I Am

This morning, we're going to open to Exodus chapter 3, the day that God introduced Himself. Let's have a read of Exodus 3:1. Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. And he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.

He looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside to see this great sight why the bush is not burned. When the Lord saw he had turned his sight to see, God called him out of the bush, Moses, Moses. And he said, here I am. Then he said, do not come near.

Take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. And he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face for he was afraid to talk to God, to look at God. Then the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

And now behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppressed them. Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? He said, but I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.

Then Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me what is his name, what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, 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, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.

Generations. Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob has appeared to me saying, I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt, and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey. So far, our reading. Friends, do you remember the moment or a time when God was introduced to you?

Do you remember what that person told you? It may be a very long time ago. Do you remember what that person told you about God? Perhaps some of us, this is something we remember quite well, but for others, it may be something that happened a long time ago. To be honest, I can't remember the exact moment that God, the concept of God was explained to me, but I'm sure it was when I was very little. Having been brought up in a Christian family, I can't remember that exact time. Mum and Dad are here, and you can ask them afterwards. But some things I remember very clearly is how openly we did speak about God.

One particular moment I remember quite well was when my mum said to me that although she loved my dad very much, she loved God even more because He was the most important thing in her life. Now for a young mind, that was a huge shock. My young worldview struggled to grasp the concept that you could love someone you couldn't see more than someone you saw all the time. I remember another time when my dad told me that God was stronger than him. Wow.

How can anyone be stronger than my dad? They must be so strong. All the time, my parents told me they weren't scared of dying because that would mean that they would be with the God they loved. It's a terrifying thought, that idea of your parent dying, so what a powerful testimony of the confidence and the love they had for God. Can you remember the day that you were introduced to God?

Maybe I should put it this way or add this angle. Can you remember the time that you introduced God to your children? How did you struggle in trying to come up with concepts, words, and metaphors to make this huge, powerful being something understandable to a four-year-old, five-year-old mind? Well, this morning, we look at a moment where God was not so much introduced as he introduced Himself. Let's have a look at Exodus chapter 3.

Now this morning, we come to a significant part where God explains exactly who He is to Moses, but also through Moses to the Israelites. And what does God reveal about Himself in this passage? Now remember, God had been the God of the Israelites for at least four hundred years. But in this four hundred years of captivity in Egypt, the Israelites had forgotten who He was. For four hundred years, they were oppressed and they were surrounded by the gods of the Egyptians, the priests of the Egyptians.

And for four hundred years, there were no prophets. There were no voices to urge them back to God, and they had forgotten Him. In the first two chapters of Exodus, four hundred years had gone past. But now on this day, God introduces Himself, and this very moment, friends, is one of the most significant for the Bible. It shapes and it influences our theology throughout.

This morning, if you don't know God, this morning, if you don't feel close to God, listen to these words because these words breathe life into this relationship with God. These are the words that God uses to reveal Himself to you and me. Firstly, this is who God explains Himself to be. He is holy. Earlier in the story of Exodus, Moses is shown to be this hopeless, pathetic, weak saviour who has far too much of a self-esteem or an ego for his own good.

A would-be saviour of Israel who murders an Egyptian man fighting with an Israelite, and then runs away, hides for forty years in the backwater of the Midian wilderness. In Exodus 3, we find him looking after a handful of smelly sheep in the bundes. Imagine it just as you would an ordinary working day, a Tuesday in your normal week. Moses standing outside lazily looking after these sheep as they're grazing. And as he's doing this, in the corner of his eyes, he sees a bit of light.

There is a shrub. There is a bush. Nothing particularly fascinating about this bush burning. Now that's probably interesting, but it's also not unusual for people that were very used to fires, who used fires every night, at least for warmth, to cook on. But it's probably more interesting than these smelly sheep. So looking over there, he sort of is interested in what's going on and how this fire is burning without anyone being around to have started it.

But as he sort of looks at it, he notices that this bush is not burning up. It's not being consumed, the Bible says. As Moses comes closer to it in verse 4, the Bible states that God calls to him from the bush by name. Moses, Moses, he hears, here I am.

