40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 65 (Exodus 3:7-17)

Episode Date: December 6, 2016

This episode is all about what God tells Moses His name is. Well, there is a little about milk and honey in there too, but really this could be called the great "I Am" episode. Check it out!

Welcome to 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. I'm Daniel Emery Price. I'm joined by Chad Bird. Chad, how's it going, man? It's good. Starting off this week with a little bit of Exodus 3. I have to apologize for the roughness of my voice. I've been fighting laryngitis the last few days, but I think I can hold up for 39 minutes and 30 seconds. All right. That's good. That's good. Well, I think we left. It's been this way since we've been in Exodus.

this, but we left Moses in not necessarily a precarious situation, but definitely not an average situation. No, we left him kind of, you know, with his shoes off, so he can't go very far. That's right. He's stuck there in front of a bush that's burning, but not burning up. And lo and behold, God is talking to him. So, yeah, kind of a precarious situation, I guess you could say, at least one that is fraught with all kinds of expectation and apprehension as to what's going to happen, what's going to happen next. I guess we should, well, if not come to his rescue, at least see what happens.

Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Let's find out what's going to go down with Moses here. So just to just to recap here, Moses is is 80 years old now. And I always like to mention that because I think sometimes we have the impression, and maybe it's from the, you know, the old movie, the Ten Commandments, that he's, you know, middle-aged, 60, something like that. But he's 80. So 40 years have passed since he had to run out of Egypt after killing the Egyptian. And all this time he's been in the desert. He has been taking care of his father-in-law's sheep. He's basically a nobody.

Just an average guy out there in the desert doing what the Bedouin people do, move around, live in tents, take care of their livestock. So that's where he's at. And he sees this bush that is on fire, captures his attention, of course. And so he goes over to see what's up. And that's when God speaks to him. and says, first of all, his name twice, Moses, Moses, and Moses is, in Hebrew, it's one word, Hineni, which is literally, here I am. One commentator says, at your service. So God tells him, first of all, don't come any closer. Secondly, take your shoes off, because you're standing on

holy ground. And then he identifies himself as the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hides his face. So he has his shoes off and his face hidden because he's on holy ground and he's afraid to look at God. So that's where we left him last time. Now what's going to happen? Well, there's a lot. Actually, this covers the rest to chapter three and most of chapter four as well. So we're going to have quite an interesting conversation that takes place here between Moses and the Lord. And we're going to learn a lot of things about Moses, but we're also going to learn a lot of things about God. I'll go ahead and say this now, this is kind of something to keep in mind as we proceed forward. One of the fascinating

things about this whole back and forth between Moses and God is that if Moses had immediately agreed to do what God wanted him to do, I mean, if Moses would, as soon as God said, go down to Egypt, if Moses had said, yes, sir, heading that way right now, then we would not have a lot of the revelation and insight that we have in the rest of these chapters. And I think that's worth mentioning, because this relationship, I guess you could call it, that develops here between Moses and the Lord, in which Moses is not afraid to dialogue and to question and to struggle. Because of this, we actually learn more about God than we would have otherwise known. In fact, if Moses had never asked a question of God, in particular, if he had never said,

hey, what's your name? But then we wouldn't have this whole discussion about the name of God being Yahweh, and I am who I am, and all of that rich material that we're going to get to in just a minute. So I think that's worth mentioning to kind of keep in mind as we're proceeding forward here, that the dialogue between Moses and Yahweh, Moses' non-hesitation to engage in this, It really opens up possibilities of learning more about God as the story unfolds. So, what happens first? Well, the Lord is going to talk first. After Moses is hiding his face and he's afraid to look at God, then we have about a five-verse speech that comes out of God's mouth.

