Biblical Text

You can read Exodus 3.1-16 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

[Note: The actual sermon will differ somewhat from what I had typed.]

Normally, the Advent season begins four Sundays before Christmas. However, this year, we are departing from church tradition and beginning today. For our Advent sermon series, longer this year due to the early start date, we have chosen to focus on the ‘I Am’ sayings of Jesus in the fourth Gospel. Today, we will try to lay the groundwork for those sayings by looking at a passage from the Old Testament – Exodus 3.1-16.

Those of you who have read Exodus often will recognize the passage as the one in which Moses sees the burning bush, encounters God in a new way, and is called by God to be the one to lead the Israelites out of their Egyptian slavery. So let us see what this part of scripture has to say.

If you read the accounts of Moses in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, you will realize that he was a very logical person. And this logic gets him into trouble, at times. But no one can accuse him of being credulous.

Having fled from Egypt after killing an Egyptian, Moses is happily tending to his father-in-law’s sheep in Midian. And while doing so he comes across a curious thing – a bush that is on fire, but that is not burning up. Moses, the logical man, knows that not only can you not have your cake and eat it too, but also you can’t have your bush and burn it too!

His curiosity stoked, Moses goes to investigate. And he encounters the living God and is transformed from being a shepherd of sheep to being a pilot of people.

Our passage is well known and has been portrayed often in big budget movies as well as simple Sunday school skits. Unfortunately, as is often the case, when we tell a story often enough, sometimes we lose sight of the original focus of the story. And sometimes we add elements to the story that are not in the original. We could, therefore, go through the entire passage phrase by phrase. But that would take too long.

Luckily for us, the crux of the passage lies in the two questions Moses asks God – burning questions at the burning bush – and in the responses God gives to those questions.

So let us fast forward to the point where Moses asks his questions. When he approaches the bush, God speaks to him and tells him that he has seen the suffering of the Israelites at the hands of the Egyptians and that he is soon going to act decisively to deliver them from this oppressive condition.

God then tells Moses to take this message to the leaders of the Israelites. And here Moses asks his first question: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

Moses quite likely is remembering the question of the Israelite in chapter 2. Remember, Moses had murdered an Egyptian and then tried to step in when two Israelites were fighting. And one of the Israelites asked him, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?”

At that time Moses could only flee from Egypt to Midian. But now God was asking him to actually be a ruler and judge. And Moses knew what he was – a murderer who had fled justice.

And so he asks God, “Who am I to do what you are asking me?” In other words, on what basis are you asking this of me? Do you not know my track record? Do you not remember my past? Do you not know that I have blood on my hands? What qualifies me to do this task?

Very pertinent questions. And many of us probably have asked ourselves this when we have felt God leading us in a new direction. We may become plagued with doubts. We may wonder if we are truly hearing the direction of God or if we are just entertaining our own fantasies.

God’s response to this is just wonderful. Moses asks, “Who am I?” And with his response, it seems that God would have failed every language comprehension test!

In most of my classes I tell my students to answer the question that was asked and not the question they think was asked. But what does God do?

Moses asks, “Who am I?” and God says, “I will be with you.” Is this evasive? After initiating this encounter, why is God not directly answering Moses’ question?

But God is answering Moses’ question; just not in the way we – or perhaps even Moses – expected. “Who am I?” asks Moses and God replies, “You are one I am with” but the emphasis has shifted from Moses to God. Moses’ question does not have God in the picture. He asks, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

But God responds and puts the focus where it ought to be – on God. “I will be with you.”

It is the assurance of God’s presence with Moses as Moses fulfils God’s call on his life. It did not matter what Moses was or had done. It did not matter that Moses viewed himself as insufficient to the task or disqualified on the basis of his past actions. All that mattered was that God was going to be with him.

God could have listed any number of qualities that Moses possessed. But none of these – or even all of these – would have been sufficient for the task ahead of Moses. What was sufficient is precisely what God includes in his response. “I will be with you,” says God.

It is an assurance of success in the task to which he had been called. Note that not once does Moses doubt God’s ability. And even through the rest of his life, you will not see Moses doubting God’s ability to do what he had promised. This is because Moses knew what Paul writes about in his letter to the Romans, “If God is for us, who can stand against us?”

