking at these accounts of the Angel of the Lord, they were likely not meant to carry the full weight of Trinitarian doctrine to their original audience. So, what significance do they carry? Vos identifies it as twofold: what he calls “the sacramental intent” and “the spiritualizing intent”. Vos finds the sacramental intent in the Angel being God, showing God’s desire “to approach closely to His people, to assure them in the most manifest way of His interest in and His presence with them.” The spiritualizing intent, Vos finds in the Angel speaking for God as if to guard against the wrong conclusion that God’s nature is bodily and limited like ours. In other words, the Angel is divine and walks among humanity, showing God’s desire to be with us. At the same time, the Angel speaks for God, indicating that “the visible, physical form of meeting this need is not due to the nature of God.”
Vos concludes his thoughts in this vein where we ought to let our reflections on the Angel of the Lord lead us: “In the incarnation of our Lord we have the supreme expression of this fundamental arrangement.” That is, God in Christ condescends to humanity in its need, and at the same time he becomes fully human, he remains fully God in order that his Might may save us. When we encounter the Angel of the Lord in Scripture, it should lead us to the incarnate Christ, the true Sacrament of God dwelling with us.
[i] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975), 72-74.