god says i have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in egypt in hebrew that's what we call an infinitive absolute uh which is a fancy way of saying that this is the way that the way that hebrew really accents something we have i have surely seen but in hebrew i have seen seen the affliction of my people. That's the way that they emphasize the seriousness of an action. They repeat the verb. So I have seen, seen the affliction of my people. I've really seen, I've surely seen the affliction of my people are in Egypt. And I've given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, because I know their sufferings. So I've come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land,

to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivite. And I'll only pause there for a minute before I go on to the way he wraps up his speech. This is, I think, an important way to begin, because what God is saying in all of these verbs that he strings together is that he's not he's not sort of this um oh i don't know i guess we we might call him a an american god who is blind to really what's going on and kind of a uh a deistic sort of god who is uh like the watchmaker that makes the universe and then steps back and just lets it tick on its own accord. He's a God who's intimately involved in his creation. He is deeply involved in the sufferings of his people. He is a suffering

God. He doesn't simply pull out his binoculars and view from a distance what's going on with his with his people. Instead, he gets down in the pit with them. He suffers with them. He bleeds with them. He is in pain alongside them. That is abundantly present in the Old Testament as it is, of course, in the New Testament as well. One of the words that's used here at the end of verse seven is that I know their sufferings. The Hebrew verb there is yada. It's the same verb that's used way back to being at Genesis, where it says that Adam knew his wife, and they conceived and bore a child. So there, of course, yada means sexual intercourse. So it's an intimate knowledge. It's not simply an intellectual apprehension of some truth. So it's not like God knows their

sufferings the way that I know people are suffering in Africa, or I know people are suffering in new york city or wherever it is now i might know that in an on an intellectual level but i don't really i don't really enter into their sufferings but god does so for him to know someone's suffering is for him to dive headfirst into their sufferings and to be there with them and to and to and to suffer alongside them in order that he might bring them out of that when when the time is right so he he has seen the uh the affliction he knows they're suffering he's going to come down to deliver them from the egyptians and he's going to bring them up to a good and spacious land one that flows with with milk and honey now i i've said this before

and i'll say it again i have i've studied exodus chapter three i don't know how many tons countless of stones. I've taught it. I've written about it. I've studied it on my own. And yet every time that I come back to it, I learn something new. And as I was looking at this the other day, I learned something new here. And that is that we see in his speech here that God is not simply a God who saves us from something, he delivers us to something as well. Now, in this case, he comes down to deliver them from Egypt, but he's not simply going to save them. He's not going to simply deliver them from their slavery and leave them there. He delivers them from something in order to bring them into something. So he delivers them from slavery in Egypt

in order to bring them into the promised land. So he's a God who doesn't simply reach down and pull us from whatever we're in, sin or addiction or slavery or depression or whatever it is that he's saving us from, but he also brings us where he wants us to be. And I think that's one of the missing aspects of a lot of Christian teaching these days. We hear a lot about how God saves us, Jesus saves us. Well, that is very true, but that's only half the story. He not only saves us, but he fills us with his own righteousness. He not only rescues us, but he puts his holiness around us so he doesn't simply just you know wash us bathe us cleanse all of our dirty sin away he follows that up by bringing us into his closet if you will and

clothing us with his with his own righteousness so that that's the that's the full gospel not simply the the removal of sin but the imputation of righteousness as well yeah i mean And I've been saying for a long while now that imputation is the great missing thing within broader Christianity. There is a difference between sort of innocent and righteous, where if God comes in and just kind of takes away all my bad and just kind of makes me neutral, right? we're just just kind of like starting over like a clean slate almost as if it's now up to you right like give another shot like you know well let's let's hit reset on this whole it's not like that at all he's not he's not just he's not hitting reset i i mean i always equate this to baptism and and there's so many parallels between baptism and what's going to happen in exodus you

know when you when you talk about the what's going to happen at the red sea and i mean i don't think i'm doing any spoilers here i think most of the audience has heard about the red sea uh maybe not i don't know but uh but still there's this there's this out of the out of slavery and the and this just baptism into the red sea and and like you said being taken to something as well though promised something hey like a good lutheran when i think of salvation my mind wanders to baptism on the regular so uh but in baptism even you know it's not just a matter of you know you know okay be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins like that's that's true so so i'm definitely going in dirty and i'm definitely coming out clean but but more than clean i'm coming out righteous

