"From the Midst of a Bush" - Part IV

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Exodus 3:13-14

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Well this morning we have finally arrived to verse 14 which we've been pursuing ever since we began chapter 3 in the book of Exodus and of course we've stressed how important verse 14 is to this larger focus of chapter 3 which is not only the call of Moses but even more importantly the self -revelation of God.
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God revealing who he is and what he will do to Moses who will act as the deliverer and mediator between God and his people the
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Israelites. And so this morning we arrived to verses 13 and 14 where we actually encounter as it were the apex of God's self -revelation where God gives
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Moses his divine name. That's verse 14.
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Up to this point we've seen many ways that God reveals who he is by what he does in relationship to his people.
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We considered first the God who calls. The Christian life may seem sometimes to begin with our seeking but it won't take long for us to realize as the
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Great Hymn says, it was not I who sought thee but thou seekest me.
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God must first seek and find that which is lost. That's why the Son of Man came to seek and to find those who are lost and so God calls.
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That was the first thing we saw. Secondly, we saw that God knows. There's an intimacy that God has with his people.
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He knows the sorrows and the trials of their hearts. He knows what troubles them. The continual refrain throughout
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Scripture from the lips of our Lord Himself, fear not. He knows what's in the heart of man.
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He knows the burdens of our soul. He knows the things that afflict us. The Lord knows.
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We saw third, God who delivers. Because he knows our bondage, our sorrows, our misery, our affliction, he undertakes to deliver us.
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He will not sit idly by those whom he has set his love upon. He will pursue to the uttermost.
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He will grab them in his hands and will not let them be pulled asunder. And then those people who he has called and known and delivered, he sends.
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And we saw last week how God sends his people, not off on their own in the hopes that some will make it back, like the mighty
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Eighth Air Force did and sorties over Europe over the Second World War, just send a bunch of warplanes and hope some of them make it back.
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That's not how God sends his people. When God sends his people, he himself is with them.
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So God calls, knows, delivers, sends, and is with his people.
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But these are just the actions of God. These are the activities of God. Who is this
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God and what is his name? That's what Moses wants to know in verse 13.
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And God answers in verse 14 with the giving of his name.
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This is the name, sometimes called the divine name, sometimes called the covenant name of God.
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I prefer divine name. I'll explain a little bit more about why we have to distinguish between the divine name and the covenant name.
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It's part of an ongoing debate about verse 14. And we'll also carry this into next week.
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So we're not quite out of verse 14 yet. We're going to see more in the rest of chapter 3 about how verse 14 relates to God's intention for his people.
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Now with verse 14, you should know we're heading into deeper territory. There will be some technical terminology this morning, and I do not want you to be flustered nor dismayed.
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Take heart and take pen, if necessary. The weakest ink is stronger than the strongest memory, as is said.
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But we are dealing with a verse that Terence Fretheim, in his commentary, said is one of the most puzzled -over verses in the
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Hebrew Scriptures. That's where we are in verse 14. We're looking not only at the
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God who calls, knows, delivers, sends, is with us, but with verse 14 we're looking simply to the
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God who is. No other attribute following that, but God who is.
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That's how he reveals himself. That's our sole focus this morning. I want to unload and unpackage some of that and then give five uses for this divine name, the self -revelation of God and all that that means.
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That's all we'll do today, and next week we'll unfold some of the covenantal ramifications of the divine name.
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So our focus this morning, the God who is. Moses said to God, indeed when
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I come to the children of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, please note
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Moses already knows that this God who has revealed himself in the burning bush is the
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God of his fathers, is the God of the Israelites. So there's no confusion there. God could simply say, yes
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I am, as he said earlier, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. I am the
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God of the Israelites, the God of my people. I am the God of your fathers. But Moses is saying,
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I already know that you are the God of our fathers, but when you send me to the people and they ask, what is his name?
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They're asking for prophetic confirmation. How has he revealed himself to you?
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What is his name? Moses is asking, tell me more than I already know about yourself,
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Lord. We'll see that again later on. Lord, show me your glory. You get something of Moses' heart here, isn't it,
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Lord? It's not enough. I need more of you, need to understand more of you, need to mediate more of you to your people.
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What would you have me say to them? And God said to Moses, and if you have a good study
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Bible in front of you, a good translation, this should be all capital letters. It's a way of showing the reverence for this name.
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I am who I am. This you shall say to the children of Israel.
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I am has sent me to you. We've been standing in front of the burning bush for some weeks now and perhaps that has fallen out of view.
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This bramble bush, this small little brush in the Midian desert is still ablaze, and the voice that is speaking to Moses is speaking from the angel that stands in the midst of this burning bush.
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When we began chapter 3 several weeks ago, we considered some of the symbolism that is tied to this burning bush.
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We talked about fire being symbolic of God's presence. That's found throughout Scripture.
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God as a consuming fire, God as the one who brings light, the
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God whose presence is both refining and purifying, also devouring to those who hate him and do not follow his ways.
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And so this symbolic presence of God is shown forth in fire. The fact that the bush is not consumed, a lot of commentators see this bush, this desert bramble, as enigmatic of Israel itself, prickly to the neighbors around her, practically unable to sustain itself, clearly not usable for sustaining fire.
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It's not durable fuel source. It would burn up too quickly. And so there's this symbolism of this bramble, perhaps representative of the people of God, and then the fiery presence of God which surrounds them, and yet though he is holy and though he devours all within his presence, he does not devour nor consume them.
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That prickly, vulnerable, faint bramble is somehow within the midst of this self -sustaining fire.
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That, if that's true, that will bear out by the end of Exodus. So that book -ending
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Exodus, we have God's theophanic presence among his people. Remember, at the very end of the book of Exodus, it is the glory of God in the form of the cloud that indwells the tabernacle.
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He is tabernacling among his people and yet they are not consumed. And so we may have that symbolically here.
