The Great "I AM"

The Great "I Am"

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up."

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses! Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am."

"Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

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.'"

Exodus 3:1-6, 14

Fires that burn a large area or burn for a long time have a continuing fascination for most of us. The largest forest fire on record burned 13,500 square miles in East Kalimanton, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. The fire burned from February to June 1983, devastating an area bigger than the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

At the same time in February 1983, a fire storm ravaged southwestern Australia. Winds built to gale force, and within hours, flames raced along miles of coastline. A broad arc of rich farmland and a fragrant eucalyptus forest were quickly reduced to scorched earth. Seventy-five people died, and property damage totaled more than $2.5 billion. There is something awesome about such consuming fires.

But as destructive as these huge fires were, they lacked the power of one small fire that burned more than three thousand years ago on Mt. Sinai. That fire was confined to one desert bush, which burned—but did not burn up. The fire in the bush gave life, not death. And the result of that fire was dedication to God, not destruction.

Moses had been away for forty years when God suddenly called him back to Himself and explained the plan He had for Moses' life. You can probably identify with some of the reasons Moses had been away from God, as well as the way God invited Moses back.

Meeting God as He Really Is

God moves your life toward a confrontation with Him. You may be moving toward that moment without even knowing it, just as you may not feel yourself moving when you're flying in a jetliner at six hundred miles per hour. God moves you toward Himself. There is a wind blowing, and it carries you in that direction. There is an invisible hand pushing and pulling. When you study Moses' encounter with God, you see clearly how God can spend eighty years leading up to an encounter with Him. Moses moved from being a prince in Egypt to a shepherd in the desert in order to encounter the living God.

God did three things to prepare Moses for an encounter with Himself. In the same way, God will use one or more of these three things in preparing your life for an encounter with Him.

One way God prepares us is with devastating events. Gordon MacDonald calls some of us "broken-world people," those whose worlds have been broken apart, shattered by events. Moses was one of the most striking broken-world people in history. He spent the first forty years of his life in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh, a sun god who lived in and out of his palace in splendor, shining like the sun. The pharaoh did not walk. He was carried in a sedan chair by eight courtiers. As an Egyptian noble, Moses had been bathed, barbered, and pedicured daily. He knew the palace well, a great hall of pillars adorned with lapis lazuli and malachite, and a balcony of gold. Moses had been in what was called "the room of adoration," where only the sons and the nearest friends gathered around the Pharaoh. The princes were brought up in a special part of the palace where they were tutored with friends. It was a life beyond our imagination.

Then suddenly Moses was expelled from the Egyptian court (Exod. 2:15). He literally moved from the palace to the pasture, from the food of royalty to a subsistence diet, from the companionship of nobles to the company of shepherds. One could hardly find a more devastating change of circumstances in world history. Moses spent the next forty years of his life reflecting on the shock, bitterness, and finality of everything he had lost when he was expelled from Egypt. His resume would have been very simple: "Ex-prince in Egypt, forty years as assistant shepherd to father-in-law." Yet God intended that very devastating experience of loss to set the stages for Moses' confrontation with Him.

Devastating events are part of the fabric of life. You will face them. We all do. They usually come to us in the guise of loss—loss of health, friends, job, opportunity, companions. These losses can make us bitter; they make us want to escape or deny. Or they help us see that a bush is burning with the presence of God on the other side of the devastating event.

The second way God prepares us to return to Him is in isolated places. He sent Moses to the "far side of the desert," farther than he had ever gone before—literally "beyond" or "behind" his customary routes. In the blazing summer the Bedouins leave the low country and go to the high country where the grass grows. When Moses pushed out into the silence of the desert farther than ever before he came to Horeb, which is the name of the region where Mt. Sinai stands. The word "Horeb" means dry, sterile, bleak, and rocky. It was a place of aloneness, isolation, silence, absolute quietness. We can hardly imagine a world this quiet, with no cars running, no faint sound of jets in the air, no television or radio, no sound of children playing or appliances churning. In this quiet place, Moses met God. Not in a crowd, but alone. Not in noise, but in silence. Not in a hurry, but in stillness.

