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Come now immediately to the heart of the message of this first major section of the book of Exodus, to observe the declaration of the name of God in the burning bush, and then subsequently on another occasion, and examine how it is designed to break the oppression in Egypt by restoring Israel's faith in God and in his purposes. So it says in verse twenty four um of chapter two, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.
And in chapter three verse uh six, God says to Moses through the flames of the burning bush, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God. And subsequently, when God commissioned Moses to go to Pharaoh and deliver his people, Moses says in verse thirteen: Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers has sent me unto you, and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I am that I am.
And he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you. And God said, moreover, unto Moses, thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob hath sent me unto you. This is my name forever, and this is my memorial unto all generations. Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say unto them, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, hath appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited you and seen that which is done to you in Egypt.
And I have said, I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanite, and unto a land flowing with milk and honey. When I go to the children of Israel, says Moses, quaking in his shoes at the enormous responsibilities that now were being thrust upon him. For you must remember that while he had a heart for his people, his initial attempt to deliver them from bondage to Pharaoh in Egypt had been repulsed by his own brethren, rejecting both him and his methods.
And he had lived in exile these long, long years. When I come to the Israelites and I tell them that the God of their fathers has appeared to me, and they shall say to me, what is his name? What shall I say? My dear brethren, have you never yourself felt that trembling of heart as you have responded to God's commission of you to go and preach to men and women lost in this world under the power of the prince of darkness?
When you have sensed in your heart the commission to go and preach to your fellow believers, all entangled in the love of the world. And you go to preach a message that God has sent a savior to deliver them, and they say, dumbly, without words maybe, what is his name? And in that moment, standing in your pulpit or on the street corner, you say, whatever shall I tell them? How can I, six foot of mere clay, tell people the name of God?
In such a way as the telling of the name of God will provoke faith at the deepest level of their being. A faith that can break the bondage of this worldism and set them free to enjoy the eternal dimension to life in the present, and set them on the journey that shall lead them to the eternal inheritance above. It is no mere information, is it, that we are called upon to impart.
I, we in our little way, have to do what the Savior did supremely. We have to tell the people the name of God. And so when God was asked, what is your name? He gave a number of replies, did he not? He indicated, go tell them I am the God of their past. I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.
For many Israelites, this had become a very dim memory indeed, even if it survived. For they were modern Israelites, and they'd been in Egypt a long while. They doubtless heard from their mother's knees, some of them, the story of Abraham. But they were now nearly four hundred years beyond that in a very sophisticated Egypt. And for some of them, perhaps it had become nothing more than a folk tale, like Christian doctrine has to many of our contemporaries in Christendom.
Go and tell them I am the God of their past. How would that help? Well, in this immediate way, I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I made a covenant with Abraham and with his seed, so that long before you came into Egypt, long before you were born in Egypt, there was a past in the councils and covenants of God that concerned you, and it is vital that you come to believe in that past. You may never have got your feet out of Egypt, your eyes may never s- have seen across its borders, perhaps Egypt to you is everything, but that isn't the real situation.
Before you came into Egypt, God was planning and purposing, and covenanted with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob concerning Abraham's seed. That God still adheres to his original purpose, God of your past. Now he has remembered his covenant, in the sense that now he is bringing his covenant before him to act upon it, to put it into action and to fulfill it, and to bring you up out of Egypt.
Secondly, he is the God of your future, because in the covenant that God made in the past was not only their now present deliverance, but the glorious inheritance that they were to be given according to that covenant that now still was in the future for them. Declaring the name of God, therefore, would mean stirring their faith in those past revelations of God, and stirring and provoking their faith in the glorious future that lay beyond them.
Say also, says God, I am that I am. Or, if you'd like so to translate it, I will be what I will be. The nub of the matter seems to be that God is now declaring his eternal constancy. Not, of course, simply his being in the Greek philosophical sense of mere existence. Or this eternal God is always active being. Thank God he is the unchanging eternal.
I am that I am. Because he is the eternal and had covenanted with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob regarding their seed. Though Israel were oppressed in Egypt, the thorn bush was not consumed. But in the very midst of the thorn bush was the presence of the unchanging I am.
Therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed. God of your past, God of your future, God of your present. It is easy also to see, is it not, how this message applies with equal force and relevance to us today as we attempt to preach to our modern world. Oh, what a magnificent thing. Is it to be allowed by God's grace to stand before one's fellow believers, hemmed in as they may be by the pressures of modern life that makes life such a drudgery sometimes and such a slavery, to remind them that there is a God who is a God of their past?