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It's a picture of grace. This is the first time in Scripture where a place is pronounced as holy.
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Moses, take off your sandals. The ground that you are standing on is holy ground.
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And it's holy because of God's presence. God dwells with his people as a flame amidst bramble, and yet they are not consumed.
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This is truly a picture of grace. But we can also press forward in other aspects of this image.
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Not just in the relationship between the flame and the bramble, but the flame itself. Exodus 3, verse 14, is the central place in the
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Old Testament where God's name is explicated, where God's self -revelation is made manifest.
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Say that again. Exodus 3, verse 14, is the central place where God makes his name and therefore his innermost being.
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Though he is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, as we'll come to read in Exodus chapter 6,
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God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty, El Shaddai, but by my name,
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Lord, that's capitals, that's Yahweh, I was not known to them. So when we come through the story of Genesis, though we have at various places the use of the divine name,
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I think Exodus 6 gives us an insight that Moses is going back, perhaps for certain theological reasons, to articulate that this is indeed
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Yahweh. We have it really from the beginning of Genesis 2, 4, 10, again throughout we find the use of the divine name, but we find out in Exodus 6 that it was first revealed to Moses, not to Abraham, not to Isaac, and not to Jacob.
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By my name, Lord, that's all capitals, I was not known to them. I was known as the
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Almighty God, the great God, but I was not known as I am who
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I am. So we have here new revelation. What is his name?
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I am who I am. What's in a giving of a name?
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Some parents say go to extremes in giving a name, other parents it seems not to really matter much, it's how it sounds, not what it denotes.
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I've seen examples of both in this congregation. I'm married to someone who the sound could be ridiculous, but if it had a good meaning it was golden.
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My name means swift horse, which is ironic because I was far from swift.
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I was always one of the last people to complete the 50 -yard dash growing up in grade school.
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So sometimes parents give a name for high hopes, they want to imbue something of a character or an attribute in the giving of a name.
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Sometimes it's a family name, so there's a sense of lineage or belonging with the name. Maybe it's a name that is more than just virtuous, it's actually something that is meant to be fulfilled, and we've seen examples of this throughout
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Genesis, that there's a lot of significance bound up in the giving of the name, not only in the giving of the name, but in who gives the name.
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It's very significant that the one who gives the name exercises a position of authority in the giving of the name.
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The fact that they give the name shows that position of authority, and so it's not surprising that when
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Joseph was taken away from his land and his people and brought into Egypt, he was given a new name.
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Why? New position, new relationship of authority. No longer shall you be called Joseph, you shall be called Zopnotpeneia.
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New relationship, new authority. I have authority to name you now as your master, as your
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Lord. God, of course, names Adam. I'm not going to suggest too much because it will just distract from our focus this morning, but I would argue it's significant that Adam names
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Eve. Position of authority given in the relationship of naming.
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So what's in the giving of a name? Authority? Character? Some attribute that we desire?
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That's why we give a child a certain name? What does God do when he names himself?
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He defines himself. He alone is the one who names himself.
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Don't be distracted by the headlines that you read today of people just making up their own names, along with making up their own identity, which is in a sense saying,
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I am my own authority. I cut off all and any connection of my origin, of where I came from, and who raised me, and who has authority over me, and who
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I'm called to honor by the Lord, who himself created me, and therefore has all design and all authority over my life.
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That's what's at stake in the giving of a name. Self -definition is off the table, but God defines himself.
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God alone names himself. I am who
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I am. It manifests his complete freedom. I derive from nothing, from no one.
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I require nothing. I am sustained by nothing outside of myself.
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I am who I am. No one named me. No one created me.
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I simply am. I am who I am. We're gonna go deeper into this now.
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What's in the divine name? What's in the divine name? It's very hard to comprehend the divine name because it brings us to consider aspects of God that are very difficult to understand, and even if we could master the technical or philosophical or doctrinaire definitions, we would still struggle to comprehend the fullness of what they relate to, of what they refer to.
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In other words, we're beginning to approach the incomprehensibility of God, that even in God revealing himself to man, he's revealing himself as yet the unknowable
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God. Only God himself can know God. Only the infinite can grasp the infinite. The finite is not able to grasp the infinite, and so the
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Spirit of God searches the deep things of God. Even when God reveals himself to us, we come to know him as a
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God who is hidden. Even in the fourth giving of his glory, that glory is a veiled glory.
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Only the infinite can grasp the infinite. John Calvin says, this name is given to us so that our minds would be filled with admiration as often as his incomprehensible essence is mentioned.
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Do you see how Calvin understands it? The divine name is a picture or a statement of the incomprehensible essence of God, and yet it's not only found here in Exodus 3 .14,
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it's found over 5 ,000 times throughout Scripture, and every one of those times,
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Calvin says, we're meant to stop and not read too quickly and contemplate on the utter otherness of our infinite
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God who is I am.
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That's the statement. I am. It's here as it stands in Exodus 3 .14.
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It's a first -person verb. It would actually be pronounced Eieh, so the whole phrase
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Eieh, Eieh, I am who I am, that's a translation. It literally could be taken as a future aspect in the stem form it's in.
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It could be, I will be who I will be. Some argue for that. They argue because of what goes on in the rest of chapter 3 of what
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God will do. He's saying, Moses, this is who I will be to the Israelites, but the
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Greek Septuagint translates it in the Greek as something present. I am uses the
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Greek present tense, I am, and I think that's right on the money as to how the
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Israelites would have understood it. I am not the God who will be, but the
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God who is because he is the God who is God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the
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God who is God, and the God who will be the God who is to the Israelites.
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He is who he is. So Calvin's right to say there's the incomprehensible essence given in the divine name.
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Remember that we're standing in front of a burning bush that is yet not consumed. The fire is self -sustaining.
