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These things Philosophy could never have discovered. As we have said so many
times already, God's gracious solution of life's enigma is found in the personal Christ.
Returning to Exod. 3:, we find that the Lord modifies His original title:--
"The Lord God of your father . . . . . hath sent me unto you: this is My Name unto the
age, and this is My memorial unto all generations" (Exod. 3: 15).
The timeless "I AM" is replaced by a name that is "unto the age". The Infinite
condescends to the limitations of men.
The word "Lord" here is the name "Jehovah", which is made up of parts of the verb
"to be". Its composition is unfolded in Rev. 1:: "Grace be unto you . . . . . from Him
which is, and which was, and which is to come" (Rev. 1: 4).
The title "Jehovah" is further explained in Gen. 21: 33, where the words "The Lord,
the everlasting God" are in the Hebrew, Jehovah, El Olam--"Jehovah, God of the age".
It is simple to believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and many
other high and wonderful things, but it is the glorious peculiarity of the Christian
revelation that it turns our worshipping gaze to a lowly cradle, a virgin's Son, a crucified
Redeemer. These things are utterly beyond the power of human wisdom to discover.
The philosophy that denied the pulse of life and the joy and sorrow of a teeming
creation, carried within itself its own death sentence, and came to an end with the
teaching of Zeno. It would serve no useful purpose to occupy space and time in dealing
with his empty dialectics. Some readers may know how, in order to disprove the reality
of "things seen", he invented the problem of Achilles and the Tortoise, and sought to
disprove the reality of motion. Such jugglings as these led at length to skepticism and
sophistry, and failed altogether to meet either the cry of the living, or the dreadful need of
the dead. Any attempt to discover God apart from Christ is doomed to failure.
To the despised and afflicted captives in Egypt, a revelation was given (Exod. 3: 14,
15) that would have provided a complete answer to the quest of a generation of
philosophers. And yet there will probably be some believers, who will consider that the
few minutes required to read and weigh over this simple article are almost a waste of
time. May we never need to learn the value of the Word of God by being compelled to
do without its light and teaching.