“Am I or Am I Not?” That’s God’s Question

Don: God’s first claim to the name “I Am”, which is associated with the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH commonly transliterated as “Yahweh”, is made in Genesis 15:1:

After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying,

“Do not fear, Abram,
I am a shield to you;
Your reward shall be very great.”

This is the first time god uses the “I am” notion. In Exodus 3:14, god specifically identified “I am” as his name, when Moses asked him for it at the Burning Bush. God continues to use it over and over again throughout the Old Testament: seven times in Genesis, 21 times in Exodus, seven times in Psalms, 35 times in Isaiah, 70 times in Ezekiel, and 21 times in Jeremiah, plus 21 times in the minor prophets.

The final reference to it in the OT is in Malachi 3:1-6:

“Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, behold, He is coming,” says the Lord of hosts. “But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a smelter and purifier of silver, and He will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, so that they may present to the Lord offerings in righteousness. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.

“Then I will draw near to you for judgment; and I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers and against the adulterers and against those who swear falsely, and against those who oppress the wage earner in his wages, the widow and the orphan, and those who turn aside the alien and do not fear Me,” says the Lord of hosts. “For I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.

Note that this is a refining fire, not a consuming fire.

In one of the strangest stories in the bible, god sends a powerful message to us not just through the words but also through the life and behavior of his prophet Hosea. Hosea 1:2-9:

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry; for the land commits flagrant harlotry, forsaking the Lord.” [It seems absurd that god would tell his prophet to find a wife from among the fallen women of the Red Light District.] So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. And the Lord said to him, “Name him Jezreel [a most desolate name that means “anti-Israel” or “non-Israel” and is also the name of the valley where Ahab’s wife Jezebel was pushed to her death from a palace window and her body eaten by dogs]; for yet a little while, and I will punish the house of Jehu for the bloodshed of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.”

Then she conceived again and gave birth to a daughter. And the Lord said to him, “Name her Lo-ruhamah [which means “not be pitied”, not to have compassion”], for I will no longer have compassion on the house of Israel, that I would ever forgive them. But I will have compassion on the house of Judah and deliver them by the Lord their God, and will not deliver them by bow, sword, battle, horses or horsemen.”

When she had weaned Lo-ruhamah, she conceived and gave birth to a son. And the Lord said, “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not My people and I am not your God.”

Lo-ammi is best rendered, in the context of our study, as meaning that god has seen the condition of his people, has understood that they have broken the covenant set up with him in his name as the great I Am by essentially re-naming him as the “Not I Am” or the “Negative I Am” or the “Non-I Am”.

I think verse 9 could be translated: “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not My people because I am not ‘I Am’ to you.” The people have come to view their relationship with god as adversarial rather than covenanted. All they have to do is to recognize the transcendent and everlasting “I Am”-ness of god.

The rest of the story of Hosea and Gomer parallels this adulterous relationship between god and his people and is filled with the language of reconciliation. Gomer eventually leaves Hosea and returns to prostitution, disrupting the family and taunting Hosea’s generosity and graciousness. But in chapter 3, Hosea finds his wife and redeems her for 15 shekels of silver and an omer and half of barley. Exodus 21:32 tells us that the price of a slave is 30 shekels of silver, which is also the price paid for Jesus, so Gomer does not have even the value of a slave. Her worthlessness is a metaphor for our own worthlessness before god, and yet god still loves us as Hosea loves Gomer and attempts to redeem her from her sinful life by purchasing her.

In chapter 11, Hosea talks about his great loss and his great love for Gomer. This is what we see in the reversal of the “Not I Am” and back to the “I Am”—the reconciliation.

Jay: I am struck by the timelessness of the “I Am” name. It embodies a sense of eternity—of past, present, and future; of alpha and omega.

Don: In several places in Revelation, god says “I am alpha and omega”.

Jay: But in contrast, the perception of god changes so much, whether within an individual’s lifetime or the course of history. The god of the New Testament seems much changed from the god of the Old, due to the teachings of Jesus. My own view of god is different than it was, say, 15 years ago. So god seems to develop, whereas his name is changeless, constant. The “I Am” portrays that constancy: Wherever you are, whenever you are, no matter your history and culture, “I Am” is constant. To me, that constancy is its essence; its importance.

