Good morning! Today we begin a new series, called “I AM”. This series explores the purpose, the works, and the character of Jesus through metaphorical pictures found in the Bible. Each of these pictures are rich in meaning and help us to better appreciate our Savior and all He has done for us.
Today’s message title is the same as the series title, and we are going to explore what God means by the name “I AM”. To begin, we are going to look at God’s calling of Moses in Exodus chapter 3. For context, recall that in Genesis, the book ends with the death of Joseph in Egypt. Recall that Joseph, through the power of God, saved Egypt from severe famine and even made them immensely wealthy and powerful because of it. This happened because God showed Joseph the proper interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams. Under Joseph’s direction, Egypt stored up massive amounts of grain in the years before the famine and made an extreme profit during the famine by selling that grain.
Exodus begins where Genesis ends. Jacob and his descendants continued to live in Egypt and multiplied greatly. At first, the Pharaohs remembered what Joseph had done and treated the Israelites honorably, but eventually Joseph was forgotten, and the Egyptians forced the Israelites into slavery. But even this did not stop the God-blessed multiplication of the Israelite people, so the Egyptians treated them more and more harshly.
Because even this had no effect on the Israelite’s multiplication, the Pharaoh decreed that Israelite baby boys should be killed, thrown into the Nile River. At this time a particular baby was born, and his mother hid him for as long as she could. But eventually she could do so no longer, so she placed him in a basket and put it along the bank of the Nile. Pharaoh’s daughter picked him up, saving his life, and she named him Moses.
As a grown man, Moses saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite, and in anger he killed the Egyptian, thinking that no one had seen him. But the next day, he tried to intervene between two Hebrews fighting each other, and one of them revealed that what Moses had done was known. Moses fled and ended up living in Midian, and in time he married a woman there.
This brings us to Exodus chapter 3. Moses sees a bush that appeared to be on fire but yet did not burn up. It was the LORD, who told Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” He told Moses that He had heard the crying out of the Israelites in Egypt, and explained that He was sending Moses to Pharaoh to bring them out of Egypt.
Moses replied, “who am I to do this?” And God said He would be with them, and the would leave Egypt and worship God on the mountain where they were. Picking up the account in Ex. 3:13:
Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” 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.’” – Ex. 3:13-14
The phase translated “I am who I am” is in Hebrew “Ehyeh”. Going for a literal translation, this word is best translated “I will be”. It is in the future tense in Hebrew. A slightly less literal translation is “The one who is will be.” What does this mean? It means that He is the forever existing one. He was never created, and He will never be unmade. He is eternal. Again, the literal translation is “I will be” and it is in first person.
Now it would cause confusion if Moses used this exact form of the word when he talks with the Israelites, saying “I will be has sent me to you.” It’s kind of like a very old joke I don’t remember about a person named Yu. I don’t remember the joke, but just imagine this person introducing himself to someone saying, “Hi, I’m Yu.”
God knows this, so He explains further:
God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘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 you shall call Me from generation to generation.” – Ex. 3:15
The word translated “the Lord” is “Yahweh”. This word is closely related to “Ehyeh” except that the pronouns have changed from “I will be” to “He will be”. It makes perfect sense that Moses would use “Yahweh” as he talks about Him to others. Again, a fuller in-context translation is “He who is will be.” And again, this speaks to his uncreated and eternal nature.
And this name, “Yahweh” is found repeatedly in Scripture – it appears over 6,500 times in the Old Testament. This is incredible, as the entire Old Testament is about 23,000 verses, less than four times this amount.
Now one of the ten commandments says to not use God’s name in vain. Over time, Jews reasoned that if you use God’s name out loud, even reading Scripture, who can say for sure that they don’t have mixed or slightly imperfect feelings as they say it? God’s standard is perfection, after all. So they decided that the safest thing to do would be not to speak God’s name aloud at all. So when they read out loud passages that had the name Yahweh, they substituted another name for it, the Hebrew word for Lord, “Adonai.” And many translations of the Bible in English keep this tradition by translating Yahweh as all-caps LORD.
