Wednesday 7 June 2017

Is Jesus the Archangel Michael?

In a previous post, I explained how it is indubitable that Jesus is God.  I did this by showcasing just some of the Scripture that affirms that Jesus and the Father (and the Holy Spirit) share certain qualities, attributes, and abilities that can only belong to God. So even though the doctrine of the Trinity is pretty confusing, it's very clearly there.

Jehovah's Witnesses try to do something similar with Jesus and the Archangel Michael. What strikes me as particularly odd is that they can see using these handful of passages a connection between these two, yet they can't see the glaring, obvious, repeated, blatant connections between Jesus and God!
To be fair, some of the passages that are said to connect Michael to Jesus are at first glance fairly interesting, and you can see how the case can be made. However, many just don't hit the mark at all, and have to have the Michael theory read into them.
The simplest rebuttal to the Michael being Jesus claim would be in showing the Trinity. If Jesus is God, then he is not one of the angels. But when looking at things like this I prefer to be objective and not start with my conclusion. I'd rather look at the case for Jesus being Michael without the baggage of already knowing it's false. So I have to pretend I don't know, and try and perhaps even see it from the JW perspective. We can let Scripture speak for itself.

I could even entertain the thought that Jesus may also be Michael, given that Jesus manifest himself as a human. Why couldn't he not also sometimes manifest as an angel? Saying that, we know that Jesus did manifest as an angel a number of times in the Old Testament. However, he was never referred to as Michael in those passages, he was always called The Angel of the LORD.
So maybe, maybe Jesus is Michael as well as God, but that remains to be seen.

So let's look at the case for Jesus being Michael.