THE GOD WHO IS

[Exodus 3:1-15]

          Introduction to the Scriptures: Exodus, as you know, is the second book of the Bible and it introduces us to a grand story. Here’s what’s happened so far: in the first chapter we saw God’s care for His children when they might have been wiped out a number of times. But over the course of generations, even centuries, He had preserved them and they had grown against all odds. Then in the 2^nd chapter, we looked at Moses and what God was doing in Moses’ life. We learned some fascinating things, how God was preparing him for leadership and Moses himself didn’t even know it. Now in the 3^rd chapter we are coming to God’s confrontation with Moses – Moses meeting God personally, face-to-face for the first time and discovering some amazing things about God. Let’s listen to God’s word.

[Read Exodus 3:1-13]

          Then verses 14 and 15:

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites [this time he is introducing him to the word Yahweh], ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob – has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.

Well that conversation is not over. We are going to pick it up later, but now we’re going to see about this encounter with God and what Moses saw and what we might see as we meet the God who is.

Prayer for Illumination – Father, as we continue our worship, we want to listen to your word here. This is a great story, we see a piece of it here, and we want to learn what we’re supposed to learn from it. In this story you have introduced yourself, so I pray that we might really be tuned in. We sort of think we know a little bit about God. We talk about God. We know you are there somewhere, but here is a face-to-face encounter. Indeed Father, may we not only learn about you but may we encounter you today as well, the Living God. That is what this is all about. That is why we are here. So we pray that you would illumine your word for us, that my words might be your words, and you might speak to our hearts and shape us with your word, through Christ the Living Word, AMEN.

Message

          This is a great story! I hope you got enough sleep last night because you really want to be paying attention today. What we encounter today has to be the critical piece of this story. Last week we were introduced to Moses, and of course he seems like the main character. And he is a critical actor in the story, but not actually the main character. Today we will meet the central actor in this story.

          Moses’ life and experiences, which we reviewed last week, we might be inclined to call extraordinary. But that would be the right word only if we recognize that God deals with all of His children – even us – in the same extraordinary way. Extraordinary describes the unique attention God pays to His own children. It is extraordinary only by comparison to what we might have expected without His special attention, but we have His special attention. So the extraordinary is ordinary for us – I suppose something like all the children in Lake Wobegon are “above average.” All God’s children are dealt with extraordinarily in His plan. He does not waste anything, we learned that last week, not the tiniest detail. He doesn’t waste anything in our lives; He didn’t waste anything in Moses’ life. Everything is shaping him, everything is shaping you for what God has next.

          But up to this point in the story, we may be inclined to be disappointed in Moses – as his parents were probably disappointed in him, and Moses was likely disappointed in himself. A life which had begun with such promise has ended up here, herding sheep in some far corner of a desert. Talk about under-employed, Moses had not only a great foundation in the Hebrew faith, a good family – functional not dysfunctional, the best education, experience, and exposure money could buy in the greatest and richest civilization history had known! Think Prince Charles and his privileged education and experience in England for example.

          And now here Moses is, long past his mid-life crisis, herding sheep in the wilderness. I mean, we saw last week, Jethro’s back-country daughters could handle that job way back when they were kids! What a failure this guy has turned out to be. There was just no way he was living up to expectations. If I were the cartoonist, Gary Larson, I would probably depict Moses holding back the waters of the Red Sea in front of a reluctant flock and shouting, “Come on, you stupid sheep, I can’t hold this water back forever!” The guy is underemployed, right? With his skills and experience, you would think he might be more successful.

          But if you were here last week, you know something of what has been going on behind the scenes. You have learned to detect God’s sovereign hand in Moses’ life and in our lives, and you might be pardoned if you suspect that we haven’t gotten to the end of the story. It may be that things are about to change.

          So yes, here he is, as chapter 3 begins, tending sheep in the wilderness – and not even his own sheep by the way. It’s his father-in-law’s sheep. And the text tells us he leads the sheep to the far side of the desert, to a mountain called Horeb, or Sinai, depending on what language you are speaking. Now, no one is absolutely certain where this was. The Hebrew word for far side is actually back side of the desert, and since you always gave directions facing east, this probably means the west side of the desert behind you. But that isn’t very definitive. We know it is south of Israel. We know it is in the territory where the Midianites roamed – they were a nomadic people. We learn that it is a high mountain, and that there is a large gathering area nearby. There are still several candidates for the location, but the traditional site, which about 40 or more of us will be visiting in a few months, is still considered to be the most likely.

