The words we have in our text this week are spoken by God to Moses in a crisis. The people of Israel are under the thumb of Pharaoh and are helpless to do anything about it. They are an enslaved people, but their misery has been intensified exponentially after Moses visited Pharaoh and asked permission for Israel to go and worship the Lord.
Remarkably, God essentially tells Moses that Israel is a privileged people. They certainly don’t feel privileged with Pharaoh’s threats of beatings and death hovering over them. Yet God says they are. He says: “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself known to them (verses 2-3).”
In other words, God is saying that what he is going to do for Israel in this situation is going to reveal God’s nature, power, and especially promise in a far greater way than the patriarchs ever experienced. God teaches his people that knowing him is the greatest privilege or experience man can have. Sin causes us to diminish the value of learning of God.
Certainly Abraham
, Isaac, and Jacob knew the Lord’s name and the promised connected to his name, but they would die with the promise of deliverance from bondage and inheritance into the Promised Land yet future. The people of Israel in Moses’ time were about to live through the fulfilment of a 400-year-old promise of deliverance. They were going to see God’s power as well as the veracity of his promise first hand.
Therefore, in redemptive history there are degrees of privilege. Jesus told the Jewish people in Galilee that their judgment would be worse than immoral cities such as Sodom or Sidon because they had seen and heard him first hand. They were given a great privilege yet did not respond in repentance and faith.
Unquestionably, we have far greater privilege in our epoch of redemptive history than those who saw and heard Jesus.
We have been given great clarity on our need of redemption and its accomplishment by the Lord Jesus Christ. Christ has come, been obedient to God even unto death on the cross, been raised from the dead, and ascended into heaven. We have been left in no doubt as to what God requires of us with respect to Christ; to humbly bow, rest in his death in our place, and follow him with our lives in order to honor him.
God’s nature has been revealed to us in Christ. We learn of God in him. We have communion with God through him. In our passage God refers to two names he has that serve to reveal him to his people. One is “God Almighty.” This name points to the power and sufficiency of God for his people. Jesus assures his people that God knows their needs both spiritually and physical and is disposed toward them (in love) to give them all that they need; if it will benefit them.
In Christ, God displays the power of salvation. Christ not only takes away sin and death, he delivers us from the power of the devil. To have God work in us to change our nature is the highest need and good we receive. It is a hard thing to change the nature of a sinner; harder than delivering a people out of physical bondage.
The gospel teaches us that God not only works to change the lives of his people, but also to change their nature. The prophet Isaiah uses the analogy of instead of a thorn there is now a fig tree; a being transformed to seek God’s glory. Christians aren’t made perfect in this world, but they are given the power to see their sin, their need of Christ crucified, and the joy of knowing God, as redeemed people. The struggles they have remind them of their need of God’s power working in them.
God also reveals himself by his name “the Lord.” This is the covenant name of God, referring to his keeping his promise. In Christ, we are promised cleansing from our sin, and God adopting us as his children. Much of the promises of God to Christians are yet future, awaiting the full consummation of enjoying God in a new heaven and earth.
So, we are required to live by faith, not sight, knowing that God has given us greater privileges than the patriarchs and Moses’ generation.