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The Lord is giving us a metaphor, a creaturely image as a theophany to express something of his presence, and then he also gives us creaturely language to express something of his being, and that's what the divine name is.
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Another way we talk about the divine name, the four letters in Hebrew, you've heard it already, Yahweh. We don't know if that's how it was pronounced.
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Hebrew was originally written without vowel points. Those came around much later. There are probably good hunches on how things were pronounced, but when it comes to the divine name, we simply do not know.
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You've heard Jehovah. That's very common among Reformed tradition to use the word
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Jehovah. If you read Spurgeon's Daily Devotions, you'll often see that Spurgeon loved to say Jehovah. Our Blue Hymnal often refers to Jehovah.
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That's simply an English transliteration of the four letters, Yahweh. We write that as YHWH.
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In Hebrew that's Yod -Heh -Vav -Heh. And then they take the the term
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Adonai, which is God or Lord, and they take the vowels out of Adonai and they insert it between the consonants of Yahweh.
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Anglicized, that becomes Jehovah. So that's where Jehovah comes from. So Jehovah is not found in Scripture.
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It's a merging together of Adonai and Yahweh because we don't know exactly how
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Yahweh was pronounced. YHWH. Sometimes if you come across Messianic Jews or for some weird reason fringe
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Pentecostals, they'll say Hashem, which is Hebrew for the name. They won't refer to God as Yahweh.
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Out of reverence, they'll say Hashem or Adonai. But God here has given us this name.
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It's a name to be used. It's a name that's used throughout Scripture. And what does he show in this name?
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Sometimes we call it the tetragrammaton, the four -lettered word. Well, God is showing us, as Hermann Bavink, the great
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Dutch theologian, said, God is showing us that he is independent, self -sufficient, within himself, all -sufficient, and the only source of all existence.
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Yahweh is the name, this is Bavink, that describes this essence most clearly.
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His name is being. I am. I am who
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I am. In other words, this is Bavink, God is that which he calls himself, and he calls himself that which he is.
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What is he? He is. He is being. He is pure being.
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He is not becoming. There is no shadow or change or development in God.
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He is being, pure and simple. There is nothing else like that. We do not, as Thomas Aquinas made,
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I think, a fatal mistake. We do not place God at the top of a chain of being. This is what we call the ontological critique of Thomism.
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I know we're going really technical here, but bear with me. God is not at the top of being. Here's the highest form of being, and then there's lesser forms of being, like angels, powers, and principalities, and then humanity, and all the way down to the most irreducible forms of being or existence in life.
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No, God is not at the top of the chain. God isn't on any chain at all. He's pure being.
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There is nothing like God. Nothing that God derives from.
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Nothing that God is composed of. Nothing that God is sustained by.
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God simply is pure being, pure act, no contingency, absolute, utter being.
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When we talk about God in this way, what we're talking about is
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God's aseity. There's a technical word you can write down. God's aseity.
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A -S -E -I -T -Y. It's a technical term that theologians use.
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It comes from the Latin ase, from one's self, and this is a way of talking about God's self -existence or self -sufficiency.
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God is of himself. Everything is of God except God. God is of himself.
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Nothing can be apart from God except God. God is the only thing apart from all that he has made, and who is this
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God? He is the God who is. Let me spell it out in a few other ways.
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Sometimes you have to hear it in a few different ways for it to click. I realize this is sounding very philosophical. What we're dealing with in verse 14 with the divine name,
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I am who I am, we could call it a ontological tautology. In other words, it's saying two things in the same way.
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I am who I am. That's tautologous. That's the same thing. I am I am. God is simply saying, if you want to know who
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I am, I am. Wait a minute. We're waiting for the attribute.
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We're waiting for the predicate to follow. You are what? I am.
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What are you? Who's God saying he is? He's just saying he is. He is what? Is.
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He's isness. He's amness. He's being, pure and simple, without origin, without end.
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He is being itself. Existence is not a higher quality that is above God, or that is an attribute of God.
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God is being. God is who he is, and all that is derives its being from him.
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I am who I am. In other words, who God is identical with what
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God is, and also the fact that God is. Let me say that again.
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Who God is, is identical with what God is, and also with the fact that God is.
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The greatest and best man in the world must say, this is Matthew Henry, by the grace of God I am what
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I am. But God says absolutely more than any creature, man, or angel can say.
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I am what I am. We, in the progress of many toils and troubles and backslidings and stumblings, we say, oh, but by the grace of God, in this linear progression through life,
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I am what I am. There is no linear progression to God. He simply is.
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No. God says, I am who I am. No changes, no shadow of turning within me.
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All that God is, he is of himself. That's the aseity of God.
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By virtue of himself, he is goodness. Goodness is not a quality outside of God that he takes hold of or incorporates into his being.
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He is goodness. He is holiness. He is wisdom. He is life.
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He is light. He is truth, and so on. He is his attributes because he is the
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God who is. He doesn't go between attributes. He's not, if you had my childhood in the early 90s, he's not the composition of his attributes, like, by your powers combined,
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I am Captain Planet, and all the kids put their rings up, and it was always that lame kid that, you know, like the heart, and he's like, oh, heart, you know, why couldn't
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I have fire or water? That would be the best. God's not the composite of his attributes.
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There's nothing that combines to make God. God is of himself.
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As is evident, Hermann Bavink again, as is evident from the word aseity, God is exclusively from himself.
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Not in the sense of being self -caused, right? We can't even put causation into God's being because that implies an origin.
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God simply is. There was never a time that God was not. He is.
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Is -ness is God. That's what is -ness is. He is from eternity to eternity.
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That's who he is, being, not becoming, and not only as having being from himself, but the fullness of being.
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There can be no changes in God because that implies there's a different state of being other than God is, but God is being in its fullness, in its purity.
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God is what being is. God is being. In him we live and move and have our being.