God often pushes those He encounters into great silence. Elijah found a fresh encounter with God not in the busy work of his ministry, but alone in a cave. Jesus encountered God's sustaining power alone in the wilderness. After his Damascus road experience, Paul went into the desert, where he heard the voice of the risen Christ revealing the message he would take to the world.

Do you want to meet God? Prepare in silence. Henri Nouwen writes in Sojourners of the need for silence. He recalls the lives of the desert fathers, those monks who fled to the desert for absolute silence. One was named Arsenius, a Roman educator who went to the desert to find God. He prayed, "Lord, lead me into the way of salvation," and heard the response, "Be silent." We are inundated by words. They form the floor, walls, and ceiling of our lives. Words scream at us from radios, TVs, billboards, bumper stickers, and announcements. Nouwen said that while driving through Los Angeles he had had the strange sensation of driving through a dictionary: "use me, take me, buy me, drink me, eat me, smell me, touch me, kiss me, sleep with me." Words gone wild.

He goes on to say that words tangle us up with this world and put out the inner fire within us. Our spiritual life is like a steam bath. When we open the door, the room loses its heat. When we are always talking, the fire of the spirit within us cools. Silence has become a fearful thing. It creates nervousness. Many of us would rather do anything than sit alone with ourselves in an absolutely quiet place.

Thomas à Kempis wrote the immortal devotional classic, The Imitation of Christ. In chapter 20 he calls for silence: "The greatest saints avoid the society of men, when they could conveniently, and did rather choose to serve God, in secret."

Do you wish for an encounter with God that changes your life? Fight and flee to find silence. Make this silence a violent obsession. Some of you are now in an enforced silence and isolation. You have no choice. Then thank God, and use that enforced isolation as the preparation to meet Him. Have your own Horeb. Search for your own Sinai. Desire your own desert. Find it at home, or away from home. Find silence if you would find God.

The third way God prepares us to return to Him in humbling activities. At age eighty, Moses did not have anything as his own. Egypt faded in his memory. He felt his own life ebbing away in that wilderness. Dreams of achievement, notoriety, and leadership drained into the sand of the desert. Shock, rejection, and bitterness faded into the desert landscape, along with the feelings in Moses that needed to die: pride, self-sufficiency, impatient impulsiveness.

It is in being humbled that God prepares us to encounter Him. In 1940, at age fifty-four, the world-famous theologian Karl Barth was called up to military service and was given a helmet, uniform, rifle, and bayonet. At his urgent request he was not posted to office work, which his respectful superior wished to do for the world figure. No. Barth stood watch by the Rhine at midnight, and slept on straw. Once a fellow soldier genially asked him if he was ever confused with the famous Professor Barth. Sometimes he preached to them, recalling later, "I learned once again to write a sermon that is really preached at a man." He was thoroughly humbled, and connected God with man in a new way.

Are you humbled? Have you been demoted? Are you less in the eyes of others or yourself than you were? Then God is preparing you to meet Him in that experience, as He did Moses. Do not resent it. Expect God in it.

Remember that Jesus also faced devastation, isolation, and humiliation. His life on earth began with devastation—a trip to Egypt. He grew up in isolation—in Nazareth. He knew the humility of being assistant carpenter to His stepfather. Then suddenly He went to the Jordan. Heaven burst open, God's voice spoke, and the Spirit descended.

Last winter, some of you buried bulbs in the earth. They were hidden in the darkness, the quietness, the isolation of the soil. Suddenly one spring day they burst through the surface in colorful glory. Confronting God happens like that.

Experiencing God as He Really Is

In very few lives does the decisive moment of change happen when it is expected, however. The day Moses heard God's voice in the burning bush was his last day as a shepherd; but when the day began, he did not know it would be the last. This could be the last day of your life without an encounter with God, and you did not pick up this book knowing that. When God takes the initiative in meeting you, you do not expect it, just as Moses that day expected nothing different from the thousands of other days during his forty years of hearing the sheep bleat. Then a bush exploded with fire.

