Skip to main content

Who does God say he is?

Exodus 3:14 

“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” 

The title of this isn’t a rhetorical question. For us, we call God different things. We speak different languages, have had different circumstances, and may refer to God differently. Maybe to you God is Healer, and maybe to another person God is Provider, but what does God call himself?. We see countless times in the bible where God self-identifies. Whether it is “Almighty” (Revelation 1:8) or “Alpha and Omega” (Revelation 22:13), God is multifaceted in his title. Today, I want to highlight one of those names. From the verse we see God refers to himself as “I am who I am”. This is the first time in the bible where God refers to himself by a specific name. Prior to this moment, the Israelites called God “Elohim” or “El Shaddai” which is more of a title rather than a personal name and loosely translates to “God Almighty”. They called him this as a recognition for sovereignty and an identification of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, the bloodline for which God blessed. “I am who I am” translates to “I am who I will be”. In context, God is bringing hope to the Israelites who have been enslaved for 400 plus years. God is essentially saying that the same God he was for Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, he will be the same God that will bring them out of Egypt. We can have our own hope in this as well because God will bring us out of our own Egypt: whatever that may look like. With this name God is saying he has no beginning or ending, he is constant. He has stayed the same through the history of time and will forever stay the same. With everything worldly eventually ending, God remains consistent throughout: he transcends earthly conventions of timing. God is also inviting us to intimacy with this name. He wants more than us to simply acknowledge his sovereignty.  The vagueness to this title allows us to personalise it to our own situations. That being said: the same God that got you through that grief, God is saying “I am who I will be”. The same God that got you out of that sickness, God is saying “I am who I will be”. The same God that got you out of that debt, God is saying “I am who I will be”. God will be who he will be.  

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Identity built through Christ

John 1:12    “ Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed his name, he gave the right to become children of God”   Identity is always something I have struggled with. I believed that if I did not act a certain way with certain people I would not be accepted. I built my identity on the perception of others: letting other people's opinion of me dictate my value as a person. One thing I didn’t realise was that my value had already been written , something established long before I was even born. My value: your value, is built through Jesus. And so, we can’t let the opinion of others affect us, whether positive or negative because our identity is not built on the perception of others but of God. We are all seen di fferently by different people , maybe your someone’s brother or sister, a mum or a dad, or something else. The most common association t o our identity is our names. It’s what our friends , teachers and family refer to us by: an associat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Being intentional with Joy

James 1: 2   “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”   Have you ever not been in a good mood? Have you ever felt like things are just not going your way? If you answered yes to any of those questions, it shows that you are human. Problems occur and things happen that can make us upset, and that is an unfortunate reality we have to face in this world .   For me, one of my resolutions this year is to be more joyful. If I had to make a book about the year of 2024, the title of it would be “ A sequence of difficulties” . In my life, it seemed I was experiencing problem after problem and issue after issue. I couldn’t escape them. The bitter truth is that problems and issues are inevitable, but our attitude towards them isn’t .   At th at time, I was angry at God for allowing all those things to happen to me, but in retrospect I can be grateful to see the work God was doing inside of me, the resilience he was building, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dealing with Fear

2 Timothy 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind”  Fear is a universal emotion we all feel.  It comes in different formats, affects different people differently and is an unavoidable aspect of life.  For me, as I’ve progressed in my relationship with God, fear has been the hardest thing I’ve had to deal with.  Whether it was certain dreams, visions or the enemy trying to play with my mind: they were all spiritual attacks.  You may not deal with spiritual attacks, and maybe your fear is embedded of people’s perception of you.  Maybe you have fear of rejection, or fear of failure, nevertheless we should all identify our fear, but let us not make it our identity.  Don’t hold your fear hostage, set it free by allowing Jesus to use his keys of comfort.  Looking at the verse, once we have given our lives to Jesus and have accepted him as our lord and saviour, w...
Post a Comment
Read more