We often, I would say we usually, call God by titles rather than by His name. For instance, we call Him Father or we call Him Lord. And these are titles based on His office or His place in our lives. Or we call Him by the generic designation God. I remember many years ago, I was a teenager, my dad rebuked me for addressing God as, well, only God. I would begin my prayers, O God, and he said that would be like me addressing him as O man. or addressing my mother as, oh woman. And so ever since, I have tried to begin my prayers something like, oh Lord my God and Heavenly Father. I kind of try to cover all the bases. But I still never call God by His name. What is His name? Do you know his name? You know, it's amazing to me that there is not a Muslim on the face of the earth, no matter how nominal his faith, who does not know that the name of his God is Allah. But there are very few Christians, I believe, that know that the given name of our God is Yahweh. This morning, by God's grace, let us remedy that situation, at least as far as this congregation is concerned. My name is Yahweh, our God says. Our God reveals this name in a story that's very familiar to all of us who attended Sunday in the story of the burning bush here in Exodus chapter 3. I'm going to begin reading in verse 7 and just on through verse 15. Exodus 3 verse 7. And the Lord said, I have surely seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. Now therefore behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come now therefore, I will send you, Moses, to Pharaoh that you may bring my people up the children of Israel out of Egypt. But Moses said to God who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt. So he said I will certainly be with you and this shall be assigned to you that I have sent you when you have brought the people out of Egypt you shall serve God on this mountain. Then Moses said to God, Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they say to me, What is his name? What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me to you. Moreover, God said to Moses, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, the Lord 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 this is my memorial to all generations. Now, of course, the key verses are the last three that we just read. In this passage, Moses comes to the base of Mount Sinai. He sees a burning bush there. And when he turns aside to see it, he engages the Lord God in conversation and God commissions him to deliver the children of Israel from their bondage in Egypt. And Moses immediately begins to make excuses. This entire passage, Exodus 3 and 4, furnishes an interesting study of the excuses that we make to God and His response to those excuses. I've often thought of preaching that message, but that's a message for another day. The point for our study this morning is that in Moses' second excuse, He speaks of the name of God. Notice verse 13. Moses says, when I go to the Israelites and I say, the God of our fathers has sent me, has commissioned me, they'll ask, what is his name? Now don't get the wrong idea. Don't misunderstand the question. The point is not that the Israelites had never before heard the name of God mentioned in verse 14. If you do a search on the name Yahweh, you'll find that it's used scores of times in the book of Genesis. Abraham was familiar with God by this name. So this name had been revealed centuries before. And so it's hard to believe that Moses was thinking here that the Israelites would simply want to know God's name in the sense of pronouncing it or spelling it. That's not the idea. Rather, Moses was using the concept of name here, as it is often understood in the Old Testament, to reveal the personality of a person. Moses understood that the Israelites were going to ask, in what way has God revealed his personality to you that he never revealed it to us before? I mean, what makes you think that after 400 years, this God that we've known for many centuries is going to deliver us? What about His person has changed? You see, for this sermon to make much sense to you this morning, for it to make much difference to you this morning, you've got to get a hold of a principle right up front here. In the Old Testament, a person's name and the person himself were to some degree interchangeable. And this is particularly true of the name of God. Throughout the Old Testament, we see the children of Israel go into battle in the power of the name of the Lord. Now whose power is that? The power in the name? Or the power in the person? It's a trick question. The answer is yes. The name and the person in the Old Testament are interchangeable. That's the idea. The psalmist says we run into the name of God as a fortress. He says the name of God comforts us. The name of God protects us. We give glory to the name of God. Do you get the idea? As the name goes, so goes the person. That's the idea here. And so when Moses here remarks in verse 13 that the Israelites are going to want to know what is his name, he means that they are going to want to know what Moses has learned of the person of God that they hadn't known before. See, Moses realizes that they would have their doubts that this God who had left them in captivity, in slavery, in Egypt for 400 years. A little aside here, how old is our country? 