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So that's why God cannot change. It implies that there's some status, some possibility, some remnant of being that he has yes to occupy, but no, this is the
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God who is. God who is not dependent on anyone or anything else.
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How different from the ancient world this is. In Moses' day, before Moses' day, long after Moses' day, how were sacrifices and rituals performed?
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The idea was that the gods have these powers and there are certain things they don't want to do, but they need, and they need us to make certain sacrifices to appease them or to sustain them, to give them honor or power, lest they take away our harvest or blight our cattle or bring defeat in warfare or what have you.
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So many sacrifices must be made because the gods are very needy and they're very jealous and hungry and full of wrath and vengeance.
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These are the gods that the people surrounding Moses knew. These are the gods of the Egyptians. Continual sacrifice is made because the gods were needy and there were certain things that they needed in this symbiotic relationship with humanity.
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You fulfill our needs and we'll fulfill yours. God says, do
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I drink the blood of bulls and goats? The cattle of a thousand hills is mine.
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These sacrifices are for you, Israelites, not for me. I am who
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I am. Humanity along with every molecule of creation is fully dependent upon God's being.
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All that is derives its isness from God who is.
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There is no being apart from God. Everything then is contingent upon God.
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And when we say everything, we mean everything. I'm not just talking about pine trees. I'm talking about the possibilities of communication or logic or morality or truth.
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You get nothing without God. Everything that is derives from him.
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And we've seen in Genesis 1 and 2 the story of humanity unfold that this God who is, who has no beginning nor end, who is pure being in himself, out of the goodness, out of all that belongs to his attributes, he creates man and woman in his image to have a righteous relationship with him for his purposes in the cosmos.
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Adam and Eve are not there to sustain Yahweh by sacrifices. They are rather planted in the garden to enjoy
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Yahweh in all of his glory and goodness. And as his image bearers to expand that to the very ends of all that he had made, which is ever bringing him glory.
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Psalm 19, Revelation 4. God's existence is necessary.
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Our existence is contingent. God's essence is pure and absolute. Our essence is entirely dependent.
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God alone is self -sufficient. Everything else has its sufficiency from him.
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And this is what brings the prophetic critique against the rival gods, the the idols.
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Remember 1st Kings 18 at Mount Carmel when Elijah challenged the the priests of Baal to a test and how they had a rather parched and flammable altar at the ready, and they did all the frenzy that they could, cutting and scourging themselves to try to attract the interest of Baal to just send some sort of spark or someone, you know, hey
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Bill put the Zippo down there if nothing happens the next hour. Anything they could to get that altar aflame.
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And of course nothing happens. Day, night goes by. And then Elijah doing everything he can to do to render that altar flameless, pouring, digging a trench, filling it with water, pouring water all over, making it completely soaked.
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Have you ever tried the light wet wood? I remember going on a camping trip some years ago before I was married with a few friends.
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We didn't watch enough Bear Grylls videos. We got to our campsite and built our tent just as dusk was setting.
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It's like we got to hurry. Find some thin sticks to cut down and maybe we'll find some more. We chose all the green wood.
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And after, and green wood is tough to saw. And so it's pitch black out and we have this massive pile of green wood and we might as well have been lighting concrete.
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It's like what in the world are we gonna do? So we had to swallow our pride and go to the camp store and buy some logs.
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That was embarrassing. Well here's a situation. There's Elijah and he's calling out, mocking the priests of Baal because they're trying to get the attention of their their
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God. And how does Elijah mock them? I love this. We have a little kids version called
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The God Test. It's this little kids book. It's a wonderful little book and this scene from 1st
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Kings 18 is included in the book and it always makes Elsie giggle. And so I love it for that reason especially.
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Is he musing, Elijah says? Is he relieving himself? Is he using the restroom?
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Is he on a journey? Maybe he's asleep and you need to wake him up. In other words, Elijah's saying you make gods after your own images.
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You make gods like men. So like men, maybe he's asleep and he needs to be woken up. Maybe he's relieving himself.
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Maybe he has all these bodily functions like men do because your God is not like our
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God. Your God is a bigger version of you, a bigger version of man with all of the limitations and deficiencies of man.
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But our God is not like man at all. Isaiah 44, the same thing.
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He mocks the idolatrous man who makes an idol and falls down before. He takes a log without any thought to where that log came from and he cuts it, half of it.
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He burns in the fire. The other half, over that half he eats meat. He roasts it. He warms himself.
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He says, I'm warm. I have the fire and the rest of it he makes into his God. And he falls down to worship it and he says, deliver me.
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You are my God. The God that I carved out of this wood that I cut down and half of it I used to heat my supper.
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And Isaiah's mocking that. A God that's made by man. A God that's a lot like man.
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And there's a criticism that runs through the whole Old Testament. You become like that which you worship. You worship a dumb and deaf idol, you become dumb and deaf.
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You worship an insatiable, lustful idol, you become insatiable and lustful. You know, that's still true today.
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You become like what you worship. Your idol cheapened humanity, then your humanity will be cheapened.
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How unlike God who is. So God's aseity, pronounced here in verse 14, reminds us that we rely on Him for all things.
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The air we breathe, the food we eat, the homes we live in, the language we possess, the categories that we think in, the structures of the world and of creation.
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Everything that is, however abstract it may be, and all potentialities therein, find their derivation from the
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God who is unlike anything and requires and has no stake in anything that He has made.
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He is utterly other. Of Him, through Him, to Him are all things to whom be glory forever.
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Do you see what Paul's saying at the end of that great doxology in Romans 11? Of Him, through Him, to Him is everything.
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And yet, not one single aspect of that everything is needed by God for who
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He is in Himself. He is utterly of Himself. There is nothing without Him.
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There is nothing apart from Him. There is nothing before Him. There is nothing after Him.
