EP: 463 There Are Two Powers in Heaven with Dr. Joel Muddamalle And Doug Van Dorn *members only trailer

And then Jesus expresses so much anguish, pain, hurt, like death. "You turn her back on me. Where are you, when he's dying on the cross? How does that happen? How does that exist? If they don't actually have a relationship and you can't have a relationship, but yourself." That is the mystery, I think, is that you have one M3 simultaneously. God is just God, but the Father is not the Son, and He is not the Spirit, and yet the Spirit is God, and the Son is God and the Father of God, and there is one God. If there's one God, how can there be a relationship? And yet, somehow there is. And it's perfect, and it's pre-existent to creation. It's eternal. It is eternal. The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. The Smithsonian, that if they found out about Lord Skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. "I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it busts the paradigm." It all goes back to the fallen chair, and the problem with the modern-day church, they had a very truncated view of the supernatural. "This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaty associated with this Mount Herman event." And this guy defecs from the kingdom. That's a big deal. We got Stranger Theology, Reform, Franch, and Blurry Creatures, represented on four couches. We're going to have an interesting conversation today, a little bonus for all you guys out there. To support all the channels in Dr. Heiser's production studio, this is the Greyhaven Report. And if it weren't for Dr. Heiser, we wouldn't be here. Most of us, our lives were transformed by that man, and I know Blurry Creatures, the beginning of it, was Heiser being willing to entertain these weird ideas as a theologian, and it was monumental to me personally. So thank you, Dr. Heiser. We know you're out there looking down, and you started a lot of great things, and we're trying to carry the torch. So today, we're going to do a member's content for all the people's sports shows. We're talking about the Angel of the Lord. Doug wrote a book. Doug, what is it? We have the alley-jeet. Okay, so if you've been with us at Blurry Creatures, we have done episodes, an episode with Doug on the Angel of the Lord. And we were talking about how we could do something refreshing new on a topic that he's written a book about. And we have the illustrious and revered, Dr. Joel Mutamali here. So we have theologian in-house. We wanted to go through some of the characteristics of the Angel of the Lord that we didn't cover in our previous episode. And kind of do a deep dive, right? Because this goes back to a lot of Heiser things. It's not lost on me that we're sitting on set of the Grey Havens report talking about the idea of this lesser Yahweh. These two powers in heaven, the Elohim, all these things come together in this character. It was the Angel of the Lord who shows up many places and has many names. And so we're going to kind of do a deep dive into all of the identities, names, personas. So I don't know how you want to put this Doug of this particular Elohim, this particular character of the Bible who is so very important and I may be often overlooked unless you are Doug Van Dorn, you read a book about it. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, so let's start with the place that I think so many people go back to the Angel of the Lord episode. It was a long time ago for you guys. You honored me to have that be, I think, episode 100, Angel of the Lord-- Oh, it was. The Blurr, Scripture of all Jesus. Yeah, that was crazy. So, and that was the Angel of the Lord episode, and it's such an important topic because I think so many people think that the Old Testament God is like this Unitarian entity, but the Trinity is there in the Old Testament. And so I've actually written several books on this. When I first came across this in Heizard's kind of the book that became the unseen realm, I was just blown away. He's talking about-- I think he talked about maybe the Word of God where you have John and the Logos and John 1.1, that was familiar, but then he also talked about, I think he used the name of God and maybe the glory of God or something like that. And he didn't really develop that much further. He had spoken about the Angel of the Lord in a couple of chapters, and then his book was way broader than that. And I started thinking this as a pastor, somebody who wants people to understand, especially the connections between the two testaments, so that this becomes one book, I thought this is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen to be able to do that. That Jesus isn't just there in a prophecy. He's not even just there in typology. He's actually there in person in the form of the Angel of the Lord. And what I was talking to you kind of pre-roll about what maybe we could do with it, because I don't remember if we really got into this in that episode, is that when people think about the Angel, I think what they do is they just want to look for this character called the Angel of the Lord. And if the title of the Angel is there, then they go, okay, here he is, but he's nowhere else to be found. And so this kind of episode, I want us to kind of talk about some of these other titles or terms or scholars would call them hypostasis ideas. It's almost like what Jesus was later called in Christian theology as a hypostasis of the Godhead that John picks up on, but there's several of these things that we