Have you heard of the name, “Angel of the Lord,” in the Bible? I think you have. It appears a total of 64 times. It is always mentioned in the singular. You will not find the name mentioned in the plural anywhere. There are not “angels of the Lord” in the Bible. Written with the definite article before the name, “the angel of the Lord” appears a total of 53 times. That leaves “angel of the Lord,” without the definite article, a total of 11 times. Then there are many other places in the Bible that simply say, “angel” or “angels”. Is there a difference between “angel of the Lord” and a simple “angel”? Is there a difference between “an angel of the Lord” and “the angel of the Lord”? What do you think? More significantly, who is “the angel of the Lord”? When you read, “the angel of the Lord,” what goes on inside your mind?
Genesis 16:7
Now the angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, by the spring on the way to Shur.
Genesis 22:11
But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”
Exodus 3:2
The angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed.
Judges 2:1 Now the angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, “I brought you up out of Egypt and led you into the land which I have sworn to your fathers; and I said, ‘I will never break My covenant with you...'"
Judges 6:12
The angel of the LORD appeared to him and said to him, “The LORD is with you, O valiant warrior.”
2 Samuel 24:16
When the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the LORD relented from the calamity and said to the angel who destroyed the people, “It is enough! Now relax your hand!” And the angel of the LORD was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
As you have guessed, the Bible does not say explicitly anywhere who is the “angel of the Lord.” But if you are someone like me, you might have heard someone say in the past that the angel of the Lord is a theophany. In other words, it is an appearance of God in physical form. Some would go even further, and proclaim that the angel of the Lord is the Christ before his incarnation. But why do they think this way? Why has a certain someone in our lives taught this to us? If someone were to ask you why do you believe that wherever the Bible says, “the angel of the Lord,” it is referring to the preincarnate Christ, how would you answer?
Many say they believe the angel of the Lord is the Lord himself because the Bible seems to say so. For example, in Exodus, the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a burning bush in Exodus 3:2. But only two verses later in Exodus 3:4, he would identify himself as Lord. It happened again in Judges, twice. In Judges 13, after Manoah and his wife saw the appearance of the angel of the Lord, he said, “We will surely die, for we have seen God.” Manoah’s understanding was that anyone who saw God would die, and he thought that since he saw the angel of the Lord, he would die because seeing the angel of the Lord was the same thing as seeing God. The angel of the Lord spoke again, this time to Gideon in Judges 6:12. But only two verses later in Judges 6:14, the Bible says it was the Lord who was continuing in his dialogue with him. Finally, Zechariah 12:8 appears to say that the angel of the Lord who appeared before the inhabitants of Jerusalem was synonymous with God.
Places like these in the Bible give us pause that the angel of the Lord is a theophany. But even though these passages seem to say the angel of the Lord is an appearance of God in physical form, for me, there has always been an even stronger reason. It may come as a surprise, but the reason does not come from the Old Testament. It comes from the New Testament! While we find appearances of the angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, they stop altogether after the incarnation of Christ. In other words, we do not find the words, “the angel of the Lord,” anywhere in the New Testament*. Could it be that the angel of the Lord ceased to exist in the New Testament because he now appeared as Jesus Christ in the flesh? I think it is very interesting.
In John 8:58, Jesus said to the Jews, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am.” Jesus made himself known to the world that he existed before Abraham. Even before he appeared in the flesh in the New Testament, he was actually already here in the world, and more importantly, active in the Old Testament. Christ was always with us, and he is with us today. Join me, and let us give thanks that Christ is always at work in us.
*In my opinion, the translation, as it stands in the King James Version in Matthew 28:2, cannot be supported. It reads, “And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.” Because the verse contains no article in front of “angel” in the original Greek text, one may understand it to be “the angel of the Lord” or “an angel of the Lord”. It can be either, but it does not demand an article before the word. All other English translations of Matthew 28:2 chose to omit the article in front of “angel”.