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Why Did God Call Himself _I AM WHO I AM__ _ The Mystery Behind His Name · truthunedited

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Speaker 1: Why did God call himself, I am that I am?
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Speaker 1: And what does that name reveal about his power? Moses
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Speaker 1: was being sent to confront Pharaoh, a king who held
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Speaker 1: his people in slavery. He needed to know who was
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Speaker 1: sending him. But when he asked what name he should
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Speaker 1: give the Israelites, God answered with words that still leave
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Speaker 1: readers asking, What does that mean? Why this answer? What
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Speaker 1: was Moses supposed to understand about the God speaking from
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Speaker 1: the fire? And why should Pharaoh fear him? Centuries later,
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Speaker 1: Jesus would declare, Before Abraham was, I am. The people
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Speaker 1: listening reached for stones. What did they hear in that sentence?
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Speaker 1: In this video, we will trace the mystery from the
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Speaker 1: burning bush to the words of Jesus. What God's name means,
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Speaker 1: what it reveals about his power. and why understanding it
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Speaker 1: matters when you call on him. To understand the answer,
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Speaker 1: you have to understand the question. And the question was
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Speaker 1: not what you think it was. In ancient Egypt, a
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Speaker 1: person was made of parts, not one soul but several.
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Speaker 1: The Ka, the life force. The Ba, the personality. The Ib,
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Speaker 1: the heart. The Shut, the shadow. And the Ren, the name.
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Speaker 1: The Ren was not a label. It was a component
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Speaker 1: of the self, as real as a limb. As long
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Speaker 1: as your name was spoken, you existed. When the last
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Speaker 1: person stopped saying it, you were gone, which is why
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Speaker 1: Egyptians carved their names into everything they owned, and why
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Speaker 1: the worst thing you could do to an enemy was
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Speaker 1: chisel his name off his tomb wall. Not vandalism, erasure.
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Speaker 1: You were killing a piece of the man himself. and
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Speaker 1: what was true of people was true of gods. If
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Speaker 1: names were pieces of a being, then knowing a god's
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Speaker 1: true name gave you a grip on that being. Egyptian
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Speaker 1: magic ran on it. The priest who knew the right
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Speaker 1: name could invoke, compel, bind, redirect. Spells were not requests.
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Speaker 1: They were instructions issued to a god by someone holding
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Speaker 1: the handle. In that world, a name was not information.
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Speaker 1: It was technology, which is what makes the story of
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Speaker 1: Isis and Ra the most revealing myth in Egyptian religion.
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Speaker 1: She does not defeat him. She does not outfight him
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Speaker 1: or outrank him. She extracts a word from him under duress,
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Speaker 1: and the moment she has it, the supreme god of
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Speaker 1: Egypt belongs to her. That is the whole plot. A
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Speaker 1: name changes hands, and power changes hands with it. Now
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Speaker 1: put Moses in that world, He was raised in Pharaoh's household,
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Speaker 1: educated in Pharaoh's court. He would have learned the theology
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Speaker 1: of that court the way any child learns the assumptions
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Speaker 1: of the place they grow up in, not as doctrine,
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Speaker 1: but as the obvious shape of reality. Gods had jurisdictions,
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Speaker 1: gods had origins, gods had names, and names could be used.
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Speaker 1: And the people he was being sent back to had
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Speaker 1: spent 400 years in the same country. generations of Hebrews
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Speaker 1: living under Hapi of the Nile, Osiris of the dead,
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Speaker 1: Amun-Ra above all of them. Whatever they had inherited from Abraham,
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Speaker 1: they had inherited it inside Egypt. And think about what
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Speaker 1: those elders were actually facing. They were slaves in a
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Speaker 1: country whose entire state religion was arrayed against them. Pharaoh
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Speaker 1: was not merely a king. He was understood to be divine,
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Speaker 1: the living presence of Horus, the son of Ra. To
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Speaker 1: go up against Egypt was not a political act. It
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Speaker 1: was a contest between gods, and everyone on both sides
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Speaker 1: understood it that way. If you are about to take
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Speaker 1: on the pantheon of the most powerful nation on earth,
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Speaker 1: you do not want reassurance. You want the credentials of
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Speaker 1: whoever is backing you. So when Moses says they will
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Speaker 1: ask me, what is his name? He is not asking
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Speaker 1: for an introduction. He is asking a technical question, and
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Speaker 1: the elders in Goshen would have understood it exactly. Which
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Speaker 1: God are you? What is your territory? What is your specialty?
