Exodus 3:14, I AM WHO I AM
A serious young Christian wrestles to integrate the
"many faces" of God (the one true God that we’ve come to know in and as
Jesus Christ). He isn’t alone in his wrestling. The rest of us who are
equally serious do plenty of that ourselves. There is
no getting to the bottom of the mystery of God. We can pile up all the
words on top of one another until they’re higher than the Matterhorn and
the depth and mystery of God still eludes us. We call him things like
omnipotent, omniscient, sovereign, gracious, loving, majestic,
omnipresent and so forth—all true I’m sure; but he’s bigger and grander
and deeper and more elusive than all our words. A prophet who knew God
intimately said, "You are a God that hides yourself!" Of course he was
right! But God doesn’t even have to deliberately conceal himself in
order to be beyond our grasp.
Moses wanted to know who’d he’d say sent him when Israel asked and
God said, maybe even a bit dryly, "Tell them that I AM WHO I AM sent
you." We can get from I AM WHO I AM to Yahweh because they’re
linguistically/verbally connected, but we can get nowhere with either
one of them. God gave him a name but clearly he was withholding a name
from him. No one knows how to render the Hebrew phrase. We just say
things like I AM WHAT I AM or I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE to keep from
saying nothing. Scholars give us educated guesses at the linguistic
options and from there they guess even more about what their linguistic
guesses mean.
I say we don’t know what God said, but that’s an overstatement. He didn’t leave us utterly ignorant. One thing we’re sure of is this: Moses wasn’t to go to Israel and say GOOD LUCK SENT ME!
Nevertheless, God will not be boxed in. He won’t give us a name that
we can memorise and then pigeonhole him. "Oh, yes, well you know there’s
Osiris and Zeus and Molech and Bel and then there’s ‘Yahweh’." No
verbal sound captures God. No series of sounds, no theology contains all
of him. No Christology can lock Jesus Christ in with even its wise
pronouncements—like God he breaks through all the verbal boundaries.
Even my Ethel’s too mysterious to be summed up in any biography I might
write. Persons are bigger and vaster than our mental constructs no
matter how accurate they are in their way.
Will God continue to puzzle and mesmerise us? Will he always be
showing us his "back parts" while telling us "you can’t see my face"?
(Exodus 33:20-23) Will the temple always be filled with smoke at his
presence? See Yes—he’s
beyond us! It is with good reason that Paul, when he had finished
spilling out his Romans 9—11 was suddenly seized by it and poured out
his awe and adoration (11:33-36).
But our inability to grasp God fully is not just an intellectual
thing—it’s a moral and spiritual affair. We don’t see him well because
we’re not pure enough to see him well. It’s hard to think God’s thoughts
after him when our own thoughts are so unlike his. Our sinfulness has
affected our capacity to judge well. We think because we can still use
our brains to work out mathematical problems or grasp cosmological
theories or understand that 2+2 = 4 that our rational capacity and the
way we use it are unaffected by sin. Sin has hurt us! "How can you
believe?" Christ said to them, "when you seek the glory of men and not
God!" He didn’t have in mind their ability to handle abstract truths or
empirical realities. He said (Matthew 16:1-4), "You can understand the
weather patterns but because you are evil you’re completely ignorant of
your spiritual peril and who is speaking to you."
If texts look like they’re saying things we don’t want to be true our vested interests will suppress them.
We don’t have to build idols and fall down and worship them to be
idolaters. We can build a verbal picture of God, a picture we draw from
pieces taken from here and there in the Bible. We can build a verbal
picture of God and fall down and worship that. It will be God built in
our own inner image and he’ll come out looking like us—with all our
likes and dislikes. We’ll tell him what he can or cannot do or look
like. We’ll tell him, as ancients (and many moderns) have done, that he
can’t come dragging a cross. But when the Holy Father laid the cross on
the Holy Son of God he defied our labels and our idolatrous worship that
would tell him what he can or cannot do as he works to bless us.
For while we are reverently agnostic about much that God is he has
made it clear to us that he has made an eternal commitment to his
creation—the human family included. That eternal commitment and purpose
arose from his holy love and came to a throbbing completion in Jesus
Christ. He will never turn from that commitment because he cannot be
faithless to himself. Those of us that have been privileged to be called
to be his witnesses in Jesus Christ have come to trust him—for all our
dithering and our fumbling—that he is holy love "embodied" in a God that
has shown himself in and as Jesus Christ.
He is no destroyer! If we will not trust that his wrath and
chastisement on the human family is the form his redeeming love takes,
because he thinks it is appropriate, then it’s because we know less of
him that he has given us to understand. It is humility to confess that
we do not know what we do not know. It is not humility to say we don't know the truth that God has explicitly brought to our attention. It is not humility—it may be idolatry!
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