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When you’re in a wilderness season—the kind that doesn’t feel like a season at all—the doubt that creeps in isn’t usually about theology; it’s simpler and sharper than that: Is God really with me? That’s precisely the question hanging over Exodus 3, where God meets Moses in the wilderness and answers it not with reassurance alone, but with His name.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon emphasizes that God rescues His people before calling them to obedience, rather than the reverse. How does this order change the way you think about your own spiritual life and struggles? Where might you be placing performance or obedience before experiencing God’s rescue?
The Israelites looked back on Egypt and softened the hard parts while remembering the food and better conditions. When have you idealized a past season of life, and how might remembering God’s faithfulness in your present reality reframe your perspective?
God reveals His name as “I Am Who I Am”—connecting it to His faithfulness to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob centuries later. What does it mean that God still calls Himself by this name today, and how does knowing you are adopted into God’s family change how you hear this promise personally?
The sermon contrasts how culture often focuses on what God wants people to do rather than who God is to them. Why does this distinction matter so much, and how have you experienced the difference between rule-focused religion and relationship-based faith—both in your own life and in how you share hope with others?
Jesus points to God as still “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” to show He is the God of the living, not the dead. How does this truth about God’s ongoing faithfulness encourage you when His promises feel delayed or distant in your own wilderness?
Communion is described as our modern “pillar of cloud and fire”—a visible sign of God’s faithfulness. In what practical ways can this regular reminder of Christ’s finished work help you trust God the next time you feel abandoned or forgotten in a wilderness season?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So we’re beginning a new series tonight entitled “Wilderness.” And if you noticed in our opening video for it, we go from lush green fields to not so green to the cold deadness of winter. And that’s part of the seasons that we experience, right? We see the beauty of summer, everything growing. We see the harvest time, we see the barren fields. But we also often can kind of relate to those fields, I think. Sometimes we feel like our lives are just right in the middle of a powerful growing season. Everything is going so great, it just couldn’t be any better. And sometimes we find ourselves, and it doesn’t feel just like for a season. It feels like for many seasons in those barren, just empty dirt fields.
It sometimes feels like life is going the wrong direction, that we can remember the good old days. The good old days were those days when everything was lush and green and beautiful, and now it’s just dirt. Let’s think about this question for a moment. This sentence, think about this for a moment. Ten years ago, I was, I’m just going to leave a blank there. Imagine your head for a moment. Ten years ago. If you think about that for a second, now maybe ten years ago was a particularly trying time for you and you’re thinking, “Oh boy, I’m glad I’m not in the time that was ten years ago.” But oftentimes, especially through the filter of our minds where we kind of start to soften some of the bad things, and we thankfully forget some of the bad things, we look back and we think of what we think of the good old days. Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, whatever it might be. We go back and we think, “Wow, that was when it was lush. Now I’m in the wilderness. Now I’m just in a dirt field.” And I keep waiting for spring to come. I keep waiting for the crops to start sprouting back up again, and it feels like it’s just wilderness.
I think that’s often during the time of the Exodus how the Israelites felt. They looked back, and it wasn’t ten years ago even at first. It was just a few months ago, and then it was ten years ago, and then twenty years ago, then forty years ago, but they looked back to their time in Egypt, and they started to kind of smooth off the rough edges of being slaves and being forced to produce bricks and the ways that they were being pushed harder and harder and tortured. They started to forget that, but they did remember, “Well, but you know, there was a lot of tasty stuff that we got to eat back in the day in Egypt. There were all these wonderful things, and they’re not out here. There was a land that was much nicer than this barren wilderness that we’re in now.” It sure was a lot nicer then.
