The God Who Is

Good morning. I’m glad we can be together again today, and I’m especially thankful that we have another opportunity to open God’s Word together. Wherever this week has taken you—whether you come in encouraged, tired, distracted, carrying a burden, or simply grateful to be here—my prayer is that the Lord would use this time to steady our hearts by showing us more clearly who He is.

We’ve been walking through Exodus under the theme A People for His Presence, and over these first few weeks we’ve already seen how much the book says about the character of God. We’ve seen His providence at work when His people could not see it. We’ve seen Him preserve life in the middle of danger. Last week, in Exodus 2, we watched Moses’ attempt at deliverance collapse and then watched the chapter end with Israel still suffering in Egypt. Nothing had changed yet on the surface. Pharaoh was still powerful, Israel was still enslaved, and Moses was still far away in Midian.

But the chapter ended with those remarkable words: God heard their groaning, God remembered His covenant, God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. That means last week’s message left us with an important question. What do we do when deliverance must wait? Today Exodus takes us one step deeper and asks another question: Who is God while we wait?

That is where Exodus 3 takes us, and it is one of the most important passages in the entire book because before God tells Moses very much about what Moses is going to do, God tells Moses who He is. So our message this morning is called The God Who Is.

Let’s begin with prayer.

Father, thank You for gathering us together and for giving us Your Word. We confess that we often come to You with our minds already full of conclusions. We look at what is happening around us, we look at what is happening inside us, and then we are tempted to decide what You must be like based on what we can see.

So this morning, would You humble us enough to listen? Give us eyes to see what this passage reveals about Your holiness, Your covenant faithfulness, Your compassion, Your presence, and Your name. For those who are carrying pain, remind them that You see. For those who have been waiting a long time, remind them that delay is not the same thing as abandonment. For those who feel inadequate for what faithfulness requires, teach them to depend on Your presence rather than their own strength.

And above all, lead us to Christ. Help us see the greater redemption You have accomplished in Him, and let Your Word shape not only what we know about You but the way we trust You and live before You.

We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

One of the things difficult circumstances can do is begin to interpret God for us. At first we may simply be dealing with the problem itself, but if the problem lasts long enough, another struggle begins underneath it. We start wondering what the situation means about God.

If the pain continues, we may begin to wonder whether God sees it. If the answer is delayed, we may wonder whether He cares. If the responsibility in front of us feels larger than our strength, we may assume that everything depends on whether we are capable enough. And if we cannot understand what God is doing, we can slowly begin to make our understanding the standard by which we judge Him.

That is a dangerous reversal. Our circumstances are real, and Scripture never asks us to pretend otherwise, but our circumstances are not the final authority for telling us who God is. God has revealed Himself. He gets to tell us who He is.

That is why this passage matters so much. Exodus 3 does not begin by pretending Egypt is less oppressive than it is or Moses is stronger than he is. Instead, it brings both of those realities into the presence of the God who is greater than them. The passage moves from God’s holiness, to His knowledge of His people’s suffering, to His promise of presence, and finally to the revelation of His name.

Here is the truth I want us to keep coming back to this morning:

What we can see—and what we know we cannot do—must never speak louder than the God who is.

The story begins very quietly. Exodus 3:1 tells us that Moses is keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. Forty years earlier, Moses had been connected to Pharaoh’s household. Now he is a shepherd in the wilderness, caring for someone else’s sheep. There is nothing in verse 1 that looks dramatic. Moses is simply doing what his life now requires him to do.

Then he leads the flock to Horeb, which the narrator calls the mountain of God, and there he sees the bush burning without being consumed. Verse 2 says that the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush. Moses turns aside to see this strange sight, but verse 4 shifts the focus in a way I think is easy to miss. Moses sees the bush, but then the text says the LORD sees Moses turn aside, and God calls to him from the bush: “Moses, Moses.”

The story begins with Moses looking at something unusual, but very quickly the greater reality is that God is looking at Moses and calling him by name. And that is where the revelation begins.

