CHRIST THE HEALER
and thorns in your sides, and shall vex ye in the land wherein ye dwell." Here the Scripture itself plainly tells us what the "pricks" in the eyes and the "thorns" in the sides of the Israelites were. They were the inhabitants of Canaan that had been spared, not eye trouble or sickness. God was only using this as an illustration to show that as a thorn sticking in the flesh is annoying, so the Canaanites, if allowed to remain in the land, would be a constant annoyance to the children of Israel. In all the other places in the Bible where this expression is used, the thorns are personalities. In each of the other instances the Bible definitely states what the thorn was. In this particular instance Paul definitely states what his thorn was. He said it was "The messenger [Greek angelos] of Satan," or, as translated by others, "the angel of the devil," "Satan's angel," etc. The Greek word angelos appears 188 times in the Bible. It is translated "angel" 181 times and "messenger" the other 7 times. In every one of the 188 times where this word is used in the Bible, it means a person, not a thing. Hell was made for "the devil and his angels." An angel or a messenger is always a person that one person sends to another, never a disease. Paul not only tells us that his thorn was an angel, or messenger of Satan, but he also tells us what that angel came to do. He said that he was sent "to buffet me," in the same way "the waves buffeted" the boat, and the soldiers "buffeted" Christ. Weymouth translates this passage in this way, "Satan's angel dealing blow after blow." Buffeting means giving repeated blows. If Paul's buffeting was a physical one, it would have had to be a succession of diseases, or the same disease repeated many times. Otherwise, he could not have termed it buffeting. In speaking of this messenger or angel, Rotherham's translation uses the personal pronoun he. Weymouth's translation says. "As to this, three times I besought the
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