Who Do You Say That I AM Is?
Who Do You Say That I AM Is? by Rev. L. John Gable
February 13, 2022
Through the years I have had many opportunities to visit with people about matters related to faith. I consider this to be a great privilege, both as a pastor and as a fellow follower of Jesus, to engage in these kinds of important discussions which I believe have both temporal and eternal significance. While many of the conversations have dealt with the timelessly unanswerable questions, such as “Why is there suffering?”, and the perennially confounding questions, such as “If we all read the same Bible and believe in the same God why do we disagree on so many different issues?”, it seems to me there is only one essential question which each of us must ask, and ultimately answer, for ourselves, that being “Who is Jesus Christ?” Is He who He says He is? Is He who the Scriptures say He is? Is He who the Church through the ages has said He is? Once this question is resolved in our minds and in our hearts, all of the other questions begin to pale in significance. But until this essential question is resolved we run the risk of allowing any of those other questions to capture our attention, engage our debates, and too often keep us from enjoying a meaningful, life giving faith.
So, who is Jesus Christ? What are we to make of Him? What are we to do with Him?
As I visit with those who are first exploring the Christian faith one of the troubling questions which is frequently asked is, “If Jesus really is the Son of God, why didn’t He just out and out tell us so? Why did He speak in such veiled language of parables and metaphors? Why didn’t He just say, “I am the Son of God, the promised Messiah, the One you’ve been waiting for, believe in Me and you will be made right with God, now and for eternity?” Why can’t we just point to one passage of Scripture and say, “Here it is! This is where Jesus says who He is?” And I know even we who are long in the faith have wondered the same.
Despite the fact that that approach to faith would not really be faith at all, rather I believe that God desires us to “seek and find” not simply memorize and recite; He desires to have a living, dynamic relationship with us rather than our simply reducing Him to a static, lifeless list of propositional truths which we can cite on command. Yet, having said that, there is a passage of Scripture, some would say many, that we can point to and say, “Here it is! This is where Jesus tells us exactly who He is” if we have ears to hear the meaning of His words.
In the 8th chapter of John’s Gospel, of which we just read the closing verses so I’ll encourage you to read the lead-up verses for yourselves, Jesus is engaged in a very lengthy debate with the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day. They are going back and forth as to Jesus’ authority to preach and teach, and it gets a little down and dirty. They accuse Him of being demon possessed and He accuses them of being liars, of going through the motions of worshiping a God they don’t really know. At one point in the discussion Jesus says, “If you keep My Word you will never taste death.” The Pharisees take this to mean that Jesus thinks Himself to be greater than the patriarch Abraham, the great father of the faith, as well as of the prophets, all of whom lived and died. So they ask Him the timeless question, the same one we ask Him today, “Who are you? Who do you claim to be?”
We’ve heard this question before at Caesarea Philippi when Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do others say that I am?”, and then the rejoinder, “Who do you say that I am?” When Peter famously answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”, we are pleased to hear Jesus affirm his answer, but this time the question is posed in a different way. Here the Pharisees are asking Jesus to answer for Himself, to put into His own words, “Who are you?”, and the answer He gives is telling.
He says, “It doesn’t really matter who I say I am. It only matters who God says I am.” This may be a message for another day, but it is true for Jesus and it is true for every one of us. Our true identity is not determined by who we say we are, and even less by who others say we are. Our true identity is determined by who God says we are, and God says that we, each of us, is a precious child, created in His image and privileged to know His great love, and like Jesus, our highest calling is to seek His glory.
But then Jesus goes on to say something curious. “Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that He would see My day; he saw it and was glad.” The Pharisees were naturally confused by this statement, so they challenged Him, saying, “You aren’t even 50 years old, yet you have seen Abraham who lived some 2000 years ago?” And that’s when Jesus finally lowers the hammer and tells them who He really is. He says, “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was, I am.” And after all the discussions and debates, after all the accusations and name calling, the Pharisees had had enough, so they picked up rocks to stone Him. Why? What had He said or done that was so terrible? To say, “Before Abraham was, I am” doesn’t sound nearly as offensive as some of the other things He said about them, not nearly as offensive as calling them “white washed tombs and pits of vipers.” Yet clearly they were offended by this statement to the point of wanting to put Him to death right then and there. What did they hear Him say that perhaps we miss, and what does it tell us about who Jesus really is?
Let’s go back to our Old Testament lesson from Exodus. We are all familiar with the setting of this story when Moses sees a burning bush and God speaks to him from it, so let’s move on to the meat of their conversation. God instructs Moses to leave the relative ease and security of sheepherding and go back to Egypt to deliver the Children of Israel out of bondage. While Moses’ first response to realizing he was in the presence of God was to take off his shoes and cover his eyes, here he basically answers God’s command by saying, “I can’t and I won’t.” What I love about this dialogue is that it shows us the kind of God we have. God is not an autocratic commander who speaks and expects a “puppet-like” response. Rather He engages us in dialogue. When Moses says, “No”, God doesn’t zap him, instead He restates His command and promises to be with Moses all the way, which is all well and good, but Moses pushes back again by saying he needs something more to go on. “If I go to the Israelites and say ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you’, and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ what should I say to them?”