230 years. This God who had left them in slavery for 400 years, what have you learned about this God who's left us here for 400 years that we didn't know before? I mean, all of a sudden this God is going to deliver us. What part of His personality has changed? And in response to that question, God reveals his name afresh to Moses. Notice the statement at the end of verse 15. This is my name forever. This is my memorial to all generations. This is how God says we are to remember him. This is His name forever. Of all of the names, of all of the titles of God, this is the one that I believe is most important for us to understand. It is what I call God's given name. You know, we talk about a lot of odd things down here in the South. You know, cash money. We talk about someone's given name. This is the name that God gave Himself. And in giving this name, He reveals His personality, who He is in His person. Now, the name that God reveals in this passage is a form of the Hebrew verb, to be. the most common verb in any language. And that's where the difficulty comes in because the name of our God is a form of the verb is a form of the verb to be men down through the centuries who have translated have not translated because it would just add a great deal of confusion to the translation. And so they haven't translated it. They have substituted other words for it. In our New King James Version, they substitute capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D. Now the problem with that And to be truthful with you, if I had this problem, I don't know how I would have solved it. But the problem with the solution that our translators have come up with is that there is a title for God, capital L-O-R-D, a common title for God used in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And most of us, when we're reading Scripture, we don't know the difference between the two. And instead of clarifying it, it has confused it. Look with me at verses 14 and 15 here in our text and let me read it to you in such a way as I think it will give you the true flavor of God's name. Look at your Bibles while I read and compare. And God said to Moses, I am who I am or I am what I am. And he said, Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me to you. Moreover, God said to Moses, Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, The he is 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. Do you get it? If a person says to us, I am, How do you say the same thing about that person? You say, He is. If I say to you, I am Pastor Gerard, for you to say that same thing, you would say, He is Pastor Gerard. And so God says in verse 14, I am. And when we say the same thing about God, we say, He is. And that's the Hebrew word Yahweh. That's the name of your God and mine. He is. Now there's also a little bit of difficulty here because I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing Yahweh correctly. Because for many centuries, the Jews never pronounced this name. In the older English versions, the American Standard Version that was translated in 1901, they used the translation Jehovah. Many of you are familiar with that translation. That's simply a different way of pronouncing this Hebrew word. There's a little bit more to it than that, but I'm not going to go into that explanation. So, Yahweh, Jehovah, this is the name of our God. He is. That's the name of our God. Now, if the point of God revealing His name here is that He is revealing something important about His personality, And by the way, this was at a very important point that they understand his personality. God was about to do what? He was about to create a nation. He was about to bring this motley bunch of slaves out of Egypt and bring them to Mount Sinai and meld them into a nation, the nation that would bear eventually the Messiah. And so there's something very important happening here. And in the context of that, he reveals himself by this name, I am who I am. But now what does that reveal about God? When God says, I am who I am, or I am what I am, what does that teach us about this person that we have gathered to worship this morning? Well, let me suggest that it reveals three great truths about this God. First of all, it reveals His self-existence. His self-existence. Now, obviously, the form of God's name revealed in this passage emphasizes the verb, to be. It repeats that verb, and repetition is something that's often used in the Hebrew language for emphasis. If I say in Hebrew, promising I promise, that is the Hebrew way of emphasizing that promise. And so when we see the verb here, to be, repeated, It is a special grammatical form in the Hebrew language used for emphasis. So the very form of this name, I am who I am, I am what I am, emphasizes the being of God, His existence. Now in this context where Moses was was dealing with doubt about God being able to deliver his people from Egypt. God was saying, I am the self-existent God. I am dependent on no one or nothing. Everything is dependent on me. And so this name teaches us, first of all, that God needs nothing. God needs nothing. Think about this, will you, for a minute with me? It's worth engaging our brains to think a little bit about