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All that is or ever could be is predicated upon Him being the
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God who is. I am, says the Lord. And the response is, who is like the
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Lord our God? There is nothing that you can find, that you can dream of, that is like the
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Lord our God. The only right response is Romans 11 36. The only right response is to fall down in worship.
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And all that flows out of worship, which is contemplation and a changed orientation to your life and to the world around you.
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That's what worship is meant to affect. And how is worship displayed before Israel? I'll give you just one of hundreds of examples from Psalm 113.
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Praise the Lord. Praise, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the
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Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord. From the rising of the sun to its going down, the
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Lord's name is to be praised. What's His name? He's the
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God who is. What does the psalmist want you to do from the rising of the sun to its going down?
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To contemplate the blessed name that's worthy of all praise. What is that blessed name? I am who
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I am. There are none like me. There are none like me. Everything that is is from me.
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And yet not one thing that I have made do I require or need. I am alone who
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I am. Who is like the
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Lord our God, who dwells on high, who humbles himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and in the earth?
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You love that. He humbles himself to look at the cosmos, to look at the galaxies that our
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Hubble is just scraping the surface of. It reminds me, at the very end of John Piper's book,
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Think, he has a little appendix and he recounts this quote from Charles Misner who was dealing with general relativity theory as a scientist.
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And this is what Misner wrote, referencing Einstein. I see the design of the universe as essentially a religious question.
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This is Misner. It's magnificent. It shouldn't be taken for granted. In fact,
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I believe that's why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, even though he strikes me as basically a very religious man.
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He must have looked at what preachers said about God and felt as though they were almost blaspheming.
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He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing.
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My guess is that he simply felt they did not have proper respect for the author of the universe.
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I don't give Einstein a hall pass at all, but I simply pick up on this. That little insight from Misner.
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If our thoughts of God are so low and human -like, we might as well blaspheme who
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God is. The contemplation of the grandeur and the majesty of the
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God who alone is of himself and everything that is is from him and came through him and is to him.
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If our thoughts are low of him, we might as well blaspheme. Who is like the
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Lord our God who humbles himself to look at the heavens? Blessed be the name of the
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Lord. What are some uses as we shift toward application now?
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And we're gonna expand on these next week, especially the last two. What are some uses we can have when we think about God revealing his name and that name essentially showing his perfection of being, the fullness of being, that he is ase, of himself?
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Well, there's far more that any sermon or any length of application could suggest. There's 50, if not five, uses, but I'll give you uses.
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By the way, that's the old Puritan term for application, use. You'd say, you know, here's the uses for this text, so I'm borrowing that from our
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Puritan forebears. The first use is the identity -forming use.
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I couldn't come up with a better way to put that, so it's kind of awkward, but it is what it is. Identity -forming.
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The use of the divine name, the use of God's name to form identity. That's clearly how it's used throughout the
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Old Testament. I'm gonna build on this a little bit next week. God's name, from the very beginning, is used to demarcate, to signify his people, the people that he has a covenant relationship with.
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Therefore, it's called sometimes the covenant name. If my people who are called by my name, right, it's used to signify or identify or form the body of his people, the body that he relates to.
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And we see that in the New Testament, this terminology, the name, and the way that the name denotes a people of God or a relationship with God, it extends now not only to Israel, as it was in the
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Old Testament, but now to every tribe and every tongue, whoever is named by the name of God.
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And so Jews and Gentiles alike, those who are far off, all that comes to fruition with the name that can be called, the name by which anyone who calls may be saved, the name that is unlike any name under heaven, the name which is indeed above every name.
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Do you see? The significance of God using his name to identify and demarcate his people runs the gamut of Scripture.
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I'll get there next week with Revelation 22, it's beautiful. We're blessed with the name of God, it denotes us as his people, we're blessed by the name of God, it denotes us as his people.
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Think of number six in the great Aaronic blessing, it's the name of the Lord that gives forth that blessing to the people of God.
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And when God makes his presence known among his people, a way of putting that, Deuteronomy 12, for example, is he makes his name to dwell among them.
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I make my name to be among you. What's that name? The God who is. I am who
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I am. I am now dwelling in the midst of this desert bramble that I ought to consume, but somehow, marvelously, my infinite presence does not consume it.
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If you were an ancient slave, pretty much uniform across all the cultures of antiquity, you were named, you were marked by your master, by your
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Lord. The early Christians spoke of Jesus as Kurios, as Lord. They probably went back to their workshops and homes as slaves and they called their master
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Kurios, Lord, Lord of the house. You still have that in English culture about 1 ,500 years later, my
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Lord, Downton Abbey, Lord. The ancient slaves would have a collar or a branding or perhaps something on their forehead to signify who they belonged to.
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It formed their identity because it formed a relationship. They were named by the name.
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The continuity between who God was to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is brought over to who
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God will be to Moses and the Israelites and it's connected together by the God who is.
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That's His name. That name was not given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
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He walked with them as a disparate, in a sort of disparate way, in a way of solitude as they walked through the land and experienced all that God was going to do in His promises.
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And then, of course, God actually names Himself to Moses so that the Israelites may be called by that name.
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Now God's doing something more significant with a larger scale. He's naming His people.
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His people will be called by His name and that's what carries us into the New Testament. I will be your
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God. You will be my people. That's the covenantal relationship. It goes both ways.
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I am has become your God and you have become the people of I am.
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So that's the first use, identity forming use. I'm going to expand on that next week. Second use, the sanctifying use.
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The sanctifying use. When the Lord chose to glorify
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His name by proclaiming it over His people, they were in turn to faithfully represent all that that name and that relationship signified.
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I will be your God. You will be my people. That's a two -way street. I will be your
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God. You are now named by my name and so do not bear that name in vain.
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The prophets begin to point to a time when God will redeem His people and how? What's a language they often use?
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Ezekiel 36 is an example. God will glorify His name among them.
