Moses was eighty, a fugitive keeping someone else's sheep, when a bush caught fire and did not burn up. He asked God two questions. The second answer only makes sense once you hear the first.
I am who I am is how God answers Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks what name to give the enslaved Israelites. In Hebrew it is ehyeh asher ehyeh, and it can just as fairly be read I will be what I will be.
Two verses earlier Moses had asked, who am I? God did not answer with a pep talk about Moses. He answered, I will be with you, using the same Hebrew word, ehyeh, that the name is built on. The name is that promise, turned into a name.
Most teaching jumps straight to philosophy: God is self-existent and eternal. True, but that is not the conversation on the mountain. A frightened man is being sent back to the place he ran from, and God is telling him who is going with him.
You cannot hear Exodus 3 without Exodus 2. Moses is not a young man waiting for his calling. His one attempt at being a deliverer blew up in his face. The whole life is in who Moses was. Here is the stretch that leads to the bush.
Raised in Pharaoh's household, Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, looks both ways, and kills him. Justice done in secret, on his own authority.
The next day a Hebrew throws it back at him: who made you ruler and judge over us? Pharaoh tries to kill him, and Moses runs.
He marries Zipporah, daughter of a Midianite priest, and names his son Gershom, because he has become a foreigner in a foreign land. More on Moses' wife and that household.
Stephen says forty years passed before the bush. Exodus puts Moses at eighty when he stands before Pharaoh. Four decades of sheep and a past he could not undo.
The king dies, the slavery goes on, and Israel groans. God hears the groaning, remembers His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, looks on the Israelites, and is concerned. Moses knows none of it.
The call came to a man who had already failed at the exact thing he was being called to do, and had settled into a life where nobody expected anything from him. That is not an obstacle in the story. It is the setting God chose.
Moses leads the flock to the far side of the wilderness and comes to Horeb, the mountain of God. Verse 2 says the angel of the LORD appeared in flames of fire from within a bush, and by verse 4 it is simply God speaking. Exodus moves between the messenger and God Himself without stopping to explain.
Moses notices the bush is on fire and not burning up, and he goes over to look. Verse 4 says God called to him when He saw that he had gone over. The encounter starts with curiosity.
God calls his name twice. Moses answers, Here I am, the same answer Abraham gave on the mountain in Genesis 22.
The ground is holy, and there is nothing special about the dirt. It is a hillside in Midian, far from Egypt's temples. It is holy because God is standing on it.
Before any new name, God gives the old one: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Moses hides his face, afraid to look.
“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”
Exodus 3:5Preachers and rabbis have attached many meanings to the fire: Israel suffering and not destroyed, holiness that does not devour, the incarnation. Some are beautiful. They are later reflection. The text never explains the fire. It uses it to get a man's attention, and then the conversation is the point.
Every post here is free to read. If this one helped you, you can help keep it that way. Pick an amount and finish on Stripe's secure checkout.
Change your amount, update your card, or cancel anytime. Enter the email you give with and Stripe sends you a secure link.
Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
Before God says a word about His name, He says what He has been doing. Count the verbs in verses 7 to 10. Every one is God moving toward people in pain.
The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.”
Exodus 3:7Forty years of silence on Moses' side was not forty years of blindness on God's.
Not a polished prayer. Groaning. God counts that as being heard.
The Hebrew is the word for knowing. God knows their suffering the way you know something from the inside.
Verse 8. God does not send sympathy. He comes down to bring them out and up into a good and spacious land.
Verse 10. I have come down, God says, and I am sending you.
That is how God works all through Scripture. He comes down, and He comes through people. The rescue that followed, the ten plagues and the sea, was God's work, and it still went through a reluctant shepherd.
Moses' first response is not a question about God. It is a question about himself. Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? Fair, from a man with his record. Egypt knew him as a killer, and his own people had told him he was nobody's judge.
Who am I? Am I qualified, credible, clean enough, brave enough? Every question pointed back at Moses.
I will be with you. God never argues with Moses' assessment of himself. He changes the subject to who is going.
Here is the detail that ties the whole chapter together. In verse 12, I will be with you is ki ehyeh immak. Two verses later the name is ehyeh asher ehyeh. God answers who am I with ehyeh, and He answers what is your name with ehyeh again. Zev Farber, writing at TheTorah.com, notes how often the phrase I will be with you runs through the Bible and draws the obvious conclusion: “If God keeps saying it, it must be an important clue to understand Him.”
Notice the sign in the same verse: when you have brought the people out, you will worship God on this mountain. Moses can only see it after he obeys. God does not give him proof up front. He gives him company.
Maybe your version of who am I has a specific memory attached. Something you did, something done to you, a season you would rather nobody knew about. Moses carried a man's death with him to that mountain, and God called him by name anyway.
God does not ask you to settle the question of your worth before He speaks. He answers it with Himself. If you need someone to pray with you about what you are carrying, you can ask for prayer here, and a real person will read it.