Moses replies, probably very perplexed. And God commands Moses not to approach, not to come any closer, but to take off his sandals because the ground on which he is standing is holy ground. God then says to him, I am the God of your forefathers. I'm the God of your father, but also your forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And add this, all of a sudden, the vague childhood stories of a long-forgotten God comes rushing back to Moses, and he collapses on his face in reverence before God.

The first thing that Moses comes to know, therefore, about this God is that He is holy. And this holiness is tied up very physically, very visibly in this element of fire. Now this image, the concept of God as fire is actually introduced as a pattern from here on out. God's divine presence is shown in the physical world through fire and smoke, isn't it? Exodus 13.

God shows Himself leading Israel in the wilderness by day in a pillar of smoke, by night in this column of fire. Exodus 19:18, Moses meets God on Mount Sinai, and the mountain, it says, is covered in smoke and fire in this meeting. Exodus 24 explains this moment from Israel's perspective when Moses meets God. It says this, to the Israelites, the glory of the Lord looked like a consuming fire. Not just a fire, an enveloping huge consuming fire.

The burning bush, therefore, introduces this God who is a God of holiness and fire. Now the Hebrew word holy literally means separate. What this means for us when we use the word holy, when we talk about having a holy life or God being holy, means to be other, means to be completely different to what is here and around us. Take off your shoes, Moses, God says, this place is holy. This moment is holy.

I am holy. Of all the attributes God could have communicated first, He chose to introduce Himself to Moses as holy. Why? Because a god who is anything like Moses, a god who is anything like the god of Egypt, a god who is anything like you and me will always fail for what God was going to tell him next. God showed Himself to be holy by showing His incredible power, and God calls Moses by name.

God needed no introduction from Moses. God knew who Moses was. God's holiness, His separateness is shown in part by His supreme omniscience, that He knows everything. He knows everything. God is not simply concerned about an empty display therefore of His holiness.

No. He communicates His holiness to Moses, I believe, so that there may be a confidence for Moses and for Israel. If God were anything like us, Moses, if God is anything like you, He's gonna fail you. Just like you failed Israel, but He's not. Moses, He is your superior.

This is why Moses has to take off his shoes. It's a sign, an old Testament ancient Near Eastern sign of humility, to take off your shoes, to be completely bare and vulnerable to your superior. Moses has to acknowledge that God is holy. Moses has to know that God is on a far higher plane than he is. Take off your sandals, Moses.

Humble yourself before someone who is your superior. This God is so holy because He is so powerful. As fire naturally consumes and destroys, so God can control even the forces of thermodynamics to keep a flame burning without using up any fuel. How impossible is that? It is supernatural.

And from this time forward, all throughout the Bible, people will hear again and again and again how God is a fire, but an all-consuming fire. A purifier against everything that goes against His nature, namely sin. Malachi 4:1 will later say, behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven when all the arrogance and all the evil doers will turn to stubble. The day is coming that will be set ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave neither root nor branch, but consume them. The God who is fire, the Bible says, is holy, separate from all that is human and frail.

And not only must all things therefore bow to His authority and His complete otherness, but also those that oppose Him, those that resist Him will be overcome by His holiness and His glory. This is the introduction. This is the beginning of the introduction of God. Do you think of God in that way? First and foremost, that He is holy and that He is dangerous, that He is altogether different from us.

Now as Christians, we sit with this tension, don't we, between the altogether otherness of God and yet the intimacy that He seemingly has, the connection that He has with us. God is what theologians call both transcendent and immanent, both above us but also among us. And this is a theological tension that we must hold if we are to know God. Now unfortunately, we often fail by emphasising one over the other as we often do with these sort of tensions. We either emphasise His absolute transcendency and don't see Him as a God we can know personally, or we know Him without fearing His transcendence and otherness.

We see world religions, the religions around us also struggling with this concept and getting it wrong. In Islam, God is so transcendent. God is so far above humanity. He does not know even His followers' names. He doesn't know those people that profess love for Him because He's altogether too holy.

On the flip side, we have Hinduism that says God is everywhere. God is in the rocks. God is in the trees. God is in amongst us as we share in the divine spark. God is absolutely everywhere, and yet we fail to know a God who is holy and a God who is to be revered.

And God then becomes as messy and as broken and as corrupt as we are. But the living God, the God of the Bible, is both supremely other and wholly intimate in His creation. He demands respect from Moses. He demands respect from Moses, but He knows Moses' name. He calls you to fall in line with His will, but He does so from the closeness of your own heart.