          You’re going to love it, by the way! It is exotic and rugged, and we know that God met the Israelites right around there someplace, and changed the whole course of history, and it is going to be grand to be there! We will have an opportunity to climb to the top of that mountain, a 7,400' peak, by an ancient path and stairway carved into the stone, and be at the top when the sun rises in the morning!

          But it is what happened here that is so fantastic. On location you grasp a sense of the history that is unfolding, and what happened at that place is marvelous beyond our comprehension. Keep in mind that up to this point, Moses knows a fair bit about God. But he is about to meet God face-to-face! You and I, also, know a fair bit about God. But what will it be like when we meet Him face-to-face? I’ll tell you one thing: there will be no room for our own little “pet” gods anymore. This will be, as our sermon title suggests, The God Who Is. This will be the God who created the universe by the power of His Word. This will be the God who has directed every detail since the world was born out of the chaos we know as the Big Bang, moving it all toward the accomplishment of His sovereign and glorious purpose. And this will be the God who will one day step forward and say: The time has come! The Grand Climax of All Things is now!

          Regardless of our wishes or our expectations, regardless of our preferences, this will be the God Who Is. And when we stand before Him, like tiny figures on the beach before a tsunami, it will seem pointless to protest, “But I didn’t think you were going to be like this. I thought you were going to be tolerant and inclusive. I thought you would congratulate me for being so creative in making up my own god.” But no, this will be the God Who Is.

          So in verse 2, the first representation Moses sees of The God Who Is, is flames of fire from within a bush. Why fire? I don’t know. But it was one of God’s favorite forms in which to make Himself visible to His people. What does fire mean to you? What do you suppose fire meant to them? I guess first of all it was real, not an apparition. You could watch it and feel it’s heat. You could see what it was doing. It was dynamic. And I think fire was unsettling – would it be accomplishing good or ill? Something helpful or destructive? Because it was quite capable of doing either. Could you cook on it, or warm yourself by it, or scare away your enemies with it? Or would it consume you and all you held valuable? All that is true of fire. Fire has always been as scary as it is necessary. And, when you stop and think about it, I guess that is true of God as well, is it not?

          Perhaps also it suggests something “Beyond” – a fiery cauldron out of which the universe and the galaxies and the stars were forged. And of course we have always feared that the world would some day end in fire, consuming all worlds and all things we have known.

          But Moses is intrigued by the fact that this fire was not doing what he expected. In fact it was not consuming the bush at all! And he is, after all, Moses. He’s acted rather impetuously before, though it has tended to get him in trouble. So he makes his way over to the bush, and this time encounters an even greater shock. He hears a voice speaking to him out of this bush. Now a voice suggests something personal, not just a great and mysterious force, birthing and destroying worlds. It suggests intelligence, and the possibility of communication, maybe even of relationship.

          And indeed, the first thing the Voice does is call out his name in the Hebrew, “Moshe! Moshe!” Whatever, or Whoever this fire represents, it knows his name. He had better be paying attention. It, presumably, knows him! And further, there is an urgency about what It wants to communicate with him. There is a suggestion of both warning and promise.

          This, by the way, is fundamentally what God’s calling us by name always involves as well. I’m afraid that theology, perhaps particularly Reformed Theology which I love, may be guilty of having cut the very heart out of this personal nature of God’s calling, as we see it in our text today. Theologically we call it “election” and picture a distant and disinterested God . . . I don’t know. . . scanning some colossal phone directory, selecting some names at random and without regard to their own will, to belong to Him, and others, equally randomly and without regard to their own will, to be cast away from Him eternally – God has made these decisions in advance. But this is not the God we meet on the pages of scripture. When God calls us, He calls us by name, He knows each one of us, He approaches us, and that calling contains both warning and promise. It depends upon our response, doesn’t it? It’s a warning if we ignore; it is a promise if we accept His sovereign calling.

          When Moses acknowledges God’s call, “That’s me; I’m here,” he says, God issues a stern warning. Right away, He says, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Moses has met The God Who Is, and now he is going to learn something critically important about this God, namely that He is, fundamentally, holy.

