I AM

An eighty-year-old shepherd on the far side of a desert, forty years past the only thing he ever tried to do, sees a bush on fire that does not burn up, and walks over to look. That is the whole beginning of the Exodus. Not a plan, not a call to arms. A man who had given up, turning aside to see why a bush was not burnt, and hearing his name said twice.

Forty years of nothing

He had tried once. Raised in Pharaoh's house, he "went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens" (Exodus 2:11), and saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and "he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand" (2:12). Stephen says what he was thinking: "he supposed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them: but they understood not" (Acts 7:25). He was going to be the deliverer, his way, with his hand, at forty. It got one Egyptian killed and Moses run out of the country. He "sat down by a well" (2:15) in Midian, married a shepherd's daughter, and kept sheep for forty years. The prince of Egypt, minding someone else's flock in the back of nowhere, until he was eighty.

Meanwhile, in Egypt: "the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God… And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant" (2:23-24). Heard, remembered, looked, had respect. Four verbs. Nothing has happened yet, and everything has.

Why the bush is not burnt

When the LORD saw that he turned aside. That is the hinge. The bush would have burned for a man who kept walking. The call came to the one who stopped and went to look. And then the name, twice, the way God says a name when the person matters and the moment does: Moses, Moses. Abraham, Abraham. Samuel, Samuel. Saul, Saul. And the first instruction is not a mission. It is shoes. "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (3:5). Then: "I am the God of thy 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 upon God" (3:6).

Jesus would one day take that sentence and prove the resurrection with it: "have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham… He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living" (Mark 12:26-27). I am, not I was. Abraham was four hundred years in the ground, and God spoke of him in the present tense, and Jesus said that settles it.

I have surely seen

"I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry… for I know their sorrows; And I am come down to deliver them" (3:7-8). Seen, heard, know, come down. God has been paying attention the whole forty years that Moses thought nothing was happening. And then the sentence Moses did not want: "Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh" (3:10). I am come down; I will send thee. God does the delivering and sends a man to do it. That is how He has always worked.

And Moses, who at forty was sure he was the deliverer, at eighty is sure he is not. Five objections in a row. "Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?" (3:11). And God does not answer the question. He does not say who Moses is. "Certainly I will be with thee" (3:12). Who you are is not the point. Who is with you is.

I AM THAT I AM

Second objection: they will ask Your name, and what shall I say? And the answer is the most important sentence in the Old Testament.

Not "I am the god of this mountain" or "the god of storms." I AM. The One who is. Every other thing that exists was given its existence and can lose it; the bush burns because He is in it and is not consumed because He is not fed by anything. Augustine, who thought about this sentence for most of his life, put it as plainly as it can be put:

Then the third objection, they will not believe me; the fourth, I am slow of speech, to which God says, "Who hath made man's mouth?" (4:11); and the fifth, which is not an objection at all but the truth finally coming out: "O my LORD, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send" (4:13). Send somebody else. "And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses" (4:14). And He sends him anyway, with his brother to do the talking. The man who would not go became the man who "endured, as seeing him who is invisible" (Hebrews 11:27).

Where this lands

Fifteen hundred years later, in the temple, a man from Nazareth was asked how He could have seen Abraham, and He answered with the name from the bush: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). They picked up stones, because they knew exactly what He had said. The voice in the bush had a face, and the face was His. The One who said "I am come down to deliver them" came down. The fire that does not consume what it fills is the Spirit He sends. And the first thing He did, before any plague or any sea, was find a man who had failed at forty and given up at eighty, out at the back of the desert, and say his name twice.

If you have turned aside, that is the whole qualification. Who am I? is the wrong question, and He does not answer it. Certainly I will be with thee. That is the answer, and it has not changed, and neither has He, because He cannot. I AM.

Related: The Names of God, The Prophet Like Moses, The Passover, and He Wist Not. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.