Oh, I tell you again, my brethren, those great simplicities you've known from your babyhood are nonetheless real. Chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. Chosen and predestinated to the adoption of sons through Jesus Christ to himself. Self. For you who trust the Savior, things didn't begin, did they, when you breathed your first, as you came out of your mother's womb.
You are the subject of the very councils of eternity. Chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, you'll say that's a remarkably long time ago, isn't it, the foundation of the world? When do you think the world, uh, began? It's not my interest this morning, because when Paul says chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, he's not thinking merely in chronology, he's thinking in logic. If your end product is to be a Christmas cake, then, gentlemen, you must do some logical thinking. That is the end product, but the fresh question will be, as Christmas draws near, now what, uh, steps must I take beforehand that will eventually lead to the desired Christmas cake?
You will have to think of the flour and the currants and the spices you need to put in the Christmas cake, and if need be, go to the grocer's and get them. Then you'll have to scratch your head and think, yes, but to have a Christmas cake, I shall need an oven. You'll see. And so, uh, you proceed. That's quite logical, isn't it? You first choose your end out there in the future, and then you work backwards from the end, those logical steps that you will have to take to reach the desired end. And God's heart was set on having what he calls sons through Jesus Christ.
That was the end. It is an impertinence, I suppose, to talk about the Almighty as though he had to take logical steps like we humans have to. He will pardon me for, for associating himself with such humble processes. But then, if that was the end of getting sons, by what processes could it be achieved? And one of the processes was the creation and foundation of our earth, wasn't it? That there he might bring creatures, born mere creatures of God.
Born, I might add, without asking their permission. I don't know about you, but, uh, nobody asked me whether I wanted to be born into this world. I just woke up and found I was here. There are moments when I doubted the wisdom of those who were responsible. But you can't get sons of God that way, can you? Any more than you can be born married. Or if you were born married, then marriage would be a very different thing from what it appears to be at the moment. To become a child and son of God.
For that, the creature will need to be given the proposal and given the opportunity to respond. That meant that God would have to have an earth to put his creatures on, and distant enough from him that they should not be overpowered in making their decision either, but would be free to use their rational processes and all the rest about them to come to a genuine response to God Almighty. Oh, what an incredible story this is, that the infinite God should have the plan to have sons to himself through Jesus Christ, and for that purpose create a whole world.
And if it be that the vast universe around our planet is necessary somehow for the existence of our planet, then he created the whole lot. Being a backyard astronomer, I go out into my backyard some nights and turn my telescope to the sky and ask myself what it's all about. And the words of Paul come before me. Chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, the whole great universe, a mere stepping stone to God's purpose for me.
Oh, if God's Holy Spirit shall so reveal the name of God to us as the God of our past, I tell you, gentlemen, it will break the restricted bounds of the prison house of this little world, over which the prince of this world, his satanic majesty, presides. God of my future. I needn't elaborate it. You know it and would preach it far better than I. Not just a present, important as that present is, but the scheme of redemption geared to the great eternal future.
We have been born again unto a living hope, begotten again unto a living hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ to the dead. And I sometimes think that Peter's very terminology is geared to the fact that some of his re- uh, those that read his letter were Jews. They knew of an earthly inheritance, and much of their earthly hope had been shattered. Would it ever be real? God has begotten us again unto a living hope of his glorious inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.
And I, for one, am not ashamed, let them say what they will, who tell me I'm building castles in the air and giving vent to my childish fantasies. Because life has been rough, I comfort myself when I go to bed with dreaming about a heaven that doesn't really exist. No, gentlemen. How did this hope come in my heart? Begotten again by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. This is a dying universe, as it is all running down, so the dear scientists tell me. The old sun up in the sky running down, giving out its energy, doomed to collapse one day.
And then, to add insult to injury, they tell me that my brain cells are running down. They do when you get over sixty at an alarming rate, and apparently it's true. This is a decaying universe. However, when our blessed Lord Jesus was put in the grave, the process was stopped. Thou wilt not suffer thy Holy One to see corruption. And then the whole process was reversed. Jesus Christ came out of the grave, raised with a glorious body. Never, as Paul put it, to return to corruption.