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Speaker 1: And what do we say to call you down against
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Speaker 1: the gods of Pharaoh? Moses was not asking who God was.
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Speaker 1: He was asking for a handle. He got one, and
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Speaker 1: it had nothing to hold. The scene is a mountain
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Speaker 1: in Midian and a bush on fire. The text spends
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Speaker 1: one sentence on the strangeness of it and then moves on.
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Speaker 1: But stop there for a moment, because the physics matter.
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Speaker 1: Desert scrub burns fast. An acacia bush in that heat
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Speaker 1: is gone in under a minute. Flame, ash, wind. What
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Speaker 1: Moses sees is a fire that keeps burning without consuming anything.
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Speaker 1: That is not a magic trick. It is a statement
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Speaker 1: about what is standing in front of him. The fire
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Speaker 1: is drawing nothing from the bush. It needs no fuel.
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Speaker 1: It is not sustained by what it stands in. Everything
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Speaker 1: the rest of this film says about the name is
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Speaker 1: contained in that image. Creation gives God nothing he needs.
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Speaker 1: He was already burning. Moses turns aside to look and
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Speaker 1: a voice says, take off your sandals. And the first
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Speaker 1: thing that happens in this story before any conversation is
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Speaker 1: is that a man covers his face. Remember that. It
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Speaker 1: is going to happen again. Now, who is standing there?
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Speaker 1: Not a theologian, not a prophet, an 80-year-old fugitive with
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Speaker 1: a killing behind him, herding another man's sheep in a
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Speaker 1: country he ran to because he could not stay in
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Speaker 1: the one he was born in. Forty years earlier, he
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Speaker 1: had tried to intervene for his own people. and it
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Speaker 1: had gone so badly he had been running ever since.
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Speaker 1: And he does not accept the assignment. He argues, four
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Speaker 1: separate times. Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?
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Speaker 1: What if they do not believe me? I am slow
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Speaker 1: of speech and slow of tongue. And finally, when the
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Speaker 1: arguments run out and there is nothing left to say,
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Speaker 1: please send someone else. That is the man asking the question.
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Speaker 1: Not curious, frightened, and looking for a way out. Now
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Speaker 1: watch what God does with the first objection, because almost
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Speaker 1: everyone reads past it. Moses asks, Who am I? A
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Speaker 1: question about himself, about his qualifications, his standing, his adequacy
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Speaker 1: for the job. And God does not answer it. He
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Speaker 1: does not say, You are enough. He does not list
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Speaker 1: Moses' strengths or remind him of his education or promise
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Speaker 1: him courage. He changes the subject entirely to himself, and
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Speaker 1: he says four words in Hebrew. Certainly, I will be
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Speaker 1: with you. Hold that sentence. Do not do anything with
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Speaker 1: it yet. Just know that it was said, and know
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Speaker 1: when it was said, because it comes two verses before
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Speaker 1: the famous one, and it is the key to this
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Speaker 1: entire film. And notice what God had already told him
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Speaker 1: one verse earlier. because it makes the question sharper rather
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Speaker 1: than softer. I am the God of your father, the
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Speaker 1: God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God
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Speaker 1: of Jacob. That is an answer. It is a real one.
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Speaker 1: It says, I am the God your family already knows,
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Speaker 1: the one who made the promises your grandfathers died still
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Speaker 1: waiting on. And Moses does not think it is enough.
