YHWH - Forever
Notes
Transcript
Good Questions
Good Questions
Have you ever noticed that kids ask the best questions? Don’t get me wrong, they also ask terrible questions. How many times have you answered the question “why?” in your lifetime? But sometimes kids ask just the most amazing things. Mostly because their thinking is not constrained by or conformed to the logical boundaries that we place around our world. Also, they have no fear of sounding foolish or silly. They just have a wonder, and they express it.
A few years ago at the church that I served prior to being here, I stood outside of our worship space with my boss, our senior pastor, welcoming people into worship. A sweet little girl was walking by with her parents and they stopped and the parents said to the little girl - “do you want to ask Pastor Jason your question?” She looked up at him and said - in just the sweetest and most sincere voice, “Pastor Jason, when is God’s Birthday.”
I looked over at him and gave him the face like “good luck with this one sucker.” He looked down at her and said “Well we celebrate God’s birthday on Christmas.” Which was a pretty smart deferral. Probably better than what I would have said.
But she was not fooled by such simple adult tactics. She said “no that’s Jesus’s birthday. When is GOD’s birthday.” To which he responded something like “well God doesn’t have a birthday because God has always existed.”
I’m not 100% sure that she was satisfied, but she did say thank you and move along to sunday school with something really big to think about. And we walked away feeling thoroughly not convinced that this was a good enough answer for her big question. But man, Sunday morning is a hard time to do on the spot theological work that is digestible for a 5 year old’s mind. But that’s how it goes sometimes.
But that answer “God has always existed” points to one of the most fundamentally important and distinct aspects of our Judeo-Christian theology. The fact that God has no start and no end date. God is eternal. God has always existed. And just how important is this reality…? Well we are going to find out that it’s actually critically important.
God’s Name
God’s Name
Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about the names that are given to God, and particularly looking at how those names tell us a very important truth about who God is. In the Ancient world, and particularly in the Bible, names are not arbitrary. Names are important. Names are adjectives, descriptors that point us to a fundamental truth about the person or entity being named.
Last week Pastor Jeff talked about the name El-Roi, which means “God who sees me.” The Egyptian slave girl, Hagar (who by the way that name means “the immigrant or foreigner”) believed that God could see her plight and would make things right for her. So she called on God using the name “God who sees me” to come and protect her from her circumstances.
This god is the same God who announced himself to Abraham as “El-Shaddai” or God Almighty - the God of the Cosmic Mountain.
And these two names are going to lead us to our next name for God. So we have seen that God is both the all powerful creator of the cosmos, and a personal God who sees his people. These are very important realities that build up to what we learn is the personal name of God.
So many years after the time that Abraham and Hagar spoke with God, the descendants of Abraham find themselves in slavery down in Egypt, which is kind of ironic considering this is a bit of a role reversal since Abraham had Egyptian slaves - one of whom was this woman Hagar who bore Abraham’s first son Ishmael. But that’s not really the point here.
The family of Abraham, now called Israelites or the Hebrews are being oppressed greatly by their Egyptian overlords, and in particular by the king of Egypt - Pharaoh. And then, suddenly things begin to change. A baby is born… sound kind of familiar for the season? Yes a baby is born, a baby named Moses. And Moses, a Hebrew baby, is miraculously saved by Pharaoh’s daughter and is raised inside of the Egyptian Palace. However, when he grows up he becomes an enemy of the state after he kills one of the guards who was beating a Hebrew slave.
Moses runs into the wilderness and hides out there, eventually meeting a woman in the land of Midian, marrying her and then becoming a shepherd. And that’s where we’ll pick up our story. This is Exodus 3.
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.
There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.
Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”
When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
So here we’ve got a bit of a strange deal right? Moses is just out keeping his father in law’s sheep, trying to keep a low profile since he’s a wanted man back in Egypt and he finds himself confronted by a supernatural occurrence. A bush that is burning but is not being consumed.
This burning bush, we know is the physical manifestation of this character who is called throughout the Old Testament as “The Angel of the Lord.” This is not a normal angel. This is how the Hebrew people expressed the personal and physical embodiment of their God. The Angel of the Lord IS God in physical form. So God comes and speaks directly with Moses, and says “hey I’m the God of your ancestors. The one that your people, the Hebrew people talk about and cry out to.
The text goes on then:
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,
El-roi: The God who sees right? I see my people, I have heard them, I know them.
and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
El Shaddai: God Almighty. A god who is capable of creating and delivering.