This is a holy and powerful God who is both transcendent and immanent. Now this leads us to the next attribute we see. In verse 7, God begins by saying that He has seen the misery in Egypt for the Israelites. He says, I have heard them crying out and I am concerned. I am concerned about their suffering.

Now this is so beautiful to me. Immediately following His introduction of the holy God of fire, God shows His next attribute that He is compassionate. That He is compassionate. Like a loving father who is worried about his children, His heart is moved. His heart is moved with emotion for them.

And again, theologians and Christians wrestle with this idea because we also say that God is unchangeable. God is immutable, but here we see that God is moved by emotion. God is moved with concern. So He makes a plan, an audacious rescue plan out of Egypt, the most powerful country in the world, and to bring His people into a better place, a good land, a spacious broad land, He says, full of good things, a land flowing with creamy, delicious milk and sweet, sweet honey. A land of plenty instead of existence of pain.

Now this compassion is unexpected and it's remarkably gracious because the Israelites did not know God. Did you pick up on that? In chapter 2, when they groan in their agony, they don't cry to God. If you look at it, they don't cry to God and say, Yahweh, our God, the God of our forefathers, rescue us. They just groan, the Bible says.

Ra'ak, the Hebrew word is. They just cry out into the big blue sky for anyone to hear them, but God hears them. So why is it important for us to know that God is compassionate? Why do we need to know? Why does God reveal Himself as compassionate?

Well, because without God's compassion, we would not be able to know God. I was shocked one day when my Old Testament lecturer, a man I really, really respect, said to us, and it rocked my world, he said to us, the Bible is not about God. It's about us. The Bible is not about God. It's about us.

The Bible is man-centred, he said, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. What do you mean the Bible is man-centred? I said it's all about God's glory. It's all about who He is and what He is doing to restore His kingdom. He said, of course, it's about God's glory, but why was the Bible given to humanity in the first place?

It is so that we could understand. It's so that we could know who God is. God's glory is His eternally. God's perfectly satisfied in full knowledge of Himself and His full knowledge even of us. He doesn't need this book to attain glory.

The Bible tells us the story of how God is saving humanity. The Bible tells us of how we were created, of how lost we became, and how magnificently He saved us. The Bible is the story of humanity and the compassionate God who loves it. So while God is supremely holy and other, He could have existed in this perfect holiness and glory forever without us. But because He is compassionate, because He is gracious, He also allows us to know Him.

And it comes to Moses for no other reason but simply that He is moved by His compassion. This is why God wants us to know Him. If you have ever struggled feeling God's goodness, if you have ever struggled finding where He fits into your life, please remember this. If it wasn't for His mercy, you would have no God to long for in the first place. You can only know God because He has mercifully reached out to you.

And even though Israel had forgotten Him, even though Israel did not know Him, they did not even acknowledge Him. God would show them the extent of His love by bringing them up out of Egypt by His mighty hand. And so the second thing God shows is that He is compassionate. And then thirdly, and lastly, God reveals Himself as dependable, completely secure. After God tells Moses His rescue plan, that he is to be sent by God to speak to Pharaoh and the Israelites and to bring them out of Egypt, Moses asks the question, what is the name of this God who I will tell them is saving them?

What should I tell them? God Moses asked God, and God replies, telling him, I am who I am. I am has sent you. Now I'm not sure what the Israelites would have thought when they heard this or what Moses thought when he heard this, but the word God gives Moses introducing His name, well, it's a bit perplexing even today. God doesn't give Moses a noun, a name, a title.

God gives Moses a verb as His name, a doing word which says I am. Now this verb is so dynamic and so intangible, Bible commentators can't completely be sure how to translate it, what the meaning is. In our English Bibles, you might even see that there is a footnote in that verse that introduces God's name. Let me just find it here. Can someone yell out where that verse is?

14. I am who I am. Now there's a footnote in my Bible here that says, it can be also I am what I am or I will be what I will be. In fact, it can be I will be what I was as well. We don't know how to translate this.

We don't know what to do with it. I don't know if the Israelites or Moses himself understood what God was saying in this moment. God introduces Himself not as a noun, but as a verb. Now why does God do this? Well, it's probably what God intended in the first place because He is the one who was, and He is the God who is, and He is the God who will be.

