MONDAY 7th
Exodus 3:7-22
NIV (v14) – ‘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.’
ESV (v14) – ‘God said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM. And he said, Say this to the people of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.’
There is so much we could look at from these verses for our devotion that choosing which to highlight was a difficult choice, the revelation to Moses of the identity of God as the ‘I am’, or there is the whole conversation that Moses had with God, the task he was being given to do, the excuses Moses made, the equipping that God was making available for him, but we can sum it up with the verses that remind us that God was aware of what was happening , he had heard the cry of his people, (Exodus 2:23-24) and that he had made a provision for them and that Moses was the man that God was going to use as his instrument to implement the plan and cause it to happen. A point to mention here is that God had not forgotten his people, and remember that in the middle of any crisis you may go through, God will not forget about you, he will always come to you.
The verse that I finally chose is verse 14 ‘I am who I am’ for everything that is contained in this chapter and what follows through this book, only happened because of who God is, because he was aware of the situation and because he was going to deal with it on their behalf. Despite their number, recall it said in chapter one that they had ‘multiplied and grown very strong’,(vv7,20) they themselves could not do anything about their plight. It required God’s help, and as we read in the Psalms, God was going to be their refuge and strength, a very present help in the time of trouble. (Psalm 46:1) Imagine the plight of the people of Israel if God was not in the equation, what if God was uninterested and had ignored them, even worse, what if God did not exist! But he did exist, and here in our text he reveals himself to Moses as the ‘I AM WHO I AM’, further clarified in the next verse (15) ‘God also said to Moses, Say this to the people of Israel, The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’ The ‘I am’ is the eternal and everlasting God, the One who has always been and will always be, the one who was the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, this would remind Moses that as God had been with his fathers, (ancestors) so he was going to be with Moses and with the people of Israel, but more specifically he was the one who was calling and commissioning Moses to go to the Pharaoh and demand that he let God’s people go. What a contest it was going to be – the ‘I AM’ versus the Egyptian King.
We wind back here a couple of verses to v11 where after hearing what it is that God has commissioned him to go and do (v10) Moses asks the question, ‘Who am I that I should go . . .’ God replies, ‘. . . But I will be with you . . .’ If Moses had paid more attention, he would have remembered that God had already said, ‘I have seen, . . . I have heard, . . . AND I HAVE COME DOWN to deliver them out of the hand of . . .’ (vv7-8) Moses thought that he was going to have to be doing all the doing, when in fact it was God who was going to be doing all the doing, but through Moses as his channel, his servant. Even with all the instruction that God gave to Moses, notice how many times it says in this chapter ‘I will . . .’ That is ‘that God will’. This is a sure reminder for all whom God has taken up and used, that they are only who they are and what they are because of the call of God and the commission of God upon their lives, anything we do or say or achieve is not through or by any of our own ability, but because God is doing the doing, and doing it through us as his channels, therefore and this is so important, all the glory must go to him! We live in an age of putting people up on a pedestal and sadly the culture has crept into the Church, where we see individuals being almost idolised, may we always look beyond the individual to one who has called and commissioned and may we always ensure that it is to God be all the glory, for great things he has done and will yet do.