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So embedded within the promises of God's redemption are, I'm going to sanctify a people so that my name will be sanctified, so that I will be glorified in their midst.
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God connects it to His name because His presence is in His name. His being is in His name.
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His people then are called by a new name and even nations come to bear the name of Yahweh.
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Amos 9 is an example of that. Again, we'll get to there next week. And then that's set apart from idolatry.
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If we're named by the name of God, we must not be named by the name of anything in this world, any false idol or false trust.
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We cannot take the equivalent of hunks of stone or wood and fall down to worship them. What would those hunks of stone and wood be today?
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They wouldn't be stone and wood. It'd be something else. Money, ambition, lust, greed, jealousy, covetousness.
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Many different idols, but the same mechanics of idolatry. They cannot save.
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They can only bring condemnation. They cannot deliver on what they promise. And when you worship them with your life, your time, your resources, and your energy, you become like them.
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Only when we see God in His aseity do we realize that sin is just a lie.
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Sin is a perversion of the gifts that come from the giver. That anything that is made cannot be compared to the
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Maker Himself. That we cannot truly see light unless it is in His light, as Augustine said.
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We cannot truly find what it means to be human and the fullness and the glory and the joy and the satisfaction, the wholeness, the peace, the shalom of what it means to be human unless we find our humanity in God.
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So that's a sanctifying use. This view of God's name, this contemplation upon who
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God is, it puts within us this call to be set apart, to be sanctified. We see through the lies of idolatry and creatureliness.
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Third use, devotional. This leads us to a devotional use of the divine name. Because the divine name is a revelation of God's being,
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His aseity, we take this to a devotional way. We don't simply say Lord or God flippantly.
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We slow down and we ponder what does it mean for God to be God. That's essentially what
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Moses is asking. This has a tremendous effect in our devotional life.
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It ought to. How quickly we read past Lord or God. It was very significant when the
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Old Testament scriptures were written, all sorts of names and ways to refer to God. El, Eloi, Adonai, El Shaddai, all the names what we anglicize as Jehovah Sidkenu or Jehovah Shammai, Jehovah Rishi, all these names that Sunday school groups remember as they grow up.
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Jews were very careful to demarcate names that were used and it was very significant when they came across the divine name.
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It doesn't seem to be original that they wouldn't pronounce it. That seemed to have developed later on, but still you get an idea of the reverence.
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It was significant that it wasn't just all Lord or God for them. There were places in Scripture where God's divine name was given and even when it was written and even when it was spoken about, it was approached with reverence.
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Why? You slow down and you think through who is this God that we're even speaking of. That's devotional.
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The creature is nothing in comparison with God. The greatest good that a creature can perform is a contemplation in worship of God, the right understanding and right response to God's being.
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That is the highest good a creature can attain to in life. We don't even get there in our devotions.
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We don't see it as the highest good. We see it like a vitamin. We see it like a box to tick. We've done our due diligence.
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This is a means of grace. I hope this will help me fight the battle today. We're not actually approaching with reverence the
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God who is, the God who is unlike anything that he has made. All created things vanish out of sight when we begin to ponder the
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God who alone is. I love what Thomas Manton says in this regard. The sun does not annihilate the stars.
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It created things, issues, circumstances in life. It's not that they're annihilated.
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The sun does not annihilate the stars and make them nothing. It annihilates their appearance from our sight.
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So that summer of first magnitude, some of second, some of third, but in the daytime all are alike.
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You see what he's saying? When God is far from view, when you're in, as it were, a nighttime of thought, there's things in your life, things that you're facing, trials, troubles, circumstances, stressors, anxieties.
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Some are of first rank, some are of second, third rank, some are bright stars, some are smaller stars.
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When you contemplate the sun, when the daylight comes, can you see any of those stars?
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Can you see the the significance of the brightness or the dimness to any of those things relative to the radiance of the sun?
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Manton's saying, contemplate the being of God. Contemplate the attributes of God.
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Spurgeon put it this way, there's something exceedingly improving to a mind that contemplates the divine.
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It's a subject so vast that all of our thoughts are lost in its immensity, so deep all of our pride is drowned in its infinity.
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Other subjects we can grapple with, we feel self -content when we do so, we leave them and we say, behold,
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I am wise. When we come to this master science, finding that our plumb line cannot begin to sound its depth, our eagle eye cannot see to its height, we turn away with a thought that a vain man would be wise, but he is like a wild colt.
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And with solemn exclamation we say, I am but of yesterday, I know nothing. There's a lot of people in the world today that could could use a good dose of what
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Spurgeon is referring to here. Listen, I was born yesterday, I know nothing. Everyone's pontificating today.
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Social media has only accelerated that fact. There used to be at least some social shame in pontificating as if you were a know -it -all, but now the barriers of glass and digital screens have taken all that shame and modesty away.
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Nothing will tend more to humble the mind than thoughts of God.
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Nothing will magnify the soul of man like a devout, earnest investigation of this great subject of his deity.
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I know of nothing which can bring such comfort to the soul, to calm swelling billows of sorrow and grief, and speak peace to winds of trial as musing upon the subject of God's being.
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Who is like the Lord? We sing it with the great hymn by Francis Light, Abide With Me.
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This is from, I think, the second or third stanza. Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day. Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away.
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You're looking at everything that's changing, your body, your family, the world around you, the seasons, the headlines, the nations, the economy, everything constantly in a state of flux, and usually that flux is for the worse and not for the better.
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Change and decay in all around I see. O thou who changes not, abide with me.
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See, in the midst of all of these violent tides and waves of change, we contemplate and meditate and worship a
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God who never changed. Why? Because he simply is.
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He is. He is who he is. We find this divine name then, not surprisingly, used throughout the book of Psalms.
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We saw that with Psalm 113, this jubilant call to praise, this exhortation to bow before a contemplation of who our
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Creator is. We also see it in the Psalms used with lament and with misery and with sorrow.