The LORD Is Holy — Approach with Reverence

The first thing God says to Moses is not, “Here is the plan for Egypt.” Before Moses receives a mission, he is confronted with the holiness of the One who is sending him. Verse 5 says,

Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

We need to be careful here because this is the kind of passage where people can become fascinated with details the text itself does not explain. We can ask what the bush symbolizes, why it was not consumed, or whether every part of the scene points to some hidden meaning. There may be interesting possibilities, but the text itself moves us toward something much clearer: God is making His presence known, and His presence makes the place holy.

Notice the tension in the scene. God is near enough to call Moses by name, but Moses is not free to approach casually. God initiates the encounter, yet God also sets the boundary. The same God who says “Moses, Moses” also says, “Do not come near.” His nearness is gracious, but it is still the nearness of the holy God.

Then in verse 6 He identifies Himself:

And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Moses responds by hiding his face because he is afraid to look at God.

That identification matters because God is connecting this moment with everything He has already promised. Moses is not meeting some new god of the wilderness. This is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who made covenant promises generations earlier. Israel’s situation has changed dramatically since the days of the patriarchs, but God has not changed. The years have passed, the people are in bondage, Moses is in exile, and yet the God who spoke to Abraham is still the God who is speaking now.

That is one of the first things this passage teaches us about how to interpret difficult seasons. We are often tempted to let a new circumstance rewrite what we know about God. Something changes in life and suddenly we begin thinking as though God must have changed too. But Exodus 3 reminds us that the faithfulness of God is not measured by how quickly our circumstances improve.

There is also a very practical word here about worship. Familiarity with holy things can slowly dull our sense of reverence. We can hear the name of God so often that we stop thinking about the weight of it. We can open the Bible as though we are simply opening another book, sing words about the glory of God while our attention is somewhere else, or pray with so little thought that we barely realize whom we are addressing.

Exodus 3 corrects that casualness without pushing us away from God. That is important. The answer is not to become afraid to draw near to Him. The answer is to remember that grace gives us access to the holy God; grace does not make the holy God ordinary. In Christ, we are invited to come boldly to the throne of grace, but boldness is not the same thing as carelessness. The God we know as Father is still the God before whom Moses hid his face.

So perhaps the first question the passage asks us is very simple: Have we become too casual with God? Has familiarity with Scripture, church, prayer, or Christian language made us forget the wonder that the holy God has made Himself known at all?

Before God tells Moses what He will do, He reorients Moses around who He is. And then, beginning in verse 7, He tells Moses what His holiness and covenant faithfulness mean for a suffering people in Egypt.

The LORD Sees — Trust Him in the Waiting

Listen again to verses 7 and 8. The LORD says, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”

Those words deliberately take us back to the end of chapter 2. Last week the narrator told us that God heard, remembered, saw, and knew. Now God says it in His own words. He has seen their affliction, He has heard their cry, He knows their suffering, and He has come down to act.

There is even emphasis in the Hebrew behind “I have surely seen.” The point is not that God has a vague awareness of the problem. He knows exactly what is happening. He knows the oppression, He hears the cries, and He calls Israel “my people” while they are still living under Pharaoh’s power.

Think about that for a moment. Their visible situation says they belong to Egypt. Pharaoh treats them as a labor force that exists for his purposes. But God says, “my people.” Their bondage has not erased their covenant identity. Pharaoh may control their labor, but he does not own the covenant promises of God.

And then God says something even more remarkable: “I have come down to deliver them.” He is not only aware; He intends to save. He will bring them out of Egypt and bring them into the land He promised. The Exodus will be God’s work from beginning to end.

That is why verse 10 is so interesting. After saying, “I have come down to deliver,” God says to Moses, “Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” God’s sovereignty and Moses’ responsibility stand right beside each other. The LORD is the Deliverer, and Moses is the servant He chooses to use.