And as is typical in Hebrew Literature, a repeat of those same concepts...
The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.
So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
I have seen, I will send you to Pharaoh (who is considered a god to Egypt). God who sees, God Almighty.
You see what God is doing here? He’s playing off of the names that Moses would have heard used to speak of God.
But Moses is not convinced. So he asks one of those really good questions that maybe he learned to ask when he was a kid.
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”
Moses is not having it though. Much like my little friend who wanted to know when God’s birthday is. So he goes on.
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”
God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’ ”
God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.
And this is when we begin to really get into the weeds. Because this all sounds very strange. So here’s some stuff that you need to know. The words “The LORD” in your Bible, when they are all capitalized are a translation of the name of the God of Israel — YHWH. The word lord is used because in Jewish tradition they stopped saying the name Yahweh and instead used the word “adonai” which means Lord. And through history that tradition has been kept.
But it is important that we look at God’s actual name, because it tells us about who God is. And who God is, it turns out seems like a riddle.
I am who I am. Gee Thanks. That’s helpful. Not really right? Like what does that even mean.
Well what our english fails to be capable of embodying is that YHWH is a very ambiguous grammatical construction. Without getting terribly technical, it’s impossible to truly discern the tense of these words. Now YHWH itself is simply the verb “to be” (in this case HE IS) smashed together twice. What scholars have argued over for years is whether it is past, present, or future tense. And I think that’s the beauty. I think that this is intentionally ambiguous. Because God’s name can be translated as all of these possibilities:
He is who He is
He is who He will be
He will be who he is
He is who He was
He will be who he was
and so on and so forth
What this means is that the name of God, God’s personal name YHWH, points to the eternal and unchanging existence of God and God’s relationship to his beloved people. God has always been and God will always be. The person who God is — God Almighty, the God who is capable of making and keeping extraordinary promises, as well as the God who sees and hears the plight of his people, will never change. God was, is, and will continue to see and respond in power to the messes that God’s people find themselves in — even when those messes are self inflicted. God will be faithfully God for God’s people forever.
This is good news for the Hebrew people because, well they are in a mess now and they are going to be in countless messes in the years to come. So much mess in fact that they would again find themselves in a place of hopeless desperation. A place where they cried out to God to send a deliverer, a long awaited Messiah.
Jesus the I am
Jesus the I am
That messiah would come to them in the most unexpected way. God, having seen the suffering of Israel, and indeed of all of humanity came in the person of Jesus Christ to remind the world of the great love that he has for them.
Jesus wielded the authority and power that could only be ascribed to God Almighty. He gave the blind their sight, commanded demons out of the afflicted, and controlled storms.
And yet in all of that power, he never failed to see those who were afflicted. He saw and showed compassion to those whose lives were lived on the margins, who found themselves drawing the short straw in the game of life.
And when those who were in power saw Jesus acting like God almighty and the God who sees questioned his Identity he answered them in this way:
Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”
I am. YHWH. Jesus, the physical embodiment of YHWH, the God of Israel, the God who was and is and will be always faithful, always present, and always radically for his people. And Jesus took that truth to the cross in order to prove how radically for us that he is.
Forever our Hope
Forever our Hope
So here’s where this still matters for us today. We live in an age where we are sold solutions to our problems every single day. Our phones and televisions promise us that if we buy this thing or subscribe to this practice then we will have our problems solved. And while sometimes our human problems are relieved, we do find that we are still spiritually empty.
And it is in these moments, when we come face to face with our true longing for a hope that extends beyond the temporary, that we are challenged and pulled towards the gaze of the God who sees us in that moment and the God who is capable of rearranging our lives out of the deep love for which he has for us.
This God, This YHWH, this Jesus — who came to us once has promised that his presence is always and forever with us. And not just with us, but deeply desiring of a relationship with us.
Advent is an invitation to submit ourselves to that relationship. To not take for granted the Foreverness of God. It’s a time when we live in a counter-cultural way. While the world says hurry hurry hurry! Jesus says rest rest rest! Rest in me, spend time with me, hope in me, be loved by me because I have loved you forever and always. I am love and I have been love as I will be love. Now, Forever, Always.
With that, take a breath this week. It’s heating up. The pressure is starting to mount right? Christmas is coming. But don’t forget to breathe. And when you breathe, make it a moment to rest and remember that YHWH, the God who is forever is forever with and for you.