          Now Moses may not even know what “holy” means, although I’m sure he stopped and took his shoes off. It is the very first time the word “holy” has ever been used in the Bible so he may not have been familiar with it. But from the way God says it, Moses learns his first and most important lesson about God, and it is the same lesson we are learning about fire – he had better take it seriously! You cannot be casual here. It is clearly a warning. Whatever might be harbored in that burning bush, Moses cannot approach it casually. He cannot come before this God unprepared. A short time later two of his nephews, Nadab and Abihu, his brother Aaron’s sons, found that out when they tried to approach God casually, and fire came out from the Lord and consumed them. So God says, “Take off your shoes!” and Moses does it. Now it could simply be that shoes, then and now in the Middle East, are always considered “unclean,” because they have been in contact with the contaminated earth. Likely it is also a warning for Moses to humble himself before this God, for a slave nearly always went barefoot while his master wore foot-coverings. We can believe that Moses got the point in any case, and removed his desert sandals, humbled himself and made an attempt to remove the corruption which may stand between him and this God whom he was meeting in flames of fire in the desert – an awesome God indeed.

          Now Moses is getting his first glimpses of God in this place. If we, in our world today, have never seen God, could it be that we have refused to humble ourselves, and to acknowledge the corruption of sin that separates us from God? The book of Hebrews in the New Testament says that without a radical cleansing, there can be no forgiveness, no approach to a holy God. And we must certainly know that Pride is the deadliest of the deadly sins.

          In his popular book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes, “There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. . . . I am talking of . . . Pride . . . and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. . . . According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. . . . it was through Pride that the devil became the devil [the pride that Adam and Eve felt]: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

          It is Pride, of course, which encourages us to consider ourselves gods, as Adam and Eve were tempted to do. At the very least it is Pride which makes us think we are capable of inventing our own gods. Look around, by the way. I’m not making this up. This happens all through our culture today – gods whom we prefer to The God Who Is, the God Moses was encountering here. But of course, even this inventing of our own gods is only a subtle way of attempting to usurp the place of God for ourselves, for we do not really serve our invented gods, do we? We demand that they serve us. That is the whole idea -- “If I create you, you serve me.” But what about the God Who Is? What will happen when we encounter Him?

          No, our world does not see or know God, not because He is inaccessible or because He doesn’t want to be known, but because we are not willing to humble ourselves, and without humility, none of us will see God – until it is too late!

          So Moses is asked to humble himself, and to take seriously the fact that “our God is a consuming fire,” as a later prophet would say. By His very nature He must annihilate all that is impure and corrupt. Basically, the word “holy,” some of you may know, means separate. So very often when we think about God as holy, we think of Him as separate from us, aloof, distant, and untouchable. In fact, I think it is the reverse that is true if we really understand this. It is we, who have been corrupted by our sin and by our pride, who have therefore been separated or cut off from God, from life, from all that is good. It is we then who are aloof, we who are distant, and we who are untouchable. We are like the leper who must dress in sackcloth and cry out, “Unclean!” to warn away those who would be contaminated by a touch. We have been separated from all that is holy and good, by our sin, by the contamination of our souls. A holy God then must either cleanse and heal us, or sweep us away, outcasts, separated from Him for eternity.

          I think you are beginning to see, Moses is beginning to see that there is a very good reason the Bible tells us “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” For if we will not take God seriously and let Him do His work in us, then His only alternative is to purge that contamination with fire, cast us away from Him for eternity. With Moses’ calling comes the warning to humble himself before The God Who Is, or he will be consumed by Him. And our calling is quite the same. Moses was right to do what he did next in our text, to fall on his face before The God Who Is.

          The next thing Moses learns about this God is that He is a God who pays attention. He knows Moses. He knows Moses’ father. He knows Moses’ ancestors. He knows what is happening at this very moment in the lives of Moses’ people. He is a God who pays attention, and it turns out He has been paying attention all along. Now this could be good news, or it could be very bad news. I don’t know about you, but there are far too many times in my own life when, in all honesty, I hope God is distracted and not paying very close attention. If I sense Him watching in my private moments, I am tempted to ask Him, “Don’t you have something better to do? I mean, I think they need you in Haiti, or in Afghanistan, or in Washington D.C., for God’s sake! If you are looking for serious sinners, I could give you a few names. There’s got to be something better for you to do than pay attention to me.” But God says, “No, actually I thought you would appreciate my full attention.”