God and who he is. God, for an eternity past, dwelt alone and completely self-sufficient in need of nothing or no one. self-contained, self-satisfied. If God had needed a universe, if God had needed angels, if God had needed man, then those things would be just as eternal as God. But God needed none of those things. He existed, hear me, for an eternity before ever creating one of those things. Nothing is necessary to God. When God created the universe, when God created angels, when God created man, it added nothing to Him essentially. God changes not. And that means His essence could never change. It could never be added to by anything that He's created. Now you extend this thought another step and you realize that God was under no constraint, no obligation, no necessity to create anything. God did not need to create. that God chose to create was a purely sovereign act on His part caused by nothing outside of Himself. Nothing forced God or could have forced God to create anything else. God's decision was based purely on what Ephesians 1 calls the good pleasure of His will. To put it simply, God created only because He wanted to, not because He had to. Now that truth is at once humbling to man and exalting to God. I don't know that I could preach that truth in a public university without having people screaming running from the room. God does not need us in any sense. We can add nothing to Him. We do not have to be here as far as God is concerned. Even our praises, even our worship, all the ways in which we positively interact with God's glory still add nothing to God in His essence. Nehemiah 9.5 says that God's name is exalted above all blessing and praise. God does not need the glory that we give. He is glorious enough in himself. He doesn't need anyone to share that glory. Now we're already down a path where very few people today have ever gone. Most people don't ever think this deeply about God. But stick with me, okay? Take one more step on this path. And that is that God cannot be put under obligation by any creature. Because He is God alone, because nothing in creation is necessary to God, God can never be brought under obligation to man or to any other creature. Paul states this principle clearly in Romans 1135. Don't look it up, just listen to me. He says, or who has first given to God and it shall be repaid to him. Or to put it point blank, we can never put God in a position where he owes us anything. Our righteousness does not add anything to Him. It does not profit Him. We can't chalk up brownie points with God. We are only here because He wants us to be here and created us to be here and keeps us here moment by moment. Every moment of the day, we owe Him. Every breath that we take, we owe Him. Every beat of our heart, we owe Him. How shall we ever say to God, You owe me. Now, as my friend Johnny Smith would say, you're really deep today, Pastor. I understand. And this may seem a little bit abstract for God dealing with a bunch of Israelite slaves, but I think it was part of what God was saying. And it's certainly something that we need to understand about the person of God today. We are living in a revival of atheism today. Within the last five years, three books by prominent atheists have hit the bestseller list. Last year, the members of the British Parliament were surveyed as to their favorite summer reading. The number one book on their list was Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. That's scary. Dawkins is the professor of the public understanding of science. Oxford University. He is perhaps the best-known atheist in the world now and his central argument in this book, The God Delusion, goes like this. It says, there are many things in the world that have the appearance of having been designed. But he said, That can't possibly be the case because who would have designed the designer? He says that's an unanswerable question and that closes the case. Until we come to Exodus chapter 3 and God simply says, I am! I am. I simply am. Do you get it now? You see, the fallacy to Dawkins' argument is that every worldview, including his, has to go back to the beginning and say something was there. Now, Dawkins won't tell you this. But he has an undesigned designer as well. It's called the universe. But he's got the wrong designer. God says, you go back as far as you can go and I am. I am that something. I am that someone. I always, ever am. Now, very closely related to this idea of self-existence, of independence, this name also reveals a second truth about God. His sovereignty. Or, if you don't like that word, His self-determination. Not only is God self-existent, God is self-determining. Let me give you a paraphrase of that name in verse 14. It goes like this, I am whatever I am. God is not only self-existent, but self-determining. God cannot be forced to do anything by a force outside of Himself. And again, you can see the point here in terms of the context in Exodus chapter 3. The Israelites have been enslaved for 400 years. It certainly seems as if the gods of the Egyptians are someone to be reckoned with. And God simply says, well, I am whatever I want to be. No god of the Egyptians is going to force me to do anything or keep me from doing anything. I am whatever I am. You've heard the motto made famous by the U.S. Army, be all that you can be. Well, there's only one person in this universe who has ever been all that he wanted to be. And that is Yahweh. Now, God's sovereignty, God's self-determination means two things about His power. First of all, it means that God's power is essential to His being. God's power is part of His essence. God's power doesn't come from anything or anyone outside of Himself. Absolute power is part of His being. Who's the most powerful person in the world? And I'm talking about on a human... Most people would say the President of the United States. But the President of the United States derives his power from the people who elect him. He derives his power from the fact that he is commander-in-chief of the great armed forces of this nation. Not so with God. With God, it's just the opposite. He derives His power from no one. He doesn't get His power from men. He gives power and authority to men. He doesn't need anyone's vote in the upcoming election. Whether men recognize God's power, whether they believe He is omnipotent, matters not at all. You know, we live in a day when men think that if they believe a certain thing hard enough, well, then it is so. And if they believe that God is all-powerful, well, then for them He is all-powerful. And if they don't believe He's all-powerful, well, for them He's not all-powerful. Well, I've got news for all of them. It doesn't make any difference what we believe about God. He is all powerful. God derives nothing from us. His power is inherent and in person and it knows no bounds that any man or angel or devil can place upon Him. Isaiah says he makes the great men of the earth as vanity. The Holy One says to whom will you liken me or to whom shall I be equal? And this leads me directly to a second thought that I think we need to understand because a lot of people don't understand this and that is God's power is superior even to man's free will. God's sovereignty, His self-determination is superior even to man's free will. It's common in fundamental circles to hear preachers say God's power and ability are limited by man's free will. That, folks, is simply not true. Now, let me explain what I mean. God has made men free. He has endowed them with a will with which He will never interfere. He leaves them absolutely free to do as they will, and we know from Scripture when they do what they will, it is always universally contrary to His will. We know that. Scripture's clear. And yet, despite all of that, it is the magnificent wisdom and power of God that God's will is still done always and ever without limit. Man is free, but it is God's power that is supreme. Now you say, you're going to have to explain that to me, Pastor. I can't. I can't explain that. I only know that both of these truths are taught clearly in Scripture. I cannot comprehend it, but without hesitation I believe it. I worship a God that I never expect to fully understand. If I could grasp God in the hollow of my hand, I would not worship Him as my God. If I could understand His dealings the way a child understands a spelling book, I would not worship Him. But the God that I worship works all things according to His will by His mighty power. The book of Daniel says He works them among the inhabitants of the earth. Now, these first two meanings to this great name of God may seem to make God distant. God is self-existent. God is self-determining. God is so big. He's so distant. He doesn't need me. It makes God seem very distant. But the third meaning to this name balances the picture, for it emphasizes something that theologians call God's eminence, God's nearness. A number of conservative scholars of the Old Testament point out that this verb, to be, can also have the meaning of becoming. Now, our verb in English is the same way. You know, I can say, someday I will be as old as Walt. OK? I thought that would get you. And the idea has the idea that I will become that at some point. And the idea in this verb has that same idea. When I say that God exists, God doesn't exist like a rock. You know, a rock just kind of sits there and it exists. That's not the idea. Our God exists and He becomes in the sense that He reveals Himself to man. Remember, God at this point where He was talking to Moses was about to inject himself into human history. He was about to take a covenant people to himself. And this name is the name that is associated with those covenant dealings all through Scripture. God revealing himself. And so we can say that this name is God as the self-revealing one. He is self-existent, he is self-determining, and he is self-revealing. And praise the Lord that he is, folks, or the agnostics would be right, and we wouldn't even know whether God was there or not. But it is part of God's person to reveal himself. Another way to say the same thing is that God was assuring Moses here that he was present with Israel. Some Old Testament scholars translate God's name here in verse 14 like this, I am present is what I am. I am present is what I am. The point is that God was emphasizing that his very personality backs up his promise to Moses in verse 12. Did you catch the reading that we did? I didn't emphasize it a great deal, but Moses is begging God. He's