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Speaker 1: Four hundred years had passed. the men who had heard
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Speaker 1: those promises firsthand were long dead, and their descendants were
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Speaker 1: making bricks. The God of your fathers was, by then,
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Speaker 1: a phrase about people nobody in Goshen had ever met.
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Speaker 1: So he asks again. He asks for something more specific
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Speaker 1: than a family history. Then Moses asks his second question,
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Speaker 1: the one about the name. And God answers, Eieh Asher Eieh. Now,
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Speaker 1: What does that mean? Here is where this channel is
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Speaker 1: going to be honest with you, because there are three
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Speaker 1: serious answers, and no consensus, and anyone who tells you
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Speaker 1: the question is settled is selling you something. The verb
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Speaker 1: is haya, to be, to become, to happen, to come,
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Speaker 1: to pass. And the form God uses is what Hebrew
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Speaker 1: grammar calls the imperfect, which is not a tense. Biblical
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Speaker 1: Hebrew does not divide time into past, present, and future
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Speaker 1: the way English does. It divides action into complete and incomplete.
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Speaker 1: And this verb is incomplete, unfinished, still running. So the
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Speaker 1: sentence can be read three ways, and scholars have read
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Speaker 1: it all three for 2,000 years. I am who I am.
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Speaker 1: The traditional rendering. The one you know. A statement of
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Speaker 1: pure existence. I will be what I will be. The
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Speaker 1: reading that follows the grammar most closely. Not a description
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Speaker 1: of a state, but a refusal to be pinned to one.
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Speaker 1: I cause to be what comes to be. A minority reading,
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Speaker 1: taking the verb as causative. The one who brings existence about.
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Speaker 1: We are not going to choose for you. What matters
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Speaker 1: is what all three have in common. And it is
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Speaker 1: the thing that should have stopped Moses where he stood.
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Speaker 1: It is not a noun. Every other god in that
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Speaker 1: world had a noun for a name, Ra, Osiris, Chemosh, Baal.
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Speaker 1: A word you could put in a sentence, carve on
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Speaker 1: a wall, write into a spell. Moses asked for a
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Speaker 1: noun and got a verb, a verb whose only subject
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Speaker 1: is the one speaking it. And look at what that
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Speaker 1: takes away. Isis needed a name with a domain, so
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Speaker 1: she would know what she was getting power over. This
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Speaker 1: name has no domain. It does not say of the
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Speaker 1: mountain or of the storm or of the harvest. She
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Speaker 1: needed a name with leverage, a fixed thing to grip.
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Speaker 1: There is nothing here to grip. The sentence moves. It
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Speaker 1: is unfinished by construction. and every god she knew had
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Speaker 1: a beginning, born from the primordial waters, hatched from an egg,
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Speaker 1: spoken into being by an earlier god. This sentence has
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Speaker 1: no origin in it at all. It reports no birth.
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Speaker 1: It reports no maker. Every tool Egypt had for handling
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Speaker 1: a god, that answer took away in three words. But
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Speaker 1: look at what it gave, because this is the part
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Speaker 1: that gets missed. Consider what God could have said instead.
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Speaker 1: I am the God who breaks Egypt. I am the
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Speaker 1: God of armies. I am the God who brings the rain.
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Speaker 1: Moses could have carried any one of those back to Goshen,
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Speaker 1: and the elders would have understood it immediately. A God
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Speaker 1: with a specialty. A God with a track record. A
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Speaker 1: God you could reasonably expect to do something specific. He
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Speaker 1: did not say that. He gave a name that guarantees
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Speaker 1: no outcome at all. No victory. no safety, no timeline.
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Speaker 1: It promises presence, and it promises nothing else. The name
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Speaker 1: is not a claim about what God can do. It
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Speaker 1: is a claim about where He will be. And a
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Speaker 1: promise like that cannot be verified in advance. It can
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Speaker 1: only be tested by walking into the thing you are
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Speaker 1: afraid of. Then, in the very next verse, the grammar shifts.
