Our wonderful Christ is all-inclusive and all-extensive, and He is so much to us for our enjoyment and experience. Throughout the Bible, there are many titles, statuses, and riches of Christ that are being displayed, and in particular this week we are enjoying the matter of Christ being the Angel of Jehovah for His people to take possession of the promised land.
If we were to get into what the angels are, where do they live, how do they look like, what do they do, etc we will get “into the forest”, since the Bible offers us a limited amount of revelation concerning the angels.
However, in Exodus and Judges (as we saw in our previous article) we see Christ as the Angel of Jehovah and the Angel of God who was sent by God to save us from our suffering, care for us, lead us, and serve us so that we may enter into the full enjoyment of the all-inclusive Christ as the reality of the good land promised to God’s people.
We cannot understand everything related to Christ and the Triune God with our limited human mind, but we can enjoy the riches and the function of this wonderful Christ in our Christian experience. Christ is far superior to the angels, even though in His humanity He was made for a little while inferior to them.
On the one hand, Christ is the second of the Divine Trinity, that is, Christ is God Himself, and on the other hand God sent Christ (that is, God sent Himself) to do some specific things to God’s people so that they may enjoy God to the uttermost, and when God sent Christ in this way He is called, the Angel of Jehovah, the Angel of God, and as we will se today, the Angel of the covenant.
Hallelujah for our Christ as the Angel of Jehovah, the Angel of God, and the Angel of the covenant who comes to us to save us from our suffering, cares for us, leads us, serves us, and makes sure we enjoy all the benefits of the new covenant today and for eternity!
Christ is the Angel of the Covenant to Fulfill the Covenant He Made with His People
In Mal. 3:1 we see a particular title ascribed to Christ – He is the Angel of the covenant who will come and purify His people so that they may enjoy the covenant He has made with His people. First, Christ came as the Messenger of God with a living message from Him, and He Himself was the message – Christ is the Word of God (John 1:1; Mal. 3:1).
As the Messenger of God, Christ not only brings a word or a message from God to His people, but He Himself is the living message (see the four Gospels, a complete and perfect record of Christ as the living message sent by God to His chosen people).
Toward the end of His ministry on earth, Christ enacted the new covenant through His blood, and in His resurrection and ascension, He became the surety, Mediator, and Executor of this new covenant so that, whoever believes into Him would not perish but would enjoy all the riches of the Triune God being covenanted to them.
However, in regards to His earthly people, because of their unbelief and rejection of the Lord Jesus, they were temporarily put aside until Christ returns again. The people of Israel are still God’s earthly people today, but because of their unbelief and rejection of Christ they do not benefit of the new covenant – unless some of them repent and believe into Jesus as their Savior.
Although the Lord Jesus enacted the new covenant two thousand years ago, generally the Jewish people have not benefitted from it. Instead, the benefit has gone to the believing Gentiles.
However, when Christ comes back, He will come as the Angel of the covenant to execute His covenant over the repentant and believing Jews. When Christ returns at the end of this age, all His earthly people – the people of Israel – will physically see Him, repent, and believe into Him, and Christ will be the Angel of the covenant to them so that they would become the beneficiaries of the new covenant.
But, hallelujah, we as God’s spiritual people can experience Christ today as the Angel of the covenant, the One who not only enacted the new covenant through His blood but who also became the surety and mediator of this covenant to make sure we enjoy all that God has bequeathed to us in the new covenant! Praise the Lord!
Lord Jesus, we love You as the Angel of the covenant, the One who makes sure we enjoy all the bequests of the new covenant today! Lord, thank You for not only enacting the new covenant through Your blood but also for becoming the executor of this covenant to make sure that we today enjoy all the riches of God, we have God’s life imparted and growing in us, we have the law of God written on our inner being, and we have our sins forgiven! Lord, we praise You! We thank You for being the Angel of the covenant coming today to us!
Christ is the Angel of the Covenant to Dispense the Riches of the Triune God into us
In His first coming Christ came in the way of an Angel, a serving one sent by God (see Heb. 1:14) to serve God in forming the new testament (Mark 10:45).
When the Lord established His table on the night in which He was betrayed, He enacted the new covenant (see Luke 22:20) to replace the old covenant; in the new covenant God is obligated to forgive our sins and to dispense Himself into our being to be our life, our law of life, and our everything as our inward content so that we may live Him and be His people (Jer. 31:31-34; Heb. 8:8-12). Hallelujah for the new covenant!