that's different you know uh yes i'm clean but i'm also good which is which is better than neutral i'm perfect as if i had done everything yeah yeah and and you say that way yeah it's not just kind of a uh a kickstart okay you're washed uh you're clothed uh now make sure that you don't mess everything up by getting those clothes dirty it's it's the uh the righteousness that we receive is not a potential righteousness or righteousness that we can somehow mess up no it it's it's not ours that's the whole point right we're wearing somebody else's clothes yeah you come out they're not our own yeah you come out in an indestructible jesus suit i mean it's that's it is just the way it is. Yeah. So can we sin? Well, of course. But our sin does not detract or sully the righteousness

of Christ. Yeah, it sullies us, it dirties us, but it does not dirty the gospel. The gospel remains perfect and pure and spotless and righteous because it's not ours. Sometimes we talk about an external righteousness or alien righteousness. I don't like the term alien just because I think, you know, outer space stuff. But alien meaning it's not, it's from somewhere else. It's not ours. So because it's not ours, because it's always a gift, then there's nothing we can do to mess it up.

You can't in some way mess up the righteousness with which you're clothed because it's always Christ's righteousness, which is perfect and complete and holy and spotless. And that's what God puts on us as he does this kind of second action of salvation. He saves, but he imputes his righteousness to us. He cleanses us and he clothes us, just like he's going to bring the Israelites out of Egypt and not simply leave them in the wilderness and say, all right, you're on your own. He's going to bring them out of slavery into the freedom of the Holy Land. So that's a picture here of the complete action of how God works for Israel as well as for us today.

Hey, you want me to make you like the term alien righteousness? Yeah, yeah, convince me. i have a friend i have a friend uh who had a guy come to his church uh he got a visitor come one day that uh he was there and he you know asked him how he heard the church stuff he's like oh i just i was just looking for a church and uh as he got to know this guy it turns out what ended up happening was this guy was a huge huge sci-fi fan yeah and uh he saw where this is going he saw the term alien righteousness somewhere thought that sounds super interesting it started reading up on it and then and then it was like i better get to church

that is great that is great hey well i it just uh it just moved way up the ladder as far as my uh my liking of it now there you go who would have thought that uh that alien would be a great evangelism tool but there it is works one guy one guy but that's a good one guy it's worth a true story so uh yeah so that's the uh the equivalent i guess the bringing into the promised land would be the equivalent of this alien righteousness clothing clothing us the righteousness of christ so that's what god is telling moses he's going to do he's going to come down and he's going to bring up, and he's going to bring them into this good and spacious land. Now, this is, I wanted to mention something about the milk and honey. I was talking with my wife about this the

other day, about how I sort of have an explanation that almost ruins the romanticized image we have of milk and honey, because, I mean, it is a land flung with milk and honey, but not really the way that we are accustomed to think of it because most of the milk from the Holy Land came from goats. So this is like a land flowing with goat milk. And there is, there's no record in the Old Testament of anyone ever raising bees in order to harvest their honey. What seems to be the meant by honey here is actually a product that's very common in the Holy Land. It is a kind of a syrupy resin, honey-like substance that's made from dates. So I guess if we could translate this in a way that's a little bit more realistic

to the agriculture and the horticulture of the Holy Land, it would be to a land flowing with goat milk and date juice. This just doesn't sound quite as romantic, you know. But it's realistic. Hey, where there's goat milk, there's potentially goat cheese. Yeah, well, there you go. There you go. So you can't beat that.

