OUR LORD JEHOVAH IS OUR GREAT I AM
EXODUS 3:9-15 MARCH 23, 2003
EXODUS 3:9-15
9And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyp-tians are oppressing them. 10So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt."
11But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?"
12And God said, "I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this moun-tain."
13Moses 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?"
14God 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.’ "
15God also said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites, `The LORD,C 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.
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Dearest Fellow-Redeemed and Saints in the Lord:
Today in our text, the Lord wants us to not limit our thinking. He wants us to look at our God as He looks at Himself, that He is not limited by mankind’s limited thinking. Our Lord is lim-itless. We are going to look at the limitlessness of God. That’s hard to do because you and I often have very exacting parameters that we set up…5280 feet = 1 mile, 16 ounces = 1 pound, etc. Our thinking becomes rather narrow and limited. When it comes to the Lord, we have seen time and again, as He has spoken to His prophets and to His people, and as He speaks to us, that He is limitless. He loves us with an everlasting love. His grace is an undeserved gift to each and every one of us.
In our second lesson today, we heard how the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom. Because of that, we stand in awe of God. We gather together on Sundays and other special occasions that we might offer up our worship and our praise to our God who is limitless. It is something that our Lord deserves. The prophet Isaiah tells us: "I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols"(ISAIAH 42:8). He says, ‘I am the LORD.’ He deserves our attention, our full love from our hearts and minds and souls. That’s what the Lord teaches us this morning.
OUR LORD JEHOVAH IS OUR GREAT I AM
I. I AM remains unchanged
II. I AM keeps every promise
I. I AM remains unchanged
The words in Exodus 3 start with Moses going up to Mount Horeb. Moses is going off to worship by himself. As he gets closer to where he wants to worship, he sees a bush that is on fire but is not burning up. He gets closer to see this miracle. As he gets closer, he hears a voice that says, ‘I am the Lord.’ Moses realizes this is a holy, awesome place. This is the place of God. He takes off his shoes and the Lord is going to speak to Moses. The Lord is going to show Moses His limitless love because He’s going to give him a task to do.
The Lord has been listening and He has heard something. 9And now the cry of the Isra-elites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. When the Israelites went down into Egypt when Joseph was there, it was the only place that had food. Joseph was in favor with Pharaoh. It didn’t take long for a different Pharaoh to rise up and to forget about Joseph and to forget about the promises made to the Israelites. Pharaoh was now concerned about the Israelites overtaking Egypt, so all the male offspring born to the Israelites were commanded by Pharaoh to be put to death. Pharaoh did not want a leader to rise up from among the Israelites. Moses was spared. We come to this part and God says, ‘I’ve listened. I’ve heard the Israelites cry out. I’ve seen the Egyptians and seen how they’ve made them slaves.’ Now God says to Moses: 10So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my peo-ple the Israelites out of Egypt."
Moses was going to be the man; he was going to be the leader.
But, what about Moses? He has limited thinking. He’s just a man. 11But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" Certainly, Moses did not feel worthy to do such a task. He, too, had heard the promises made for genera-tion after generation that there would be a leader. Moses didn’t look at himself, a shepherd at heart, as a leader of God’s people. The Lord is not going to let Moses do this by himself. He says to Moses: "I will be with you.” Of course Moses is still limiting his thinking, still not looking at the limitlessness of God. 13Moses 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?" Moses was in the wilderness already because he had killed an Egyp-tian. He went there because his fellow-Israelites saw that. Moses knew if he went back, they wouldn’t forget. He knew if he went back, they would ask him, ‘and why should we listen to you? Who really sent you?’
So Moses asked God, ‘What shall I tell them?’ And then 14God 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.’ " Go home today and look at that verse. I AM is in big capital letters. I AM was the word for Jehovah. ‘Je-hovah sent me,’ he was to tell the Israelites. They are not to question Moses. They are not to question his authority. He came with the authority of I AM, the Lord God Jehovah, the great I AM who remained unchanged.
This Lord Jehovah, who created the heavens and the earth, is the same Lord God who sent His Son to die for our sins. Today He wants us to open up our minds to understand that we don’t to limit God’s grace. We don’t want to put it in a small definition when it is so full of mean-ing, enriching our lives. God is not like us. In order to understand God, we have to look at God in that sense that He is not like us. He is unlike us, sometimes He’s the very opposite. We read from (1 SAMUEL 15:29) "He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind." He remains unchanged.
We change quite a bit. It had been a long time before we had seen rain. We got down in the dumps. It came and we changed. We’re happy. Sometimes in our life we face troubles and problems. We might blame God and say, ‘Why, Lord, me?’ When things are resolved accord-ing to our thinking, we change again. Sometimes our attitude changes all too easily. Yet, we’re reminded that God always treats us with the best intentions in mind. He says everything works out for our good. In James God tells us: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shad-ows"(JAMES 1:17). You and I are so used to change, in a sense, (we’re not used to it—we just see it a lot) that it’s hard to imagine a God who does not change but He does not change like shifting shadows. He is our constant in life. While the world and people all around us change, the Lord remains the same.
As part of that we are going to look at as God’s promises to people. They remain the same.
