Exodus 3:1-15

Today we begin a new series looking at the greatest topic any human being can explore – the nature of God and knowing God. I approach this series with some trepidation as well as some excitement. I am nervous because the subject is so vast and even in taking one characteristic of God per sermon there is so much depth it is difficult to know what to say and what not to say. I am also cautious because here we touch the core of what we are about as a church – knowing and loving God is not only the essence of church but the essence of us as people. AW Tozer says “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Our beliefs about God not only define our worship but they define what we are as people for we become like what we worship.

Also I am full of trepidation, for what person can say they truly know God well. It is the adventure of not only a lifetime but an eternity to get to know God. I would like to think that I know God better now than when I first came to faith thirty odd years ago, and yet the paradox is this, the more I get to know of God the more I realise that  I don’t know him, I know so little. I am still scrambling around the foothills of the mountain. But we need to keep scrambling for it seems to me the church has lost its way and Christians have lost their way. Knowing God should be our chief pursuit and yet even in the church he can be the last we consult.

AW Tozer in his book The Knowledge of the Holy laments the state of the church (and he was writing some years ago and how much more it applies to today). He notes “the loss of the concept of the majesty of God from the popular religious mind.. the church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be unworthy of thinking worshipping people. With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and the ability to meet God in adoring silence. Be still and know that I am God means next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshipper.”  The essence of idolatry is entertaining thoughts about God which are not worthy of him, so we need to be careful, and we need to allow the word of God to direct our thinking.

It is important that we address this issue for there have been three losses today – the loss of awe in our worship, the loss of the centrality of God which has been replaced by the centrality of men and women, and thirdly the loss of understanding of what God is like. So many people have an idea of God that is less than biblical, or we focus upon one aspect of his character to the neglect of others. There is a lovely balance in the character of God we need to see the whole picture as given to us in God’s word. I hope this study will make us people of substance, will give us weight, will lift us up for as we study God it will have the impact of lifting us up to higher level I believe. It will lift our game as it were. You know that when you play a sport with a better player it can have the impact of lifting your game and improving it. My hope is that over these weeks as we allow our minds to be saturated by God and godly ideas that we will be lifted up out of ourselves and not focus so much on ourselves.

A key verse for me is in Jeremiah 9:23 and it would be good if we memorised it -“This is what the Lord says, Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on the earth, for in these I delight says the Lord”.  So if we are to boast about anything the best thing to boast about is that we know God - that we understand God and know him. Note there are two things there – understanding and knowing, for we will not know him without understanding him. So this series will focus first on understanding God. What is he like? When we see what he is like then we can get to know him better.

The Shorter Catechism gives this definition of God: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice and truth.”

That is a good definition. Of course there is no perfect definition of God that encapsulates his essence – our mere words cannot do justice to him but probably one of the best definitions is the one we have in the Westminster Confession of Faith. Listen to this - There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection,  a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments; hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.  (Westminster Confession of Faith)  That definition in itself is a lifetime study for it is packed with truth, but we shall attempt between now and December to understand it. Note it describes God as incomprehensible. That does not mean he cannot be understood at all, it means in the older sense of the word - he cannot be fully understood. Nobody can fully understand God, or else he would be God. We are mere creatures. Ps.145:3 “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness no-one can fathom”.

So we are going to study the attributes of God. An attribute is whatever God has revealed to us as being true of himself. We believe that God reveals a certain amount to us through nature, theologians call that general revelation, but that tells us only so much. No, we need what we call special revelation to know more about this God who made everything and God reveals himself to us supremely through his Word, the Bible, and through the word made flesh, His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus said if you have seen me you have seen the Father. He also said “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”   (John 17:3)

One of the first things that God reveals to us is his name. God, as well as being Spirit, is personal. A person has a name, it is one of the first things that you find out if you want to get to know someone. It is hard to get to know someone well if you do not know their name. God has a name.

In Exodus he reveals his name to Moses and we want to explore this name and what it tells us about God. Firstly some general points about the names used for God. The most common name for God in the Old Testament is Yahweh (6828 times). This is most often translated in our Bibles as LORD in capitals (eg see 3:2,4,7). You see the name Yahweh was usually too sacred for Jews to pronounce so they avoided using it and often used Adon (Lord or master) or Adonai (my Lord) instead.

The other main name for God is El (238 times), or in its plural form Elohim (2600 times. Eg 3:1,4,5,6). Elohim as opposed to Lord is usually used in scripture when God is dealing with creation in general or the nations of the world outside Israel, but there is a bit of overlap. Occasionally there are other names God gives himself such as El Shaddai (God Almighty) but by far and away the most used are Yahweh (LORD) or Elohim (God).