But that's really what's being described here. It is a picturesque description of the Holy Land, but not really the way that we commonly think about it. Hey, man, contrasted with leeks and onions, it still sounds pretty legit. Yeah, it's still a whole lot better than leeks and onions. I've never quite understood the Israelite attraction to life back in Egypt where they had leeks and onions. That's the deceitfulness of sin right there, man. Remember when you look back at that sin and you're like, hmm, leeks and onions day and night. Man, I wish I could have a diet of leeks and onions.

And the other person looks at you like, what? What are you talking about? Leeks and onions are not a good diet. no man it was so good it was so good i think you've forgotten that's the deceitfulness of sin there you go there you go i didn't know what they were so confused i didn't know what was good for them right that makes sense so uh that to kind of pick up where we left off here so god describes all these things he's going to do and uh how he's going to bring israel into this promised land and then he kind of wraps everything up by saying this he says now look

the the cry of the of the israelites has come to me and i've seen the oppression with which the egyptians are oppressing them and if i can kind of pause there say so you're moses all right and you're listening to all this and in the back of your mind you're thinking uh-oh i i can i can feel something coming here there's there's a reason god is telling me all of this right he's leading up to something, and then, bam, he gets to it. Therefore, come on, I will send you to Pharaoh so that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. Now, we're going to get to Moses' response in just a second, but I'd like to point out now that this is one of the first of many what we call, what we refer to as call narratives in the Old Testament.

These are stories where God appears to someone, usually a prophet, and he calls that prophet to serve, calls that person to be a prophet, to be his spokesman, to foretell his will for the people and to foretell what's going to happen in the future that's what prophets do they foretell and they foretell well moses is going to be a prophet and this is god uh coming to him to call him to to do that and uh it's it's very i think revealing the verb choice that's used here because it says that god says that i will i will send you to pharaoh the hebrew verb that's used there is a shalach. To shalach is a technical term. So if I commission someone to go on an official mission for me in order to speak for me, to act in my stead with my full authority,

that person is my shalach. To shalach is to send, so a shalach is one who is sent. So the rabbis had a saying They said that the shaliach of a man Is as the man himself So the shaliach of Yahweh here Is Moses Moses is the one who bears the The authority of Yahweh to speak and to act for him

And shaliach is the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek verb apostela, which means to apostle or to send. So we could really compare Exodus 3 with Matthew 28, when Christ sends out his apostles. There he commissions them with the full authority that he possesses, and they speak and they act for him. He who hears you hears me. And so he's going to do the same here with Moses. Moses will be the mouthpiece of Yahweh, speaking with his authority so this is sort of the matthew 28 of the old testament so all that leads up now to moses response what is what is moses going to say well most of the time in the old testament when a person is called to the prophetic office they

object. They come up with a list of reasons they should not do this. The only exception that I know of is Isaiah, who is unusually gung-ho about this. You know, he says, send me, send me. Well, Moses says, send somebody else, send somebody else. And this is the way that he this is the way that he starts. So after God says all this, Moses responds, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt? So Moses begins this whole list of reasons why he shouldn't go, why God should. Think again, go to plan B, send somebody, send somebody else and it begins then with basically this uh uh question of uh his his his own inherent personal deficiency i mean who am i there's got to be a whole lot of other people who

are more qualified for this better at this uh younger than i am whatever whatever it might be there's got to be other options because who am I that I should go and and do this and every time that Moses has an objection God has a response so this one is pretty mild to begin with you know who am I and so God answers his response this way he says certainly I will be with you and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain. So Moses says, who am I? And God's response is basically, it doesn't matter who you are. What matters is who I am. And not just who I am, but what I'm going to do with you and for you.

So don't get an idea, Moses, that this is somehow up to you, that somehow you have to submit the proper resume, that you have to have a lengthy enough CV, that you have to have a whole list of credible sources that I can turn to to make sure that you're a legitimate and qualified candidate for this position. No, it's quite the opposite. The only reason that Moses is going to succeed is because God is with him. Certainly, I will be with you.