His love for us remains the same. Our love might grow cold. We might sin against God, we might even forget God for a little bit, but He never forgets us. We might not love God with all of our heart and soul and mind all the time, but God loves us because He does not change. He provides for us, He protects us; He preserves us day in and day out until finally, we see Him face to face in eternity. From DEUTERONOMY 33:27 we read: "The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemy before you, saying, `De-stroy him!’" Because the Lord remains unchanged, He has driven out our enemies before us—sin, Satan and finally death, itself. (The last enemy to be destroyed is death.)
This is our Lord, Jehovah. He is the great I AM. Our great I AM remains unchanged. And
II. Our great I AM keeps every promise
We probably know that already, but it is good to refresh our memory. Moses (remember how that came about?) writes God’s words, ‘I heard my people cry.’ God says to Moses, ‘I’m going to make you the man to deliver them. That is my promise that I made to your people. You’re going to be the one who is the promised deliverer. I will be with you. This will be the sign to you that it is I who sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship me on this mountain.’ It did happen. I don’t know if it took Moses that long to really un-derstand God’s promises or not. We know that Moses argued with God a little more thinking there were others more qualified, but God sent Moses. Moses went back, did all of those plagues against Pharaoh until Pharaoh finally let Moses’ people go. They crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. They wandered in the wilderness. They came then, to this mountain and wor-shipped once again. I don’t know if it took all that time for Moses to understand, as they wor-shipped with all the Israelites there, that ‘Yes, I now understand the Lord is with me. Yes, now I understand that the Lord has kept His promise.’ I’m sure he knew that in between that time. The Lord, the great Jehovah, I AM, did not limit Himself because He was able to keep every promise.
15God 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…” He was saying I am Jehovah. I am the same Lord God who was the God of Abraham and who made promises to him and has kept them—that he would have descendants like the sand in the sea--the God of Jacob and now also the God of Israel. He said to Moses, ‘this is I AM who is sending you.’ Tell the people, ‘The God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.’ When he would say those words, they would remember all the promises that God had made to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, and they would realize that God had kept them—had kept every single one of them because He is the great I AM. As a sure sign of the fact that the Lord Jehovah kept every promise He adds: This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.
There is a lot of meaning in those simple words…two words in the English (I AM) and one in the Hebrew (Jehovah). The Israelites, because they respected that name of the Lord so much, would never completely spell out the word Jehovah. They were so much in awe that they did not want to misspell it. Jehovah meant I AM. Again, it talked about the limitlessness of God.
Our Lord Jehovah doesn’t say, ‘I am George or I am a carpenter or I am a farmer.’ All of those things limit us don’t they? When we give someone our name, it limits us to people named whatever our name is. When we tell someone what we do, it limits us to that category of people that do those things. The Lord says I AM. He is limitless—again the opposite of us. We are assured and comforted by the fact that God is not like man. In the book of Numbers we are told: "God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?"(NUMBERS 23:19). You and I know that sometimes we speak and don’t act; sometimes we promise and don’t fulfill. Not God! He is not like us. He is limitless. He is infinite.
In a world where there’s nothing lasting and everything is changing, that is a great com-fort and joy for us…knowing that the anchor of our Christian faith is God, Himself, who does not change and keeps every single promise. PSALM 145:13 tells us: "Your kingdom is an everlast-ing kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations. The LORD is faithful to all his promises and loving toward all he has made.” We know that the Lord loves His creation. He takes care of it and provides for it. What stands as a special blessing for you and I is the fact that as His believers, we might say that our Lord Jehovah loves us just a little bit more. As be-lievers we know and understand and appreciate every promise God has made and has kept throughout every generation.
Because of that, you and I are able to live lives of thanksgiving and thankful living. We don’t have to wait for those times when we feel that the Lord has especially blessed us to rejoice because we know that in good times and in bad times (or what we might consider bad times) the Lord is still with us to bless us and to provide for us. He asks nothing in return except to worship Him with love and praise and rejoicing. We read the words of Joshua (as he takes over the leadership from Moses) after the people are soon to be in the Promised Land. "Praise be to the LORD, who has given rest to his people Israel just as he promised. Not one word has failed of all the good promises he gave through his servant Moses"(1 KINGS 8:56). You and I can look back through the scriptures and look at every promise that God has made and say the same thing. Praise be to the Lord God of Israel! Not one word of His promises has failed that He gave to Moses, to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to the Apostle Paul, to His early apostles, or to Adam and Eve. Even for Adam and Eve, when they first sinned, the Lord promised a Savior—low and behold He provided one--for us and for the sins of the whole world.
Our Lord Jehovah is our great I AM. Our great I AM remains unchanged. Our great I AM keeps every promise. These are very deep things of God this morning. In our finite mind, our limited mind, sometimes we limit our God who is limitless, who is infinite. The Lord wants us to expand our thinking, to reflect on the meaning of I AM. Just the little portion of our text in Holy Scripture as our Lord Jehovah speaks to Moses and as He speaks to us reminds us that He re-mains unchanged. He keeps every promise.
At the end of God’s Word, in the Book of Revelation, we read another description of I AM. "’I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ’who is, and who was, and who is to come, the Almighty’"(REVELATION 1:8). Our Lord Jehovah says, I AM, in the past, in the present and in the future. This is our God. No one can limit Him. May we not limit Him with our limited thinking but enjoy the blessings of the fact that He remains unchanged and that He keeps and fulfills every promise that He has ever made. Our Lord Jehovah is the great I AM. He is our great I AM. Amen.
Pastor Timm O. Meyer
