Friday, September 29, 2023

Blake Ostler, "Divine Agency and Angelic Mediation in the Book of Revelation"

  

Divine Agency and Angelic Mediation
in the Book of Revelation

 

The notion of divine agency is illustrated perfectly by the last chapter of Revelation. The visionary tells us that the angel of the Lord came to him. However, the angel speaks in the first person as if he is Christ: “Behold, I am coming soon” (Rev. 22:7). John fell at the angel’s feet to worship him, apparently because he did not know that his companion was “only” an angel and thought that it was the Lord himself who was addressing him. However, the angel warns him: “Don’t! I am a fellow servant of yours and of your brothers the prophets. . . . Worship God!” (Rev. 22:9) Worship is appropriate only to God and the Lamb in Revelation 4 and 5. However, when the angel begins to speak again, he picks up right where he left off, addressing John in first-person as if he were in fact the resurrected Lord: “Behold, I am coming soon. I bring with me the recompense. I will give to each according to his deeds. I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:12-13). It is clear that the angels speaks in the first person exactly as if he were the Christ. It is equally noteworthy that the resurrected Christ adopts the same titles as God, “the one who sits upon the throne. . . I [am] Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end . . . I will be his God, and he will be my son” (Rev. 21:5-7). The angel thus speaks in the first person as the messenger of Christ, saying the very words that Christ would say. In turn, Christ uses the very words by which the Father refers to himself because Christ is God’s messenger and agent who has been exalted to the same status as God himself by overcoming death and the devil and by delving the kingdom to the Father.

 

The same paradox of divine agency arises in the first chapter of Revelation where Christ appears in vision as “one like the son of man” and in the glory of the Ancient of Days of Daniel 7. Revelation opens by stating that Jesus Christ “made it known by sending his angel to his servant John” (Rev. 1:1; emphasis mine). However, the voice declaring the revelation proclaims: “’I am Alpha and Omega’, says the Lord God, ‘the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty’” (Rev. 1:8). It is the angel who speaks as if he were God. Just a few verses later, however, it is Jesus Christ who speaks, although the text gives no notice of a change of character: “I am the first and the last, the one who lives. Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever” (Rev. 1:18). The statement that Christ is the first and last recalls Yahweh’s own claim in Isaiah 41:4 as well as God’s declaration that he is Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. All of these declarations should probably be understood as being made by an angel who delivers the revelation as an agent who speaks first as if he were God and then as if he were Christ. In the same way, the Gospel of John presents Christ as the one who appeared and who spoke in the first person as if he were Yahweh.

 

Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought: Of Gods and Gods (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2008), 183-84