          But we don’t appreciate His full attention, do we? And the reason does not escape us. We know why we don’t appreciate His attention. It is spelled out quite clearly in John’s gospel in the New Testament. John 3:19ff. says,

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. [We wanted to hide.] Every-one who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

          So we sometimes hide from God’s attention. But what we have failed to understand is that God pays attention, not to try to catch us in a compromising position, as the media love to do with all their victims. Not so He can say, “Aha! Gotcha! Now I can ruin you!” Rather God pays attention because He loves us, and because He wants to rescue us even from the destruction we are so insistent upon bringing on ourselves. That is why He’s paying attention. Read about it in Psalm 139: Where could I go from your presence? And God says, “But I love you!”

          Yes, Moses will eventually learn, God knows us. He knows us by name, and that turns out to be a good thing. As J. I. Packer points out in his book, Knowing God, there is no moment when God’s attention is distracted from us. He knows everything about us. He is utterly realistic about us. There is nothing he can learn that will disillusion Him as we are so often disillusioned with ourselves.

          Yet He still loves us, and the reason for His attention is because He desires to bless us. As John 3 says once again, “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world [that wasn’t his intent], but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already,” because, essentially, he has failed at this first test. He’s not been willing to take God seriously, he’s not been willing to humble himself before the Lord. He prefers to be his own god. So where do you stand before the God Who Is?

          Well, Moses has met The God Who Is, and he’s found Him frightfully holy, but unexpectedly loving. Now he is about to learn that He is not only an observant God, but He is one who acts on behalf of His people. “I have seen the misery of my people . . .,” He says, I have heard what’s going on, “I am concerned about their suffering.” In verse 9, He says, “So I have come down to rescue them [and, he adds, to bless them more abundantly than they can ever imagine].”

          We are going to begin to follow that action on behalf of God’s people, that remarkable deliverance which He is anticipating here, over the next few weeks. But Moses gets one more surprise about this God in verse 10, and that is that God intends to use him to make this happen. You know, when we pray, if you’re like me, we are always asking for God’s miraculous intervention. We would like Him to come and do something for all these people that are in need and for us: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,” as Isaiah the prophet said, “. . . [that you would] cause the nations to quake before you! [That you would do] awesome things that we did not expect.”

          We all want miracles. But God says: You know what? I’ve got a better idea. How about if you do it? That doesn’t sound like a better plan to me! It didn’t sound like a better plan to Moses. But God said, Nevertheless, that is my plan. I could come down. I could rend the heavens. I could send an earthquake or fire. I could make this all happen, but how about if you make this change? Moses of course protests, as you and I would protest. But God does not seem particularly fazed by his reluctance. He says, Don’t worry. Maybe you didn’t understand. I’m not sending you out by yourself. I’m going to be with you. “The God Who Is” is going to be with you, empowering you, the God who has done all this will be with you. And I can just hear God chuckling as He thinks, Let’s see Pharaoh try to resist that! We will see Pharaoh try to resist that – but it didn’t work out.

          Moses, has lost all that early swagger and confidence, and he is terrified at the thought of God’s call, and we will explore his wonderful dialogue with God later. But we need to see that what we have seen here is true for us today, because we are coming to know a God who does not change. He made men and women in His own image – remarkably like himself – from the very beginning; He empowered them with His Spirit so they could have dominion over the earth. And He is still calling us, you and me as He called Moses, to change the world today. Sounds like a pretty tall order, doesn’t it? If He is depending on our wisdom and our insight, our energy, it’s not going to happen. But if we are depending on His Spirit, then it will, for He is the God Who Is. He accomplishes what He sets out to do.

          So it would be good for us, as God clearly knew it would be good for Moses, to stop and take a closer look at this God Who Is. Let me summarize what we’ve said today as we come to the climax of our text in those final three verses, 13-15. We’ve met this God Who Is, we’ve found Him to be holy, to be paying attention, to be willing to act, but here in these final verses Moses says, You know, I’m looking at this and I don’t think these people are going to be very impressed with me. The Pharaoh isn’t going to be impressed, my fellow countrymen aren’t going to be impressed. So what can I tell them about You that may persuade them to take this seriously?