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Speaker 1: God tells Moses to go to the elders and say
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Speaker 1: that YHWH has sent him. Same root, different person. When
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Speaker 1: God speaks of himself, he says, Ehyeh, I am, I
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Speaker 1: will be. When people speak of him, they say, YHWH,
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Speaker 1: he is, he will be. First person becomes third person.
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Speaker 1: The name Israel would carry for the rest of its
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Speaker 1: history is the sentence from the bush. repeated by everyone
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Speaker 1: standing outside it. This, God says, is my name forever.
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Speaker 1: Remember that word, forever. And for a long time, it
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Speaker 1: was ordinary. That is the part almost nobody knows. This name,
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Speaker 1: the one that would eventually become unspeakable, was, for the
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Speaker 1: better part of a thousand years, a word people used,
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Speaker 1: written on monuments, carved by enemies. scratched into silver and
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Speaker 1: buried with the dead. We can prove it because we
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Speaker 1: have found it. Start with the oldest and note who
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Speaker 1: wrote it. In Sudan, at a place called Soleb, there
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Speaker 1: is a temple built by the Pharaoh Amenhotep III around
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Speaker 1: 1400 BC. On its columns is a list of foreign
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Speaker 1: peoples Egypt claimed to have defeated, and among them is
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Speaker 1: a phrase Egyptologists read as the Shasu of YHW, the
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Speaker 1: nomads of YHW. Now, honesty. Some scholars read that as
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Speaker 1: a place name rather than a divine one, and that
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Speaker 1: debate is live. But the leading reading takes it as
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Speaker 1: the name. And if it is, then the oldest surviving
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Speaker 1: mention of the God of Israel anywhere on earth was
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Speaker 1: carved by an Egyptian king listing enemies. 600 years later,
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Speaker 1: a Moabite king carved his own. The Mesha Stele, a
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Speaker 1: black basalt slab from what is now Jordan, dated around
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Speaker 1: 840 BC. King Mesha, boasting about his war against Israel,
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Speaker 1: describes taking a town and dragging its sacred objects before
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Speaker 1: his own god. and the phrase he uses is the
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Speaker 1: vessels of YHWH, four Hebrew letters cut into stone by
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Speaker 1: a man who hated the God they named. He wrote
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Speaker 1: it because everyone knew it. It was the name of
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Speaker 1: the enemy's God, and you do not need to revere
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Speaker 1: something to spell it. And then the third, and this
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Speaker 1: one is not political at all. Southwest of the old
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Speaker 1: city of Jerusalem, on a ridge above the Hinnom Valley,
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Speaker 1: There are burial caves. In 1979, an archaeologist working there
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Speaker 1: found two tiny rolled cylinders of silver, no bigger than
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Speaker 1: a fingertip, in a chamber that grave robbers had missed.
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Speaker 1: It took three years to unroll them without destroying them.
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Speaker 1: Scratched into the silver... in ancient Hebrew letters, was the
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Speaker 1: priestly blessing from the book of Numbers. May YHWH bless
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Speaker 1: you and keep you. May YHWH make his face shine
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Speaker 1: upon you. They date to around 600 BC, before the
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Speaker 1: Babylonians burned Solomon's temple. They are the oldest surviving fragments
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Speaker 1: of biblical text in the world, and they were not
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Speaker 1: temple property or royal inscriptions. They were amulets. Ordinary people
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Speaker 1: wore that blessing around their necks, and when they died,
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Speaker 1: their families buried them wearing it. That is what the
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Speaker 1: name was for 800 years, spoken at altars, carved by enemies,
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Speaker 1: worn to the grave by people whose names we will
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Speaker 1: never know. Put those three together and notice what they establish.
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Speaker 1: An Egyptian king carving the name of a people's god
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Speaker 1: onto a list of his enemies, a Moabite king carving
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Speaker 1: it while bragging about looting a shrine, and a family
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Speaker 1: in Jerusalem scratching it onto silver small enough to wear.
