If you ask the question, who delivered Israel from Egypt?
Some passages will say God, Elohim. Some passages will say Yahweh.
Some passages will say the Angel. Some passages will say the presence.
Which one is it? The answer is, yeah.
This is why when you get to Jacob's blessing, and you know, these other passages,
or you look back, or you look forward to all this talk about the name of the Lord
in Samuel, and Jeremiah, mixed in with the Word of the Lord.
You get word of the Lord passages, you get Name of the Lord passages,
you get Angel passages. And they're all interchangeable.
They're all different ways of talking about the same thing; God, God Himself.
Another way you can see this is to ask the question;
who delivered Israel from Egypt and guided her to the promised land?
Sounds like a simple question. Well, God did that.
I mean, you know, Moses was the human agent, but God did that.
But if you actually looked it up, and you went through the Torah,
and you know, Joshua will throw in here at the end here.
You'd find out that in some passages in Deuteronomy 4,
let's just click out to that one. How does God deliver them? Let's see here.
In verse 37, God brought you out of Egypt, back in verse 34.
"Don't you remember what the Lord your guy did for you in Egypt?...
Because he loved your fathers and chose their offspring after them
and brought you out of Egypt with his own presence."
The word is Panim.
So here the presence of God was with them,
bringing them out of Egypt, delivering them.
If you go to Judges 2:1, "the angel of the Lord went up from Gilgal to Bochim...
'I brought you up from Egypt,
brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers.'"
Notice the first-person language and the very explicit statement,
the Angel says, 'I brought you up from Egypt.' Okay,
Deuteronomy 7:19, great trials that you saw... the signs, the wonders,
the mighty hand, the outstretched arm."
You know, all referencing the plagues of Egypt.
"By which the Lord your God brought you out."
Lord is Yahweh. So, you realize what we just did there?
If you ask the question; who delivered Israel from Egypt?
Some passages will say God, Elohim. Some passages will say Yahweh.
Some passages will say the Angel. Some passages will say the presence.
Which one is it? The answer is, yeah.
They're all interchangeable. They're all different ways of saying the same thing.
Talking about the same deliver. And this is important because in that mix,
you get anthropomorphic language, God as a man,
certainly with the Angel you get God as a man.
We can go to Joshua 5, get outside the Torah. And this is a significant passage.
"When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold,
a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand."
So a man was standing before him. With a drawn sword in his hand.
Joshua says, "'Hey, are you for us are our enemies or adversaries?'
And he said, 'No; but I am the commander of the army of the Lord.'...
Joshua falls down in his face and worships and said to him,
'what does my Lord say to his servant? '
And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua" well, first,
"take off your sandals, from your feet for the place where you are standing is holy."
Where have we seen that language before? I hover over the cross-reference
Exodus 3, yes, the burning bush. God says that precisely to Moses,
"take your sandals off your feet, because the place where you're standing is holy ground."
Same thing here. But now it's the captain, the commander of the Lord's host, the Lord's army.
You say, Well, it doesn't say that's the angel of the Lord.
Right, doesn't say that. But here it is in Hebrew. If I highlight the phrase.
This is the phrase. Notice what's happening on the right-hand side here.
So that you know this Hebrew corresponds to this English
"with a drawn sword in his hand." If I highlight that, and I'm going to select it,
and I'm going to search the Hebrew Bible, we get that description in two other places.
Here's Joshua 5, we get it in Numbers 22:23, which is the Angel of the Lord.
It's the Balaam incident. Balaam and is donkey.
The Angel of the Lord stops Balaam and is donkey.
The donkey is the one who sees the Angel the Lord standing there
with drawn sword in his hand.
And we get it in 1 Chronicles 21:16 This is the judgment of David with David census.
When the destroying angel is... it's the Angela Lord,
it's right there in the text with drawn sword in his hand.
Elsewhere in the parallel passage, and there's a relationship between
1 Chronicles 21 and a passage in Samuel, where you have the same story told
from two different perspectives. Except for one is you have an adversary there,
which English translations, unfortunately, translate Satan,
which has caused innumerable instances of confusion.
It's just the adversary. It's the same description up here in Numbers 22 and 23.
The Angel of the Lord is opposing Balaam. .
And you also see the word Satan in that passage
You get it right down here in first Chronicles 21.
The point is that it interchanges the Angel and Yahweh in between the two passages,
and the Angel of the Lord is the one there with a drawn sword in his hand.
It's the same angel who said, I'm the God of Bethel.
It's the same angel that Jacob in his prayer blurs with God Himself.
Okay, this is who Joshua runs into. Joshua has an encounter with God as man.
"Take your shoes off, because the place where you're standing is holy ground."
That's burning bush language, where who was in the bush?
The Angel, and God. And all of these things network together theologically.