I opened my Bible to Read Exodus. My eye gravitated towards the statement that Mose first said to God, “Who AM I..? To which God responds with “I AM”. I really hadn’t thought of that before. Who Am I meets I AM.
I looked up the meaning of AM and it means to BE. Now I am not a scholar, but even I can grasp there are many layers of revelation available for those who do study root meanings of words. What does cause me to pause and ponder is the significance of AM. We all casually say, I am this or that, but we don’t really think about what it means to BE, to exists. Be has to do with past and present. It also is an intransitive verb to be equal in meaning, such as God is love. The is, the Be tells us that they are the same. God can be defined as love, and love can be defined as God.
What was God telling Moses in this interchange? Moses questioned his value, his purpose, his ability to do what God was asking. Moses expressed his lack of confidence in who God had made him to be. His destiny. Yet God responds with authority and with the reassurance that the I AM who is all powerful, all existing from beginning to end is in Moses’ midst. God is introducing himself, the great I am. I believe this exchange is more complex than just introducing God to Moses. I believe he had been taught of the I AM even as a child. He knew he was a Jewish child rescued from the river.
I believe in this exchange, that God is not just allowing a personal encounter with himself. God is revealing to Moses his own identity. When Moses asks the question of Who am I? to God, God responds with I am.
We know from Genesis that God (the great I am) created man in I AM’s (God’s) image. We know I AM = God. Which we also know, means that God created in man, the ability to create, to rule, to have authority. God then breathed his own breath into the man he created. Moses has been created in God’s image with the purpose of authority and to rule. When God speaks with Moses he is reminding Moses of whose image he is made in. In fact, God even tells Moses that when he speaks to pharaoh that he, Moses, will be as God to pharaoh.
I believe that God wants us to be reminded as well. When we question who God made us to be, our purpose for being on this earth, when we question our value; God wants to remind us we are created in His imagine and we walk in his authority as believers. We have too easily lost sight of our value to God and to others. When we encounter things of this world that seem overwhelming; we need to respond to the internal question of “Who am I?” with I AM. I am because of the one who created me, who saved me, who realigned me to be in the place of authority seated next to him in the heavenliness.
God once spoke to me with a vision and in that vision he was showing me the difference between himself and the spirit of fear. Fear was like an ant to him. Inconsequential. When I saw this revelation, I declared ” I will never be afraid again.” Then he spoke to me that” I was like him, I was like God.” After proclaiming I wouldn’t be afraid again, this statement terrified me. In those days the Church wasn’t teaching about its authority to the body. We didn’t have a proper understanding of authority. God wanted me to know because of Jesus’s sacrifice we have all been restored to our authority in Him as he intended all along. Spiritually we are like him and able to access his authority because we represent him on this earth.
Our identity is important. The next time you question who you are, remember, you are the loved, cherished representation of God on this earth. Your access to the throne room makes you a powerful influence on this earth. Don’t sell yourself short or underestimate what God can and wants to do through you. Advance the Kingdom of God with assurance that the Great I AM is with you, for you and leading you.