Claim. SMM identifies “Jehovah” of the Old Testament as an angel serving on God’s behalf — not the Creator directly — and grounds the identification in two interlocking arguments: from divine character and from Acts 7 exegesis.
Elaboration. The character argument: the OT portrays God as “a jealous God who terrified worshipers of other gods, a cruel God who ordered the Israelites to exterminate the seven tribes of Canaan leaving no survivors, and a merciless God who slaughtered the Israelites who had violated the commandments and law” (2.1. The attributes of Jehovah God, 124-202, 1983.2.15). SMM presses the contradiction: could the God of love who created the universe also feel such jealousy, exact such revenge, exhibit such cruelty? Lex talionis “cannot stem from the character of the Creator God.”
The exegetical argument cites Acts 7 directly: “an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush … you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it” (30, 53, quoted ibid). Stephen reads burning-bush and Sinai law-giving as angelic mediation. SMM extends to Genesis 18: the three beings who visited Abraham “were angels sent by God, who commissioned them to work on His behalf. The people did not know this” (ibid).
The framing reason is principled, not ad hoc: “the Old Testament Age is the age of the servant, and God cannot appear as a father to a servant” (ibid).
The claim is maximally polemical — mainstream OT scholarship, classical Christian theology, and Jewish tradition all identify YHWH as the Creator. Phase 2 seeds the thread engaging this counter-position.
See also. csg-angels-mediated-gods-ot-providence, csg-jesus-introduced-god-as-father