God

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. (Proverbs 9:10, NKJV)

Surely I am more stupid than any man, And do not have the understanding of a man. I neither learned wisdom Nor have knowledge of the Holy One. (Proverbs 30:2-3, NKJV)

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:13-14, KJV)

Moses

Moses, the mighty man of Pharaoh's court, the murderer of an Egyptian, the self-styled deliverer of God's people from bondage, has spent forty years in the back-waters of Median working for his father-in-law, Jethro, as a shepherd. During those years God gradually removed Egypt and its self-confident ways and prides from Moses until he "was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth" (Numbers 3:12).

The burning bush

It is this Moses, now eighty years old, who one day leads his flock to Horeb, the mountain of God. There he sees what no one has ever seen before—a burning bush that is not consumed by its burning. He stops and turns aside to see why the bush isn't burning.

"And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see," He speaks to him through His angel who was in the midst of the bush and tells him not to come near, but to "put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5).

What is Your name?

During the conversation that follows, God tells Moses that He is sending him back to Egypt to bring out His chosen people, the Israelites. Moses complains that he isn't qualified and asks God to send someone else, which God refuses to do.

Moses then wants to know who he's talking to, who is sending him to Egypt, because the people will ask him and he must have a name to give them. They will want to know which God He is, one of the thousands of pagan gods, or the true God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.

In response, God says to Moses that His name is "I AM THAT I AM," and in so saying explains the essence of His existence and compounds its mystery beyond comprehension.

In a somewhat similar statement, the Lord Jesus told His disciples, "The Father has life in Himself," and in those six words stated a theological concept that explodes past the boundary of the capabilities of human thought. After trying to explore the vast theological ramifications of these statements, we can only shake our heads and try to decrease the internal brain-pressure that such exploration has caused. (Genesis 3:14, John 5:26)

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