God has revealed who He is through His actions in history and through His words explaining those actions. Today, Sinclair Ferguson explains how God's people come to know more and more of His immeasurable greatness.
Most of us find ourselves in one of those situations where we’re asked, “What do you mean?” And we think a little like Augustine when he was asked to explain the nature of time and said, “I thought I knew what it was, until you asked me.” And I sometimes wonder if the same is true when someone asks, “What is God like?”
From one point of view, the answer is, “He’s actually not like anything. He’s God.” It works the other way around: what He creates and what He does are like what He is. I mean, only when we begin with God, and then move to what He creates and does, are we really ready to move back again from those things and understand how the Bible uses them to teach us what God is like. That’s a very basic principle. If we’re going to think biblically, and if our theology is going to be honoring to God, then we should begin with God Himself.
And yesterday, we were thinking together about the great name of God in the Old Testament, the name “I Am,” the name “Yahweh.” I said that some biblical scholars have thought, with some wisdom, that when God says, “I am who I am,” He’s telling Moses and the people to keep their eyes and their ears open, to listen to what God says about Himself, and to watch what He does in history. From these two realities—God’s acts and God’s words interpreting His acts—they would get to know who He really is.
That helps us to understand what is meant later in Exodus 6, when God says to Moses that although He appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “by my name, the Lord (I Am, Yahweh) I did not make myself known to them.” And yet the name “Yahweh” is used dozens of times already in Genesis. It’s possible, of course, that the people didn’t know it at all and had never heard it. Perhaps Moses wrote Genesis as he did after the exodus and used “Yahweh” all the way through. Or, perhaps he simply wanted to indicate that the God of Exodus was the God of creation and covenant and providence in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But perhaps what these words mean is that although they knew the covenant name Yahweh, they couldn’t understand its meaning the way Moses and his generation would when they experienced the promises of God coming to pass with mighty power in the events of the exodus.
Either way, it’s clear in Genesis that I Am was already at work. The exodus wasn’t the first time God had revealed Himself to His people. This wasn’t the first covenant He ever made with them. They weren’t the first people He had helped. The patriarchs knew I Am, but we might say, they didn’t yet know just how great He was as the One the hymn calls “Jehovah, great I Am.” And that’s actually how God’s revelation of Himself works in the Bible. It’s progressive and it’s cumulative until He fully reveals Himself as the I Am in our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the former days, the author of Hebrews says, God revealed Himself to His people at various times and in fragmentary ways (Heb. 1:1–2). Abraham didn’t know the greatness of I Am to the degree that Moses did, and if the truth were told, neither Abraham nor Moses knew His greatness the way Isaiah did. And if the truth be told, not even Isaiah knew the meaning of I Am the way you and I do.
But there’s a lesson for us here. Because God is the great I Am, there’s no end to us growing and knowing who He is. Even when we know Him fully and sinlessly as human beings, we know that He’s even greater than we can comprehend, and that’s one of the marvelous things about being a Christian. Day by day, month by month, year by year, we can get to know God better, appreciate Him more fully, and love Him more deeply. I love the prayer of Richard of Chichester, don’t you? “Lord, for these three things I pray: to see Thee more clearly, to love Thee more dearly, and to follow Thee more nearly.” Well, let’s make that our prayer today.
