Timeless

In a conversation with my favorite three-year-old, I said, “I will come pick you up at five o’clock.”

She promptly reversed the camera on the phone she was holding so that I could see the digital clock in her mom’s car.

“Look Grandma,” she said, “it IS five o’clock!”

It was 1:30, but I didn’t argue. Everything is present tense to a toddler. 

When the Lord met Moses at the burning bush, Moses was focused on the here-and-now. He was a shepherd, occupied with his sheep, who had buried his past and was content to live in the present for the foreseeable future. 

God gently shoved him out of his toddler mindset.

“I am the God of your father,” the Lord tells Moses.

That was a loaded statement. Had Moses ever met his father? Did he have memories of him? Had he simply heard about him from others? The Bible doesn’t fill in the gaps of Moses’s history, but God knew every bit of the minutia of Moses’s past. 

It made Moses afraid.

Next, the Lord didn’t deny the emergency of the present, even though Moses had tried to forget about it. 

“I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt…” God said. 

Moses had seen that affliction too. It had tormented him so that he had killed a man to try to prevent it. That hadn’t worked out, so he had given up on ever fixing the problems of the present. He created his own present, far from the problems of his people, but God had never deserted them. He heard and saw them in every moment of their suffering. 

It made Moses unsure. 

God whisks him right into the future when He commands Moses to return to Egypt and demand that Pharoah let God’s people go.

Moses is even more uncomfortable with the future than he was the past or the present. He offers a lot of anxious “What ifs” because it terrifies him. So much could go wrong in the future. 

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” 

God’s name tames Moses’s fear. It silences his failure. It assures him of God’s ability to bring about what He has promised.

In the rest of the Old and New Testaments, God’s Name is revered as one that transcends time, shelters any who take refuge in Him, and wins victory even over enemies like death.

God later says to Ezekiel, “I will be jealous for My holy name. [My people] shall forget their shame and all the treachery they have practiced against Me when they dwell securely…Then they shall know that I AM the Lord their God.”

God’s name has always been timeless. I AM is in the past. I AM sees the present. I AM holds the future in His capable hand. 

He is with us no matter what is happening. His name has never changed, and we can trust in His ability and power to care for us, yesterday, today, and forever- no matter what time it is.