We need both truths. If we forget that God uses people, we can excuse passivity and call it trust. But if we forget that the work belongs to God, we begin carrying responsibilities as though everything depends on us. Scripture gives us a better way. We obey because God uses servants, but we do not imagine that we are the Savior. There is a tremendous freedom in knowing the difference.

Now bring this back to Israel’s long wait. By the time Exodus 3 opens, generations have lived and died under Egyptian oppression. From the human point of view, it would have been easy to conclude that nothing was happening. If you had been an Israelite living through those years, you might have prayed the same prayer many times and gone to bed with the same burden. You might have wondered whether the covenant promises had somehow disappeared under the weight of Egypt.

That is why these words are so pastorally important. God says, “I have seen. I have heard. I know.” The fact that His people could not yet see His answer did not mean He was absent.

We need that distinction because waiting can tempt us to make conclusions that the Bible does not give us permission to make. It is one thing to say, “This hurts, and I do not understand why it has lasted this long.” That may be completely honest. It is another thing to say, “Therefore God does not care.” It is one thing to say, “I cannot see what God is doing.” It is another thing to say, “Therefore God is doing nothing.”

Those conclusions may feel natural, especially when the burden has lasted a long time, but Exodus 3 teaches us not to confuse delay with indifference. God’s timetable may remain hidden from us while His character remains completely trustworthy.

That does not mean we should turn this passage into a promise that every Christian will experience an earthly deliverance that looks like Israel’s Exodus. This is a unique event in redemptive history. We should not tell someone that if they trust God enough, every diagnosis will change, every financial burden will disappear, every broken relationship will be restored, or every painful circumstance will be removed on the timetable they desire. God has not promised that.

Sometimes He delivers us from suffering, and sometimes He sustains us through suffering. Sometimes He changes the circumstances, and sometimes He changes and strengthens us in the middle of circumstances we would never have chosen. What Exodus 3 gives us is not a formula for controlling the outcome; it gives us the character of the God who sees, hears, knows, and remains faithful to His promises.

That is why faith can be honest about pain without allowing pain to become the final authority. Faith does not pretend the suffering is small. It simply refuses to conclude that God’s faithfulness is small because the suffering is large.

And that brings us naturally to Moses, because after God says He has come down to deliver, Moses hears something that suddenly makes the whole situation personal: “I will send you.”

The LORD Is with His Servant — Obey in Dependence

Verse 11 says, “But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?’” We need to hear that question carefully. It would be easy to make Moses into a man with low self-esteem who simply needs a confidence boost, but that would miss the way God answers him.

Moses knows the size of the task. He knows Pharaoh’s power, and he knows something of his own history in Egypt. More importantly, God has just said that this deliverance belongs to Him. So when Moses asks, “Who am I?” there is at least something true in the question. Moses is not enough for what God has described.

What is striking is that God never argues with that part of the problem. He does not say, “Moses, let Me explain why you are more impressive than you think.” He does not list Moses’ gifts or remind him that he was raised in Pharaoh’s household. Verse 12 says simply, “But I will be with you.”

That answer shifts the center of gravity away from Moses. The decisive question is not whether Moses can find enough strength within himself to become equal to the task. The decisive reality is that the God who sends him will be with him.

That is very different from the way our culture often speaks about weakness. We are often given two bad options. One says, “You are a failure because you are not enough.” The other says, “You are enough; you simply need to believe in yourself.” Scripture is much more honest and much more hopeful. There are many things we are not enough for in ourselves. We are limited creatures. We get tired, we lack wisdom, we feel fear, and we regularly reach the edge of our strength. God does not need to deny any of that in order to use us.

His answer is His presence.

That does not mean our gifts, preparation, wisdom, or effort are irrelevant. Moses will have to go, speak, listen, act, and obey. But his confidence cannot rest in himself. He has to learn that obedience is possible because the God who calls him is present with him.

The sign God gives in verse 12 makes that even clearer. God tells Moses that when he has brought the people out of Egypt, they will serve God on this mountain. Think about the scene from Moses’ perspective. He is standing at Horeb with a flock of sheep. Israel is still enslaved. Pharaoh has not been confronted. The plagues have not begun. The Passover has not happened. The sea has not opened. Yet God speaks of Israel worshiping at this mountain as a future reality.

