Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
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In both the Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, the word for "angel" is also translated "messenger". Also, the word is used to refer both to messengers sent from God and messengers sent from men.
In Exodus 33:2, God promised Israel that He would send an angel before them to drive out the Canaanites. Later, in Numbers 20:14, Moses sends messengers to the king of Edom. In these verses, the same Hebrew word is used. The difference in translation is owing mainly to the being that is sent. If God sends a heavenly being, the messenger is almost always called an angel. If God or someone else, such as a king, sends a human, he is called a messenger, or on several occasions, an ambassador (e. g. Ezek. 17:15). For example, the coming of John the Baptist is foretold in Malachi 3:1, where he is called God's "messenger" because he was from earth, not heaven. Israel's high priest is also called God's messenger (Mal. 2:7).
The main word for angel in Hebrew is malach. It is used a little more than 200 times in the Old Testament, and in about half of those instances, it is translated as "messenger" because about half the time it is used to refer to men on earth, not heavenly beings.
In the New Testament, we find a similar thing happening but to a much smaller extent. The Greeks were far more precise in their word usage than many other peoples. For instance, English-speaking people have only one word for "love", whether it is the holy love of God, the physical love of even wicked men and women, or the love that family members and friends naturally hold for one another. Not so with the Greeks. They had a different word for different kinds of love: agapay for the love of God; eros for fleshly love; philia for friendship or brotherly love. They were very precise in their thinking and in their speech.
So, the Greeks used their word angelos when they wanted to refer to heavenly messengers. Our word "angel" comes from this Greek word. And the Greeks used apostolos when referring to human messengers. Our word "apostle" comes from that Greek word.
This difference was not absolute, however. The word angelos could be used when referring to a human. It was used to describe John the Baptist being God's messenger (Mt. 11:10; Mk. 1:2; Lk. 7:27). And angelos was used when referring to the two men whom John himself sent as messengers to Jesus (Lk. 7:24). It is also used when describing Jesus' disciples when Jesus sent them to the cities of Israel to help him preach the gospel. Men who are deceived by Satan to proclaim false doctrine in the name of Jesus are called angeloi, or messengers, of Satan (2Cor. 12:7).
So, the word for "angel" in the New Testament is occasionally use to refer to men who are sent to the saints, by either God or Satan. Generally, whenever in the New Testament humans are the messengers being sent, the King James Version of the Bible notes this by translating angelos as "messenger" instead of as "angel". But in one important section of the New Testament, they failed to do this, and their failure to realize that humans were being referred to has resulted in a general misunderstanding of what Jesus said.
In the mid-1990s, Jesus taught me something about the word "angel" in the book of Revelation that surprised and instructed me. I am passing that knowledge on now to you.
In John's Revelation, Jesus sent seven messages to what the King James Version translates as "the angels of the seven congregations". The Lord's messages to these seven "angels" cannot possibly be understood rightly unless we realize that the "angels" here are seven anointed men whom God has placed as pastors over the seven congregations. These seven messages that John was commanded to send, one message to each of the seven pastors of those congregations, were not messages to the seven congregations of Asia. They were messages to seven men. The seven messages from Jesus to his seven messengers hold for us great learning, but only if we understand that the word "angel" refers to men, not heavenly beings. Jesus' messages are not for angels as heavenly beings nor, as is often thought, for the seven congregations as groups of people. They were individual messages for individual pastors.
I have written a gospel tract that explains these seven messages as they were meant to be understood, as messages from Jesus to seven of his pastors. This is tract #49 on the tract list found on the PastorJohnsHouse.com web site. If you will carefully read the second and third chapters in Revelation, and then read my tract explaining those messages from the Lord to his messengers, you will have an entirely new perspective on what Jesus said to them, a perspective that is impossible without understanding who the "angels of the seven congregations" really were.