Gwen Frangs / Templemore / March 12 2024
In his letter to the Colossians, Paul wrote:
15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:15-17 NIV
In his letter to the Corinthians Paul wrote:
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
2 Corinthians 3:17
We know that when Paul refers to the Son and to the Lord in the verses above, that he is referring to Jesus. If Jesus is the image of God and Jesus is the Spirit of God, it follows that the Spirit of God must be the image of God. This means that there must be times when the Holy Spirit can be seen.
Jesus made it clear that the Father had never been seen by a human being (John 6:46); therefore the appearances of God in the Old Testmament were not appearances by the Father.
They could also not have been appearances by Jesus, the Son of God, as He had not yet been begotten by the Father. Psalm 2 makes it clear that the Son of God was only begotten after there were already nations on the earth:
7 I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
today I have begotten you.
8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
and the ends of the earth your possession.
There were no nations present at the creation, because they had not been created yet, therefore the Son of God could not have been begotten before the creation.
In Zechariah 3, the second last book of the Old Testament, the Father is speaking through the Holy Spirit about the Branch. In verse 8 Yahweh says: ‘I Am bringing forth My Servant the Branch….’ Zechariah 3:8. He is describing a future event. He is not describing something that had happened in the past prior to creation. The Son was begotten only at the beginning of the New Testament when Mary became pregnant with Him, as a result of the Holy Spirit overshadowing her. When the Holy Spirit took up residence in the body that the Father had prepared for Him, the Son was begotten:
5 Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said:
“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but a body you prepared for me;
6 with burnt offerings and sin offerings
you were not pleased.
7 Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—
I have come to do your will, my God.’”[a]
The Son of God did not exist prior to that point. The Holy Spirit, existed before that point. The speaker in the verse makes it clear that He sees Himself as separate from the body that was prepared. In other words He is not the body. He is in the body. This is because the speaker is the Holy Spirit. This is what incarnation means – that a spirit or deity takes on flesh.
As there are only three members of the trinity, this means that the person Who the people in the Old Testament were seeing was the Holy Spirit, the image of God. These appearances were of an angel Who is called Yahweh, the angel of the Lord, El Shaddai and the Glory of God.
This means that the Holy Spirit is an angel and that the Father created this angel to be His image. Yahweh the Father spoke about this angel in Exodus 23:
20 “See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared. 21 Pay attention to him and listen to what he says. Do not rebel against him; he will not forgive your rebellion, since my Name is in him. 22 If you listen carefully to what he says and do all that I say, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose those who oppose you. 23 My angel will go ahead of you and bring you into the land of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hivites and Jebusites, and I will wipe them out.
I believe that Paul understood that when Yahweh said that His name was in the Angel, that He was saying that the Angel was His image (Exodus 23:21).