The other thing is that names in the OT tend to connote a person’s character or tell you something about the plans  God has for that person. The name Yahweh or Lord also tells us things about God so let us explore fivc things about God as revealed by this name.

1.He is eternal. The name in the Hebrew sounds like a form of the verb to be. It could be translated in any of the following ways - I am who I am; I am what I am, I will be what I will be; I am because I am, I will be because I will be, I am present is what I am, I am the one who is. The point is that God is there, he is eternal, he has always been and he always will be. He just is. “In the beginning God”. Now we cannot get our little minds around this. The child’s question usually is, who made God? No-one made God, it is a non question. God just is. We cannot understand this because from our perspective everything has a beginning and an end. We find it hard to get our heads around eternity because we are finite and mortal. God just is.

2. He is holy. He is other than us and his creation. He existed before anything and he made all things so he is different and separate to the creation, he is wholly other. God is so different that if he were to visit us now with the smallest part of his glory we would be on our faces in a second. We would be blown away with his presence and but for his grace we would be dead. Moses once asked Lord show me your glory and God said you cannot see my face for no-one can see my face and live (Ex.33:20). At the burning bush God says take off your sandals for the ground is holy.

In Exodus the nearest the people could get to seeing his glory was when a cloud came down, or a pillar of fire went ahead of them. When the cloud settled on the mountain when God gave the ten commandments to Moses “the whole mountain trembled and the sound of a trumpet grew louder and louder” (Ex.19:18-19) and then the people trembled. Or when Isaiah encountered God in the temple he fell down and felt this sense of unworthiness, even uncleanness as the angels sang “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts”. This is the God we worship today.

God is tremendous in that he excites fear and dread, but also fascination at how beautiful and splendid he is. When a prophet like Ezekiel catches a vision of God or John in the Revelation they are almost lost for words, they are scrabbling around trying to get words and so Ezekiel says it was “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord”.   Ezekiel 1:28

3. He is Lord. As Lord of the universe this means God is in control, he is king, he is sovereign and he can do as he pleases. I am what I am can do as he pleases, he is God and there is no other. See Isaiah 14:24-27. Sometimes the Bible uses the picture of the potter and the clay. He determines what shall happen for his glory and who are we to question him? “Who are you, O man to talk back to God. Shall what is formed say to him who formed it Why did you make me like this?” Rom.9:20

From the Persian ruler Cyrus to Jesus on the cross God is in control and is working out his plans for his glory.

4. He is personal. God is Spirit, but he is a personal Spirit with a personal name. He is a God who wants to relate to us, to speak to us and us to speak to him. He is not the impersonal force of Star Wars, or the angry Spirit who has to be placated as in so much tribal and pagan religions. The personal is greater than the impersonal. The personal has made everything and we are made in his image. We have value and dignity because we are made in the image of a God who has personality. Darwin and Dawkins would have us believe that we evolved from slime with no personal God involved but how can the personal come from the impersonal? I contend that it cannot, personality can only come form personality, from a creator God who is personal.

5. Jesus, He is God. The final thing to say is that the I am who is God was revealed more fully through his Son the Lord Jesus. In John’s gospel we find Jesus referring to himself seven times as I am - I am the gate, I am the bread of life, I am the vine, I am the way, the truth and the life, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the light of the world. This repetition of I am is deliberate because it points us to the divine. He also said Before Abraham was I am (John 8:58) and the people shrunk back and accused him of blasphemy for he was appropriating to himself the divine name. Jesus is God, he is the I am, In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and was God.

We get to know this I am through knowing Jesus Christ. It is an awesome thing to claim to know God, we do not say it lightly. But the only way to start to get to know him is through his Son.

So let us not take this God for granted for one day we shall appear before him. He is awesome and our only protection will be that we know His Son, our only hope as we face this glorious God is that we have Jesus in our hearts. To know him is to love him, but it is also to obey him and to live differently. To know God is to make a difference to how we live. This is why knowing God is relevant for it changes our lives and maybe even as Christians our lives are not changed or distinctive because we actually do not know God as he expects us to know him.

Remember when Moses spent time with God the people noticed that his face shone. Something of the glory of God reflected off him and this is what we are aiming for. As we gaze upon God in meditation on these attributes, as we spend time in praise and contemplation of him then something of his glory will impact us. We become like what we worship. Worshipping God adds weight and dignity and beauty to us. In the lovely words of 2 Cor.3:18 “We who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness, with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”  Or as Eugene Peterson has it in The Message – “Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him”.   Yahweh.   Here is God’s glorious name and it leads us deeper into his character. It is a saving name, a wonderful name, a majestic name. Trust in it and begin the adventure of getting to know the God who is there.

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