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Speaker 1: Two of the three were written by men with no
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Speaker 1: reverence for it at all. That is what an ordinary
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Speaker 1: word looks like in the archaeological record. It turns up
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Speaker 1: in the hands of people who had no reason to
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Speaker 1: be careful with it. And then it stopped. Nobody outlawed it.
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Speaker 1: Nobody was ashamed of it. What happened is stranger and
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Speaker 1: much more human than that. After the exile, a caution
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Speaker 1: grew up around the name that hardened into practice. The
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Speaker 1: commandment said not to take it in vain. The law
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Speaker 1: in Leviticus made blasphemy of the name a capital offense.
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Speaker 1: And out of that came a decision that seemed obviously
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Speaker 1: right at the time. build a fence around it. Do
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Speaker 1: not say it casually. Do not risk saying it wrong.
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Speaker 1: Do not say it at all. So when a reader
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Speaker 1: came to those four letters in the text, he said
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Speaker 1: something else, Adonai, my Lord, or simply Hashem, the name.
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Speaker 1: The written word and the spoken word came apart and
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Speaker 1: stayed apart for centuries. There was one exception in the
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Speaker 1: entire year. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest
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Speaker 1: entered the Holy of Holies, a room nobody else went into,
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Speaker 1: on the one day it was permitted. And there, according
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Speaker 1: to the Mishnah, he pronounced the name. The tradition says
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Speaker 1: ten times over the course of the service, and outside,
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Speaker 1: in the courts, when the crowd heard it, they went
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Speaker 1: down on their faces in the dust. That is the
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Speaker 1: second time in this story, a man covering his face
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Speaker 1: at a bush. a nation flat on the ground in
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Speaker 1: a temple courtyard. It is worth being clear about what
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Speaker 1: that carefulness was, because it is easy to sneer at
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Speaker 1: from a distance. This was not superstition. These were people
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Speaker 1: who had watched their city burn once already, who had
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Speaker 1: been carried into exile and brought back, and who had
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Speaker 1: concluded that the way to keep faith with God was
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Speaker 1: to take Him more seriously than their ancestors had. The
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Speaker 1: fence around the name was built by people trying to
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Speaker 1: do the right thing, and by their own standards, they
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Speaker 1: succeeded completely. Nobody profaned it. Nobody wore it out. Nobody
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Speaker 1: said it casually. You can see the same carefulness in
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Speaker 1: the hands of the scribes. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls,
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Speaker 1: there are manuscripts written in the ordinary square Hebrew script
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Speaker 1: of the period, running along in normal letters, and then
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Speaker 1: When the text reaches the divine name, the scribe stops
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Speaker 1: and writes those four letters in an archaic alphabet nobody
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Speaker 1: had used for centuries. Or he leaves a gap. Or
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Speaker 1: he puts four dots where the word should be. It
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Speaker 1: is a warning aimed at the eye. The reader's mouth
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Speaker 1: is about to move, and the letters have changed shape
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Speaker 1: to stop him. For 500 years, that is how it stood.
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Speaker 1: a word in every scroll that almost nobody was permitted
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Speaker 1: to say out loud, spoken once a year in a
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Speaker 1: closed room by one man in a nation of millions.
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Speaker 1: And then, in the year 70, the Romans burned the temple.
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Speaker 1: There was no more Holy of Holies, no more Day
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Speaker 1: of Atonement in that building. no more high priest walking
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Speaker 1: into the dark to say the name, and nobody had
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Speaker 1: written the vowels down. Hebrew of that period recorded consonants.
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Speaker 1: The pronunciation of a word lived in the mouths of
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Speaker 1: the people who said it, and this word had been
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Speaker 1: kept in exactly one mouth once a year. When that stopped,
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Speaker 1: the sound went with it. Humanity forgot how to pronounce
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Speaker 1: the name of God, not lost in a fire. not
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Speaker 1: destroyed by an enemy, lost by carefulness. Nobody banned it.
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Speaker 1: They loved it too much to risk saying it wrong.