can find. When you do this, what you're going to be finding is that he's actually almost on every page of the Old Testament. It's really remarkable. So I don't know, Joel, when I first came across this, it was from Heiser's work. And I know you studied under Mike, and we're talking about IZD as the word, the name, the arm, the wisdom of God, I mean, there's several of them. Yeah, I think one of the things that for me is so fascinating, I was actually looking up in my notes. So in terms of theology, we have the cosmic mountain series. And in the cosmic mountain series, the episode that we did on Mount Mariah, we actually jump into the Angel of the Lord. So you can get all the details in that episode. But one thing that ends up happening, I think, with the Angel of the Lord is some people get nervous about the attribution of the Angel of the Lord being the pre-incarnate Christ. And so, talk about that for a minute, because you're hitting on something that, especially in my circles in the reform world, there's a significant group of people that are so uncomfortable with it. They actually think that it's a heresy to see the Angel of the Lord as God. Yeah, and why do you think that is? Well, I think one, it's an uncomfortable conversation to have, and we've become too comfortable in demarcating almost like everybody's got their roles when it comes to the Triune God. God, the Father is understood in one specific way, God, the Spirit is understood in a specific way, and I joke about it. It's almost like we have reserved God the Son, Jesus, as if he's waiting in some green room for his grand appearance, the incarnation, and he's not active or present in the Old Testament. And yet, that is not the depiction of Jesus. If you, especially if you take John 1, the beginning was the Word, the Word is with God, the Word was God. Through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made that has been made in his life, and that life was the light of man. So we actually have to ask ourselves a question of consistency. How can we be truly consistently Triune in our understanding of the Godhead, but then want to surgically remove any presence of Jesus from the Old Testament and exclude him as only being present in the New Testament? I actually think that leads closer to polytheism than any kind of Triune understanding of God. And so my view is that the angel of the Lord is the pre-incarnate Christ, that it doesn't mess at all with the miracle of the incarnation, but what it does do is it reminds us that Jesus is the general of the army of God. Like he is the one who leads the heavenly host, and the angel of the Lord, even as he is seen, functions in that role, which is also why I opt for the ESV translation with the phrase Lord of Hosts, because the phrase Lord of Hosts has in mind the angelic heavenly armies, that the angel of the Lord is actually leading, versus Lord of Armies. Lord of Armies, which I think N.I.B. and some other Bible translations opt for, it's not that it's a wrong translation, it just subtly strips away the cosmic element of who Yahweh actually is. And so you're like the Lord of War, like Nick Cage, maybe. Do you believe, do you think that people, when they think the Trinity, they think God in three persons, they think God has three personalities, just like a human being, like I'm a grandfather, I'm a father. And, you know, I'm a son, you know, I'm saying it's like, no, no, I think Jesus is the Son of God, you know, and so I think that to them sort of causes some sort of internal conflict of, wait a minute, how could he be, how could the angel of the Lord be there? Because in our Mount Moriah episodes specifically, I think the one thing that stuck with me with that was that you have Abraham and Isaac there, and then you have the angel of the Lord there and God. So you have father son, father son, right? And I was like, it's like a camping trip for everybody. And to me, I think that is hard for me. for a lot of just traditional explanations of what the trade possibly be. - Yeah. - I think one of the things that people are concerned about with the angel is that somehow it will destroy the uniqueness of the incarnation. - Right. - Like I don't think that there's, taking it for the best of what, why people get, you know, themselves bent up and knots about this. I don't think it's because they're actually tri-theists or they think Jesus kind of came into existence or whatever, they know that he's eternal. They've read John 1-1. But they're afraid that if you say that somehow he comes in the Old Testament in the form of an angel that the incarnation is no longer unique. - Mm-hmm. - And my answer to that is that the incarnation is unique because this is the only time in history that God becomes a human being. Never before, never after. And he does not become a human being in the Old Testament. - Is there some military strategy of naming him an angel of the Lord before he comes? - Ain't, well, there is when he's called the commander of the armies of the Lord, like Joshua chapter five. That's what you were talking about, the Lord of hosts. - The Lord of hosts. - Lord Sabbath oath is the way. - But we don't want to call him the chosen one, the one that's coming to save mankind. Or would that give any giving away his Old Testament purpose? I think like Ignacognito, let's call him that. - Well, that's where the prophecy stuff comes in. - Yeah. - That Messiah will come and people didn't know how that was gonna look or whatever. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)