Our Bible verse for today: “God replied to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” Exodus 3:14 (CSB)
Our thought for today: “God has always existed”
Sometimes when we talk about creation we speak of what is called “The Big Bang”. It’s a reference to the moment when God spoke creation into existence. God spoke and “Bang!” it happened. But what existed before the big bang? The answer is that God existed. Before there was a creation, there was God. But then we have to ask, “But where did God come from?” And the answer is that God didn’t come from anywhere, He has always existed.
This is what theologians call “The self-existence” of God. He is eternal. He simply exists. He has always existed and He will always exist. (Did I mention that God is mostly incomprehensible to the human mind? Yes, I guess we covered that in some previous devotionals. Good thing too, because here we are again considering a fact about God that we don’t have the brain power to really understand.)
“I AM” is the name for God that points to His self-existence. The editors of the Holman Christian Standard Study Bible explain it this way, “God’s statement is worded with a finality that sometimes appears at the end of a conversation, typically to put an end to debate without volunteering information.” In other words, God was telling Moses, “I AM. Period. I exist, I have always existed, I will always exist, and you just have to take it on faith.”
The human mind, being a created thing, is naturally uncomfortable with the notion that there could be something or someone that was uncreated. This is outside the boundaries of our understanding and experience. Therefore humans typically deal with this discomfort about God by trying to bring Him down to our level of understanding. We try to make Him more manageable by describing Him in terms we can understand, or by creating images intended to represent Him (an idol). But doing so not only gives us an inaccurate understanding of God, and not only does it make Him in our minds something less than He really is, but it also robs us of some of the mystery surrounding God. And as was pointed out in a previous message in this series, the mystery of God is a good thing not a bad thing. It’s the mystery that keeps us yearning and seeking and searching after Him. It’s the adventure of being drawn deeper into the mystery that’s so exciting to us.
God is self-existent. He is eternal. Spend some time this morning sitting quietly before Him. Think about His eternal nature and allow Him to draw you deeper into the mystery.
Oak Hill Baptist Church