In His resurrection, Christ as the Angel of the covenant executes the new covenant to be its surety, making it real to us by assuring us that our sins have been forgiven and by dispensing all the riches of the covenanted Triune God into us (Heb. 7:22).
Hallelujah, Christ is our guarantee, our bondsman, our sponsor, our pledge – He guarantees the new covenant riches and bequests our ours, and He’s the surety which cannot be unbound!
When we believed into the Lord Jesus we became beneficiaries of the new covenant, and Christ as the Angel of the covenant is the guarantee that all the bequests of the covenant are ours, and He is the executor of this covenant to make sure we enjoy all these bequests!
Christ’s responsibility as the Executor of the new covenant is great: in His ascension He makes sure that everything stated in the new covenant is being applied to us in our Christian experience. Christ as the Angel of the covenant makes sure that we would know God, we would be God’s people, we would have the law of life written on our heart and mind, and that our sins would be forgiven.
Christ is very busy today: He is busy executing the bequests of the new testament into His people. We may fail, we may become weak, or we may backslide, but there’s One who makes sure that we have God as our God, we have His riches dispensed into us, and we have our sins forgiven!
Christ as the Angel of the covenant makes sure that, according to the new covenant, we are absolutely one with God and we are constituted with Him day by day so that we may dwell in God and He may dwell in us to be the mutual abode of God with man.
God is our Father and we are His sons; we are not “adopted sons of God” but sons of God begotten by God to share in His life and nature and enjoy all the riches of the Triune God dispensed into them (John 1:12-13). Just as the children are born of their parents to share in the human life and nature (but not in the parenthood / fatherhood), so we are children of God born of God to partake of the divine life and nature, yet we will never partake of His Godhead.
We need to be daily reminded that we are sons of God possessing His life and nature; we are not only human beings but God-men. If we see that we are God-men, we will be preserved from joking with others, losing our temper, arguing, disputing, and many other things, and we will be kept in the constant dispensing of the Triune God with all His riches into our being.
May we never forget our status as children of God, sons of God, and people of God, and may we be those enjoying Christ as the Angel of the covenant constantly dispensing all the riches of God into our being to make us His people, write His laws into our being, fill us with God, and forgive our sins!
Thank You, Lord Jesus, for not just living in us but also living in the third heavens to execute the new covenant every single day! Praise You, Lord, for being the Angel of the covenant who makes sure that all God’s riches are being dispensed into us, we are God’s people, God is our God, our sins are forgiven, and God’s law of life is written on our heart. Lord, we want to live as God-men, sons of God who are partakers of God’s life and nature and who daily enjoy the dispensing of the riches of the Triune God bequeathed to us in the new covenant and applied to us by Christ as the Angel of the covenant!
References and Hymns on this Topic
- Inspiration: the Word of God, my Christian experience, brother Andrew Yu’s sharing in the message for this week, and Life-study of Malachi, msg. 2 (by Witness Lee), as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, Crystallization-Study of Exodus (2), week 11 / msg 11, The Angel of Jehovah for His people to take possession of the promised land.
- All Bible verses are taken from, Holy Bible Recovery Version.
- Hymns on this topic to strengthen this burden:
# A better covenant was made / With Thy dear blood in heaven; / By Thee this sure new testament / To Thy redeemed was given. / Thou art its Maker adequate, / For Thou dost have the merit; / Thou art its Giver competent / That we may all inherit; / Its qualified Executor, / By life of resurrection; / Its potent Mediator too, / Fulfilling God’s election. (Hymns #188)
# Your ministry, O Lord, / How excellent it is; / A better covenant, / And better promises; / Enacted on a better law. / Of such You are Executor. / A better covenant, / And better promises; / A better law of life / And sacrifice this is. / Redemption’s work, done long ago, / A better blood has made it so. (Hymns #1187)
# “I will impart My laws into their mind,” / Our covenanting God revealed to mankind; / “I will inscribe My laws upon their heart,” / God’s highest law of life into us impart. / Christ is the title-deed of all God is; / Christ is a testament with all its bequests; / Now the New Testament is ours to claim, / As we in spirit call upon His name. (Song on the New Covenant)
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