And we think about that, and we think about God’s interaction with the people of Israel, and it’s something that Scripture comes back to time and time again because it has continued relevance throughout all time, because we go through those wilderness periods. What’s your wilderness period? What part of your life right now feels like a wilderness? Because I suspect even if we wouldn’t say, “I’m in a wilderness period right now,” all of us have at least a portion of our lives in this moment that feel wilderness-like. And can we place that before God? Because here’s our starting point that we find in the book of Exodus. We’re turning back quite a ways in our Bible today. We’re turning to Exodus, and as we turn to Exodus, what do we find? We find that God is faithful in the wilderness. And not just a wilderness, not just the wilderness of the land, but the spiritual wilderness that the people were going through at the same time. And he proves that faithfulness. He shows it before the people of Israel are even in the wilderness when it’s just Moses.
And so we’re going to turn back to Exodus 3 tonight. And as we prepare to do that, let’s come before God in prayer and ask him to help us to see what he would have us to see in this word. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your faithfulness from age to age, from the rising sun to the setting, saying, “Lord, you are steadfast.” And Lord, as we look at your word, would you help us to be reminded about how you are steadfast, how you are faithful? Would you help us to hold on to that faithfulness in both the fruitful seasons and the not-so-fruitful ones, that we would know that you are with us? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Exodus 3, verse 14, Moses encounters God at the burning bush, and God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said, “Say this to the people of Israel. I am has sent me to you.” 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, the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.”
So let’s set a little context here. Moses is in a wilderness period of his life, although one that has turned into maybe not so much of a wilderness in the moment, it feels like he has to flee Egypt because he kills a man. He kills a man for his cruelty towards his fellow Israelites, but he kills a man, he flees. He ends up out in the wilderness, and what does he do there? Well, he meets his future father-in-law, Jethro. He ends up marrying Jethro’s daughter, and he’s tending the flocks, and then he encounters this burning bush. Moses is in a wilderness, and he doesn’t even fully realize what wilderness he’s in at the moment because he’s looking and saying, “Well, you know, it wasn’t the life I thought I was going to have, but life has worked out pretty well at this point. I have a wife and kids and a flock to tend. I have a very caring father,” and while we find out more about Jethro later on, Jethro seems like a very caring man. So in so many ways, it doesn’t feel like a wilderness, and yet Moses is a long, long way away from his calling still.
So he encounters God in the burning bush, and God is going to redirect Moses, pull him out of a wilderness he doesn’t even know that he’s in, and draw him into the calling that God has given to him, and then use Moses to draw the people of Israel into the calling he has given to them. He does that by revealing his name. Moses says, “Well, who is it that I should say has sent me?” And it’s a legitimate question. People believe there are all kinds of different gods, so it isn’t good enough to go and say, “Well, God has sent me.” Okay, which one? It’s like if you went into a high-security area at a government facility, and they said, “Well, who are you? Why should we let you in?” And you said, “Well, a person sent me.” Well, nice, bud. A person’s sending you away. Now, go away.
God reveals his name. He says, “Here is who I am. You don’t have to just go and say, ‘God sent me. I’m going to tell you who I am.’” He reveals his name. Now, we often don’t say his name. That’s a tradition that goes back to the time before the New Testament that the Jews were concerned. They didn’t want to blaspheme God’s name, so they didn’t utter it, and so they would substitute it with a word that was respectful, “Lord,” equivalent to “Lord.” They would use that instead of the divine name, so they wouldn’t accidentally blaspheme it by just saying it carelessly.
But if you look in your English Bible, you have, at first, in verse 14, it says, “I am who I am,” and then it says, in verse 15, “The Lord, the God of your fathers.” Those two are connected. There’s a play on words going on here, because what God says in verse 14 with, “I am who I am,” is a translation of the Hebrew for, “I am who I am,” that we’re looking at there, but then when we look at verse 15, the exact same letters show up in God’s name.
One of the weird things about Hebrew compared to what we’re used to is that Hebrew traditionally doesn’t have any vowels. They’re written. So if you imagine taking the letters of, say, your name, and you pulled all the vowels out of them, and you just had the consonants stuck there. That’s how every word is in Hebrew, and now if you read a Hebrew Bible, there’s little dots in there to help you figure out where the vowels are supposed to go, but originally they weren’t there.