He is the God who was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of your forefathers. I was the God who made a covenant that I want to be your God and I want you to be My people. But He is the God who is, the God who does not change, the God who does not relent. If He plans to save Israel, He will do so regardless of the circumstances, but He is also the God who will show Israel exactly who He is in the wilderness. He will mould and shape Israel to know who this God is when they get the Ten Commandments, when they see how He cares for them in the wilderness, how He leads them for forty years patiently, like Exodus says, carrying them on His shoulders like a father does to his son. I will be what I will be.

God introduces Himself not as a noun, but as a verb, and this word becomes the title by which Israel will forever know their God, Yahweh. I am. This unchanging God is therefore, this is what we get from it, always dependable, so secure. This gives God's people incredible confidence because if He says He is holy, then He will be holy. If He says He is compassionate, then He is compassionate.

The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and of Jacob who bestowed them with unmerited grace and favour in horrible circumstances, in wavering faith, in very disobedient lives. The God of these three men is the same God for Israel. And this same God who would rescue Israel from Egypt is the same God who would later send Jesus. The God who is, the God who is I am, is dependable. And so that is our greatest confidence.

Because whatever our circumstances may be, whatever changing situations we find ourselves in, we know that God does not change. He remains perfectly the same. His love is not fickle. It always protects. It always perseveres.

Our God is dependable and faithful. And so just in closing, on that day that God introduces Himself to Israel in a wonderful way, Israel hears that God is holy, compassionate, and that He is dependable. But that burning bush, in many ways, is a foreshadowing of what would magnificently be announced when a man called Jesus came thousands of years later, who at one time in John 8 made this astonishing announcement. Speaking to the Pharisees and the religious leaders at the time, He said to them, your father Abraham, your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing me one day. They replied, you aren't even 50 years old, and you claim to have seen Abraham?

I tell you the truth, Jesus answered, before Abraham was even born, I am. And this just tore the house down. This just caused chaos and a riot. Friends, the I am of Exodus 3 is therefore the one who showed Himself as holy and compassionate and dependable in the person of Jesus Christ. The dependable and compassionate God who was moved by the plight of His people under the yoke of slavery, but not of Egypt, of sin and death.

The God who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, dying in our place, winning forgiveness and the cleansing of our past, and revealing Himself as the God who will be as He will be. As the new and the better Moses, Jesus Christ came to lead us into a good land, a spacious broad land, a place flowing with milk and honey, where we may dwell with our holy and dependable God forever. And so we may refuse to come to the holy God, walking across this holy ground because our lives don't line up, and we refuse by our own stubbornness His commands a thousand times to worship Him. God is a consuming fire, we think, and He will consume all who oppose Him and reject Him even with everlasting fire, but Jesus Christ has crossed that holy ground for you. The transcendent God becoming absolutely immanent, intimate in flesh.

Receive Him. Oh, if you will receive Him. This God who gives Himself to you. Cling to the cross of His sacrificial death with empty hands, stretched-out hands, the death that we needed to pay for our sin. Bring your sin so that you may receive forgiveness and new life.

Why? Because our God is holy, our God is compassionate, and our God is dependable. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your revealed Word. We thank you, God, that we may know you by your grace.

Lord, it is only by your mercy we may know you in the first place. We only sense who you are by a love that moved first. Before we knew you, before we loved you, you loved us. God, we thank you for this wonderful, wonderful moment captured in your Word. We thank you that you are a holy God.

We adore you for being a holy God, completely other and therefore completely stable, completely dependable, giving us a confidence that you are not corruptible and fickle like we are. And that you are not simply above us, but that you are moved by our plight, that you are moved by compassion and care by our needs. And therefore, you save us, God. But in saving us again, you show yourself to be completely dependable because the one who saved Israel in the past, who saved His people in Christ, will also save His people now and in the future. And so we have a great trust that this life, this faith, our future is secure, God.

That we are your people forever and ever. Oh, God, our hearts are full. Our hearts are moved. We are humbled, but we rejoice in this great news. Thank you for this revelation.

Lord, may this revelation dwell with us forever. Thank you that you are our God and that you love us. In Jesus' name. Amen.