Declared to be... Ah, here we've got it. This is declaring the name of God, isn't it? Declared to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead, whence springs our hope of a great inheritance ahead. Declaring God, the God of the past, God, the God of the future, God, the God of our present, say, I am hath sent me. Such a revelation of the name of God could well keep us occupied for many, many hours indeed, and we should never plummet to depth.
Allow me to comment, to revive in your mind the comment the Lord Jesus made on this declaration. It was when the Sadducees had accosted him in public in the last third week of his life on earth. They come to Jesus, uh, to expose him, as they thought, before the crowd. Sadducees were getting uneasy because this simple-minded crowd, you could tell them anything, uh, also were listening to this crazy popular preacher from Galilee with his silly notions, also, uh, including the notion of the resurrection, also, and they thought it would be good tactics to expose him to the crowd.
So they said, you know, you Jesus of Nazareth, um, um, um, you believe in the resurrection, don't you, Jesus of Nazareth? Yeah, yes, I do, yes. Um, well, they said, uh, I find it a bit difficult, you know, young man, because, um, you'll say, let me, let us put a case to you. There was a woman, oh yes, and she was married, and her husband died, yes. And so, after a suitable interval, of course, she, she married again. He, poor fellow, died. Seven men took her successively. Extraordinary story. But it was, it was a sad to see it in story, you see, perhaps this is their only concept of the resurrection it's sad to see in experience. And all that, and uh, all seven had her, and at last the seventh died as well.
Now they said, young man, if your theory is true, in the resurrection, whose uh, shall she be? For all seven had her. Quad erat demonstrandum, according to the Sadducees. That proved the resurrection was a nonsense. And they thought they'd won. What a perversity, uh, uh, lives in the human heart, doesn't it? They thought they'd proved that there was no resurrection, and in proving that, they thought they had won. If they had been true, what a defeat for the human race their victory would have been.
What a diminution of the significance of the human race their supposed victory would have been. How it degrades and devalues man. And our Lord replied, you are not knowing the scripture or the power of God. Have you never read them? What God said to Moses at the burning bush. I'm the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Great I am, of course. God doesn't characterize himself by dead people.
The living and eternally existent God cannot be described as being the God of things that no longer exist. If he's the God of Abraham, then, says our Lord, Abraham exists and lives to him and shall live eternally. And this is an amazing and wonderful thing, isn't it? Enter into relationship with the eternal God, and the eternal God enter into relationship with you.
That relationship is like God himself, eternal. If you were to come to me after this session and say, good evening, um, do you know Napoleon? I say, excuse me, what do, what do you mean, do I know Napoleon? Which Napoleon are you talking around, about the man who keeps the sweet shop around the corner? No, you say the great Napoleon, Napoleon the Great. I said, I'm so silly. I, do I know Napoleon? Of course I don't know Napoleon. He lived, I'm not all that old. They lived nearly two centuries ago.
What do you think? Of course I, I, I don't know Napoleon. Conversely, if you came to God this morning and you said, Your Majesty or Divine Majesty, did you know Abram? His Divine Majesty would immediately correct you, what do you mean, did I know Abram? Your choice of tense is most unfortunate. I know Abram. Here he is. He's not the God of the dead, but of the living.
That means that there is not merely a future for us in some glorious eternal inheritance. There is an eternal dimension to now. And we shall see about it when we come to dis- to do study the provision that God made for Israel in the tabernacle, by which means, according to the Epistle to the Hebrew, Hebrews, God brought the realities of heaven down to earth, that Israel might already begin to enjoy that dimension to life, even as they were crossing the wilderness.
The tabernacle was a copy of heavenly things and brought down the realities of the eternal world to the dimensions of time. There in that tabernacle, as we shall discover, was a lampstand, an unusual lampstand because it was made in the form of a stylized tree. You'll see. So it had a base that resembled the roots of an oak tree or some big tree, and then it had branches, and in both the trunk and in the branches there were symbols of life, bud, flower and fruit, all stages of life simultaneously in it.
Yet while it was a tree, it was the vehicle of light. It was, of course, symbolic representation of that tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. But by God. God's infinite grace, when Jesus Christ was born, that great tree of life came down into our space and time. Says he, as the Father has life in himself, so hath he given to the Son of Man to have life in himself.
He is source of life. Saint John comments, in him was life, and that life was the light of men. That ancient symbolic lampstand found its eventual reality, uh, fulfillment in reality when the very source of life came down into our space and time. And believing in him, we might enjoy not merely a heaven to be, might enjoy the present experience and possession of eternal life.
