God Has a Name

I Am: What’s in a Name

Week 1 – God Has a Name

Series Slide

Good morning and welcome to worship on this amazing day that the Lord has made! This past Wednesday we began the season of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Holy Week. Those that were at the service Wednesday night heard a little bit about what Lent is. Lent comes from the Latin word Lechten, which means lengthening. It is indicative of the lengthening of days in the Spring, while still being in the dead of winter. Since the early days of the church, Lent has been a time of penitence, a time of repentance, a time of sacrifice. The 40 days reminds us of the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness, and so, many will fast during this season… maybe they give up chocolate, or caffeine, or alcohol… Maybe they give up meat, or starches… the point isn’t what we give up, but instead that we allow ourselves to remember the sacrifice of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It begins with Ash Wednesday and concludes with Palm Sunday. It is 40 days, not counting Sundays… sometimes people take that as an opportunity to break their fast for the day of worship, because every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus! However you choose to observe Lent, we do so in a holy manner.

And so, we begin a new sermon series this week too. Together, we are embarking on a journey through the book of John as we consider the “I Am” statements of Jesus. We will get into the specific names over the next weeks, but today we want to look at the back story. You might even think of this as a short lecture on the origin of the phrase “I Am” in the Bible, so get your notebooks out… the test at the end will be open book. OK, I’m joking but I would recommend taking notes.

Today, we are going to be looking at the fact that God has a name.

Sermon Slide

The New Testament is written in Greek, because that was the language of the land at the time of it’s writing. That isn’t the language Jesus spoke. He spoke Aramaic, a later version of what we would call Ancient Hebrew… So, Jesus would have likely said, “Ana” or “Anakhna hada.”

But when it came to writing, the language of the land was Greek, so, when we look at the Gospel of John, we find Jesus identifying himself as “I am” or in the Greek – “ego eimi.” Each of Jesus’ statements throughout the Gospel of John begin with that phrase, but it has its origin in the Old Testament. So, let’s look at that history.

A few weeks ago, I talked about Joseph and that he was one of 12 son’s of Jacob, also known as Israel. These 12 sons, this family of Israel moved to Egypt during a drought when Joseph was in charge of the food supply in Egypt. Fast forward through the generations and the people of Israel had become a great nation and the Pharaoh who didn’t remember Joseph began to fear them.

I want you to think about this for a moment… How can just a few people become a great nation? Let’s look at the simple math. Now, I want to keep it conservative. I mean, families in that part of the world were known to have many children, I mean, Jacob had 12 sons + daughters, so we are just going to consider them having 3 children that become families that have children through each of the 10 generation in the 400 years after Joseph.

Gen 1

12 sons have 3 children that marry and form a family = 36 families

Gen 2

36 families have 3 children that marry and form a family = 108 families

Gen 3

108 families have 3 children that marry and form a family = 324 families

Gen 4

324 families have 3 children that marry and form a family = 972 families

Now, I know you don’t want me to go through each of these 10 generations, so let’s skip to the end…

Gen 10

236,196 families have 3children that marry and form a family = 708,588 Families. And that doesn’t take into account those who live beyond the age of 40.

So, With a conservative estimate, within 10 generations, about 400 years, the family of Israel would have included over 700,000 families! The crazy thing is, if you increase the number of children to 4, by the end of 10 generations if is over 12 million. How did the one family of Jacob, the 12 tribes of Israel, become such a huge nation? By simply doing what God told them to do, be fruitful and multiply. At some point, the Israelites became known as Jews or Hebrews, so now the names are used interchangeably.

Sermon Slide

So, at some point in the midst of these 400 years after Joseph, the Pharoah forgot who Joseph was and what he and his family had done… and began to enslave them into the work of building the Egyptian Empire. Now interestingly, if you travel to Egypt, they have no record of these slaves. When you tour the Pyramids of Giza or go see the Sphinx, they will tell you that all the labor to build these great pieces of antiquity were built by volunteers, both Egyptian and others. In fact, they have no record of a people called Israel or a people who called themselves Hebrews that were enslaved. They do however, have a people called the Hapiru or Habiru – a nomadic people with inferior intellect who would hire themselves out for jobs of labor, at least that’s how they described them.

Habiru = Hebrew?

Were they the Hebrew people, the people of Israel? That debate continues to this day. You have to remember, the Egyptians wrote their own history… A history written by the winners. But our Scripture includes a history, not written by the winners… but a history written by the underdog.

