Readers Guide: “The Word for Today” Wednesday, October 3, 2012 Read – Exodus 3 & 4 Chapter 2 ended by telling us of the trouble that Moses experienced when he “remembered” his people the Israelites and needed to flee into the wilderness. Another 40 years had gone by since God first “remembered” until Moses had to flee and now another 40 years have passed until God calls Moses. 40 years is a long time – 80 years is a lifetime for many of us. I don’t know about you but I’m more impatient then God appears to be in this story – and in most of the rest of the Bible story for that matter. How are we to understand these delays? Chapters 3 & 4 tell about the call of Moses as the deliverer God wants to use. Moses will emerge as one of the few dominant characters in the Bible – maybe the most dominant next to Jesus in the New Testament. But his call reveals once again the very humanness of Bible characters. Moses has a whole handful of excuses. God persists and God wins out. How many excuses do we have? Are we in Moses’ company – both in the resisting and finally in the responding? A very important part of the story of the call of Moses is the revealing of God’s name. You may have noticed in the story of Genesis that sometimes God is simply referred to as “God” and at other times God is referred to as “the LORD”, or “the LORD God”. When we see LORD (all in capital letters) in the text what we really need to see is that the word LORD is the name of God revealed in the call of Moses. The Hebrew letters for that name were YHWH which is most likely pronounced Yahweh. In this story of the call of Moses God chooses to reveal to Moses that his name is Yahweh and the implication is that up until that time God’s people had not known that Yahweh was God’s name. What are we to do with all the earlier references in the book of Genesis? The best explanation is to recognize that the stories in Genesis come from a variety of sources – at least two. Remember we had two stories of the creation and two versions of the flood story. The call of Moses belongs to that source which used “God” alone in the earlier story and not to the source that used LORD. All of this is probably not that important but for those who truly want to hear what the Bible says – these questions are important. Knowing these things helps us to understand the Bible better and also to understand that the Bible is both a human and divine book – not just divine as we tend to think. Human beings have a part in the creation of the “Word of God” and that is an amazing and wonderful thing to remember. There is one more thing that is important to know about this name, Yahweh. I have said that in the call of Moses God chooses to reveal his name. But as it turns out this revealing is as much a hiding of the name of God. The word YHWH in Hebrew is a verb – the verb “TO BE” or “IS.” God is a verb. So it turns out not to be a name in the usual way in which we think of a name. Names are nouns that define things. God cannot finally be defined. So God tells Moses to tell the people “I Am” – “Is” – sends you. All of this has implications of course for Christians who will come to know that Jesus is “I am” in the gospel story – and it is this claim that gets Jesus crucified.