At Gateway Austin, we kicked off our new series “Hello, My Name Is….”
Your view of God shapes everything—how you pray, how you lead, how you suffer, how you love. What we believe about God will determine the kind of world we imagine we’re living in.
But what if our view of God is all wrong?
When Moses asked to see God’s glory, God did not first display raw power. He proclaimed His name and revealed His character: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin – yet not leaving the guilty unpunished.
This six-week journey shows what we can learn about God from His interaction with kings, poets, prophets, and people just like you and me. When we know who God really is, we can know Him more and make Him known.
Digging Deeper:
Discussion questions and Bible study for your small group, roommates, or family.
Message Video from Gateway North Austin:
Message Notes from Carlos Ortiz, Jr.:
There are few things more personal than a name. When you meet someone for the first time, one of the first questions you ask is, “What’s your name?” A name gives you something to call the person. Now some people put a lot of thought behind what they name their children. Others choose a name because it sounds nicebut in Scripture, a name is more than a label. A name reveals identity. It tells you something about who a person is.
That is especially true when God gives us His name.
We often talk about knowing God as though it were primarily about gathering information about him. We learn what God has done. We study what God commands. We read stories about his power. We memorize doctrines about his attributes. But Christianity is not ultimately about knowing things about God. It is about knowing God himself.
In this series we are looking at the name of God and how He reveals His character to us. Many of us have a skewed version of God based on where we grew up or what we’ve heard about Him in our culture. Our hope is that you see the goodness and greatness of God in a fresh and life-changing way over these next several weeks as we look at moments in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, where God reveals Himself to people like Moses, David, Nehemiah, Jonah and others. You may have thought that the God of the Old Testament is angry. The God revealed in Jesus is kind and loving. The true story is so much better and bigger than that!
In Exodus 3 we pick up where Moses, an Israelite who was raised in the house of the Pharaoh, is now running from a murder he committed back in Egypt. He’s in Midian, building a new life, he’s found a wife, became a father, his people are groaning in slavery, and this is the moment God decided to show up:
There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”
4 When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
And Moses said, “Here I am.”
5 “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” 6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.
7 The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”
12 And God said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you[b] will worship God on this mountain.”
13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
15 God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’
“This is my name forever,
the name you shall call me
from generation to generation.
And so when Moses asks God, “What is your name?” God does not simply give Moses a word. He gives him a revelation of his character.
God says, “I am who I am.” For what it’s worth, people have at times mistaken this to mean, YHWH, but the actual Hebrew name is Ehyeh – spoken in first person to say that He is self-existent and independent.
And then God also directs Moses to say, “The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.”
The name translated “the Lord” is connected to the Hebrew name YHWH (“He is” or “He causes to be”). It is the covenant name of God. It speaks of the God who simply is—the God whose existence depends on nothing outside himself, the God who is faithful to himself, the God who is not controlled by circumstances, human approval, or human failure.
So, Moses goes to Pharoah and after 10 plagues the people are freed. They watch God miraculously provide an escape through the sea and then they make it back to Mount Sinai just as God instructed in Exodus 3. A lot has gone down and at Sinai God again meets face to face with Moses and doesn’t merely repeat the name He gave him before, but He tells Moses what his name means.
So we come to Exodus 34, and something remarkable happens. God doesn’t merely tell Moses his name. God tells Moses what his name means for us.
Exodus 34:6–7: “God passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished…’”
This is one of the most important moments in the entire Bible. God is defining himself. And that matters because our greatest problem is often not that we don’t believe in God. It is that we believe in the wrong God.
Every human being carries around some conception of what God is like. Sometimes we inherited it from our parents. Sometimes from our church background. Sometimes from painful experiences, or from the culture. Sometimes we construct a God who conveniently agrees with us.
If you grew up around harsh authority, you may instinctively imagine God as harsh. If you grew up believing love must be earned, you may imagine God as someone whose affection depends upon your performance. If you have experienced betrayal, you may struggle to believe that God is faithful. If you have experienced injustice, you may wonder whether God is actually good.
Our experiences can become lenses through which we interpret God. But Scripture gives us another way. God says, in effect, “Don’t invent me. Let me introduce myself.”
That is why revelation matters. God’s interactions with people does NOT begin with humanity’s search for God but with God’s decision to make himself known. Moses doesn’t merely climb the mountain and try to figure God out. No, he positions himself to seek after God, AND God comes down. Moses doesn’t need to manufacture God’s name. God proclaims it. This is grace. And it is still grace today.
