The Ever-Present God

In yesterday's post I made a comment I want to take up in more detail today, since it's very much how the Lord is currently speaking into my life:

After all, this is what the Gospel is all about - not just some future experience, but a here-and-now experience in Christ! It's as if, through Christ, we reach into the future by faith and take a hold of the totality of God's work, which culminates in the physical resurrection of our mortal bodies, and apply it today!...We embrace all the future blessings of the New Covenant and appropriate them today by faith.

There can be a tendency to treat our faith either as a past-based theology or as a future-based hope (and, of course, it is both). But far more than this, the Christian faith is a present-based experience.

Time and again, God reveals himself in Scripture as the God of the now. As we saw yesterday, when questioned about the future resurrection of the body, Jesus answered in Matthew 22:31-32 by revealing God's here-and-now quality. The Message puts it this way:

"And regarding your speculation on whether the dead are raised or not, don't you read your Bibles? The grammar is clear: God says, 'I am - not was - the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.' The living God defines himself not as the God of dead men, but of the living.'"

This is also reflected in The Message's paraphrase of Romans 8:11:

"It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!"

I love that description of God as "the alive-and-present God". And before I share further on what the Lord is saying to me at this time, I want to take you first on a short tour of the Old and New Testaments, in order to underline this essential understanding of God's nature.

The "I am" quality of God is one of the most fundamental revelations of God's nature. When Moses asked God for his name, the Lord's reply in Exodus 3:14 was:

"I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.' "

God's primary name is a circular definition - "I am who I am." This is rendered in the Hebrew by four letters - YHWH - which is generally pronounced either as Yahweh (the likely original Hebrew pronounciation) or as Jehovah (the Anglicized version). In fact, the entymological roots of this name could imply a number of related meanings:

• I am the One who is.


• I am who I am.


• I will be what I will be.


• I cause to be what I cause to be.


• I am present is what I am.

But all carry the same basic meaning - God is the ever-present God and he defines both himself and his activity in present terms.

In fact, a little while back, this basic revelation of God as being "ever-present" resolved a question that I been pondering - I know that God knows the future (Romans 8:29), but how does he know the future before it has actually happened? (I know, this is a bit beyond the pale of my humble human intellect, but I still like to ponder these things). And then the simple realisation hit me that, when you think about it, God doesn't actually see the future, in the sense that we understand it. Rather, everything is "present" as far as God is concerned. He is outside of time, not contained by it. He knows the past, present and future on equal terms because, for him, all is "now."

And this is how God constantly defines himself. In the Old Testament, God revealed himself on eight occasions as the God who was the immediate solution to the issues facing his people. Each time, he prefaced a new name for himself with the prefix YHWH, or "I AM":

1. YHWH-Yireh - "I AM (the One who) Sees (and Provides)" - Genesis 22:14.


2. YHWH-Nissi - "I AM is my Banner" - Exodus 17:15.


3. YHWH-Mekaddesh - "I AM (He Who) Sanctifies" - Exodus 31:13.


4. YHWH-Shalom - "I AM (Your) Peace" - Judges 6:24.


5. YHWH-Sabaoth - "I AM (the Commander) of Hosts" (or, "I AM the Almighty") - Jeremiah 11:20; 1 Samuel 17:45.


6. YHWH-Rohi - "I AM is my Shepherd" - Psalms 23:1.


7. YHWH-Tsidkenu - "I AM is Our Righteousness" - Jeremiah 23:5-6; Jeremiah 33:16.


8. YHWH-Shammah - "I AM There" - Ezekiel 48:35.

Each of these names were points of revelation for Israel. Eight times, God revealed himself to Israel not in terms of a past-tense theology, nor even a future-tense hope, but as a present-tense reality. And not coincidentally, as you read the Gospel record, you discover that Jesus himself also made eight "I am" declarations:

1. "I AM the Bread of Life" - John 6:35,48.


2. "I AM the Light of the World" - John 8:12; 9:5.


3. "I AM the Gate" - John 10:7,9


4. "I AM the Good Shepherd" - John 10:11,14


5. "I AM the Resurrection and the Life" - John 11:25


6. "I AM the Way, the Truth, and the Life" - John 14:6


7. "I AM the True Vine" - John 15:1-5


8. "I AM He" - John 13:19; John 18:5-6.

It is this "I AM" aspect of God's nature that now defines my life. It is who God is, not who I am, that ultimately matters. And of all the declarations God made, as listed above, there is one that has special relevance for me at the moment. This declaration is a defining declaration for me.

"I AM the Resurrection and the Life" (John 11:25)

In the Old Testament, this basic description of God as "the resurrection and the life" was expressed in a very practical way in Exodus 15:26:

"...If you listen carefully to the voice of the LORD your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the LORD, who heals you."

I'm most impacted by the fact that God doesn't just say that he will heal me (some time in the future), although obviously the healing itself is a specific event that can be pinpointed in time. No, what God says is that he is "the LORD, who heals you." In other words, I'm not waiting for the specific act of healing. My God is already my healer! He is, not will be, everything I need.

Today I go back to the hospital for another battery of tests, all in preparation for the start of chemotherapy next Wednesday. But even as I go through these necessary preparations, submitting to the best that medical science can offer today, I'm reminded once again that my life is not defined by my illness, nor by the way that I presently feel, but by the Lord himself, who is the Great I AM for me. He is for me today the resurrection and the life! And so today I'm going to reach out for his touch of healing - and the experience of knowing the power of his resurrection in my mortal body - not next month, not tomorrow, but now.