God Sending, God Sent

When Moses finds a bush burning on Mount Sinai, he turns aside to look. “Yahweh” sees him turn aside, so “God” (elohim) calls from the bush, Moses, Moses (Exodus 3:4). Earlier, we were told that the Angel of Yahweh “appearing in a blazing fire from the midst of the bush” (v. 2). So, who’s in the bush? Yahweh, His Angel, or “God”?

We might say these are all names for the same being or person. Here “Yahweh” and “Angel of Yahweh” seem to be interchangeable. But there are places where Yahweh is distinguished from the Angel of Yahweh. This is most dramatic in Zechariah 1, where the Angel of Yahweh speaks a prayer of lament to Yahweh. Yahweh and the Angel are identified; yet Yahweh’s Angel can speak to Yahweh.

All this is a patristic commonplace: The Angel of Yahweh is a pre-incarnate appearance of the eternal Son, the Word of God who became flesh in Jesus. But we can push this a further step by considering the nature of Yahweh as “angel.” The Hebrew malach means “messenger,” and can refer to human prophets who are messengers of Yahweh, as well as to the Angel of Yahweh. To call the Angel a malach not only highlights his angelic nature, but also to emphasize that He is a messenger, sent by Yahweh.

The anticipation of New Testament Trinitarianism is very strong: Yahweh and His Angel are distinct yet identical. The Angel is Yahweh’s messenger, the one who is dispatched to deliver the word of Yahweh. So, we have Yahweh dispatching, and Yahweh dispatched; Yahweh sending, and Yahweh sent. That is, we have a glimpse already of a God who can send God without Himself coming, a God who sends and a God sent, a Father inaugurating a mission and a Son fulfilling His Father’s mission.