And that's really all that you need to know. God has already said, look, I'm going down. I've heard, I've seen. I'm going down to deliver my people. I am just simply going to use you as my tool, as my servant in order to bring this about. So don't think so highly of yourself or so lowly of yourself either way, because who you are ultimately doesn't matter. Whose you are is what matters. You are my servant.

you will be the one who speaks and acts for me and as a way of of assuring you when all is said and done that I'm the one who's behind this all you're going to bring the people back to this exact location Mount Sinai Mount Horeb same place and here you're going to worship me you're going to acknowledge that I am the God who has accomplished all of this all of this through you so that's uh where the answer begins but we have more so god has said this he said i'll be with you and moses moses continues this so he's got he's got another objection now he's first of all said who am i and now he's going to he's going to pose another question. He says, well, look, I'm going to the sons of Israel. You know, say I do this. And I

get there. And I tell them, hey, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they're going to ask me, what's his name? So what am I supposed to tell them? This is a fascinating question for more than one reason, because it implies, to some extent anyway, that the Israelites may have actually forgotten kind of the whole history of who they were, of what Yahweh had done for the patriarchs in years past, and that Moses himself may have forgotten this as well. You know, they maintain some knowledge of God and some of the things that he had done, but the very fact that Moses has to ask God what his name is suggests that there's a deficiency of knowledge about who this God is to whom he's speaking.

So he wants to know his name. And this is verse 14, probably one of the most, not probably, one of the most famous verses in the Old Testament. Moses says, what is your name? God responds, I am who I am. And he said, that's what you're supposed to say to the sons of Israel. I am has sent me to you so uh what what's going on here well there's a there's a lot that we could say about this and I'll try and I'll try and keep myself uh at least somewhat restricted

as to as how much I say but I want to explain this a little bit first of all when God says I am who I am that can be translated uh a few different ways it could be I am who I am or I will be who I will be, or I will cause to happen what I will cause to happen. There's a whole lot of proposed translations for that. I personally think that we should just kind of stick with I am who I am, or I will be who I will be. So in Hebrew, it's three words. It's eieh, asher, eieh. Eieh means I am or I will be. So I am who I am or I will be who I will be. Eieh asher eieh. Usually, at least in my experience, when I've heard this explained, it's almost as if the people who are explaining it are saying, see, there's this unwillingness on the part of God

to disclose too much of who he is. It's almost like, hey, I am who I am, but don't ask me any more questions. Period. That's it. But context is extremely important here because just a few verses before, actually two, two verses before, the same word, eieh, was used

when God was speaking with Moses. He said, certainly, eieh, with you. Certainly, I will be with you. And then two verses later, we have God saying, I will be who I will be. I think that the most, the explanation which makes the most sense in this context is not simply God being unwilling to disclose more of his identity, rather that God is saying, look, who I am is the God who's with you. I am Eya. I will be with you. So what God is telling Moses is, look, I've just promised you that I'm going to be with you, Eya, when you go down to Egypt in order to deliver the Israelites. And that's how I want to be identified.

so i am the god who is constantly with you to deliver you to be with you when you deliver the children of israel you know what about this so like it's interesting that um he says i am you know i am who i am or i'll be who i'll be i think it's a little bit strange that moses asked this question considering that it was just before this that he said that i'm the god of you know the god of abraham isaac and jacob that's there so he's not like so the idea that he's completely unwilling to disclose his identity doesn't really work because he he did give him more information i mean it's it's as though moses wants more than that because he clearly already knows that he's already stated himself as the the god of his fathers right the god of abraham isaac and jacob

right yeah and uh and so it's a little bit strange i think i've always thought it was strange like that that moses is like well who should i tell them sent me and he's like well i mean this is the same god it's a god they believe he said he it's not like he like comes up he's like hey i'm a god and you're gonna go do this thing and he's asking which god he knows what he knows it's the god of abraham isaac and jacob i do think there's like this this sense in which uh he's saying that that i am that like that's sufficient but i am that i'll always be that and then of course you know i mean i'm sure we're going there but um i think the simplicity of it is sort of beautiful too that that god doesn't that doesn't give you like too much he gives you this sort of simple