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Thou who changes not. We adore you and worship you at the heights of your blessing.
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You change not, our Heavenly Father, who is like you. And in the deepest sorrows and pains of our life, we say, you changes not.
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Therefore, I'm not consumed. Therefore, this veil of grief will pass, because you change not.
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Everything else changes but you. Fifth and last.
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Oh no, fourth. We didn't get to fourth. Isn't that frustrating if I went from three to five? Be the burning question.
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The fourth use. The apologetic use. Apologetic use.
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In other words, this is one of the ways we defend our faith. You have lots of conversations with people week after week after week, and maybe even we're guilty of this at times.
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We say, well, to me God is like, well, it seems like God to me, and to me I think that God is.
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Isn't it a great thing that Moses doesn't go to Israel with that? You know, guys, in my mind, God's kind of like, you know,
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God defines who he is.
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God reveals what he's like. We don't think our best thoughts of what a good
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God would be and then say that therefore is God. We don't say this is what I hope God will be like and therefore that must be
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God. God defines himself. God reveals himself. God does whatever he pleases, and whatever
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God pleases is in perfect unison with all of his attributes, his wisdom, his power, his love, his goodness.
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He cannot move between parts because he simply is. There's no change of status, no modes that he engages at from time to time.
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And for that very reason, whatever he does is not only right for him, but it's right for us.
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Whatever my God ordains is right. You ought to go home and just read that.
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If you're a struggling believer, let me encourage you today. Go home, look up or open up whatever my
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God ordains is right. Spend some time slowly and carefully reading that. An apologetic use.
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We don't begin with manlike definitions of God, philosophical categories for God.
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We let God reveal himself. God's absoluteness, God's pure being,
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God's is -ness is the standard of all that is. It's what makes the possibility for all that is.
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Without God and his purity of being, there can be no ultimate abiding absolute criterion for truth or goodness or beauty.
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If God is not, if God comes and goes, if God is or in other times is not, then we can't have something like truth, goodness, beauty.
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They become categories over him that change not. But God is truth.
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God is goodness. God is beauty. And so this becomes an apologetic use.
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I'm not going here down the road of classical apologetics for those who have a dog in this fight. I'm quite thoroughly
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Vantillian, but I'm trying to make the point about ways that we need to approach the divine name. God's absolute being simply means everything that is outside of him is not him.
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He is self -sufficient. He is of himself. He and he alone is of himself.
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Everything else outside of him is created by him, through him, to him, for him. He alone governs the absolute reality of all that is.
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He alone is utterly free from the constraints of what he has made. Nothing originates apart from the counsel of his own will.
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Therefore, God is the most important reality, the most valuable being, the most urgent thing that everything that is points us to, draws us to, sin, darkened minds, mutated, twisting, betraying affections, point us in the other direction.
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We rather run from the most important being, the most valuable reality, the most blessed, everlasting, joyful contemplation.
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We run, hide, distract, darken, and therefore we run headlong to a swift path of misery, to oppression, and destruction.
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But the point I say apologetically here, this is true in sharing your faith, this is true in preaching, or in how we even think about sharing
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God to others. We do not conform God's being to others' expectations or hopes.
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Let God speak for himself. Let God define himself. Let his name be the name that we name.
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We must conform to the reality of God, rather than God conform to us, to our structures, to our desires.
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And that's something that takes place all the time, in very subtle ways. Seeker sensitivity and a church can very subtly make
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God conform to the expectations and soundbites of popular culture, and hopes to be winsome.
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And they argue, aren't we just doing 1st Corinthians 9 here? To a Jew, I became a Jew. To a Greek, I became a
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Greek. I do all things that by any means I might win some, not by these means, not by giving a distorted presentation of who
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God is and how he's revealed himself. You want people to conform to God's revelation, rather than God's revelation being pitted and exacto -knifed to other people's confirmation.
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So that's the apologetic use. Notice that Paul, in Mars Hill, Europagus speech in Acts, notice that Paul starts at that level in his preaching.
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It's fascinating, isn't it? I don't think I ever really noticed it until this week. I come to proclaim to you the
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God who you do not know. And he goes on to say, in this
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God we live and move and have our being. Here's all these philosophically minded
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Greek writers, and they're all taking up their posts on Mars Hill. By the way,
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Paul doesn't come away with a great following. We don't have an Acts 2 report of mass conversion. They're in Acts 15.
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It's very interesting, isn't it? Or Acts 16. It's really interesting that Paul only gets perhaps a handful of people following him.
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We don't even know if they're converts. They're just interested to hear more. But he starts at what he called a meta -level, this
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God that you know nothing about. You know nothing of the story of Israel, nothing of the covenant promises, nothing of the revelation of Scripture.
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Where can I even start? I'll just start from your being, from your mere existence. The God that you don't know is the
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God who made all things and everything that is has its being in him. In him we live.
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In him we move. In him we have our being. So that's the apologetic use.
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Fifth and last, and this is truly going to be opened up next week, the missional use.
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The missional use. I think this is perhaps one of the most important.
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The missional use. It's interesting to me that Exodus gives us this picture of God's people being a kingdom of priests.
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Israel has brought his people out of Egypt and he's made them his own people by his own name, and part of the entailment of that name is you shall be unto me a kingdom of priests.
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You shall all worship and serve me. It's one of the things we're going to see repeatedly in the contest between Moses and Pharaoh.
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The Lord says, let my people go that they may worship me in the wilderness. And when they're finally brought out into the wilderness,
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God says, you are now to me a kingdom of priests. Worship me as priests.
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And of course, 1st Peter chapter 2 says this is the reality for the church.
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This was but an example, a foreshadowing, or a picture of what's the ultimate fulfillment. We, the church,
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Jew and Gentile combined, all who compose the body of Christ are that royal priesthood.
