Author: Texas Gospel

JEFF TURNER

Words have weight, and some words carry the weight of the entire universe. When Jesus stood in the midst of the Jewish leaders in John chapter 8 and said, “Before Abraham was, I am,” he was not being careless with his phrasing. He was making a claim so direct, so utterly unambiguous in its implications, that his listeners immediately reached for stones. They understood exactly what he meant.

To hear those words as a Jewish man or woman in first-century Jerusalem was to hear them against the backdrop of centuries of scripture. You would know Exodus chapter 3, where Moses at the burning bush asks God for his name, and God replies: “I am who I am.” You would know the repeated declarations in Isaiah where God says, “I am he.” The phrase carries the idea of self-existent, eternal, present-tense being, the God who simply is, without beginning, without end. That was the name, the signature of the divine identity.

And Jesus loved to use it. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He said, “I am the good shepherd.” He said, “I am the vine.” He said, “I am the light of the world.” Each of these declarations was more than a statement of function; it was a declaration of identity. He was consistently and deliberately placing himself within the category that belonged only to Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the Lord of all creation.

To the religious leaders of his day, this was the ultimate blasphemy. It was worse than cursing God, worse than denying him, worse than any form of irreverence. And so they picked up stones.

But here is the thing: they were right that such a claim would be the most monstrous of blasphemies, if it were not true. The only way in which Jesus’s “I am” statements are not the ravings of a megalomaniac is if he is actually who he claimed to be. The evidence he offered them, his words, his works, his resurrection, his entire life, all of it points toward the same staggering conclusion: it was not blasphemy, because it was true.

JEFF TURNER

Before God asked anything of Moses, he told him who he was.

Consider the order of that moment at the burning bush. Moses has turned aside. He has drawn near. And the voice from the fire does not begin with a mission or a mandate. It begins with an identity: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. That fear was not weakness. That fear was the only appropriate response to suddenly understanding who was speaking.

God knew what he was doing. He knew that before Moses could say yes to anything, he had to know who was asking. You cannot give your life to an abstraction.

So much of the uncommitted Christianity we see around us, the half-surrender, the one-foot-in and one-foot-out discipleship, traces its root not to defiance but to ignorance. People do not fully give themselves to a God they do not fully know. To know him rightly is to find every excuse for reservation consumed in the fire of his holiness.