saying, God, you've told me to take these people out of Egypt and to take them to Israel. He said, I won't do this, God, unless you are present with me. And God says, well, I'll be present with you. And Moses says, I won't do this, God, unless you're present with me. God comes back and says, my name, my very personality is I am present is what I am. How can you doubt, Moses, that I will be present with you? You see, this God who is sovereign This God who is self-determining, this God who is self-existent is a God who is also present with you and I. How many times in the Bible does God say to His people in one way or another, I will be with you? That is our God. That's who He is at the core of His person. Wow. And this self-revealing God, the greatest revelation of this self-revealing God was what? This God who said, I will be with you. What was the greatest revelation of this name? I am present with you is what I am. It was in the person of the second member of the Trinity. His name was what? Emmanuel, God with us. This God is so much with us that the second member of the Trinity took human flesh forever. Has that thought ever struck you? Sometimes I think that we have this idea that Jesus, that God the Son came down and took human flesh and then he died and he was resurrected and he went back to heaven and he's not man anymore. No, my friend, he shall be the God-man, 100% God and 100% man forever. He will always, forevermore be with us. That is the God who said to Moses, I am what I am. And if you have any doubt about this, turn with me to John chapter 8. Will you? Will you do that? This Jesus, this Emmanuel claimed this same name of God. Claimed it for himself. Turn with me to John chapter 8. I can't read the whole context. This is a very lengthy passage of scripture where Jesus is having a discussion with people who claimed to believe in him, by the way. Dave pointed this out a few weeks ago. An interesting passage. I can't comment on the context, but beginning in verse 56, Jesus says to them, Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it and was glad. Then the Jews said to him, You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham. Jesus said to him, Most assuredly, I say to you, Before Abraham was, I am. Then they took up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by. So in verse 58 here, Jesus, in no uncertain terms, claims this name of God for himself. By the way, this is perhaps the clearest passage in all the Bible that indicates that Jesus understood that he was God. claimed the very name of the Old Testament God to himself. And by the way, did the Jews understand what he had just said? You bet they did. That's why they picked up stones to stone him. This was blasphemy. He was claiming to be God. Jesus, then, is the I Am. In particular, He is the self-revelation of the self-revealing God. And a number of Bible students down through the years have tied this great name of God, the I Am, to seven wonderful titles of Jesus from the book of John. And you see them listed there in your bulletin. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the door to the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth and the life. I am the true vine. Jesus is the ultimate expression of this name, I Am, as it communicates the God who is with us. The God who will never leave us nor forsake us. But I'm not through yet. Jesus died, and he rose again, and he went back to heaven. But this God who said, I am present, that's what I am, is present with us today in the third member of the Trinity. For He indwells every believer in Jesus Christ. You see, God was with the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. With them as a nation. He brought them out of Egypt with a strong arm. He was with them as with no other nation on earth. But listen, my friend, if you know the Lord Jesus Christ, God is with you now, not on a national level, but on an individual level. He is. Yahweh. He indwells you by His Spirit. He teaches you. He comforts you. He convicts you. He empowers you. This is Yahweh. The self-revealing One. The One who is present in our lives. within us. Now, I commonly close my sermons on Sunday morning with an invitation. And I'm going to do so this morning. But it's going to be a little bit different invitation. A very simple invitation. I simply invite you this morning to worship the self-existent, self-determining, self-revealing God, Yahweh, Jehovah, I am. He is. We're going to close the service with a time of worship now, and I hope that this isn't, okay, we're over the hump now and I'm fading out. Oh, I hope not. I hope that your hearts have been primed to worship this great God. The first hymn that we're going to to sing is a hymn. These words were written specifically about this great name. This song uses the name Jehovah, but it mentions many of the points that I have made in this sermon, and I trust that you'll use it now to lift glory to this great God. We're going to sing it to the tune of higher ground. What's the first phrase? Okay, that's not what I was thinking, but you know, higher ground, I'm pressing on, okay? It's that tune, okay? But you see the words there in your bulletin. Brian's going to come and lead us. Let us with all of our hearts now worship this great God.