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Speaker 1: And the protecting is what did it. A word protected
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Speaker 1: to death. Now go back to what God actually said
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Speaker 1: at the bush. This is my name forever. The name
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Speaker 1: you shall call me from generation to generation. Forever. And
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Speaker 1: within 700 years, there was not a living person on
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Speaker 1: earth who knew how to say it. Sit with that.
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Speaker 1: This film is not going to resolve it yet. There
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Speaker 1: is one more thing to clear up before we move,
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Speaker 1: and it is probably the most common misunderstanding about this
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Speaker 1: name in the English-speaking world. Centuries later, Jewish scribes called
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Speaker 1: the Masoretes set about preserving the pronunciation of Hebrew by
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Speaker 1: inventing vowel marks. When they came to the four letters
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Speaker 1: of the divine name, they faced a problem. They could
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Speaker 1: not write the vowels because they did not know them
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Speaker 1: and would not have written them if they had. So
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Speaker 1: they marked those four consonants with the vowels of Adonai instead.
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Speaker 1: A signal to the reader, say the other word. It
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Speaker 1: was a note in the margin, essentially, a do not
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Speaker 1: pronounce sign. Some centuries after that, Christian scholars learning Hebrew
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Speaker 1: read that construction as if it were a word. They
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Speaker 1: combined the consonants of one name with the vowel marks
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Speaker 1: of another and produced a hybrid that had never been
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Speaker 1: spoken by anyone. Jehovah. It is not an ancient name.
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Speaker 1: It is a scribal instruction misread as a pronunciation. And
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Speaker 1: the letter J did not exist in any alphabet until
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Speaker 1: roughly the 16th century. So we are left with this.
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Speaker 1: The name God called forever is the name nobody can say,
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Speaker 1: except that someone had said it, forty years before the
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Speaker 1: temple burned, in its own courtyard. The eighth chapter of
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Speaker 1: John's Gospel is an argument, and it has been running
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Speaker 1: for most of the chapter before it turns. Jesus is
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Speaker 1: in the temple treasury, in public. surrounded by people who
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Speaker 1: know their scriptures far better than most of us know ours.
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Speaker 1: The argument is about Abraham, about who has the right
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Speaker 1: to claim him. And Jesus says something that stops it dead.
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Speaker 1: Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw
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Speaker 1: it and was glad. The reply is exactly what you
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Speaker 1: would expect from men who think they are talking to
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Speaker 1: a carpenter in his 30s. You are not yet 50
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Speaker 1: years old, and you have seen Abraham? And then the sentence, Truly, truly,
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Speaker 1: I say to you, before Abraham was, I am. And
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Speaker 1: understand who is standing in that courtyard, not a crowd
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Speaker 1: of the uninformed. These were men who had grown up
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Speaker 1: hearing the scriptures read aloud in synagogue every week, who
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Speaker 1: knew the law on blasphemy in detail, who lived inside
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Speaker 1: a religious culture where the divine name was so protected
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Speaker 1: that that a reader's own mouth was trained to substitute
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Speaker 1: another word before he reached it. If anyone on earth
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Speaker 1: was equipped to recognize a claim on that name, it
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Speaker 1: was the men in that room. Now, the Greek matters here,
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Speaker 1: and so does the honesty. The phrase Jesus uses is
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Speaker 1: ego amy, and you should know something that most videos
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Speaker 1: on this subject leave out. On its own, that phrase
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Speaker 1: is completely ordinary. It is basic Greek for I am.
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Speaker 1: In the very next chapter of this same gospel, a
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Speaker 1: blind man who has been healed is asked whether he
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Speaker 1: is really the same person. And he answers, Ego, Amy,
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Speaker 1: I'm the one. Nobody picks up a stone. We are
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Speaker 1: telling you that because leaving it out would make the
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Speaker 1: argument weaker, not stronger. Once you set the phrase aside,
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Speaker 1: you can see what is actually happening in the sentence.
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Speaker 1: It is the collision of two verbs. For Abraham, Jesus
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Speaker 1: uses genestai, to come into being, to be born, to
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Speaker 1: be brought about. Abraham had a starting point. He began.
