Moses’ question about God’s name might seem strange to us but in a culture that had many different gods it is not strange at all. Moses anticipates that the Israelites are going to want to know which ‘god’ Moses is claiming to speak for. The answer is spectacular: God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”. (The name ‘YHWH,’ translated as ‘LORD’ in most Bibles, is derived from the Hebrew ‘I AM’.) This name with which God refers to himself at once casts his divine person infinitely beyond anything that people were dealing with in the religions of the ancient world. He is the infinite and eternal creator of all things. He is both transcendent (that is, above and beyond all things) and immanent (always working in and through all things). He is not just a being, he is, as the Westminster Confession of Faith says, the “fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things”. Don’t therefore treat Yahweh like a finite god who is ‘up there somewhere’ and who occasionally pops by to help us. You are immersed in God’s presence now. Your very being and life flow from him. You are experiencing God right now in a constant and fundamental sense. It is in fact the very constancy and primacy of God’s presence that makes him unnoticeable to us. And so, we often look for tangible experiences and even, as in the ancient world, we prefer the tangible experience to the reality of the intangible God. This is what leads to idolatry. All people know God, but few people worship him for who he is.
Acknowledge God’s presence and thank him for all he is doing for you.
Read Exodus 3:13-15