Moses raised four more objections: what is your name, what if they do not believe me, I am slow of speech and tongue, and finally, in Exodus 4:13, please send someone else. That last one angered God, and He sent Aaron alongside him. Reluctance is not humility, and the story does not pretend it is. Soon after comes the strange night of Exodus 4:24, which I have worked through separately.
Now the second question. Suppose I go to the Israelites and they ask me, What is his name? Then what shall I tell them? He is asking what will convince a crushed people that this is really their God and really a rescue.
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.’”
Exodus 3:14First person of the verb hayah, to be. The same form God used in verse 12: I will be with you.
A connecting word: who, that, what.
The traditional rendering in most English Bibles. The King James has I AM THAT I AM.
Equally fair to the Hebrew, whose verb form leans toward ongoing and future action. Many translations put it in a footnote.
Then the four letters, YHWH, the LORD, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is my name forever.
I have gone into the Hebrew and the different scholarly readings more fully in what Yahweh means, and into the four letters themselves in the YHWH meaning. For the scene, it is simpler. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is spoken to a man who has just been told I will be with you, and it tells him he will learn who God is by watching what God does next.
This is Sound of Heaven's position: in Exodus 3, I am who I am is first a promise of presence, and reading it only as a statement about abstract being misses what God was saying to Moses.
The classical reading deserves its full weight. God depends on nothing, was not caused, and does not change with circumstances, and the Greek translators of Exodus leaned that way. We believe every word of it. It is just not the first thing this verse is doing. The context is a rescue, the verb points forward, and verse 12 has already told us what ehyeh means in God's mouth.
Some read it as God dodging the question. There is something to that, since God defines Himself. But He gives the name in the very next verse. That is not a refusal. It is an invitation to trust first and understand along the way.
And one correction to our own side. You will hear this preached as I will be whatever you need me to be. That turns the name into a blank check we fill in. The name says the opposite: I will be what I will be. God decides who He is, and He shows us, finally and fully, in Jesus.
What word does God use in Exodus 3:12 that returns in the name of Exodus 3:14?
In verse 12 God says ki ehyeh immak, I will be with you. In verse 14 the name is ehyeh asher ehyeh. The promise to Moses and the name for Israel are built from the same word.
Moses asked who am I, and God answered with who He is. That exchange did not stay on the mountain.
The God who said I have come down came all the way down in Jesus. John says the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. Matthew opens with Emmanuel, God with us, and closes with Jesus saying, surely I am with you always. When Jesus said before Abraham was born, I am, His hearers heard the bush in it, a thread traced in the I am statements.
This is not a story about Moses being special. It is about a God who picks up a man who had given up on himself, says I will be with you, and keeps His word. The Kingdom Jesus announced is that same presence, here and active now. If you are sitting with your own who am I, the answer has not changed. It is about who is going with you.
If you are trying to work out what God is asking of you, start with what a calling from God is. And if you would rather ask questions in person, come visit us on a Sunday.
At the burning bush a fugitive shepherd asked who am I, God answered I will be with you, and then gave His name from the same word, ehyeh asher ehyeh, I am who I am or I will be what I will be: a promise of presence before it is a definition, kept in full in Jesus.
Tell us where you feel unqualified or stuck, and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you by name.
It is God's answer to Moses in Exodus 3:14 when Moses asks what name to give the Israelites. The Hebrew, ehyeh asher ehyeh, is built on the verb to be and can be translated I am who I am or I will be what I will be. It says God depends on nothing outside Himself, and in context it is above all a promise of presence, since two verses earlier God answered Moses' fear with ehyeh immak, I will be with you.
The text does not explain the fire, and it is honest to say so. What it shows is the effect. Moses sees a bush burning without burning up, turns aside to look, and God calls him by name once he does. Later readers have seen pictures of Israel surviving affliction or of God's holiness that does not devour. Those are reflections added afterward. In Exodus the fire gets a tired shepherd's attention so the conversation can begin.
Because the place where he stood was holy ground, according to Exodus 3:5. Nothing about that hillside in Midian was sacred before. It became holy because God was present there. Removing sandals was a sign of reverence, and the text gives no further explanation. The lesson is that holiness follows God's presence rather than a location, which is why God could later meet His people far from any temple.
In Exodus 3:11 Moses asks, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? He had killed an Egyptian, fled for his life, been rejected by his own people and spent forty years as a shepherd in Midian. It is the question of a man who feels disqualified. God does not argue with his self-assessment. He answers, I will be with you, shifting the question from who Moses is to who is going with him.
They are closely connected. In Exodus 3:14 God says ehyeh asher ehyeh, in the first person. In verse 15 He gives the name written with the four Hebrew letters YHWH, usually reconstructed as Yahweh and printed LORD in most English Bibles. Both come from the same verb, to be. The first explains the name, and the second is the name itself, which God says is His name forever, from generation to generation.