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Speaker 1: And for himself, he does not say, I was. That
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Speaker 1: is the natural thing to say, and the grammar is
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Speaker 1: sitting right there. He says, I am, present, unfinished. the
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Speaker 1: same shape as the verb at the bush. Before Abraham
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Speaker 1: came into being, I am. And then the reaction, which
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Speaker 1: is the real evidence. They picked up stones to throw
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Speaker 1: at him. Under the law in Leviticus, stoning was the
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Speaker 1: penalty for blaspheming the name, not for claiming to be
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Speaker 1: a prophet, not for being wrong, for that one specific offense.
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Speaker 1: Those men were standing in the temple. They knew the
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Speaker 1: law in detail. and they did not go and consult
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Speaker 1: about what he might have meant. They reached for the
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Speaker 1: nearest heavy thing. They did not misunderstand him. They understood
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Speaker 1: him exactly. There is one more scene, and it is quieter.
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Speaker 1: A garden at night, some years later. Torches coming through
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Speaker 1: the olive trees. A detachment of soldiers and temple officers
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Speaker 1: with Judas in front of them. Jesus does not wait.
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Speaker 1: He steps forward and asks who they are looking for.
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Speaker 1: Jesus of Nazareth. And he answers, Ego Amy. And the
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Speaker 1: text says they drew back and fell to the ground.
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Speaker 1: That is what the account says, and this film is
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Speaker 1: not going to embroider it. What it records is armed
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Speaker 1: men sent to make an arrest, going backwards and going down.
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Speaker 1: That is the third time. A man covering his face.
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Speaker 1: a nation prostrate in a courtyard, soldiers on the ground
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Speaker 1: in the dark. He could have said it again. He
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Speaker 1: did not. He asked them a second time who they wanted,
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Speaker 1: told them to let the others go, and let them
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Speaker 1: take him. And through the rest of that gospel, he
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Speaker 1: takes the words from the bush and puts them in
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Speaker 1: front of the things a person needs to stay alive. Bread, light,
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Speaker 1: a door, a shepherd, a road, a vine, and resurrection itself.
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Speaker 1: He was claiming the name nobody would say, and he
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Speaker 1: answered to a different one. His mother did not call
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Speaker 1: him by any of that. The name she used, the
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Speaker 1: name in the village, the name on the paperwork of
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Speaker 1: a Galilean carpenter's household, was Yeshua, and it is built
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Speaker 1: out of two pieces. The first is Yah, the short
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Speaker 1: form of the name nobody said. The second comes from
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Speaker 1: the verb Yah, Yasha, to save, to rescue, to deliver.
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Speaker 1: Y-H-W-H saves. It was not a rare name. There were
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Speaker 1: other men in that country called Yeshua. It appears in
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Speaker 1: the records of the period repeatedly. An unremarkable Jewish name
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Speaker 1: in an unremarkable Jewish town. That is the point of it.
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Speaker 1: It was ordinary. A name a mother calls across a courtyard.
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Speaker 1: A name a child learns to answer to before he
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Speaker 1: can read. a name that people who could not read
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Speaker 1: at all could say without fear of getting it wrong.
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Speaker 1: Consider the distance that covers. On one end, four consonants
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Speaker 1: so protected that an entire nation trained itself out of
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Speaker 1: pronouncing them, spoken once a year by one man behind
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Speaker 1: a curtain. On the other end, a name shouted across
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Speaker 1: a yard in Nazareth by a woman calling her son
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Speaker 1: in for a meal. Same name. One of them has
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Speaker 1: the other inside it. The unpronounceable name carried inside a
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Speaker 1: name anybody could pronounce. And 30 years or so after
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Speaker 1: the crucifixion, Paul writes a sentence to a church in
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Speaker 1: Philippi that puts the whole thing together. God, he says,
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Speaker 1: has given him the name above every name, so that
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Speaker 1: at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow. Paul
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Speaker 1: is quoting Isaiah when he writes that. And in Isaiah,
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Speaker 1: the one before whom every knee bows is YHWH. That
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Speaker 1: is the fourth time. And here is the answer to
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Speaker 1: the thing this film left open twenty minutes ago. God
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Speaker 1: said the name was forever. Then the sound of it
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Speaker 1: was lost, and it has never been recovered. But the
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Speaker 1: name did not survive as a sound. It survived inside
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Speaker 1: a name, one a mother used, one a village used,
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Speaker 1: one that people who could not read could still say.