I shall not need to tell you, gentlemen, how we need to stress that what to us is simple and elementary fact. For religion has it, and the bulk of Christendom still has it, that of course you can't know you have eternal life in this life. Eternal life is some vague thing that you hope to attain to in the world to come. Grant us this, that, and the other, and in the end, everlasting life. But why in the end? We may enjoy it in the now. The declaration of the name of God.
And if it's any comfort to us preachers, incidentally, as we pass by and we haven't time to, uh, follow all the details, as God sent Moses to declare his name to the Israelites, he showed himself to be the God, even of our disabilities. I'm not eloquent, says Moses. I can't speak. And God replied to him, who made man's mouth? Who maketh a man dumb or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?
A staggering statement and difficult for us to handle, because surely it doesn't mean that God sits up upon his throne dishing out dumbness to one and blindness to another. You'll say these things, blindness and dumbness and disability, are these not the end products of a long, long heredity, the long results of the fall of man, and so and so and so. Yes, I, I, I hear what you say. Many intervening causes and effects.
All but ultimately. Gentlemen, I want to know, is there anyone behind all that long chain of cause and effect that landed me on this planet Earth with my disabilities? And may I not believe that the God who chose me in Christ before the foundation of the world and has a glorious future with me, the God who invites me into present and eternal relationship with himself, has exercised his divine control even over my disabilities, and I may comfort my heart that they are not some mere accident of old mindless Bill bildame Dame evolution.
But behind all Earth's sorrows and the hereditary of a broken, fallen world stands the superior wisdom and providence of God. That can take me, disability included, and use me for the declaration of his name. Oh, but when I come, when I come and say to the Israelites, says Moses, that, uh, the God of their fathers has sent me, perhaps they won't believe.
And so it becomes exceedingly important that the Israelites shall be brought to believe that Moses has been sent by God. That is a small matter compared with what we find constantly repeated in the Gospel of John, that it is of absolute and eternal importance that we should come to believe that Jesus is the sent one of God. Jesus was sent by the Father and has returned to the Father. I take one, just one ins- instance of that from the Gospel of John in chapter sixteen.
For these are our almost our Lord's last words with his disciples before he went to suffer. And in them he sums up what is perhaps the most important and basic ingredient to his message and his mission. Verse twenty eight of John sixteen, he says, I came out from the Father and am come into the world. Again I leave the world and go unto the Father. His disciples say, lo, now speakest thou plainly and speakest no proverb. Now know we that thou knowest all things and needest not that any man should ask thee.
By this we believe that thou camest forth from God. Jesus answered, do you now believe? Behold the hour cometh, yea, is come, that you shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. Picture the scene. Almost the final briefing of the apostles before he suffered. And the thing our Lord chooses to concentrate upon and to impress upon their minds as being of the very heart of his message is this: I came forth from the Father. Do you believe it, gentlemen?
I came forth from the Father and am come into the world. Do you believe it? Why is it basic? Why listen to what it's saying? There is another world. I came from that other world, sent by the Father. Do you believe it? There's a good many theologians in Christendom that don't. They published a book ten years ago called The Myth of God Incarnate and hoped it would be a bestseller. I'm glad that it didn't make them too much money.
We cannot now, they say, accept the doctrine of the incarnation. A whole bevy of so-called Christian theologians. We cannot accept in divi- the possibility of divine intervention in our world, and therefore, by definition, we cannot accept the incarnation, because if the incarnation is true, this is the biggest divine intervention in our world that the world has ever seen. We are contending for our everything when we contend for this point that Jesus Christ is the sent one of the Father, in the sense not merely that God raised him up as a prophet from Nazareth and sent him to Jerusalem, but the God the Father sent him forth from heaven and sent him into our world.
And that, as you see, is its meaning, as now he adds, and now I leave the world and go to the Father. So there is another world. And one day his design is to take us thither. Do believe it. Why is it important I believe it? Because, listen to John, would you overcome the world? The secret of, of overcoming the world is not that I've had such a happy experience in my heart and I feel so good.
Though let's hope we have ten thousand happy experiences in our hearts and feel very good. But the key to overcoming the world is this, is Jesus, or is he not, the Son of God? Was he the sent one of the Father? Did he come out from heaven and come into the world? And has he gone back to the Father, or is he still amoldering in the grave outside Jerusalem's city walls. If he is the sent one of the Father and has returned to the Father, all gentlemen dance for very joy.
