January 22 – Exodus 3:13-15

Main focus: God comes to us and introduces himself so that we can know about him but also know him.

We’ve made quite a jump in time from Genesis 1 to Exodus 3, but there’s a common thread: revelation. In Genesis 1, God begins to reveal himself to mankind, and here at Mt. Horeb he takes it a step further with Moses by giving his name, which even the patriarchs never received (Exo 6:3). This passage will help us stress God’s otherness as well as the need we have for God to reveal himself to us—we never would’ve known God’s name had he not given it to us, and similarly we wouldn’t have known the nature of the Trinity had God not chosen to reveal it.

And just like the doctrine of the Trinity, this scene is otherworldly, even kinda weird. In our discussion we’ll back up to Exodus 2:23 to get the whole context. While Israel is languishing in Egypt under brutal slavery, God comes to Moses out in the wilderness. There Moses witnesses an unearthly sight, a solitary bush engulfed in flames, the leaves still green and the branches still healthy within the blaze, and there he hears an unearthly voice commissioning him for the work of the exodus. This is the background necessary to understanding Moses’ encounter with the God of his fathers—God takes this opportunity to reveal himself to Israel in name, promise, and deed. By this name, by this promise of liberation, and by this redemption from slavery, Israel’s God would be “remembered throughout all generations.”

This is particularly evident given the name by which God revealed himself to Moses. When Moses asks for God’s name, God responds quite mysteriously, “I am who I am.” The name by which he will be known, Yahweh, is taken from the Hebrew word for the verb “to be.” It is, in one sense, a reference to his otherness, his self-existence as Creator—he simply is. In Deuteronomy 4:32-40, Moses will explain to Israel that God revealed himself this way and rescued Israel out of Egypt so that this truth could sink down deep into their hearts, “that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deut 4:39).

But the verb “I am” can also be translated in the future tense—“I will be what I will be”—which is perhaps the stress on it given the amount of times that God promises a future event in the rest of Exodus 3 (ex. “I will bring you up;” “he will let you go”). Thankfully these two meanings are not at odds with one another; the Bible will develop both strands of thought to show that God simply is who he is and he is a God who reveals himself through promises. In discussion we’ll look at this latter aspect of the passage to see that God reveals himself to Moses, and to Israel through Moses, through the promise of liberation from Egypt. And when Moses falters, saying, “Who am I that I should go?”, it is God’s character and nature alone that provides the assurance, “But I will be with you.”

Now at this point you might be wondering, what does all this have to do with the Trinity? To that I’d pose you another question: who is named Yahweh? The Divine Name gets loaded with intense significance throughout the Old Testament, so much so that devout Jews would never speak it aloud, would even swap out the vowels to produce the alternate name Jehovah in order to protect themselves from its holiness.