Gen. 3:8 says, “Then the man and his wife heard the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.” As I was studying angels with my small group of high school boys, we came across this verse and I was intrigued by the fact that it implies God taking some physical form and interacting with the earth as humans would. Is this simply the Angel of the Lord? Or perhaps this Gabriel or Michael?
Since Genesis 3:8 says the Lord was walking in the garden and they heard him, then the Lord must have appeared to them in physical form. Many theologians believe that whenever that happened, it was the Lord Jesus in an Old Testament appearance. In those cases, the Bible often describes Him as The Angel of the Lord. It couldn’t have been either Gabriel or Michael. Being angels, they are never spoken of as the Lord God.