And so if you look at this verb, “I am who I am,” he’s stating that like you could say, “I am Tim,” right? “I am,” that part there. Those letters are the same as what is under the— what’s translated the “Lord” in small caps in your English Bible. So it’s a play on words there. God first says it in an expanded form, and then he shrinks it down to what’s used in the rest of Scripture. And we look at it, and I think oftentimes we look throughout the Bible and we find “Lord” over and over again. We’re not thinking of a name. We’re thinking of a title properly. So that’s what’s there in English, but in the original language it’s actually God’s name.
Should we say God’s name? Should we not? I think they were wise not to just want to say it all the time carelessly. We shouldn’t toss it around, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying it either because God introduces Himself. He wants people to know His name. And He says His name is Yahweh.
Now, just a side note, if you’re wondering, you may have heard sometimes people say it “Jehovah” instead. That’s a corruption that comes from misunderstanding, because here’s what the Jewish people did is they copied the manuscript. They were meticulous at making sure it was all correct. They also wanted to make sure, after they had those dots to explain the vowels, someone didn’t just go on autopilot because everything was sort of written out. They’re saying what to say and accidentally say God’s name. So when you came to God’s name, they took the vowels for Lord and put it on top of the name. That way, in Hebrew, it didn’t make any sense to say it. And you realize, “Oh, wait, I’m at the name of the Lord.” And then you’d say, “Adonai, Lord,” instead. Someone along the lines that didn’t understand that stuck those vowels in. And in European languages, it didn’t sound quite as far off and said, “Yehovah,” which then in English became “Jehovah.” So if you ever wonder where that’s coming from, it is coming from the divine name. I personally would avoid it just because it’s a messed up version of it.
The key thing here, the key thing is that God gives his name. He says, “Here’s who I am.” He doesn’t give just the title. It’s not the equivalent to back in the old days. We were talking about the old days. Not back in the old days when you’d say, “Well, who are you?” And you’d say, “Well, Mr. So-and-so or Mrs. So-and-so, right?” This is God saying his first name. Here’s my actual name. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being respectful and giving a title, but what we need to recognize here is just how relational God’s conversation with Moses is here. He’s not just saying, “Well, I’m the Lord. I’m really important. I’m really God.” He’s saying, “Here’s how you can call to me. I am Yahweh. You don’t have to wonder who I am.” And he does that by first saying essentially, “And here’s what that means. I am who I am.” Or, “I will be who I will be.” You can translate it either way.
And the interesting thing about that is that he’s saying, “Here’s my name, and here’s what it means. You can know me.” And you can know that I am the same one that was known before. I’m not some new God that showed up and said, “Hey, Moses, I know that your people followed one God long ago. Now let me introduce you to God 2.0.” He’s not saying something like that. He’s saying, “I’m the same God, this very same God whom your ancestors knew.” And so he says in verse 15 that he’s not only the Lord, or if we take out the title for a moment and say how it was originally written, “Say this to the people of Israel, Yahweh, the God of your fathers.” They’re the same. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
He’s tying together the way he was known while he’s the God that called Abraham to move to the land, the promised land. He’s the God that was with Isaac. He was the God that protected Jacob and his family and preserved them in the midst of famine. He had to elevate Joseph to the prime minister of Egypt. He’s the God who, even though the people were in slavery, he never forgot them. The same God, he’s that God. He’s the God. And this is going to be a theme that we see over and over again in Scripture.
And it can feel a little more distant to us. Well, we’re not descendants. Most everyone here probably at least isn’t a descendant of Abraham directly or Isaac directly, Jacob directly. But as those who are adopted into God’s family, we need to hear this. He’s saying, “I’m the God of your great, great, great, great, great grandfather.” I’m still faithful. Not just the God of somebody.
And this is how he also appears later on when he’s called the people into the wilderness after they’ve left Egypt. Exodus 19:9, “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you and may also believe you forever.’” And then we’re told that Moses is going to tell the words to the people, or the words of the people to the Lord. There’s this conversation going on here. But God says, “Again, I’m Yahweh. I’m here. I’m the same God. I’m still with you.”