Now the Hebrew scribes went even further, as they didn’t want someone reading from the Old Testament out loud forgetting to substitute Yahweh with Adonai. They also didn’t want to materially alter the Holy Scriptures. Now formal Hebrew writing is without vowels; if you look at a newspaper in Israel it typically does not have vowels. And vowels in Hebrew are little marks like apostrophes and dots above and below the Hebrew letters. They are much smaller than the consonants, so much so that you don’t even have to alter the spacing between consonants to fit the vowels in. And so what the scribes did was add vowels to Yahweh, but not the Yahweh vowels. Instead, they put in the vowels of Adonai, the word for Lord, into the consonants for Yahweh. Now the final syllable of Adonai is what we call the long I sound. But I is not really a single sound; it is two, ahhh followed by eeee. And the eeee sound in Adonai is actually a consonant letter, not a vowel letter. I know this is getting confusing, but bear with me. What I am saying is that the vowel sounds in Adonai is ahhh ohhh ahhhh, not ahhh ohhh aii. And so what they did was stick ahh ohhh ahhh into Yahweh to get Jehovah.
Now, I can hear you saying, now hold on. Yahweh has totally different consonants than Jehovah. Well in English that is correct, but not in Hebrew. English hasn’t been especially accurate in transcribing Hebrew sounds. This is true with other languages as well. For example, the Chinese city Beijing used to be translated into English as Peking. Now some of this is partially due to the fact that in China there are many different dialects, and in some it sounds more like Peking than it sounds like Beijing. But let’s get back to Yahweh and Jehovah.
In modern Hebrew, and as far as we know, going back at least 1000 years, there was no J sound in Hebrew. There was a yeh sound, and when you combine a yeh sound with an H sound, it becomes even closer to the J sound. So it shouldn’t be Jehovah, it should be Yehovah.
Also, there is similar situation with the W sound Yahweh. There is no W sound in Hebrew. This should be a V sound. So Yahweh should be Yahveh. YHVH. So now, if you take the vowels out of Yahveh and put in the ahh ohh ahhh vowels of Adona-i, you get Yahovah.
So when Jews read the Old Testament scrolls, they see the Adonai vowels there on Yahveh and do they say Yahovah? No, because that is too close to Yahveh. So they actually use the real Hebrew word Adonai.
This is probably not a discussion that Jehovah’s Witnesses want to hear. And I think it is fair to criticize the Jehovah’s Witnesses for their bad theology built upon this word. But I think you can also fairly criticize the Jews. In trying to avoid breaking one of the Ten Commandments, they are instead breaking the direct command to literally call Him Yahweh for all generations in Exodus 3:15.
Now I want to say a little bit about names in the Bible. Often people in the Bible are named after an event or situation that either took place at or around their birth. It’s interesting to me that people who do through hiking on long trails like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail are almost always given a “trail name”; that is, people on the trail give a nickname to people they see on the trail based on something they have done. For example, someone might have the name Nahamsha based on their accent or Five-stack based on how many pancakes they ate somewhere at a stop off trail. There are some instances of this also in the Bible. The “Sons of Thunder”, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, are an example from the New Testament. And Peter was called “The Rock.” (Why do these totally sound like the names of professional wrestlers?) Anyway, who gave these men their names? Jesus Himself. And God also gave some people new names in the Old Testament: Abram became Abraham, Sarai became Sarah, and Jacob became Israel. And the Bible seems to say that we will be given new names by God! We don’t have time to go into this, but if you want to explore it, here are some verses: Rev. 2:17, Rev. 3:12, Is. 56:5, Is. 62:2, and Is. 65:15. It’s not completely clear from these verses if we will all be given different names, but I don’t think it really matters. We will be with Jesus, and nothing compares with that.
But the reason I bring this up is that names given deliberately in the ways we have discussed, whether based on events at birth or on later events or personality traits, necessarily focus in on something specific. But what do you name the God of the Universe? Everything seems far too little, far too narrow, far too confining. And so I think the name of God “ I am that I am” or “I who am will be” although vague and perhaps confusing, is appropriately so. The God of the universe is not at all like the thousands or even millions of false gods that people have worshiped throughout the ages.
It is interesting to me that in English we have the word “God” to describe Him, a short one-syllable name with three letters. We use a capital G to distinguish Him from all the false gods. This word comes from the German Gott and, further back, Gudan. But the word was first applied to false gods before it was applied to the true God. When that happened, the word shifted from a feminine ending to a masculine one. We are fortunate that there are no religions today who call their false god “God.”
But this is not true in every language. Mongolia, for example, has a huge problem because the early missionaries who came there and gave Mongolia their first translation of the Bible decided to use the word Buddha for God. In hindsight, this was a terrible thing to do because Buddha was the name of the false god they were currently worshiping. This issue continues to cause problems for the church in Mongolia. It makes evangelism more difficult, and people are more likely to try to just add worship of the true God to the false gods they worship.