thing something uh something that when jesus mic drops the same language it has the effect if this answer was long it just doesn't work as well for jesus to roll out i am yeah that's right the the simplicity and the immediate clarity of it is uh it is striking and of course yeah like you say that works well especially in john's gospel when jesus has these i am i am statements yeah i mean he he's the god who exists he is the god who is he's the god who always has been always will be and part of his identity part of his isness is the fact that he is always with us yeah i mean abandons us he's emmanuel right i mean isn't part of this when he says i am i mean the reverse of that also is that the idea is the idea that look like the god even the gods that you're going up

against or the other gods aren't right so like yeah like you said like i i'm the one who exists as opposed to these other gods who don't yeah that's that's that's that's a great point yeah so i'm the god who is they are the gods so-called gods who are not they are uh vanities uh as as the old testament were referred to them elsewhere as as nothingnesses uh they they don't they they exist only in our uh in our imaginations so he is the god who exists the god who exists not simply in in being but in action he acts to save his people he's with his people he's going to he's going to deliver his people so that's that's the name yeah there's at the end of the day there's only two kinds of gods or the god that is and the gods that are not uh or another way to say it uh i

suppose is there's the god who created and the gods we've created yeah that's that's a good way to put it yeah and one of them is and the other ones are too but they but they aren't hey they're not they're not they're not uh who they've always been they haven't always been we made them up yeah yeah well paul in corinthians actually refers to them as you know as demons it's these gods we've created are used by the demons in order to in order to deceive people so there's this malicious force behind them now uh i know we've got about three minutes left uh just want to say a couple more things about this about this divine name i am who i am And now this is, we usually know this by the Hebrew name Yahweh.

And there's a couple of things that you need to know about Yahweh. First of all, Yahweh does not technically mean I am who I am. Yahweh means he is who he is. Now think about this. So God says, I am who I am. And we say Yahweh. That is, he is who he is. So the name Yahweh, even though it's, of course, intimately connected with the I am announcement, literally in the Hebrew is third person.

So it's he is who he is. So I like to think of it as confession in a confession. We say back to God what he's first said to us. So God says, I am who I am. And we say he is who he is. Yahweh. So Yahweh means he is or he is who he is. And God, when God speaks of himself, he says, I am, I am who I am. And it's not Jehovah, by the way. If you're interested in this, you can check out my YouTube channel where I did a whole YouTube video about how Jehovah is not the name of God. But just briefly, it's not. It was a it was a misunderstanding.

Yahweh is the is the pronunciation of the divine name. now as we alluded to earlier what is what is most fascinating about the divine name is then jesus claim of this divine name for his own as we see in the is as we see in the gospel of john so we talked earlier about the angel of the lord being the second person of the trinity being the son of god who appears to moses in this in this flame of fire in the burning bush so this is Christ, this is the Son of God speaking to Moses, identifying himself right now as Yahweh, as the God who is, I am who I am. And then later, when the Son of God has taken on our human nature in his incarnation, which we're about to celebrate at Christmas, then he will once again affirm that

he is Yahweh. He is the great I am. So already here in the Old Testament, we have Jesus saying, I'm Yahweh. We'll see that in the New Testament, Jesus saying, I'm Yahweh. And in both cases, he says it in order that not only we might know that he is a true God, but he is the true God who saves. He comes down to deliver us from the Egypt of sin and death in order to bring us into the holy land of his righteousness and his life yeah and at the end this is Jesus

who's going to do this yeah it's him he's in the burning bush he's going to be in our own flesh and blood and in both cases he's there in order to do what he does best to save and to bring us into

his kingdom and that's it we're out of time but hey I feel better about that ending Getting to end with Jesus Than getting to end with some of the things we've had to end with So we just Leave it right there Guys, thank you so much for joining us

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