And what’s he doing there? We’re told he’s going to appear as a pillar. He’s going to be in front of the people. So not only has he connected himself to this story, here is who I’ve been. You know Abraham. You know Isaac. You know Jacob. And if you know them, you know me. He also says, “And just so no one doubts that I’m really here, I’m going to appear visually. They can look into the sky and I’m going to manifest myself in front of them that they always know that I’m with them through this whole journey. You’re in the wilderness now, but you need to know that I’m with you in the wilderness.” Isn’t that what we really want to know when we’re in the wilderness? We want to know that God’s really with us.
The problem that creeps in, the doubt that creeps in is, “Is God really with me? Is he really there with me?” God says, “I’m not going to make it unmistakable for it.”
Last night, I don’t follow soccer, but I’m a St. Louis, since I get excited for anything that’s going well for St. Louis. Last night was the premiere of St. Louis City SC. We won, I understand. I don’t have the slightest clue about soccer, but I’ll go ahead and say we won. Because it’s St. Louis, right? Go St. Louis.
And then, of course, we also had another triumphant return. Anyone in Kaka here? We had the battle hawks return after several years. Kaka, yes. And I don’t have the slightest clue usually what’s going on in football either, but I’m excited because it seemed like in that time right before the pandemic, when they started the first time, and we finally had a football team that wasn’t owned by Stan Kronke, it was really, really exciting. If you’re not from St. Louis, you may not understand, but trust me, this was exciting.
This was good. And then, in 2020, they were winning like crazy. They were doing a great job, and everyone was Kaka-ing, and I don’t think they even intended that to be the rally chant for it, but it just happened. And St. Louis was excited, and more people from St. Louis were going to see the XFL games than anyone else in this new league, any other city. More people were watching on television from St. Louis than any other city because we were excited. Here’s a team, and it’s not that NFL team that betrayed us and left and went to LA. This is a team that cares about us. And then the pandemic hit, and they had to pause the games, and then they canceled the season, and then they went bankrupt. But they were representing us. Kaka. Well, now they’re back, right? They’re back, and they’re doing pretty well again, I understand. Still don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on, but they’re doing pretty well, and so we’re winning. That’s great.
But doesn’t it make you wonder now? Even more than then. They’re a big question. People have tried to start different alternative football leagues for decades. They don’t usually last, and the XFL in 2020 didn’t last, and now it’s back again. Will it last this time, or are we just calling our way to another catastrophe? Doesn’t that mean anything? Sure, Battlehawk sounds really tough, and now it sounds like part of St. Louis, but does it mean anything? God says his name, but doesn’t mean anything.
When we’re feeling like we’re in the wilderness, we can say, “Well, I can read all of this about what happened in the past to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob.” Okay, he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He’s the God of me. Do you care that I’m in the wilderness? You think, “Yeah, God’s been faithful. I know his name here. Does he know my name?”
Here’s the remarkable thing if we look at what God says here. I’m trying to get ahead of myself there. I almost said, “Jesus.” That’s a good slip because Jesus is God, and we’re going to learn later on that all this ties in, but let’s not get there just yet. What does he say in verse 14? God said to Moses, “I am who I am,” or as I mentioned, you could translate that, “I will be whom I will be,” and people say, “Okay, so what does that mean?” It sounds like a puzzle, and it is a bit of a puzzle.
What does it mean to say, “I will be who I will be,” or “I am who I am”? What does that mean? I think it’s a really brilliant observation that one commentator made to say that we should understand that in the context of God connecting himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He connects back to his promises, and then he says, “I will be, and I am going with you.” In other words, what does his name mean? His name means, “See what I do, and know that that is who I am.” What I do, what I am, and who I say I am in the case of God are the same.
Not always true in our human experience, right? Never really true in our human experience. If we’re really trying to live a life that’s pleasing to God, we’re trying to pull who it is that people think we are and who it is that we present ourselves as and who we really are closer together, and we start to get hopefully a lot of overlap. But there’s still those things that inside of us aren’t shared, those things that we go ahead and let people think are one way, but we’re really struggling inside those sorts of things. But God, there isn’t any of that. What you see is what you get. You see a God who goes with his people. You see a God who is faithful over generations, who promises and then does what he promises.