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The high priest had a frontlet, this golden forehead plate made of gold with with blue tassels holding it on four punched holes on the four corners of the rectangular plate and inscribed in Hebrew, most likely would have been
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Paleo -Hebrew, which looks almost like runes. Holiness to the
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Lord. And that Lord is all capital, the Tetragrammaton, Yahweh. Holiness to Yahweh.
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And where Aaron went with this frontlet, he would give the Aaronic blessing and what would the people see? Holiness to Yahweh.
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Holiness to the God who is. Holiness to the great I am. And everything about the high priest and his function and the priesthood and how that then flows into the priestly nation, it's all about holiness to the
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Lord. So not only is holiness to the Lord to be between Aaron and God's people, but remember the
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Abrahamic promise, it's to be from the high priest to the people of God to the whole world, to all of the nations.
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Holiness to the Lord through the high priest mediated to the people who mediate it to the very ends of the earth.
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Holiness to the great I am. And in conjunction with that, in Exodus chapter 20, the
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Lord says, you shall not take my name in vain, which we reduce to simply saying, be careful about how you speak.
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Be careful how you speak. So we think we have fulfilled that commandment insofar as we don't stub our toe and use the
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Lord's name in a flippant way, but when you understand where God's name was found, in their tabernacle, on the priesthood, symbolic of his presence and of his redemptive purpose for the world, that third commandment is saying a lot more than just don't take the
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Lord's name in vain, saying don't bear, don't carry, don't live out your life with that name upon you as a plate upon your forehead in vain.
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You don't have my name for nothing. You don't have my name so you can live your own little curtailed life of comfort.
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You are bearing my name for a purpose, so don't bear my name in vain. I alone am the
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God who am. I alone as the great I am have called you and rescued you and made you holy and now you're bearing my name.
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I own you. You're my people. I'm your Lord. Don't bear that name in vain.
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Don't bear that name in vain. This name, the divine name, presupposes everything that the first two commandments have already said about the exclusive worship and devotion that Israel was to have toward God.
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I will be your God. You will be my people. I'm the God who rescued you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
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You will have no other gods before me. You will make nothing into a likeness of me to worship, nothing of any likeness of any things that I have made.
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Remember, I am the one who made all things. I alone have pure being. Anything that is has its being from me.
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And that I am, that divine name, that truth symbolized in the name, don't take it in vain.
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Don't bear it in vain. Don't hold it. Don't wear it. Don't use it in vain. So God gives us his covenant name, as we see embedded throughout the
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Psalms. Give unto the Lord the glory. Do unto his name.
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Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. We have, as it were, the name on our foreheads, as Revelation 22 literally puts there.
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We go forth as a kingdom of priests saying, bless the Lord's name.
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Bless the one who is unlike anything he has made. Bless the one whose whose work in creation has manifest all things from and to and for him.
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Give glory to him alone. All the earth shall worship thee, shall sing to thee. They shall sing to thy name.
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All nations whom you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord. They shall magnify your name.
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So what do we do as a kingdom of priests when we gather together in a place like this on a day like this? We don't have our golden plates.
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Some of you would have pawned it off in these tough economic times, maybe. I hope not. But we're named by the
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Lord's name. There's a missional use for that. Israel wasn't named by the
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Lord's name to be a little enclave in the midst of the nations. They were named by the name of the
01:07:59
Lord to be light and salt, to be redemption to those very nations, to go and to proclaim to them the great
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I am who alone is worthy of all worship. So what do we do when we gather here as a kingdom of priests, some small outpost of this kingdom of priests?
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We pray and hopefully we're taught and encouraged to labor for what
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Jesus prayed, what Jesus taught us to pray. Hallowed be your name.
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Hallowed be your name, Father. Israel of old failed to sanctify your name, failed to defend your name, failed to honor you through your name, failed to be missional with your name.
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Father, my prayer is hallowed be your name. To the ends of the earth, holiness, holiness to the
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Lord. To the ends of the earth, hallowed be the great I am who is like the
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Lord. Let's pray. Father, we pray, hallowed be thy name.
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We pray, Lord, that we would not stumble and fail where your people of old stumbled, at that very stumbling stone,
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Lord. Not understanding who you are in yourself, treating you as if you required, needed sacrifice,
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Lord, for your own sustenance or benefit. Forgive us,
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Lord. We often turn you into someone like us, a bigger version of us. We don't contemplate, approach you as you really are.
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We don't let our thoughts even begin to travel toward the radiance of your being, only then to burn up at the depth, at the immensity, at the incomprehensibility of who you are.
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And yet you speak to us in profound condescension. You bow down from the heavens.
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You whisper to us, Lord. You light upon us in a myriad of ways, day by day.
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You take thought to the hairs on our head. You take thought because to you we're of much more worth than sparrows,
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Lord. You know our sorrows. You've called us. You've delivered us, Lord. Let us not bear your name in vain.
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I pray for my brothers and sisters here, and I pray for us as a church, Lord, that we would have a greater affection, a greater sobriety to your holiness and how that's shown forth in how utterly other you are from us and from everything that you have made.
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Yet how everything that is is oriented toward you. Everything that is has its being from you, but you alone have your being within yourself.
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Help us, Lord, to bow down in doxological praise as Paul does at the end of Romans 11.
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Help us as a church to understand that we're not coming to some man -like grandfather in the clouds, but we're coming to a holy, infinite, invisible, immortal
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God ever blessed who has called us unto himself, named us with his name.
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Let us not bear that in vain. Let us not take it lightly, Lord. And if there's someone in this room,
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Lord, who does not know you, who has not been named by your name, who has been like the fool that Ezekiel and Elijah and Isaiah mock,
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Lord, becoming like the very things they're giving their lives and their affections and their time and their energy over to, won't you pull them back from that brink of destruction and foolishness,
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Lord? Help them to see your true light, our Creator God, the great