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Speaker 1: Forever did not mean the vowels. It meant the promise
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Speaker 1: underneath them. For 500 years, the holiest word in the
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Speaker 1: world could only be whispered by one man in a
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Speaker 1: closed room, once a year, with a nation face down outside.
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Speaker 1: Then it was lost entirely. And the one who claimed
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Speaker 1: it gave people a name for him that a child
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Speaker 1: could say out loud without fear. Four times in this story,
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Speaker 1: the name is spoken out loud. A man at a
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Speaker 1: bush covers his face. a nation in a temple courtyard
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Speaker 1: goes down in the dust. A detachment of soldiers in
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Speaker 1: a dark garden draws back and falls. And at the
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Speaker 1: end of it, every knee bows. Nobody in this film
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Speaker 1: ever stays standing. Now go back to the bush one
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Speaker 1: last time, because there is a verse before the famous verse,
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Speaker 1: and almost nobody reads it. Before God said, I am,
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Speaker 1: he said something else. Moses had asked, Who am I?
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Speaker 1: that I should go to Pharaoh. And the answer was
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Speaker 1: four words in Hebrew. Ki ehye imak, I will be
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Speaker 1: with you. Ehye, the same word. Two verses before God
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Speaker 1: used it as a name, he used it as a promise.
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Speaker 1: The name is not a description of what God is.
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Speaker 1: It is a sentence he finishes. And look at what
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Speaker 1: that means for the man standing there. Moses asked, who
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Speaker 1: am I? He never got an answer to that question.
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Speaker 1: not at the bush, not in Egypt, not across the
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Speaker 1: next 40 years of his life. What he got was
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Speaker 1: a different sentence, and it held. God did not tell
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Speaker 1: him he was enough. He told him where he would be.
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Speaker 1: There is one more thing worth taking out of this,
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Speaker 1: and it is not about Hebrew. The most quoted sentence
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Speaker 1: in the Old Testament has been read out of context
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Speaker 1: for 2,000 years, and the reason is simple. people start
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Speaker 1: at the famous verse. Verse 14 is on posters and
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Speaker 1: church walls and album covers. Verse 12 is on nothing
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Speaker 1: at all. And verse 12 is where the word is
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Speaker 1: first used. So read the verse before the verse. Then
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Speaker 1: go back and read the verse before every famous verse
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Speaker 1: you have ever been handed, and see what was standing
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Speaker 1: next to it the whole time. A great many of
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Speaker 1: them turn out to have been promises before anyone made
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Speaker 1: them doctrines. Moses asked for a name he could use
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Speaker 1: against Pharaoh. He got a name he could stand inside.
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Speaker 1: He refused to give Moses a weapon. He gave him
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Speaker 1: company instead. And then he came himself, and let them
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Speaker 1: call him something a child could say. If this changed
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Speaker 1: how you read Exodus 3, tell me in the comments
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Speaker 1: which of the three translations you land on I want
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Speaker 1: to know. Like this video and subscribe, so you never
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Speaker 1: miss a deep dive like this. And if you want
32:54
Speaker 1: to understand who the one who said I am really was,
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Speaker 1: not just the name, but his identity, before the foundation
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Speaker 1: of the world, we have a video that traces the
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Speaker 1: evidence from Genesis to Revelation. The link is right here.
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Speaker 1: Share this with someone who needs to hear it. God
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Speaker 1: bless you, and we will see you in the next one.