What does God do? Well, he could do all kinds of things. We can read the mythologies of other ancient world gods and all the things they did, and some of those things were kind of nice, and some of those things weren’t very nice at all. So just say even that God is who he says he is isn’t much in itself until we actually reflect. Why do we read over and over again what God has done in Scripture? We read it because as we do, we see a God who is faithful in what he does. God always rescues us.
Look again at verse 15. 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.”
So God’s looking ahead here. He doesn’t say, “Your generation is going to remember me this way, Moses.” He doesn’t say, “They remembered me this way in the past.” He says, “Well, yeah, oh, that’s true, but this is how you’re going to remember me forever more.” Because God isn’t going to claim that he’s going to rescue his people. He’s not going to give these promises. “I’m going to give you this land. I’m going to be with you.” And then he’s going to get bored and go do something else. Turns out he doesn’t really have enough God power to pull it off. It’s not the truth about God. If we actually know who God is, we know he’s a God who actually does rescue, a God who actually does keep his promises to his people.
And so when we say God’s name, when we read, “I am who I am,” what’s he saying? “I am the one who rescues, the one who is faithful, the one who promises and does what he promises, the one who leaves the prophets to prophesy, and what they prophesy comes true. The one who may take you out into a wilderness that you think is just the end of everything but then brings you faithfully to where I’ve called you.” He is faithful.
Luke chapter 20. Jesus reflects on God’s call of himself that he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And here’s what he says. “But the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.”
Isn’t that interesting when you really think about it? We’ve been talking about how God’s name is saying who he is, that he’s a God who fulfills his promises, but also, subtly enough, when he says he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he’s also saying the same thing. “I’m the God who does what I promise,” because what’s he saying when he says hundreds of years later, “I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” Jesus says. Don’t think that means that God remembers those times. He has some portraits on his wall of deceased, formerly faithful followers. That’s not how God works.
Why does he still say that he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Because Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob proceeded in faith and followed him, and God has made them alive in him. They are not dead. Jesus isn’t denying there that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but rather he’s denying what had crept into so many of those who were teaching the people of that time that Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, yes, they were faithful people. We should be like them. We should be honored that we’re descendants of them, but they’re dead. Jesus said, “Don’t think that.”
The very fact that even Moses was able to report this, the fact that then over and over again in the Old Testament, God says, “I’m the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” What’s he doing every time he does that? He’s reiterating his promise that he will redeem his people. He hasn’t forgotten them.
Now, when God says to the people of Israel, as they’ve been called out into this very real, very physical wilderness that they’re going into, he reminds them that he’s with them. He reminds them that he’s the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He also gives them a calling. And who God is and who he calls us to be are always intermeshed. They’re never to be taken completely apart from each other. Sometimes we do.
Let’s take a look at the rest of Exodus 19 just briefly. It says, “On the third new moon, after the people of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. They came out from Rephidim, came into the wilderness of Sinai. They encamped in the wilderness there Israel encamped before the mountain. While Moses went up to God, the Lord called to him out of the mountain, and said, ‘Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the people of Israel, ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. Now, therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples for all the earth is mine, and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.”
So Moses came and called the elders of the people and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him.
Notice what God does here. It’s not the way that we think. It’s not the way that we try to be pious. It’s not the way that we try to be “religious.” This is often why people rebel, I think, and say, “Well, I’m not really religious. I’m spiritual.” Because they’re thinking in terms of religion as a pile of things to do, and if you do that pile of things, or at least enough of that pile of things, you tip the scales a little bit and God maybe decides you’re okay. That’s not how God works. That’s not how he works here.