Moses’ first question is about his own identity. “Who am I?” And God reveals that the truest identity Moses has is as the one whom God is with. He is the one who basks in the presence of the living God.

Moses takes this promise at face value and asks his second question. Having understood the true nature of his own identity, Moses now moves on to God’s identity. “What shall I tell them?” he asks God. How do I introduce you to the leaders of the Israelites? “What is your name?”

What do we make of this? Are we to assume that Moses did not know God’s name? We are told in Genesis 4 that soon after Seth’s son, Enosh, was born, humans began to call on the name of Yahweh. We see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob worshipping Yahweh by name in the latter parts of Genesis. Are we to believe that, during their enslavement in Egypt, the Israelites forgot the name of God?

I find that hard to believe. The whole existence of Israel was predicated on the call of Abram by Yahweh to leave Ur of the Chaldees and go to the land of Canaan. This was their foundational story – a story that began with Yahweh singling out Abram so that through Abram the entire world would be blessed. They could not forget his name!

More likely this is an example of a common way of thinking. Many people of that time believed – and some today believe – that to say the true name of someone was to have power over that person.

So Moses is seeing if this is indeed Yahweh who is speaking to him. If it were any other person, then that person would not have had power over Yahweh and would not have been able to use Yahweh’s name. However, if he were being addressed by Yahweh, then Yahweh would be able to use his own name.

Notice that, till this point in the passage, God refers to himself as God and not by his own name. Even in response to the first question, God says, “You will worship God on this mountain” and not, “You will worship Yahweh on this mountain.”

And so God responds with the familiar phrase, “I am who I am” or as the King James Version renders it “I am that I am.” Or as the NIV footnote says, “I will be who I will be.”

We have used this phrase so often that we do not pause to understand what this means. Too often we are told and conclude that this is God’s name. However, verse 15 clearly tells us what God’s name is. God says, “Tell the Israelites, ‘Yahweh has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever.” God’s name is Yahweh, not ‘I am.’

But what do we make of verse 14? If we take this as a plain statement of fact, we will be unable to decipher its meaning. I mean, every one of us can say, “I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be.” It is obviously true that a person is who he or she is. This is a logical tautology. It conveys no information and cannot really be understood because it is circular.

It is as though I used a phone to call someone. And when a person unfamiliar with the technology asked me, “What is that thing?” I responded by saying “A phone is a phone.” Absolutely true. Absolutely useless.

If God’s response is indeed circular, then it is opaque too and goes against the very fact that it was God who had initiated this self-disclosure. If God were using this occasion to come out from the shadows and reveal himself, then saying, “I am who I am” just defeats the purpose.

But what if this is a riddle? The phrase in Hebrew is אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (‘eh-yeh asher eh-yeh’) and, the word אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה (‘eh-yeh’) can be either a present tense ‘I am’ or a future ‘I will be.’ This explains the footnote in the NIV. However, the translations also betray an unwillingness to look at the entire passage and see what is really happening.

God tells Moses that he has seen the distressing situation of the Israelites and that he is going to remedy it. And then he says not ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I will be who I will be’ but ‘I am who I will be.’

In other words, God is known through what he does. Till now the Israelites only had the wonderful stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph to look back on with wonder. For centuries now, this God, who had saved them by bringing them to Egypt during a severe famine, had been silent. And they would have been wondering – as so many wonder and doubt when reading the scriptures – if those things had actually happened.

And God tells Moses that he will now make himself known to the Israelites not through remembrance of days long gone by but in the way he is going to act soon.

So he says to Moses, “You want to know who I am? The leaders of Israel want to know who is sending you? Well, then, hear this. I am now, today, as I am calling you, what I will prove to be when I act as I have promised.”

This is the message that Moses carried to the Israelites. This is why they were ready to believe. Because God told them to base their knowledge of him on what he was going to do. And only a living God can dare to say this.

In fact, Jesus uses this very passage to defend the resurrection based on the fact that if God still says, “I am the God of Abraham” then it must mean that Abraham is somehow alive and will somehow be alive and that, therefore, God is not just the living God but the God of the living.

And this living God is alive today too. In the weeks to come we will look at a few things we get to know about God through the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus.

Each of these captures an element of the nature and character of God. We cannot do it any other way because as the Gospel of John tells us, “No one has seen God. It is God, the only Son, who has made him known.”