Moses sees the obstacle that stands in front of him; God speaks from the standpoint of His promise.

That does not remove the difficulty of obedience, but it changes what obedience rests on. There are times when we know what Scripture requires, yet we delay because we are waiting to feel adequate. We may know we need to repent, forgive, tell the truth, have a difficult conversation, serve faithfully, or take some other clear step of obedience, but we keep waiting for a level of confidence that may never come.

In those moments, it can be helpful to ask: Am I hesitating because God has not actually made the path clear, or am I hesitating because I am demanding personal sufficiency before I will obey? Those are very different questions.

We should never invent a calling God has not given us, and we should never confuse impulse with obedience. But where God has made faithfulness clear, weakness is not automatically permission to disobey. “I cannot do this in my own strength” may be exactly right. The mistake is adding, “Therefore I cannot obey.”

God’s answer to Moses is not self-confidence. It is dependence: “I will be with you.”

And that phrase prepares us for the final movement of the passage because the Hebrew word translated “I will be” in verse 12 is the same form that appears repeatedly when God reveals His name in verse 14. The promise of presence and the revelation of God’s name are connected.

Moses asks, “Who am I?” God answers, “I will be with you.” Then Moses asks another question, and this one moves the passage toward its climax: Who are You?

The LORD Is — Let His Name Have the Final Word

In verse 13 Moses anticipates going to the Israelites and telling them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you.” He then asks what he should say if they ask for God’s name. Verse 14 gives the famous answer: “I AM WHO I AM.” Then God says, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

The Hebrew phrase is ehyeh asher ehyeh. I do not want to turn this into a language lecture, but the Hebrew helps us appreciate the richness of what God is saying. The word ehyeh comes from the verb “to be,” and the ESV’s traditional translation, “I AM WHO I AM,” is entirely appropriate. At the same time, the Hebrew form can also carry a future sense, something like “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” That matters because exactly the same form was used in verse 12 when God said, “I will be with you.”

So what is God saying about Himself? At the very least, He is declaring that His existence and identity are not derived from anything outside Himself. God simply is. Everything else that exists depends upon Him, but He does not depend upon Pharaoh, Moses, Israel, creation, or anything beyond Himself. Christian theology has rightly used language such as self-existence or aseity to describe this truth: God has life in Himself and depends on no one.

But if we stop there, we miss the way Exodus itself uses the name. God is not giving Moses an abstract definition disconnected from the story. He is revealing who He is in the middle of covenant promises and in the middle of Israel’s suffering. The God who is also says, “I will be with you.” His self-existence is not cold distance; it means that His presence and faithfulness do not depend on circumstances.

Pharaoh can be powerful, and God still is. Israel can be enslaved, and God still is. Moses can feel inadequate, and God still is. The situation may change from one generation to another, but the LORD does not become more or less God because the circumstances have changed.

Verse 15 then connects this revelation with the covenant name Yahweh. God tells Moses, “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.” He then says, “This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”

We should be careful about treating the relationship between ehyeh and Yahweh like a simple dictionary formula, because the Hebrew is more complex than that. But Exodus clearly wants us to hear the relationship. The God who says “I AM” is Yahweh, the God of the fathers, the God who keeps covenant and makes His presence known through His saving acts.

And I think this is where the pastoral weight of the whole passage lands. Moses asked for a name because Israel needed to know who was sending him, but the answer also speaks directly to the way we so often think about God. We are tempted to define Him from below—from our circumstances, our fears, our disappointments, our cultural assumptions, and sometimes even our preferences.

But God defines God.

That is the issue underneath everything else. Egypt does not get to define Him. Pharaoh does not get to define Him. Israel’s suffering does not get to define Him. Moses’ weakness does not get to define Him. And neither do our circumstances.