For the gift he offers us of eternal life is no exaggerated devotional expression. It represents reality. And suppose I come to them and they don't, uh, believe. Well, says God, I shall give you some signs. And I shall be very interested when the question time comes up, how, gentlemen, you interpret those signs, because as I warned you, uh, when question times come up, though the organizers tell you that the chief aim of that is for you to question me, it is not so.
The chief aim of that question time is that I shall question you and steal your sermons, as many as I can possibly steal, and I shall want to know what you say when you come to the signs that God gave Moses to do. And don't say, ah, well, now we we're signs, no, no, no, no, no, no. Uh, uh, you, you should believe with blind faith. That's the only decent kind of faith, because if you do, our Lord will remark, or his apostles for him, these things are written. These signs, that is, are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Son of God.
How do those signs prove what they are alleged to prove? And could we use them effectively in our evangelism? The record of those signs that our blessed Lord did. Anyway, Moses went and told them and declared the name of God, and initially he was successful. In our closing moments, I just comment now on the major elements of the narrative in this first section of the book.
There is the story of the oppression. It begins with the names, as you'll remember. The story of the oppression, how God preserved Moses and educated him, and how Moses' attempt to, um, deliver God's people and failed and fled to Midian. They remember, you remember they said, who made you a prince and a judge? Over us and educated. Here comes the declaration of the name, as we have been dis- uh, considering.
And there God says, doesn't he, Three verse eighteen. Three eighteen. they shall hearken to your thoughts, to you or something, isn't that so? What it says, three a t. Uh, you'll say, shall hearken to thy voice. And then the third element, after Moses had made his five points uh, uh, points to God, and God had answered them, then off went Moses, uh, to Egypt, and God, uh, commissioned him once more as to what he was to say, commissioned him to go to Pharaoh and say, Israel is my firstborn, and so on and so forth.
And you come to the great climax that, uh, we are told in chapter, uh, four, verse thirty one, and the people believe. Marvelous climax, isn't it? And we'll see how that, um, from a point of view of narrative, is now answering this. Moses here rejected and running off, and now Moses returning, and the people believed, and they bowed down their head and... So as far as, uh, Moses was concerned, all he now had to do was to go into Pharaoh, announce the message, and tomorrow Israel would be free.
And he went to Pharaoh, and the oppression was made ten thousand times worse. And as he, as the Israelites in their misery came out from Pharaoh's palace, look at verse twenty one. They met Moses and, uh, uh, and Aaron, and they said, the Lord look upon you and judge you. Made our name stink. Full Fool of a emotions.
motive. Hope and faith is dashed to the ground, and no hope is left. And faith finds it virtually impossible to rise above its disappointment, chagrin, and grief. And his response to it was to declare his name again and say thus, you know, this name of Jehovah, your patriarchal ancestors didn't really know what was involved in it, but now I'm going to tell you what's involved in the name Jehovah.
It is a God who, when you are at rock bottom and your face is blown to bits and you're saying to yourself, it won't work, this message of deliverance, and look at my circumstances now, ten thousand times worse than they were before. And you haven't got a shred of, of respectable faith left amidst all your doubts and groanings. This is a God. Tell them, I have remembered my covenant. I lift up my hand. I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And what I swore I will perform, and you will know, not now as by theory, you will know in practical experience that I am Jehovah and what Jehovah means.
Marvelous, isn't it? If you should ever come across believers who once ran well and were full of faith and hope, and you meet them now in middle life, and life has gone wrong and sour on them until their faith is almost gone out by the very miseries of life, oh, pray God that he give you that ministry of declaring the name of God again. A God who will be true to his covenant, come hell or high weather, and will do what he has said and redeem his people out of Egypt.
They will discover it by practical experience. Says God, all right, Moses, I'm now sending you into Pharaoh. Now look here, God says, Moses, about time we were realist, you know. All this preaching stuff's okay, but even the Israelites haven't written, haven't hearkened and listened. What is the use of the Israelites? If the Israelites don't believe, what is the use am I going to tell Pharaoh? Sorry, God. And God said, well then, here's your cards, Moses, you can leave and I'll get somebody else.
No, no, I want you to go to Pharaoh, says God. And eventually Moses went in to Pharaoh. Let's just give thanks for God's abounding grace.