When we come to Scripture, we are not primarily coming to a book that tells us what humanity thinks about God. We are coming to the revelation of what God says about himself. That means our assumptions about God must eventually stand before God’s self-description. This is why this series is so important…we get to linger, and wrestle with the tension between how we perceive God and how God actually is.
And nowhere is that description clearer than here.
The setting of Exodus 34 makes the words even more remarkable. Israel has just committed one of the greatest acts of rebellion in the Old Testament. While Moses is on Mount Sinai receiving the covenant, the people construct a golden calf and worship it. The covenant has been shattered almost immediately after it was given.
Moses comes down the mountain carrying the tablets, sees Israel’s idolatry, and breaks the tablets in anger. Everything appears to be over. And yet Moses goes back up the mountain.
He makes an audacious request: “Show me your glory.” (kabowd – weightiness)
Moses is asking, in effect, “God, let me see who you really are.” And God answers.
But notice how he answers. God does not primarily reveal his glory by displaying raw power. He does not say, “Watch what I can do.” Instead, God passes before Moses and proclaims his name. “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness…”
God’s glory is revealed through his character.
That is something we desperately need to recover. We tend to think God’s glory is primarily about his power. We are amazed by what God can do. But when God himself wants to reveal his glory, he tells Moses what he is like.
He is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, and overflowing with steadfast love and faithfulness. And notice when God says this. Israel has sinned. They have broken the covenant. They have worshiped an idol. They are guilty. And into that situation God says, “This is who I am.”
That is extraordinary. God’s character is not revealed in spite of Israel’s sin but in the middle of it. The grace of God is not God’s response to our goodness. Grace is God’s response to our need. That distinction changes everything.
Before Israel has done anything to repair the covenant, they have Moses interceding for them, begging God for mercy, and God declares who he is. God’s love is not the paycheck at the end of a life well lived. It is the foundation from which a transformed life begins. Again, this is why the gospel is so different from religion.
Religion says, “If you become good enough, perhaps God will accept you.”The gospel which is the good news through Jesus says, “God has come to you in mercy, and that mercy creates a new kind of life.”
You do not obey in order to become loved. You obey because, in Christ, you have been loved.
There is another part of this passage we cannot ignore. God continues, “maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.”
At first glance, this sounds like a contradiction. How can God forgive sin and yet not leave the guilty unpunished? How can God be merciful and just? If God is only just, there is no hope for sinners. If God is only permissive, there is no real justice.
Imagine a judge who simply looks at a violent crime and says, “I love you, so I’m going to pretend it didn’t happen.” We wouldn’t call that mercy. We would call it corruption.
True love must take evil seriously. And yet if God takes evil seriously, what hope is there for us? Because we are not merely observers of evil. We are participants. We have been sinned against, but we have also sinned. We have been wounded, but we have also wounded. We have complained about other people’s pride while defending our own. We have condemned hypocrisy while hiding our own. We have wanted grace for ourselves and justice for everyone else.
So the question becomes: How can God forgive sinners without compromising his justice?
The answer is ultimately found in Jesus Christ. Just like God came down on the mountain and met Moses, showing Moses who he was and promising to go with the Israelites who don’t deserve it, God didn’t deal with our sin from far away. He came down in the person of Jesus to intercede on behalf of those who, just like the Israelites in the desert, have gone our own way. At the cross, God’s mercy and justice meet. God does not simply wave away sin. He bears its judgment. The guilty are forgiven because Christ takes their place.
The cross tells us two things simultaneously: your sin is far more serious than you thought AND God’s love for you is far greater than you dared to hope.
That is the glory, the weightiness, of The Good News! God does not love us because our sin is small. He loves us enough to deal with our sin completely.
There is another truth in this passage that speaks directly to the patterns we inherit. God says that he maintains his love to thousands, while also speaking of the consequences of sin extending to the third and fourth generations. This is a sobering reality.
Sin rarely stops with the person who commits it. What one generation normalizes, another generation may inherit.
Anger can seep into family culture. Addiction can grow into a family pattern. Emotional absence can become a looming legacy. Materialism can become a shortsighted worldview. Unforgiveness can be passed down like an ugly heirloom.
But notice something beautiful in the passage. God speaks of judgment to the third and fourth generation, but his covenant love is described as extending to thousands. The proportions are not accidental. The warning is real, but the emphasis is clear: God’s mercy outruns sin.