The first thing we should notice is that God starts to tell the people of Israel what they should do after he’s rescued them. He doesn’t appear to them in slavery and say, “Okay, let’s negotiate out a deal here, everybody. Here’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to be your God, and I’d like to rescue you from this slavery. Here’s what I want from you, and if you do this, I’ll pull you out of the land of Egypt.” What do you want? Do you like this? Here I’ll throw in some manna. I’ll throw in occasionally some quail. I’ll get you back to the Promised Land. Do you want to sign on the dotted line? He doesn’t do that.
What God says is, “Let’s go. We’re going to leave.” Once he gets the people out, he reminds them of who he is, and then he starts to reveal who it is that they are. But he doesn’t do it in the reverse order that we often think of it as being. He doesn’t wait until they’re good people. He doesn’t wait until they say, “We’re going to do this all faithfully, God,” which of course would have been a lie, but he doesn’t wait for them to even lie to him.
What does he do? He rescues them. This is where we need to start as Christians when we share our hope. Here I think, at least as I look at our present cultural moment, is perhaps one of the greatest failures of the church. Because I think an awful lot more people in our culture that aren’t already in church, and too many who are, can tell you what God wants them to do, or at least some distorted version of that, but don’t know who God is to them. Maybe they try. “I’m going to try to live more like I think God wants me to live.” And then they fail. And they say, “Well, I guess I have no part in anything that God says to them because I can’t do it.” That’s not how God works here.
He doesn’t wait until Moses has everything right. He doesn’t wait until the Israelites have everything right. He doesn’t wait until Joshua has everything right. David has everything right. The prophets have everything right. He doesn’t wait until the disciples have everything right. She calls Paul and he tells him, “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to be this apostle for me.” And Paul is actively killing Christians at the time.
How unfortunate is it that our culture often knows a whole lot more about what we think that they need to be doing to live lives that are pleasing to God, and they don’t know the one thing that’s essential to that, that God loves them and will rescue them and will give them grace, and when they mess up, he will forgive them, and that we’re a bunch of people who constantly need God to be forgiving us because we’re messed up and constantly mess up.
How unfortunate is it that people know how we’re going to take moral stands on this or that? And I’m not saying we shouldn’t have moral principles. We should, but we need to understand that Jesus is working in us. They don’t go anywhere, and they’re often, if not always, impossible to actually do. Should the church have moral positions? Yes. Should Christians be called to live in ways that are pleasing to God? Absolutely. Should what we be doing in our culture is trying to get our culture to live in a superficially moral way so that we can say, “Oh, look at the good people out there.” No.
Because they don’t have Jesus. They haven’t experienced rescue, and if they haven’t experienced rescue, there’s no way they’re ever going to do the things that God wants them to do. Because look at us. We struggle as God’s actually working in us. We’re not there yet, and yet we seem to expect those who aren’t there at all to somehow get it and end up placing more and more death upon people instead of the life-giving gospel.
If God doesn’t do that with the people of Israel, if he doesn’t do that with his people time and again in Scripture, then why in the world do we think it’s going to work? We need to remember who God is in our own lives, and we need to share that with other people.
If you’re in a wilderness moment at this moment, oftentimes when we’re in the wilderness, we start to tell those lies to ourselves, “Oh, I just need to do better. If I do better, God will pull me out of this wilderness,” and we start to get into that terrible treadmill of performance that we’re never going to get anywhere.
We need Jesus. And we need to look back and see he is who he is, that he does what he promises he’s going to do. And once we have that foundation, we think about building our lives on a firm foundation. If we’re going to actually do what God wants us to do, we have to start with this foundational principle.
God doesn’t go through everything else he’s going to do in the Exodus until he starts with the foundational principle of, “Here’s who I am to you.” You can trust that. And that’s what we need to share as well. You can trust that this is who God can be to you if you don’t yet know him. He’s faithful.
God isn’t like the ever-changing situations in our lives. I was looking at the weather forecast for this week, and talk about an ever-changing situation. We have possible thunderstorms tonight. We have possible thunderstorms tomorrow. I think there’s one other day we can have thunderstorms. And then I saw on Friday now they’re saying we can have snow. I think there’s 70% chance of snow according to the forecast I saw.