I can only imagine there was a very long pause at this point in the conversation. You see, up until this point, God had never revealed His name before. He was only known as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and He had only made Himself known when He wanted to. This was no insignificant decision God had to make. “Should I tell this sinful, rebellious, disobedient, disrespectful people My name or not?” To give us His name meant that He was making Himself available to us, any time, any place. It meant that we could call on Him, by name, whenever we wanted to and wouldn’t have to wait for Him to call on us. If we are in a crowd of people and I want to get your attention, but I do not know your name, the best I can do is call out, “Hey you!” and hope that you will respond. But once I know your name I can call you whenever I want to, whether you want me to or not, whether it is convenient for you or not. If God decides to give us His name it means He is willing to enter in to a two way relationship with us. He will be our God and we will be His people. If God decides to give us His name it means that not only will we be able to honor it and call upon it in our times of need and reverence it in our times of worship, but we will also be likely to dishonor it, and abuse it and use it in vain.
It was no small request when Moses asked God to tell him His name, and it was no small matter when God decided to do it. He said, “From now on you can call me, “I AM WHO I AM.”
Now what kind of a name is that? It turns out it is the perfect name for God, not just any god, not just for a “sometimes god”, but for our God, the eternal God. “I AM WHO I AM” is, in Hebrew, the first person singular form of the verb “to be” and like any verb form it can be translated into the past, the present and the future tenses. This then is who God says He is:
I AM WHO I AM.
I AM WHO I WAS.
I AM WHO I WILL BE.
I WAS WHO I WAS.
I WAS WHO I AM.
I WAS WHO I WILL BE.
I WILL BE WHO I WAS.
I WILL BE WHO I AM.
I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE.
Need I go on? In short, He is saying, “I am your God. I will be God with you and for you, at all times and in all places, now and for eternity, because I AM WHO I AM.”
So, when the Pharisees confronted and asked Jesus to declare who He claimed to be, His answer was remarkably clear and unmistakable to His first century hearers and it needs to be to us today as well. When He said, “Before Abraham was, I AM!” He was laying claim to His divinity. He was using language about Himself that only God could rightfully use. He was saying in no uncertain terms that He was God incarnate, God in flesh. Are we reading too much in to His response? I don’t think so, because we can know that His meaning was clear by looking at the way the Pharisees responded. They were horrified and immediately picked up stones to kill Him right then and there for speaking blasphemy.
Jesus’ accusation against the Pharisees was that they didn’t really know the God they were worshiping; if they had known Him they would have recognized Jesus as His Son. Perhaps that would be the ultimate tragedy for us today as well, to worship a God we don’t really know, to worship a god who is of our own making who is no god at all. So Jesus says, then and now, to them and to us, I am God with you. To know Me is to know God. To see Me is to see God. To believe in Me is to believe in God. To worship Me is to worship God, and by implication, to reject Me is to reject God.
This is, and must always be, the essential claim of the Christian faith because it is the essential claim which Jesus makes about Himself. Take away this claim and Jesus falls precipitously into the list of all the other of the world’s great teachers and leaders. Retain this claim and He stands alone.
- Carnegie Simpson writes, “Instinctively we do not class Him with others. When one read His name in a list beginning with Confucius and ending with Goethe we feel it is an offence less against orthodoxy than against decency. Jesus is not one of the group of the world’s great. Talk about Alexander the Great or Charles the Great or Napoleon the Great if you will…Jesus is apart. He is not the Great; He is the Only. He is simply Jesus. Nothing could add to that…He is beyond our analyses. He confounds our canons of human nature. He compels our criticism to overleap itself. He awes our spirits. There is a saying of Charles Lamb, that ‘If Shakespeare was to come into this room we should all rise up to meet him, but if Jesus was to come into it, we should all fall down and try to kiss the hem of His garment.’”
Friends, this is the essential claim of the Christian faith, not because we say it is true, but because He says it is true, and God says it is true about Him, and then He backs it up with the life He lived, the death He died and the new life He rose to live and give to all who follow Him.
This timeless question, “Who is Jesus Christ and what are we to do with Him?” is one which every person in every age must ask and ultimately answer for themselves. In our asking, let us listen to the answer He gives about Himself:
Are You the Christ, the Son of the Living God?
Are You the Promised Messiah?
Are You the One worthy of our worship and praise as Savior and Lord?
His answer is unambiguously simple and clear: I AM!
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN