Meditation on Exodus 3 and 1 Corinthians 13

Kevin J. Youngblood
 
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

The call of Moses recorded in Exodus 3 revolves around two questions Moses asks. The first is the question he asks of YHWH: Who are you? The second question he also asks of YHWH, but it is less of a genuine question, like the first, than it is a polite refusal of YHWH’s invitation that he be God’s agent of Israel’s deliverance.

On another level, however, the two questions confront the reader with a profound reality. Who is God and who am I. These two questions are inextricably intertwined just as much for us as they were for Moses. We cannot really know who we are until we know who God is. At the center of the human quest for identity is a vicious circle: knowing ourselves is impossible without knowing God, and knowing God seems inevitably to require us to know ourselves. Calvin captured this circularity perfectly in the opening line of Book One of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.

The First Book treats of the knowledge of God the Creator. But as it is in the creation of man that the divine perfections are best displayed, so man also is made the subject of discourse. Thus the whole book divides itself into two principal heads—the former relating to the knowledge of God, and the latter to the knowledge of man.
 
Never has this insight been more relevant than now. At no point in my lifetime has there been so much emphasis on or confusion about identity. Currently, this manifests itself most often in the raging debates regarding gender and sexual identity. The further our culture strays from God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Scriptures, the more confused we become not only about God but about ourselves. What we are currently seeing is a classic case of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind (Hos 8:7). We sow the wind, which is to say we plant utterly vacuous ideas in the mind. We reap the whirlwind, which is to say that these vacuous ideas bear the fruit of chaos and destruction. God is our Archimedean point. Without we are lost.
 

Not just any notion of God will do. Moses was confronted by the great “I am.” Before we go off in all kinds of philosophical directions confusing this statement with something akin to the Cartesian “cogito” (i.e. “I think therefore I am”), let us consider carefully the context of this “I am.” Moses’ great concern is not philosophical speculation regarding the viability of a divine being. Rather, Moses’ concern is how he could possibly pull off what God is asking of him. God’s answer is his name “I am” which God then immediately defines and qualifies as “I am with you” (Ex 3:12). YHWH, God is defined by his relationality, his love, his out-reaching and self-giving advance expressed eternally in the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Again, I say, not just any God will do. Only the Triune God of love self-disclosed in the divine revelation of the Son and the Scriptures can restore us to sanity and recover our true identity.

Fortunately, as the apostle Paul reminds us, love bears all things. Thus, I trust that God is currently bearing our current identity crisis with his characteristic patience. Love is patient and love does bear all things and I especially need to be reminded of that as I prepare to interact with others in this current cultural climate. At both the societal level and the far more intimate circle of my immediate family, God is calling me to bear all things – all slights, all indignities, all insults, all rejections, and all alienations – with incredible long-suffering and indefatigable patient love. This is more than I am capable of. Who am I to bear all things? To which God says, “I am . . . with you.” Who is God? God is the one who is with me generating in my heart the patient love that bears all things of which I, in myself, am incapable. Who am I? I am one with whom God dwells by his Holy Spirit to produce in me the divine fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Father,

Help me to bear all things in your patient love, especially as I question who I am in Christ, in this world, and even in my own family. Help me to bear with infinite grace the insults, the indignities, and the rejections that come with pursuing truth. Thank you God for naming yourself “I am . . . with you” and for being true to that name. Thank you Jesus, our Immanuel, for showing definitively in flesh and blood that God truly is, always has been, and always will be with us in you. Holy Spirit, come grow in me an orchard of patient love, gentle self-giving, and self-control. Truly, I have never needed these things more than I do now.

AMEN


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