Rationalists and liberal critics at this point like to note that some bushes in the desert exploded with spontaneous combustion in the heat, or that there may have been some natural gas leaking beneath this bush. That misses the point. This common bramble bush, this thorn bush (called seneh) burned—but did not burn up. Moses knew that God sometimes had met the men of old at a tree (Genesis 18:1) and that God had been associated with fire from heaven. But here is a combination of the two—a tree on fire, and inside it, the angel of Jehovah. That expression simply means the visible presentation of God Himself, God's ambassador, even perhaps the Lord Jesus before Bethlehem.

Then there was Moses' decisive moment—"I will go over and see why the bush does not burn up." Spiritual curiosity and spiritual initiative marked that moment. Moses did not yawn, scratch his head, and decide it wasn't worth the energy to walk over to the bush on the hot sand of the desert.

Look carefully at how God prepared Moses for this moment. There was the unwilling expulsion from Egypt— its devastation, isolation, and humiliation. But here is a willing compulsion from Moses. A bush burns—he moves toward it.

God takes the initiative in arresting us. Suddenly a spiritual thorn bush explodes with fire. How many bushes burn with God and you do not look? On a late-night walk, God breathes down your neck—and you turn away. A striking Christian confronts you; you sense glory in the person's presence—but you do not stick like a barnacle to learn the secret. God leaps off the page of a devotional book—but you turn on the TV to get away. Most of us never encounter God as we might because when the bush burns, we turn away to the desert. Browning said, "Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees takes off his shoes, the rest of us sit around and pick dewberries."

God also takes the initiative in instructing us—by what we see. A humble bramble bush burns, but does not burn up! Here the supernatural God enters into the lower natural creation—and burns within it without burning it up. This is God's way. He burns in your life without burning you out.

There was a word in this for Moses. Here was a bush that burned and burned and burned. Moses could not help but compare himself with that bush. Forty years earlier he had tried to burn for God and had burned himself out. He had felt like a heap of ashes for forty years. Now at the end of his life he finds that God can burn in a man's life—and not burn the man out. God was about to burn in Moses' life from his 80th to his 120th year. He would then die with his eye not dim and his natural force not abated. God would burn in the court of Ramses, burn marching through the sea, burn on the mountain, burn in the desert, burn when the people complained— but not burn up Moses.

Moses also found out that there was nothing exceptional about the bush. As Ian Thomas put it, any old bush will do. God could have said, "Do you see that bush over there? That scruffy, scraggly-looking thing? That bush would have done! Do you see this beautiful bush so shapely and fine? That bush would have done, too." Any old bush will do—any old bush, that is, if God is in the bush.

This is a word for you. This is God's desire for humanity. He desires to enter your life like a fire and burn within your humanity—not to burn in a desert bush, but to burn in you. As 2 Corinthians 4:16 triumphantly asserts, "Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day." This is the apostle Paul burning, but not being burned up.

On November 7, 1989 Billy Graham celebrated his seventy-first birthday. Can this actually be true? Most of us think of him as eternally youthful, full of boundless energy and vision. He preached in 1988 in China and the Soviet Union. Tired? Yes. Health problems? Yes, some potentially serious. Burning? Yes. Burned up? Never!

Consider Billy Graham's father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, a missionary surgeon from China. At an advanced age, when many men begin to fossilize, Dr. Bell continued to burn. A world Christian figure, he retired at Montreat, North Carolina, where he would go to the shambles where a drunk lived, sober the man up, and lead him to Christ. Burning in China as a missionary doctor. Burning in retirement as a witness to drunks in a small North Carolina village.

That is the lesson of the bush that burns, but does not burn up. Are you about to burn out? Take a look at this bush!

God also instructs us by what we hear. He calls us by name: "Moses, Moses." Just when we think that God has forgotten our address and area code, He calls us by name. That is what encounter with God is all about. You cannot avoid God when He calls you by name. It is one thing for God to speak to a congregation. It is another thing to know that God has called you by name.