If something painful happens, we may be tempted to say, “God must not love me.” If something confusing happens, we may think, “God must not know what He is doing.” If prayer seems unanswered, we may assume He is not listening. If we feel weak, we may conclude that He cannot use us. Those thoughts can feel persuasive because they arise out of real experiences, but experience is not the same thing as revelation.

The proper order is the other way around. God’s revelation teaches us how to interpret our circumstances. We bring what we are experiencing under what God has said about Himself.

That does not mean every question disappears. Moses is going to have many more questions, and next week we will spend time with those. Israel’s suffering has not ended by verse 15 either. The circumstances are still unresolved. Yet before anything changes in Egypt, God has given Moses something more foundational than changed circumstances: He has given him His name.

That is why this sermon is so important for the rest of Exodus. Before the plagues, before Passover, before the sea, before Sinai, and before the tabernacle, the book establishes who the LORD is. The whole story that follows will reveal what His name means in action. He is holy. He is faithful to covenant. He sees His people. He hears their cries. He knows their suffering. He is present with the servant He sends. He acts to redeem.

What we can see—and what we know we cannot do—must never speak louder than the God who is.

Christ and Exodus

At this point we need to ask where this passage stands in the larger story of redemption. We do not need to force Jesus into every detail of the burning bush in order to preach Christ faithfully from Exodus. In fact, the connection is stronger when we let the whole redemptive pattern develop the way Scripture develops it.

God’s people are in bondage and cannot free themselves. God sees, hears, and knows their condition. He takes the initiative and says, “I have come down to deliver.” He sends Moses, but the salvation remains God’s work. That pattern becomes part of the biblical story that ultimately reaches a far greater fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

The Exodus rescues Israel from slavery under Pharaoh, but humanity has a deeper bondage that no Moses can solve. We are enslaved to sin and subject to death. We cannot repair our guilt before a holy God, and we cannot raise ourselves from the grave. So the God who saves acts again, and this time His saving condescension reaches a fullness Moses could never provide: the eternal Son takes on flesh and comes among us.

Jesus does what Moses cannot do. Moses can confront Pharaoh, but he cannot bear the sins of God’s people. Moses can lead Israel through the sea, but he cannot conquer death. Moses can bring the people to Sinai, but he cannot finally open the way for sinners to live in the presence of the holy God. Christ can, and Christ has.

At the cross, the holy God does not ignore sin; He deals with it through the sacrifice of His Son. In the resurrection, Christ defeats the death we could never defeat. And through the Spirit, the risen Christ is present with His people as He calls us to live and serve faithfully.

That is why the gospel does not tell us to become strong enough to save ourselves. It tells us that Christ has accomplished what we could not accomplish. We repent of sin, trust Him, and receive a salvation that is His work before it is ever ours.

And for believers, this means the character of God revealed in Exodus 3 is not less clear when we come to the New Testament; it is displayed with even greater fullness. If you want to know whether God sees the misery of His people, look at Christ entering our world. If you want to know whether God is committed to redemption, look at the cross. If you want to know whether death or any other power has the final word, look at the empty tomb.

The God who is has made Himself known in Jesus Christ.

Let’s Live This Out

Let’s bring this passage down into the week in front of us. I do not want to give us a long list of things to remember, because the central application is actually very simple: let what God has revealed about Himself govern how you interpret what you are facing.

A helpful way to practice that is to begin by naming the circumstance honestly. If something hurts, call it painful. If you are afraid, acknowledge the fear. If you do not know what comes next, admit that you do not know. Biblical faith does not require us to pretend. Israel cried out, and God did not rebuke them for acknowledging their suffering. Moses admitted that the task was beyond him, and God did not tell him to deny his weakness.

Then ask what the circumstance is tempting you to conclude about God. That is often where the deeper spiritual battle is taking place. Is the delay tempting you to believe God has forgotten you? Is your weakness tempting you to believe obedience is impossible? Is disappointment tempting you to redefine God’s goodness? Is uncertainty tempting you to believe that everything is out of control?