          And God says, I’ll tell you my name. To the Hebrew, of course, a name always expressed a person’s fundamental character. They had a number of terms that referred to God, but a name, a personal name expressed fundamental character, so much so that if they later discovered something far more seminal in a person’s character, they would change his or her name. When Moses asks this question, he is asking God to give him some new information. Give me a name that reveals something about yourself that will convince these people.

          And God gives Moses the name by which all subsequent generations will know Him – the very name we have been using for Him throughout our study of the 3^rd chapter this morning. He is, He says, The God Who Is, I AM. “I AM WHO I AM” He tells Moses. I may not be the God you think I am. I may not be the God you think you would prefer, the God you think you want me to be. But I AM WHO I AM, and that is who you have to deal with, whether you want to or not. I am the God Pharaoh will have to deal with, whether he wants to or not. I am the God who all future generations will have to deal with, whether they want to or not. I AM WHO I AM. I don’t care what you think of me, I AM WHO I AM. Ehyeh asher ehyeh in the Hebrew, based on the fundamental word for “being” or “existence,” hayah, I AM.

          You have heard me, several times in the past, draw from this name the central or fundamental meaning, namely that God Is What Is – He is the source of all being. Nothing exists without Him.

          But there is more to the name than this. In fact, it is not at all limited to what may be perceived as a static, philosophical concept of pure being. It is, in the end, an active verb. God is not only a God who exists, He is a God who acts. As we read earlier from the prophet Isaiah, God says, “What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that will I do.” The God Who Is is a God who acts. He is a God who makes plans, who reveals those plans, and who carries out those plans.

          So there is something much more here than just overwhelming His people with an incomprehensible sense of pure Being. He is also saying, I AM what you see, I AM what you see me doing. As He said to Job, I couldn’t possibly explain to you all that I am or all that I am capable of doing. But I am the one you can see if you look, and I am the one you can see doing the things that I do and you’ll learn about me by watching. I reveal my character by my actions. You need not describe me with superlatives like “All-knowing, or All-seeing, or Infinite, or Immutable, or even, in an abstract way, Holy.” Rather, you can come to know me, and my people will come to know me, by observing who I AM and what I do.

          The description is beyond gender or number or tense. It may mean “being” or “becoming.” It can also be translated, I WILL BE what I will be, I WILL BE whatever you see me doing. You want to know who I am? Keep watching! My nature and character will unfold before you over the course of history through what you see me do. This is my name: I AM WHO I AM, and I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. That is who you are dealing with here. Technically, the name we often use, Yahweh, is four Hebrew consonants without vowels, YHWH. We pronounce it Yahweh. It is a shortening of what he has just told Moses. Really it is the 3^rd person form. He says I AM. But with this name, we refer to Him in the 3^rd person “HE IS.” That is what Yahweh means, “HE IS.” He is The God Who Is.

          We will come back to this name later, when God challenges us to tolerate no images of who He is, but it is worth considering in the light of our conversation today. In Moses’ day, those images would be carved out of wood or stone, or cast in some precious metal. In our day, we have become too sophisticated for these little icons, these little counterfeit gods. So we have shaped our own gods, not in metal images, but in mental images, haven’t we? – at least images of the God we would prefer. A god who wants to indulge us, a god who never really holds us accountable. But God will tolerate no images, not yours, not mine, not the pagans, for He is The God Who Is. If we will let Him be God, He will bless us. That is what He has in mind for us. But if we insist upon substituting our own gods, gods who do not demand holiness of us, gods who we know perfectly well can never really save us though we think we like them better, then we will have separated ourselves from The God Who Is for all eternity. The fear of the Lord, taking God seriously is the beginning of wisdom. It was then; it is for us today.

Closing prayer – Father, we have encountered you along with Moses. We have seen you through his eyes. And even though we have learned some things about you because we have been observing you in these millennia that have passed since Moses first saw you, the fundamental lesson is ours as it was his – YOU ARE who you are, YOU DO what you do, YOU WILL BE what you will be. We have to deal with the reality. We live in a world that operates on the fundamental ridiculous concept of denial. We want to make up our own truths and try to live by them. If that isn’t the most obvious expression of living in denial I don’t know what is. We need to face the reality of who you are and deal with the reality of who you are. And I pray that, with Moses, we might have learned our lesson today, and therefore we might begin to see your sovereign hand, seeking in all things to bless us. We pray this all in the name of Jesus, AMEN.