It’s changing all the time. You can’t count on it. And then we try to get some truth to the matter, right? We had a whole day to celebrate getting to the heart of the matter of what our weather is going to do earlier this month. We had Groundhog Day, right? Yeah, we’re going to get and know what’s really going to happen here.
Just watched the movie Groundhog Day a few weeks ago, and so you get to live seeing Phil come out and give the weather over and over again, right? But really it comes down to an all-important question.
How accurate is Phil? Is Phil doing his job for us? I mean, we know—if you’ve lived in this culture for any length of time, you know Phil. Everyone—I mean, can you imagine? Everyone knows this very distinguished rodent who makes sure to tell us the weather.
But apparently people have actually researched if Phil’s accurate. And so from the good folks at NOAA, here’s a chart for you of the last 10 years. Here on the one side, we can see here Phil’s overall predictions over time. He’s been predicting since 1887. So he’s predicted more winter 106 times, early spring 20 times, and they somehow failed to record 10 times.
But here’s the really important thing. Over the last 10 years, Phil has been accurate 40% of the time. As you can see, the last two years, he saw a shadow. So he said it was going to be six more weeks of winter, and he did not get it right. In fact, only in—what was it? 2020, 2016, 2014, and 2013 did he get it right.
So Moses, as he was out at that burning bush, had Phil pop out at him and say, “I’m going to tell you the weather, Moses, and I’m the meteorological groundhog of your forefathers.” Moses should have said, “That’s very nice, and it’s a pleasure to meet you, and I’m not going to even listen to your forecast because I could probably do better by flipping a coin if only I had any because I’m not in a culture at the moment that has any coins.” But if I could flip a coin, I would, because that would be more accurate.
It doesn’t matter. Okay, you know a name. What’s God saying? You know my name, so you have something to relate to, something to hold on to, but my name itself speaks to telling you. Go look at what I’ve done. When you look at what I’ve done, what I did in the past, with those who came before you, if you look what I’ve done in the present, you can know exactly who I am.
He reveals to Moses who he is. He shows that pillar in front of the Israelites, so every day when they’re out there in the wilderness saying, “I don’t know if God’s really here with me. I don’t know if he’s actually going to keep doing what I thought he had promised to do.” They can look up and they say, “But there he is. He’s manifest himself up there so we can have no mistaking what he’s going to do.”
And then once they arrived in the Promised Land, they could look at the fact, “Wait a second. We’re in the Promised Land, and there’s generations here, and there’s no way that us as this little weak people ever should have been able to have this land.” And they could say, “Well, how do we get it?” “Well, we had it because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our forefathers gave it to us.”
And so it is over and over again that this builds, that God ensures that there’s something to look to all the way to Jesus coming. We can look at Jesus coming, and we can look at his church established now, and we can say, “I am who I am has sent us.” And we look at what he does. We look at what he does, and we see he’s not accurate 40% of the time. He doesn’t even double fill, and he’s accurate 80% of the time. God is accurate 100% of the time.
When we look and we declare his name, we’re declaring that he is the one who always says what he’s going to do and always does it. He says he’s going to rescue us. And he has, and in those wildernesses that we’re experiencing, in the wildernesses we’re going to relate to as we go through the journey that the Israelites are on, what do we find? He is always the rescuer.
Can you pray with me?
Lord, thank you for being the one who rescues us. Thank you for being the one who takes us from whatever wildernesses we may be in, whether they’re physical or spiritual, and you go with us. You may not manifest yourself in a pillar of cloud or smoke in front of us of fire at this moment, but what have you done? You’ve given us your word where we see generation after generation after generation, encountering your faithfulness, that we can look to that and say, “The one who is that always will be that.”
Lord, whatever places we struggle with that right now, whatever places we think, “Is God really going to rescue me?” we would turn back to your word and we’d say, “His very name. His very name says that he is what he has done and that he doesn’t change from what he’s done. He continues to do it.” And as we see that, Lord, would you give us the confidence? Would you give us the encouragement to face whatever we face in our own lives as well? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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