David: It says nothing about the nature of god; it is simply a statement of existence. “I Am” equals “I Exist.” In the passage from Hosea quoted earlier, god’s people were not accused of opposing him. They were accused of not believing he exists. It would be illogical to oppose something one does not believe to exist. This god is simply pleading to be recognized as existing. It seems he needs to be believed.

Donna: He is “I Am” for all, not just the elite. The fact that Hosea seeks a wife from the Red Light district shows that “I Am” is for anyone and everyone; that god cares for everyone no matter their background, age, culture, or wealth.

Dave: The story is a metaphor for god pursuing even the lowest sinners, which includes us. We are all harlots, dirty rags; yet he still pursues us to bring us back to him and to ask us again and again to accept him for what he is—to believe.

Donna: It shows he loves even the unlovable.

Jay: What does it mean that Hosea is god, we are the harlot, and the product of that union are three children with the names “Not One of God’s Chosen People” [my rendering of “anti-Israel”—DE], “Unforgivable”, and “Unbeliever”? To me, the most important part is in Hosea 3:1-2:

Then the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by her husband, yet an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.” So I bought her for myself for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a half of barley.

Perhaps this suggests that the timeless “I Am” of god is the timeless love of god, despite our sinfulness and the unworthiness of our children.

Dave: That seems consistent with the metaphor of god pursuing sinners—having offspring that don’t accept him. The product of god’s pursuit of us unfortunately probably results more times than not in people not accepting god’s love and coming to that faith. So that product then becomes people who have not accepted the Lord and just carry that sin around. The characteristics of that sin are no mercy and not believing—the very character traits that are identified in those statements.

Charles: All stories in scripture seem to be metaphorical with regard to spiritual things. They are not necessarily to be taken at face value. So it is with the story of Hosea, which is a metaphor for a merciful god who loves even the worthless harlot. The deeper spiritual message in it seems to me to be that there is something missing from it. The reason Hosea and the harlot cannot produce good offspring seems to be because something is missing—the something that was lost in the Garden. That something was oneness with the holy spirit. As a result, even though god can be most merciful, he and and his worthless bride (chosen people) Israel just cannot produce the kingdom, because of what is missing. It sets the stage for the messiah, when god does not simply give us the word but melds the spirit with the flesh, bringing back unity. Adam was a one-off; just a step in the process of reconciliation and reunification.

Through Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and gift of the spirit we are now god-like. The question is: Is that going to be enough for us to produce better progeny—a better world, the kingdom of god—at the end of the Age? Because while we have the gift of the spirit, we still also have the gift of free will to choose to accept that gift or not.

The “I Am” component seems very peripheral to the Hosea story. Finite beings—in fact, all of finite, physical creation, has a cause. The “I Am” is apart from that the finite. It is the essence of being. It is the ultimate cause. All of creation is a manifestation of god’s gift, and is there for all to see his generosity and his mercy. Nothing would exist without them. It is a non sequitur that the creation would not look to the creator and want to be obedient to the creator and to please the creator; yet that is exactly what we do. Human desire and pride separate us from god. To reunite, the flesh and the spirit must reunite through Christ; and to do that we must first develop the desire to reunite with god, to seek him, to be more like him.

David: To me, the “I Am” statement is a timeless, tense-less statement of eternal Being, of existence. I do not see “I Am” as a name per se. In and of itself, it is purely a statement of the existence of god. By mixing it in with other stories there is a danger of reading more into it than exists in it. In Hosea, message is is that there are people who don’t believe that “God Is” and that god will therefore do terrible things to them. And that, by the way, is another example (to me) of the changing nature of god as between the gods of the Old and New Testaments.

Don: Do you see a time when “I Am-ness” will be perceived differently?

David: We finite physical beings have trouble grasping the enormity of the infinite and the eternal; however, science increasingly reveals more of the essence of these concepts when it turns what seemed metaphysical and spiritual into physical. Science will continue to do this but on an exponentially faster and bigger scale. To me, science is therefore one way back to the reunification with pure spirit, with god.

Jay: If “I Am” is simply a statement of existence, it is the existence of what? Why is it apparently so important to god to state his existence? What does it mean to exist? “I exist, therefore…” …what?

Dave: In Colossians 1:15-20 the apostle Paul talks about the existence of god, of the “I Am” within all of us and the importance of recognizing that fact:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

God has been in all of us from the start. The union between Hosea and the harlot always existed. It depends on whether you believe it.