And so I find the name that God gives Moses to be perfect. It captures the mystery of God, how He is utterly unlike the false gods that the people worshiped back then, gods of the moon, of harvest, of fertility, of the underworld, and so on. The Creator God is beyond names. He who invented all things that have names cannot be named with a conventional name.
But God’s mysterious name for Moses and Moses’ people, and which was used throughout the old Testament, had another purpose as well, a purpose that would come in the years after the events of the Old Testament came to a close. That purpose was to identify Jesus Christ as God. The Jews had – perhaps misguidedly – made Yahweh, the name of their God, a name that nobody ever spoke, because to say that name at all might make you guilty of breaking one of the ten commandments.
So when Jesus came along and started saying, likely in Hebrew or Aramaic, “I am” and applying it to Himself, this was a shocking thing. It meant that Jesus was either truly God or one of the worst blasphemers ever seen. To those whose hearts were soft, to those who were open, He was the former, and to those who were proud, who liked things how they were and saw no need to repent, He was the latter.
Let’s look at an account in Matthew 14. Jesus has just fed the 5000.
Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of Him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. After He had dismissed them, He went up on a mountainside by Himself to pray. Later that night, He was there alone, and the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it. Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. When the disciples saw Him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.” – Matt. 14:25-27
This is followed by Peter walking on the water towards Jesus, but then his faith wavers and he starts to sink and cry out, “Lord, save me!” Immediately, we are told, Jesus reaches out his hand and saves him. The two of them went into the boat, and the wind immediately died down. And then we are told that those in the boat worshiped Him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
Now why would they worship Him? Only God Himself should be worshiped. It is not enough that someone does miracles that they should be worshiped. To do so is idolatry. Any other Jewish person would immediately protest strongly and demand that they stop. We see this in Acts, for example, when Paul and Barnabus are worshiped as gods in Lystra. They protested vigorously, saying “Why have you done this? We are only men…”
There were multiple reasons why the disciples worshiped Jesus. They had just seen Him walk on water. They had seen the previous miracles. But there was more. When Jesus said “It is I,” the Greek phrase is ego eimi. This can also be translated, “I am.” This is the Greek version of “I am who I am,” of Yahweh. It is very likely Jesus called to them in Hebrew or the closely related Aramaic. It is likely that they heard Jesus speak the unspoken name and apply it to Himself.
And, by the way, we see the same wording in the parallel account in John 6. John 6:20 says, “But He said to them, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” Here too we have ego eimi.
Let us look at one more account from the New Testament. This is in John 8. The Jews are in the middle of having a long argument with Jesus. He told them plainly that if they did not believe that He was the Messiah, they would die in their sins. They did not like this or anything else that He said. And then the argument comes to a head in the following passage:
The Jews answered Him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?” “I am not possessed by a demon,” said Jesus, “but I honor My Father and you dishonor Me. I am not seeking glory for Myself; but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge. Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys My word will never see death.” – John 8:48-51
At this they exclaimed, “Now we know that you are demon-possessed! Abraham died and so did the prophets, yet you say that whoever obeys your word will never taste death. Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?” Jesus replied, “If I glorify Myself, My glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies Me. Though you do not know Him, I know Him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know Him and obey His word. Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing My day; he saw it and was glad.” – John 8:52-56
“You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to Him, “and you have seen Abraham!” “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” At this, they picked up stones to stone Him, but Jesus hid Himself, slipping away from the temple grounds. – John 8:57-59
“I am.” Ego eimi. The New Life Translation puts it this way: For sure, I tell you, before Abraham was born, I was and am and always will be!”
And so in the first case, on the lake, this astounding revelation of Jesus leads to worship, an act that would never be given to anyone but God Himself. And in the second case, Jesus’ revelation leads to intense anger, so much so that they would have killed Him there if He had not disappeared from them.
Jesus is not a god. Jesus is not another god. Jesus is God. Jesus is Yahweh, “I am that I am”. Jesus is “Who I am I will be.” He is the eternal one, the uncreated one. He is the Person of the Son, in relationship with the Father and the Spirit, but there is only one God, three Persons in one God.
It is exciting to me that in Revelation, God’s name is adjusted because the “will be” part is then at last taking place. From Rev. 11:
And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying: “We give thanks to You, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because You have taken Your great power and have begun to reign.” – Rev. 11:16-17
And so now, at this time, we want to join in with those who have worshiped Yahweh, who have worshiped Jesus. For us, He is till the one who was and is and is to come, and so we remember Him with the bread and the cup as He taught us to do. As Paul explains in I Cor. 11,
For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. – I Cor. 11:23-26
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