04 July 2023
Honestly, I don't have the words for this, but I need to try.
The Old Testament in particular plays fast and loose with the divine Person. Heiser notes in The Unseen Realm that God manifested Himself in an apparent human form. Then the Hebrew writers refer to His Angel, and then His Word, often in the same context. The Scripture fuzzes it all together.
A couple of items might help to clarify. I've long taught that your first encounter with God is via His authority. If the first brush with the divine doesn't drive you to your face on the ground, then you haven't met Him. The initial knowledge of God is always a matter of His authority. You must work through the implications of that before you get to know Him personally.
That's why your first encounter is via some form of divine law. The law or covenant doesn't matter so much as the submission to His authority. This is feudalism, a fundamental essence of all Creation. You have an open-ended commitment, regardless of what He may demand in the future.
The whole point of a law covenant is that you wade through that authority until you get a clue as to what kind of Person projects it. It's not unlike entering the throne room by first passing through layers of guards with the power to take your life. You discover all the ways you can die before you understand how to live. This is the common experience of most believers. We work our way through the boundaries before we start to get comfortable with the Divine Presence.
It means getting comfortable with just how hopeless you are without His mercy and grace. It also means you don't come closer until you are drawn. If you don't have this internal power that says, "He wants you", then you will never be able to approach Him. And you'll never see any reason to get closer until you sense that powerful drawing, calling force.
The other item is that God in His Person sees all of time and space as a single event before Him. He is outside of time and space; it does not impinge on Him in any way. We can put that into words, but we can't really do anything with it. This is simply beyond our ability to grasp.
And the prophets warn us that if God ever personally touched any part of His Creation, it would dissolve in fire. The whole point in saying that is so you'll understand this requires lots of filters between Him and His Creation. That was part of Lucifer's original job. He was capable of being right up next to God, but could also touch Creation without the whole thing evaporating.
Because divine authority is transmissible, other persons can bear it on God's behalf. Otherwise, Jesus the Son would not have been possible. Most of you don't struggle with the idea that Jesus was the one who spoke to Abraham as God's Word, appearing in His eternal form, same as after His resurrection. We are given all manner of parabolic expressions of how Jesus is the Son of God, and yet in some ways God Himself. You aren't supposed to dissect it, just recognize His authority.
The symbolism of God having a Son was ancient before Abraham came along. Every human ruler had his chosen heir as co-regent for some portion of a ruler's reign. It made his heir rather like his apprentice, practicing kingly things until he's ready to take the throne. We see King David putting it off way too long and having to handle a crisis with one of his sons claiming to be the heir without proper authority. The issue for the Kingdom of Israel was the transmission of authority. A delegation acted on David's authority, publicly proclaiming Solomon the Co-regent. But not too many folks were allowed to get to personally know the royal family. That was restricted access.
It's rather apparent that Abraham recognized the person who appeared with God's authority in his life, and recognized that voice without the body. The same with other major figures who got to know God personally. The difference is that, with Christ after the Cross, we have an open invitation to join the imperial household. We get to meet Him personally, though typically not in a human form. Rather, we get to meet Him in our hearts.
The Cross reversed the order of things. Previously, we had to wade through the law to get to know Him. Now, we are invited into His household at the point of His divine call, and then we spend whatever life we have left getting to know His ways.
If you get pretty good at it, there are times and places in this world when you will be called upon to represent Him, someone who carries His authority. Like Paul, you'll have to get used to the difference between His concerns and your own.
Western minds struggle with that whole business. We tend to approach it with binary thinking, as something that is all or nothing. Either some is God, or they are not. The Hebrew fuzziness about all this is rejected a priori, so that we struggle to understand the Old Testament narratives. We keep trying to insert our limited mental frame of reference where it does not fit.
God can use, and be, anyone He likes, any time He likes, because time and space limitations don't apply to Him. The trick is to recognize His authority. He can also be any number of places at the same time, and not lose track. He could be on the Cross and in Heaven. It's not that God becomes multiple Persons, but there are multiple manifestations of the same person. You and I can't do that, but God can; there was no doubt in the Hebrew mind about that.
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