Once you have identified that conclusion, return to what God has actually revealed. Exodus 3 gives us plenty to remember. He is holy, so we approach Him with reverence. He is the covenant-keeping God, so His faithfulness is not cancelled by a difficult season. He sees, hears, and knows, so our pain is never invisible to Him. He is present, so our weakness is not the only reality in the room. And He is the LORD, the God who is, whose character does not rise and fall with our circumstances.

For us as Christians, we also return to what God has revealed in Christ. The cross tells us that His love is not measured by whether the week is easy. The resurrection tells us that even death is not the final word. The presence of the Spirit reminds us that we have not been left alone while we wait for the completion of redemption.

Then, after we have remembered who God is, we take the next faithful step. Moses still has to leave Horeb. God’s promise, “I will be with you,” is not given so Moses can remain beside the bush feeling reassured; it is a promise for obedience.

Maybe the next faithful step for you is repentance. Maybe it is forgiving someone, asking for help, telling the truth, having a conversation you have avoided, continuing to serve when you feel unnoticed, or simply continuing in ordinary faithfulness when nothing seems dramatic. You may not be able to solve the whole problem, and God may not be asking you to. He may be asking you to trust Him enough to obey in the next thing He has made clear.

That is dependence. It does not say, “I am enough.” It says, “God is faithful, and He will be with me as I obey Him.”

So What?

So what? So what does all of this mean for us?

It means we need to be very careful about who gets the final word in our hearts. Something always wants that place. Fear wants it. Pain wants it. Our past wants it. Our own sense of inadequacy wants it. The loudest voices around us want it. And sometimes our own thoughts can sound so convincing that we forget they still need to be tested by the Word of God.

Exodus 3 calls us to a different posture. When suffering tempts us to believe God has forgotten, we remember that He sees, hears, and knows. When weakness tells us we cannot possibly obey, we remember that God’s answer to Moses was not self-confidence but presence: “I will be with you.” When circumstances seem to tell the whole story, we remember that God was already speaking of worship at Sinai while Israel was still in Egypt. And when every other voice tries to define God, we remember that He has revealed His own name.

Church, our hope is not that life will always make sense. Our hope is not that we will always feel strong or that every prayer will be answered on our timetable. Our hope is the God who is—the God who was faithful to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God who saw Israel in Egypt; the God who called Moses in Midian; the God who came down to deliver; and, for us, the God who has made Himself known in Jesus Christ.

So when what you can see becomes overwhelming, go back to what God has revealed. When what you cannot do becomes frightening, remember who is with you. When you are tempted to build your theology from an unfinished chapter of your life, return to the God who has already spoken.

What we can see—and what we know we cannot do—must never speak louder than the God who is.

Let the God who is have the final word.

Amen.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for making Yourself known. You have not left us to build our understanding of You from our fears, our disappointments, or our limited view of what is happening around us. You have spoken, and Your Word is true.

We confess that we often reverse the order. We look at our circumstances and then decide what You must be like. When suffering continues, we question Your care. When answers are delayed, we question Your faithfulness. When obedience feels larger than our strength, we make our weakness the controlling reality. Forgive us for trusting our conclusions more than Your revelation.

Teach us to revere You as holy without running from Your gracious presence. Strengthen those who are waiting and remind them that delay is not abandonment. Comfort those who are hurting with the assurance that You see, hear, and know. Give courage to those who know the next step of obedience but feel inadequate to take it, and teach all of us to depend upon Your presence rather than our own strength.

Most of all, thank You for Jesus Christ, our greater Deliverer. Thank You that He came for sinners who could not rescue themselves, that He bore our guilt at the cross, that He rose from the dead, and that our hope rests in Him rather than in the stability of our circumstances.

Make us a people who know Your name, trust Your character, revere Your holiness, and walk faithfully in Your presence. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Benediction

Receive the Lord’s blessing from Numbers 6:24–26:

“The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”

Go in the grace of Christ, trusting the God who is.

Amen.