#26 3:13-17 Answering Moses' Objections Part B

However, upon receiving God’s answer in verse 12, Moses launches into five more objections. We encounter his second objection in verses 13 through 17. 3:13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?

14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.

16 Go, and gather the elders of Israel together, and say unto them, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited you, and seen that which is done to you in Egypt:

17 And I have said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, unto a land flowing with milk and honey. In simple terms this second objection is, “Okay, then, who are You?” This question is definitely not meaningless. But it is merely another stalling tactic on Moses’ part. We know this because even after receiving very strong answers to it, Moses continues to object. Here we have mere mortal man upon a mountainside communing with “some Being” speaking to him from a bush that is blazing with fire, but not consumed. From what has already been revealed to him, Moses knows that this “Entity” has been observing the trials of the Hebrew people in Egyptian bondage for these four hundred years. Furthermore, he knows that whoever this Being is, He speaks of Himself as being the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In light of these revelations, Moses’ question seems odd at first consideration. But do we ourselves today, reading this familiar account, really feel that we adequately know who this God is? Are we not inclined to almost shift into a kind of neutral “religious” mode when reading such biblical accounts? What would we do if it was us on that mountainside that day?

Even more, can we see that Moses really had no adequate idea of the staggering redemptive significance of this encounter for the entire world, long after he himself would be gone from it? Taking all of this into consideration, Moses’ second question, although a stalling mechanism, is fully understandable and almost appropriate. And, unlike his first question, God actually answers this one, in detail.

In verses 14 God says something that knocks all mere mortal men backward.[1] When giving Moses a “name” for Himself, God simply says, “I Am that I Am.” In the Hebrew this is a repetition of the phrase, “I exist that I exist.” It is God claiming to be entirely self-existent, essentially from “eternity to eternity.”

In John 8:58, Jesus claims this very same reality as being true about Himself, thus clearly claiming Deity for Himself: Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. Upon hearing His claim, the Jews with whom He was disputing took up stones to stone Him, because they understood that He was claiming to be God. But on this mountainside centuries before the coming of Christ, Moses had to be stunned to hear these words given to him as a name by which he could identify Who had sent him to the elders of the Hebrew people at this point. The thing is, though, only such a Being as this could truly have any credibility in sending a man like Moses to the elders of the Hebrew people, never mind unto Pharaoh. But God once again ties Himself to these Hebrew people by reminding Moses that he is to tell the Hebrew people, and especially the elders, that it was the God of their forefathers that sent Moses unto them. At this point in their history, they sorely needed to be reminded that their God was far more than a mere tribal ‘deity’ akin to those false deities in the land from whence they had come. They needed to know Him as He is. We do well to remember that this same truth applies to God’s people today. If we think of Egypt to be a ‘type’ of the world system as a whole, then God’s people have spent many years there at this point in human history. The transcendence of God has been largely lost along the way. If we are going to be useful in seeing the deliverance of many in this world from the slavery of sin, it will only be as we are once again conscious of the fact that it is “I Am that I Am” that has sent us. We would surely think that Moses could have no further objections, in light of this stunning revelation of the otherworldliness of God. But the human heart is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”[2]

[1] Compare John 18:6.

[2] Jeremiah 17:9