This is John from the Bible Project. Today on the podcast, we're continuing a series about the complex identity of God in the Bible.

In the last episode, we looked at a mysterious and confusing character called the Angel of the Lord,

and how in story after story about this character, he is...

So closely connected to God's own identity. In the narratives where this figure appears, it actually, it's hard to tell if it's Yahweh or distinct from Yahweh.

A character that poses a paradox, that God's identity is so mind-boggling complex that he can exist in a way that just doesn't make logical sense to us.

In this brain twister of God appearing as a character that's both him and distinct from him, this doesn't stop with the Angel of the Lord.

The same pattern happens over and over with God's attributes.

Here they are. God's name, God's glory, God's word, God's spirit, and God's wisdom.

They're attributes of God, but as we're going to see, there are biblical passages where the language used to describe these, does the same blurring as the Angel of Yahweh text.

It talks about them and develops them in ways that sound odd and English and in Hebrew, and begins to talk about them as if they are distinct from Yahweh, but they are a manifestation of Yahweh himself.

So today, on the podcast, we talk about the complex identity of God by looking at his attributes.

Today we'll specifically look at two. The first one is God's name. You can think of this attribute like God's reputation.

And God's reputation is a big deal in the Bible. Such a big deal that passages about God's name seem to talk about it like it isn't just an attribute.

The name becomes personified like a person who lives in a house. Yahweh's name lives in the temple.

We'll also look at the attribute of God's glory. How in prophets see God's glory, they see fire, but also they tend to see a human figure, a human-like figure on a throne.

So we'll go through these stories and you can see for yourself how these stories create an ambiguity.

And this isn't just a fun, mental exercise to do. This has a point, which is this. The New Testament authors are tracking with all of this. They see it.

They're clearly drawing upon those mental categories to describe Jesus.

We're going to unpack all of that today. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

So in this conversation, we're going to start talking about personified divine attributes.

So again, the big category is God interacts with the world through agents, mediators.

We talked about human mediators, priests, prophets, Moses, David, whatever.

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