God calls us to come close, but not too close. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." The Hebrews took off their shoes where we would take off our hats. When God is really present, there is fellowship and fear, approach and awe. This ought to keep private devotions and the life of faith in a blaze of anticipation. There is no commonness or boredom in the presence of God. The words, "We are standing on holy ground" must be more than a song. It must be the realization that at any time in the life of faith we may encounter God in an experience that burns before us and changes everything. On the other hand, some of us expect nothing to happen in this life of faith—and we get exactly what we expect.

The result of not responding when the bush burns can be eternal. Jean-Paul Sartre became the leading atheistic existential philosopher of this century. He influenced a disillusioned generation away from God. As a youngster, he had a sense of the presence of God, but turned away. His words from fifty years later are haunted with a sense of lost opportunity to meet and know God. He writes that:

I maintained public relations with the Almighty, but privately I ceased to associate with Him. Only once did I have the feeling He existed. I had been playing with matches and burned a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime when suddenly God saw me. I felt His gaze inside my head and on my hands. I whirled about in the bathroom, horribly visible, a live target. Indignation saved me. I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion. I blasphemed. . . .

I have just related the story of a missed vocation: I needed God, He was given to me, I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him. Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while, then He died. Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the easy amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: "Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us."

Jean-Paul Sartre,

The Words, pp. 102-103

What an incredible assertion! He saw the bush burn. But he turned away. Now at the end of a lifetime, he looked back to see the moment when God was near and he walked away. When the bush burns, we had best draw near.

Knowing God as He Really Is

No moment compares with this moment, when God tells us His name. To know someone's name is a powerful thing. It singles them out, takes them out of the masses, links us to them. To know God's name is even more powerful. In the Bible God's name means more than just His I.D. God's name means His character, reputation, ability. Moses knew the names of the Egyptian gods. They were numerous and powerful; they appeared to be awesomely successful. But they dwindle to insignificance before the God who burns in the bush.

God's name means His continuity in history. "I am the God of your father." Eighty years earlier, the father of Moses, whose name was Amram, knew and worshiped this same God who burned in the bush. But more than that, this is the same God who talked to Abraham seven hundred years before Moses, and four thousand years before today. If God spoke to me in the same way, He would say, "I am the God of Henry Newton Selby and Albert C. Gregory, your grandfathers. I am the same." We are not meeting in this generation God No. 2. We are here worshiping the same God that we read about in Exodus. He is the God who keeps His covenant, His promises, His people. "O God our help in ages past / our hope in years to come / our shelter from the stormy blast / and our eternal home. . . . Before the hills in order stood / or earth received her frame / from everlasting thou are God / to endless years the same."

When you submit your life over to Him, you submit your life to One who has a recorded track record of four thousand years.

God's name means His activity as well as His history. Many scholars translate God's name in verse 14 as, "I will be what I will be." This means that God is active and reveals Himself to us only in His relationship with us and His activity in our lives. The name of God is not a password we memorize. It is not a definition in a textbook on theology. I recently read the work of an esteemed theologian who divided God into so many categories in such an elaborate outline that one could hardly remember it. You do not meet God like that. You meet God in the experience of Him. He gives Himself to you in an active relationship. "I will be what I will be. I am not going to give myself to you like a dictionary definition. Instead, for the next forty years you will experience me—in the pillar of fire, in the manna, in the water from the rock, in my judgment, and my mercy."

But more than history or activity—more than anything else—God's name means His immediacy. He is "I AM." He will not meet you in your past. He does not promise to meet you in the future. He says, "I AM." He only meets you in the razor-thin moment of now. We would prefer anything to that. This very moment, as you consider His word, He thunders, "I AM!" If you feel no immediacy, no urgency, no nowness, you will never encounter God as He is. Unless God is known in the immediacy of communion this very moment, He is not known.

You see, God blows apart our human categories to tell us who He is. Nothing in language can contain Him or express Him. He is simply "I am." You can meet Him through His Son Jesus Christ, who said the same thing: "Before Abraham was born, I am!" (John 8:58).

Homesick for God.