Sin has an echo. But grace has a longer echo. That means your family history does not have to become your destiny. You may have inherited patterns you did not choose. But through Christ, you can begin patterns that those before you never knew.
You can become the person who stops the cycle.
The first in your family to confess instead of conceal. The first to forgive instead of retaliate. The first to seek help instead of pretending. The first to pray. The first to worship. The first to build a home where grace is normal. This is why two of our campuses have RESTORE, a place for people with hurts and hangups can freely talk and work through what it means to fully surrender to Jesus…everything.
You cannot rewrite your past. But by the grace of God, you can create a different future. The gospel does not erase history. It redeems it.
There is another significant shift when we read Exodus through the lens of the New Testament.
In Exodus, God is forming a covenant people, Israel. He gives them a land. He gives them boundaries. He commands them to destroy the idolatrous structures of the nations around them.
But when Jesus comes, the mission takes a surprising turn. Jesus announces the arrival of the kingdom of God. His people are no longer defined by ethnicity or geography. They are gathered from every nation. And Jesus sends his followers not to conquer territory but to make disciples.
We are not called to establish God’s kingdom through political domination. We are called to embody the King. We are ambassadors of reconciliation.
That means Exodus 34’s call to reject idolatry still speaks powerfully to us, but our idols may look different. Our golden calves may be success, control, sexuality, approval, politics, money, comfort, achievement, or reputation.
An idol is anything we trust to give us what only God can give. And idols always make promises they cannot keep.
God’s jealousy, therefore, is not petty insecurity. It is covenant love.
When God says, “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God,” he is not saying, “I need your attention because I am insecure.”
He is saying, “I love you too much to let you destroy yourself with substitutes.”
God’s boundaries are not the boundaries of a tyrant trying to restrict our freedom. They are the boundaries of a Father protecting his children. And that brings us back to the tablets…the 10 commandments.
The first tablets were broken. And now God tells Moses to bring two new tablets. God will write again. What Israel destroyed, God restores. That is gospel language.
Because this is what God does throughout Scripture. He restores what sin has shattered. He brings life out of death. He brings reconciliation out of alienation. He brings beauty out of brokenness.
And ultimately, he does not simply write his law on tablets of stone. He promises a new covenant in which his law is written on human hearts. The tablets can be replaced. But the deeper problem is the human heart.
And that is what Jesus accomplishes.
At the cross, Christ establishes the new covenant. Through his resurrection, he creates a new people. Through the Spirit, God begins writing his character into us. So we are compelled to KNOW God fully.
The goal of salvation is not merely that we escape punishment. It is that we become people who increasingly reflect the God whose name we have learned.
So what does it mean to know the name of Yahweh?
It means that when life becomes confusing, you know, Yahweh, who “he is”
When you fail, you remember that HE IS compassionate and gracious.
When you are tempted to run from him, you remember that HE IS slow to anger.
When everyone else proves unreliable, you remember that HE IS abounding in faithfulness.
When your past accuses you, you remember that HE IS forgiveness..
When you encounter injustice, you remember that HE IS just.
When you look at your family history and wonder whether anything can change, you remember that HE IS reaches further than your sin.
We are going to look at each of these characteristics of God over the next several weeks, and I want you to really make it a priority to be with us each Sunday. When we understand fully who God is, this brings so much peace and joy and love into our lives, and we can help bring more of God to those we love!
The God who proclaimed his name to Moses has made himself known supremely in Jesus. He is Emmanuel, God with us.
The God who says, “I am who I am,” is the God who comes near. The transcendent God becomes intimate. The holy God becomes approachable. The God whose glory Moses could barely glimpse takes on flesh and dwells among us.
Perhaps the most important question is not simply, “Do you believe in God?”
It is: “Which God do you believe in?”
Because if your God is merely a projection of your fears, your desires, your culture, or your experiences, eventually that God will fail you. But the God of Scripture introduces himself.
He says, “I am The Lord.” And we respond in third person by repeating, He is…Yahweh
This is not merely information about God. It is an invitation to trust him.
So confront the patterns that have been handed down to you— and do not be defined by them.
Confess the idols that compete for your heart— and do not despair when you discover them.
Receive God’s boundaries not as the restrictions of a reluctant deity, but as the loving protection of your covenant Father.
And most of all, stop trying to earn what God has already offered in Christ.
