“What first comes to mind when you think about God is the most important thing about you”
We’ve kicked off our brand new series “GOD IS” where we are journeying through scripture and allowing who God says He is to fashion how we respond to Him. AW Tozer once famously penned that “God created man in His image, but ever since then man has tried to re-create God in his image”. Over the course of the series we are trusting that as we allow God to burst the constricting and confined ways we have thought about Him, our lives will start to come into more and more of the spacious place and design He has for us, and we will be able to more accurately reflect who God is!
GOD IS YAHWEH
“God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exodus 3:15)
We begin our journey by leaning into a conversation between God and Moses found in the third chapter of Exodus. Moses had spent the first 40 years of his life as a prince in Pharaoh’s house in Egypt until he had to flee for his life after he murdered an Egyptian in a fit of rage. Because of this, the next 40 years of his life were spent looking after his father-in-law’s sheep in the Midianite desert, a season of what seemed like mediocrity, run of the mill and down-right dreary! This moment where God revealed Himself to Moses out of the burning bush in the wilderness was the catalyst to move Moses into his third set of 4o years where he became Israel’s deliverer, a Martin Luther King Jr type figure if you will. As we get a closer glimpse of this fire-side chat, we find out the words that would move Moses from where he was and into his chapter three.
It was a revelation of who God was that shifted Moses into who he was called to be.
GOD IS YAHWEH
God’s name is almost always translated LORD (all caps) in the English Bible. But the Hebrew would be pronounced something like “Yahweh,” and is built on the word for “I am.”
“I Am who I Am” or “I will be who I will be”
So every time we hear the word Yahweh, or every time you see LORD in the English Bible, you should think: this is a proper name (like Richard or Bongani) built out of the word for “I am” and reminding us each time that God absolutely is.
John Piper (prolific author, preacher and pastor) compiled a list of ten things that the name “Yahweh”, “I AM”, says about God:
1. He never had a beginning. Every child asks, “Who made God?” And every wise parent says, “Nobody made God. God simply is. And always was. No beginning.”
2. God will never end. If he did not come into being he cannot go out of being, because he is being.
3. God is absolute reality. There is no reality before him. There is no reality outside of him unless he wills it and makes it. He is all that was eternally. No space, no universe, no emptiness. Only God.
4. God is utterly independent. He depends on nothing to bring him into being or support him or counsel him or make him what he is.
5. Everything that is not God depends totally on God. The entire universe is utterly secondary. It came into being by God and stays in being moment by moment on God’s decision to keep it in being.
6. All the universe is by comparison to God as nothing. Contingent, dependent reality is to absolute, independent reality as a shadow to substance. As an echo to a thunderclap. All that we are amazed by in the world and in the galaxies, is, compared to God, as nothing.
7. God is constant. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He cannot be improved. He is not becoming anything. He is who he is.
8. God is the absolute standard of truth and goodness and beauty. There is no law-book to which he looks to know what is right. No almanac to establish facts. No guild to determine what is excellent or beautiful. He himself is the standard of what is right, what is true, what is beautiful.
9. God does whatever he pleases and it is always right and always beautiful and always in accord with truth. All reality that is outside of him he created and designed and governs as the absolute reality. So he is utterly free from any constraints that don’t originate from the counsel of his own will.
10. God is the most important and most valuable reality and person in the universe. He is more worthy of interest and attention and admiration and enjoyment than all other realities, including the entire universe.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING AND READING:
If you missed week one of our “God Is” series, catch up here:
http://www.lifechangers.org.za/sermons-series/
We are also recommending AW Tozer’s book, “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a great resource for everyone to read as we move through the series. Download a PDF version of it here:
http://www.ntcg-aylesbury.org.uk/books/knowledge_of_the_holy.pdf