<p>1:5 <em>For to which of the angels said He at any time: You are my Son, this day have I begotten you? And again: I will be to him a Father and he shall be to me a Son?</em>- Ps. 2:7 is applied to the Lord's resurrection in Acts 13:33; Rom. 1:4. But the rest of Psalm 2 is quoted about various points of the Lord's work; at His birth, death, resurrection, return and at the time of the final rebellion against Him. And the original application appears to be to David and then to Hezekiah. Clearly it is not always so that if a verse is quoted in one context in the New Testament, then the surrounding context of the original quotation must refer to the same time. And it is likewise clear that the same scripture can have multiple fulfilments; Psalm 2 is a classic cse of that. The insistence upon context as the guiding light of interpretation is often misplaced; because the mind behind the word of God does not work according to the Greek influenced linear thinking of the European mind, with its emphasis upon logical corrolary and linear progression and development of thought and context.</p><p>James Dunn quotes Tertullian, Justin, Epiphanius and Clement as all believing that the Lord Jesus was an Angel: &quot;So too Jewish Christians of the second and third centuries specifically affirmed that Christ was an angel or archangel... Justin's identification of the angel of Yahweh with the supposedly pre-existent Christ&quot;. It was this Jewish obsession with Angels, and the desire to make Jesus understandable as an Angel, which led to the idea that He personally pre-existed and was not quite human. And hence the specific and repeated emphasis of the New Testament that the Lord was <em>not</em> an Angel but <em>because </em>He was a man and <em>not</em> an Angel He has been exalted far <em>above</em> Angels (Phil. 2:9-11; Col. 1:16; 2:8-10; Heb. 1; 1 Pet. 1:12; 3:22; Rev. 5:11-14). It's the same with the idea of Melchizedek, whom the Qumran community and writings understood as an Archangel. The commentary upon Melchizedek in Hebrews stresses that he was a <em>man</em> (&quot;consider how great this <em>man</em> was...&quot;, Heb. 7:4)- therefore <em>not</em> an Angel. He was a <em>foreshadowing</em> of Christ, and not Christ Himself. It would appear that the commentary upon Melchizedek in Hebrews is actually full of indirect references to the Qumran claims about Melchizedek being an Angel and somehow being the Messiah. Sadly, too many trinitarians today have made the same mistake as the Jews- arguing that Melchizedek was somehow Jesus personally. The Jews of Qumran were quite obsessed with Angels- they also suggested that Gabriel was somehow the pre-existent Messiah. Bearing that in mind, it would appear that the descriptions of the Angel Gabriel announcing the conception and birth of Jesus are almost purposefully designed to show that Gabriel and Jesus are <em>not</em> the same but are two quite different persons (Mt. 1:20,24; 2:13,19; Lk. 1:11,19,26-38; 2:9).</p><p>Hebrews 1 can be a passage which appears to provide perhaps the strongest support for both the &lsquo;Jesus is God&rsquo; and &lsquo;Jesus is not God&rsquo; schools. Meditating upon this one morning, I suddenly grasped what was going on. The writer is in fact purposefully juxtaposing the language of Christ&rsquo;s humanity and subjection to the Father, with statements and quotations which apply the language of God to Jesus. But the emphasis is so repeatedly upon the fact that God did this to Jesus. God gave Jesus all this glory. Consider the evidence: It is God who begat Jesus (Heb. 1:5), God who told the Angels to worship Jesus (Heb. 1:6), it was &ldquo;God, even your God&rdquo; who anointed Jesus, i.e. made Him Christ, the anointed one (Heb. 1:9); it was God who made Jesus sit at His right hand, and makes the enemies of His Son come into subjection (Heb. 1:13); it was God who made / created Jesus, God who crowned Jesus, God who set Jesus over creation (Heb. 2:7), God who put all in subjection under Jesus (Heb. 2:8). And yet interspersed between all this emphasis- for that&rsquo;s what it is- upon the superiority of the Father over the Son&hellip; we find Jesus addressed as &ldquo;God&rdquo; (Heb. 1:8), and having Old Testament passages about God applied to Him (Heb. 1:5,6). The juxtaposition is purposeful. It is to bring out how the highly exalted position of Jesus was in fact granted to Him by &lsquo;his God&rsquo;, the Father, who remains the single source and giver of all exaltation, and who, to use the Lord&rsquo;s very own words, &ldquo;is greater than Christ&rdquo; (Jn. 14:28).</p>