Sermon Slide

And in that history, we read that the Egyptians became afraid of them, enslaved them, and then began to systematically perform genocide to reduce their numbers by drowning all male babies in the Nile. One of those babies that was to be thrown into the Nile River was a baby by the name of Moses, who was floated in a basket into the arms of the daughter of the Pharoah. She took him and raised him, not as a little Jewish boy, but instead as her own child. Moses grew up in the palace and was actually in the lineage to become the next Pharaoh. But, he began to question his heritage and found out that he was actually Hebrew. One day he saw and Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave and he killed the Egyptian. He tried to hide the body in the sand, but it was too late. He ended up running away from Egypt and found himself in the desert of Midian. He found a beautiful wife named Zipporah and began building his own family with them, tending the sheep of his Father-In-Law.

Moses probably felt pretty good about himself. He had gotten out of Egypt, wasn’t being hunted for killing an Egyptian, and wasn’t enslaved like the Hebrews… but God has a way of reminding us who we are sometimes.

One day while Moses was out tending the flock near Mount Horeb, he saw something amazing… a bush that was burning, but it wasn’t being consumed by the fire, like this eternally burning bush. So, he goes to investigate, and as he get’s close he realizes that he is in the very presence of God. God calls him from the bush and tells him to remove his sandals for he is on holy ground.

God tells Moses that he has heard the cry of His people in Egypt and that Moses is to go lead them from slavery to a new land.

But, what does Moses say?

Who am I?

There’s a familiar objection to following your call. Have you ever tried that one? Who am I to tell them about God’s love, I haven’t been to seminary? Who am I to feed the hungry, I can barely feed my family? Who am I to visit the lonely, I’m lonely myself? Who am I to become a preacher God, don’t you know all the sins I’ve committed?

Here’s the interesting thing about Moses’ first objection… God never answers it. Instead he say, “I will be with you.” In other words, It wasn’t about Moses… and it isn’t about you. It doesn’t matter who you are, it only matters who God is. And that leads to Moses’ second objection.

Who are you?

I know we’ve been talking through the first few chapters of Exodus, but I want you to turn over to Exodus 3. This is where the rubber meets the road for today’s message. We’ve already covered through verse 12, so let’s pick up at verse 13.

Exodus 3:13-15

Moses 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?”

God 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.’”

God 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—has sent me to you.’

“This is my name forever,

the name you shall call me

from generation to generation.

There it is… I Am… a form of the verb “to be” That is who God is. In the Hebrew, that word is what we now call Yahweh. In Hebrew it has no vowels so it is simply YHWH. It mean, I am that I am… Or I will be what I will be… or I have been and still I am. It was such a holy name to the Israelites, that they would not even say it out loud, they might even call God, The Name, to keep from uttering the word of his name. In other parts of the Old Testament, when the word YHWH is used, it is translated into English as LORD in all caps. That’s how you know that you are reading God’s self-identity in the passage.

This name, this self-identity reveals 4 very important aspects of who God is.

First, Yahweh is the only one of his kind. We use names to distinguish someone from others of their kind. But there are no other “gods” but God alone. There isn’t anyone like I AM.

Second, Yahweh’s existence has no extension in time. God is eternal, and lives outside of time, in the eternal now. There has never been a time when God did not exist, and there will never come a time when God ceases to exist. God always IS. Scripture says there is coming a time “when time shall be no more.” But God will continue to BE. Everything else in the universe has limits, including time itself. But not God. God is the First Cause, the Immovable Mover, the Great I AM.

Third, Yahweh is always the same. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. As the Psalmist says, “As Thou hast been, Thou forever shalt be. Great is Thy faithfulness.” So, you ask, why does God seem so different from the Old Testament to the New Testament. It isn’t because God changed, it is because our understanding of who God was, is, and ever will be changed in the person of Jesus Christ. God didn’t change, we did.

Fourth, Yahweh is the One with the power to acton the people’s behalf. He is the One who makes things happen according to our greatest need. Yahweh is the creator of all that was, is, and ever will be.

So, Jesus’ use of the expression “I Am” would have been an unmistakable signal to his hearers. They knew the ancient significance of the words, even in Greek, “Ego eimi;” Jesus was explicitly identifying himself with God, and bearing God’s presence on Earth.

Sermon slide

The theological term is Incarnation, “enfleshment,” putting on the skin of humanity.

Or, as we read in the first chapter of John.

John 1:1-5, 14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

But, more about that in the week to come.

Sermon Slide

There are those… Scholars in Seminaries and preachers in pulpits who may say that Jesus wasn’t sure of his identity until he was on the Cross, or that the divinity of Jesus is just a myth. Some may even say that Jesus never claimed to be God… And yet, Jesus used the title I Am to describe himself.

Their argument falls in with C.S. Lewis’ statement when it comes to understanding the identity of Jesus. When talking about those who would say

CS Lewis

“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

So, who is Jesus to you?

Is he a liar, a lunatic, or is he your Lord? There is no room for any other decision.

Let us pray…