Donna: Each of Hosea and Gomer’s children represent who we are without “I Am”. The “I Am” releases us from the names god gave us (Hosea’s children) and gives us god’s name instead.

Chris: Hosea is about a god who is forgotten; of people who did not know god because they had forgotten the “I Am”. In the end they are reclaimed. Realizing that something exists is important but it is not everything. God’s being there is not the action of this story. The action—the thing behind the existence—is the showing of grace. Whenever Israel strayed from god, god’s love and grace always brought them back.

Donna: Once saved, always saved. That’s the message in the story of Gomer.

Charles: I still think all of this has to be recognized with what was lost in the Garden. If god is the omnipresent, omniscient essence of Being, the alpha and the omega, then the separation occurs and all the rest is the story of reconciliation to bring us back to the Garden. The gift of the spirit (which I believe can be achieved through baptism) is a very real gift but only if it is recognized and accepted as such. And that is a matter of choice—to accept the gift is to choose to accept the will of god through Christ over our own will.

Jay: God is in us and we are in god.

Charles: Everything is in god.

Jay: But god changed. Before the separation there was no need for good to pursue us, to reconcile with us. After the separation, there was.

Charles: If god is the alpha and omega, he doesn’t need us.

Jay: I tend to think that god cannot be god without us.

Dave: I don’t know that we are separated from god. We have unity with god, but sin blinds us to it. It’s not a separation; it’s just that we are blinded to his presence through sin and our fleshly desires. I think that god exists in us through the holy spirit, whether we believe it or not.

Donna: Gomer was born of god, but she chose to follow Satan of her own free will.

Charles: If god is alpha and omega than all things must be of god; all things must be a manifestation of god, albeit an imperfect reflection of him seen through the darkly distorting glass of a free will constrained by our mortality and finiteness—and free will was the cause of our separation in the first place.

David: There must have been always a problem in the Garden once god created Adam, whose free will carried the potential for evil. Before that, there was presumably no potential for evil. Alpha and omega are a singularity, they are the true unity that existed before the creation of Adam, they are the infinitesimal and eternal point in which everything that ever is, was, and will be is contained. In the singularity, there is no free will and no potential for evil. But true unity ceases to exist in the Garden as soon as the point begins to assume additional dimensions and expand beyond the infinite and eternal unidimensional point and into a finite, n-dimensional, physical universe; resulting in a world with god and man in it. They might have lived happily together for a while in that new world but the potential for disunity and evil existed where it could not have existed before. We should aspire to return not to the Garden but to the singularity. If we were to return to the Garden tomorrow in the same state as Adam and Eve before the Fall—that is, with free will—then there would remain the potential for yet another Fall.

Charles: Except to the extent that Garden is a metaphor for unity.

David: To me, the garden is not unity, not One-ness: It is .99999-ness. The .00001 remainder is the potential for evil present in free will. In true unity, there is no potential for evil.

Dave: Except that even before the Garden there was the fall of Lucifer and one third of the angels, so that there must have been the potential for evil already. Perhaps free will is something intrinsic. I see the Garden as a demonstration of the way back.

Chris: Perhaps we can’t deal with the idea that free will is part of who god is. It makes the concept of aligning with god’s will somewhat problematic!

Dave: It is troubling that free will does not always seem to be free. We didn’t choose to be a part of this whole puzzle!

Charles: Whether at the level of all of creation or the individual, it’s all a manifestation of god’s grace, because none if it and none of us exists except for that grace. These concepts are so far beyond our comprehension—no wonder we struggle to understand. It’s easy to have a dispassionate, objective concept of eternity, but it is not easy to place one’s finite self within the concept of eternity and still maintain the coherency of the concept.

David: It seems to me that when we get to Jesus and the god of the New Testament then the issue of god’s existence is trite alongside the issue of love. Unlike god, love manifestly exists and is recognized as existing by all—Jews, gentiles, atheists, and, I dare say, even the occasional Daoist. As I interpret the message of his life and teaching, Jesus went to the ultimate pains to point out that love is all that matters. I do not think that the god of Jesus gives a hoot about being perceived as existing or not. Love is all.

Don: We’ll examine Jesus’ views next week.

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