The Perfect Peace of Present Tense

Lately I’ve been pondering a specific element of God’s nature—His immutability, i.e. the fact that who He is does not change. And as I was thinking about putting my ponderings into a blogpost, this past Sunday we sang a song in church that touches on the same idea. (Funny how God does that a lot.)

The song is called “Great I Am,” and, as I have had to explain to those hearing it who are unfamiliar with the Bible, when we sing it we are not exclaiming how great each of us is. Instead, we are singing one of the names of God—I AM—and not just any name, but the name He used to identify Himself to Moses and the people of Israel.

It’s best to look right at the verses themselves in Exodus 3:13-14 (ESV). We find Moses at the burning bush, where God has just told him to go back to Egypt (from where he has fled because he murdered an Egyptian) and to confront Pharaoh and to lead the people out of slavery:

Then Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is His name?” what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

This name, perhaps more than any other, best communicates God’s immutable nature. Incidentally, it is also a great example of why studying grammar is incredibly helpful in understanding Scripture, but that’s a blogpost for another day. We will touch on grammar a little bit here, though, because this name of God is in the form of a subject (I) and a verb (am), and the type of verb is important.

‘Am’ is the first-person present tense of what’s called a “be verb” (am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been). This just means that it is a verb someone uses to describe his current state of being. Often, we follow ‘am’ with some sort of description (a predicate adjective), such as “I am happy” or “I am tall.” But here, God just turns the subject and verb combo into a name. “I AM WHO I AM,” period. And again, “I AM has sent me.” In other words, God just is.

Unlike us humans who can say, “I was short, but now I am tall” or “I was blind, but now I see,” God does not need the past tense to describe His essence. There is nothing God used to be that He is not now. This point is reiterated in the same conversation with Moses when God says, “This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations (Ex. 3:15b, ESV).” In other words, He is still I AM. Forever extends forward and backward for eternity. God is still the same being He has always been and always will be. He is always I AM.

In the New Testament, we see that the same is said of Jesus, giving us one of the many indications that Jesus is God. The writer of Hebrews writes plainly, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8, ESV). And when Jesus was arrested leading up to His crucifixion, His declaring “I am he” was powerful enough to make an entire group of people fall to the ground (John 18:4-6). Jesus, being God, is also I AM and always will be.

So why does all of this matter to us? As believers in Jesus, it’s important at the most basic level because understanding the unchanging nature of God helps us know Him better. And knowing Him better helps us love Him better and enriches our relationship with Him. But it’s also important because His immutability gives us complete confidence in Him, His Word, His work, and His promises. 

We don’t have to worry that what we read of Him in Scripture may not be true anymore. We don’t have to be concerned that God might no longer be able to finish the work that He has begun in us of making us more like Christ. We don’t have to be afraid that God might have ceased to be loving or just or gracious or kind or sovereign. He is still all of those things because He is I AM, the God who never changes. In short, we have a present-tense God, and there is perfect peace to be found in that truth.

PC: Keri-Lynn Paulson. Used with permission.

An Exercise in “Perhaps”

God has revealed Himself to us in Scripture, but He has not revealed every detail of His sovereign plan. This is why we must be careful in pronouncing a specific purpose behind His actions. As we’ve discussed in a previous post, sometimes He gives us the “why” in Scripture, but many times in our lives we are left to wonder. And as implied in another post, we are best advised to couch our ideas about God’s intentions in specific events with “perhaps.”

What follows is an exercise in speculation. What I am about to propose, I have absolutely no evidence for. In other words, I could be completely wrong. But that’s why I’m starting with “perhaps.”

Before we begin, though, let’s build up to our moment of speculation with some things we do know.

Throughout Scripture, God uses created things to explain higher truths. He uses the physical to illuminate the spiritual. Whether it be through similes, metaphors, analogies, parables, or anthropomorphisms, God helps our finite brains grasp truths about His infinite self through things that we are familiar with. Bread, water, light, sheep, shepherds, trees, birds, crops, weeds, wages, invitations, the justice system, money--these are just the examples off the top of my head that God uses in the Bible to help us understand realities about ourselves, Himself, and our relationship to Him.

And this practice is often lauded and looked to as an example of how we ourselves can teach—with illustrations that people will understand. Look at what Jesus did, people will say. He stepped into our world, and used the things that were there to “speak our language.”

This idea isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it implies a sort of reactionary element of Jesus’ ministry and even of God’s working in the Old Testament, i.e. Jesus came to earth and looked around for something that would be a good illustration of what He was wanting to communicate, or God found something that the prophets would understand and decided to use it in His revelation to them.

But God is not reactionary. He is all-knowing and is outside of time.

Now that we’ve got all of that laid out, let’s get to our point of speculation…

Perhaps part of God’s intention in creating these things in the first place was to provide a means of revealing to us truths about His character and His realm.

What if God created eagles to show us how he gently cares for His children? (see Deut. 32:11)

What if God created sheep not only to provide wool for clothing and blankets (and in some cases meat) but also so that we would have an understanding of what total dependency (and stupidity) look like and would thus recognize how much we are dependent and stupid and how much we need a good, kind Shepherd? (see Psalm 23; John 10)

What if God created fish not only to provide food but also to give us a frame of reference for what it means to draw others toward the kingdom of God? (see Matt. 4:19)

What if God created light so that we would know there was something better than darkness? (see John 12:46)

And--this one might be harder to swallow--what if God allowed slavery to exist partly so that we would see the horror of bondage and recognize our terrible plight and the beauty of our Redeemer? (see Titus 3:3-7; Hebrews 2:14-15; Romans 8:15)

Or what if he designed infants to need milk before solid food so that we could see that new believers need patient discipling? (see 1 Cor. 3:2; Heb. 5:12-13; 1 Pet. 2:2)

Then, instead of thinking of Jesus as stepping into our world and using what happened to be there, it’s more like Jesus entered into His world and revealed Himself through His creation that He had put there all along.

Al Mohler in his new book, The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down, points to Moses’s words in Deuteronomy 8:3 to show “that God designed physical needs [e.g. in this case, hunger] to point to our deeper spiritual needs. Our need for daily physical sustenance is a faint echo of our daily need of spiritual sustenance and satisfaction from God” (p. 117). This verse is one of the cases where God does reveal the “why”:

“He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” (Deut. 8:3, NIV)

If God uses the physical to point to the spiritual, then perhaps He conceived creation itself with this purpose in mind. 

Again, these “what ifs” are pure speculation. I do not know the mind of God apart from what He has revealed in His Word. But I do know that He is sovereign, creative, and love itself. So if He did design and create parts of this world for the “future” purpose of using them to demonstrate His goodness and His love for us, I wouldn’t in the least be surprised.

Source: Mohler, R. Albert, Jr. The Prayer that Turns the World Upside Down: The Lord’s Prayer as a Manifesto for Revolution, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2018.