July 13 - Judges 13

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O LORD, how often we mistake Your holiness for our destruction, such as when we think Your commandments will harm us and sin will help us, or as when Manoah thought he was doomed to death for seeing You.  Grant us the faith of his wife, that we would always recognize the appearance of Your holiness is for our salvation.

Ineresting that the Angel of the Lord says His name is wonderful, since that name is also given in Isaiah 9, along with Counselor, Almighty, God, and so on.

So just who is this Angel of the Lord that speaks to Manoah and his wife?

The Bible reveals that the Angel of the Lord is perhaps someone different than you might at first think. He is not a created angel like Gabriel or any of the myriad others that God made in the beginning. This Angel is uncreated. That's why in many Bibles, the "A" for this Angel is capitalized. This is an eternal and divine Being. Angel literally means Messenger; we might even translate it as "Word," as in John 1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." You see, this is the Messenger of the Lord, the Word of the Father, the 2nd Person of the Holy Trinity, equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Angel of the Lord is the Son of God, Jesus, before He was born among us and became man. Here the Son of God has come down to man to announce a miraculous birth through which God the Father would deliver His people, just as centuries later the Son of God Himself would be miraculously born to bring eternal deliverance to His people.

(from an Advent midweek sermon on Samson by Rev. Aaron Koch.  Scroll about halfway down.)