“Then God spoke to Moses, telling him, ‘I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but I was not known to them by my name ‘the Lord.’ I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land they lived in as aliens. Furthermore, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are forcing to work as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When a school gets an educational path right, everything you learn builds on what came before it. I’ve talked before about a very specific experience of that I had when I was getting my chemistry degree. My senior-level chem professor sat us down on the first day of class and said we were going to spend the semester learning why everything we had learned before wasn’t correct. He was being mostly tongue-in-cheek. What he meant was that we were going to spend the semester building on the foundation of what we had learned before in ways that made it hard to recognize some of what we had originally been taught. This is something God does throughout the Scriptures and especially here in the story of the Exodus. Let’s pause on this little section to see how He is doing this here.

It’s been a couple of days, so let’s take a second to get ourselves situated. When we last left Moses, he and Aaron had just had their first encounter with Pharaoh. And it did not go well. This was just as God had predicted, but for the Israelites on the ground who were now being made to work even harder to meet their already impossibly high expectations, it did not feel like things were all going according to plan. It felt like Moses and Aaron were nothing more than a couple of charismatic hucksters who had gotten them all excited about a God who obviously didn’t care about them nearly as much as they had promised He did only to ruin their lives and make everything a thousand times worse than it had been before.

Suffice to say: they weren’t thrilled. They let Moses and Aaron know this in no uncertain terms. The dynamic duo prompted turned around and complained to God about the whole situation. They asked Him what exactly His plans were and griped about being chosen for all of this in the first place. Our last stop last Thursday was a quick look at God’s initial response to them. He said, “Pharaoh had his chance. Now it’s my turn. Sit back and watch the show I’m about to put on.”

Before raising the curtain on the opening act, though, God took some time to reaffirm His plans to Moses. These were not His plans for Egypt, but for the people of Israel. We’ll get more into the specifics of those tomorrow, Lord willing, but here at the beginning, God reminds Moses of who He is. He does this in a way that is both historically rooted and forward looking. Take a look at this with me.

Let’s start with the second part. God reveals Himself to Moses to be not just a covenant-making God, but a covenant-keeping God. Specifically, God tells Moses that He remembered His covenant. This kind of language is tough for us to grapple with because of the implication that God had previously forgotten about His covenant. What good is a covenant-making God if He regularly forgets about them only to later call them to mind when the people who were supposed to be benefitting from them are suffering terribly thanks to His neglect? Looking only through the lens of how we might behave, this is an easy interpretation to buy. The thing about the God revealed in the pages of the Scriptures is that unlike all the other gods and goddesses we have created, He is not merely a reflection of our own faults and foibles but with most unlimited cosmic power.

The language of remembering here is not intended to suggest God had forgotten anything. Rather, it is a signal that He is about to take a decisive step toward fulfilling His covenant. He had promised Abraham that his descendants would be given the land of Canaan. The time had now at last come to begin to fulfill that promise. God had not forgotten the way we might forget something. He was waiting until the time was right. This feels to us like forgetting. But God’s timing is always perfect. Like Gandalf the White, He never arrives late or early, but precisely when He means to arrive.

Going back to the beginning of this passage, God tells Moses that He had appeared to Abraham and company as God Almighty, but that they had not known Him as “the Lord,” or “Yahweh.” This sets some really interesting questions before us that we do not have time here to explore fully in the detail they warrant. We can say a few things here, though, that may help this make a bit more sense.

For starters, God here cannot mean that Abraham and company simply didn’t know the name, “Yahweh.” It is used several times throughout the Genesis narrative. Now, yes, someone could make (and indeed has made) the argument that the various references to Yahweh in Genesis were additions by a later editor who had learned the name, but for a variety of reasons, that argument falls flat. Furthermore, given the way God told Moses to present the name Yahweh, this could not have been the first time the people heard it. It would have been presented differently if that were the case.

What is going on here is an example of God’s progressive revelation of His identity and character to us that we see unfolding across the Scriptures. Abraham and his generation knew God’s name, but they didn’t understand as fully as Moses and his generation were going to be able to understand it because they didn’t experience the same level of God’s character. Okay, but why wouldn’t God just reveal Himself to us one time? Why string us along with bits and pieces that almost seem to keep us from becoming all at once who we could be? For the same reason that the concepts I learned in my senior-level chemistry class weren’t taught to us in our freshman year. Because we wouldn’t have been able to handle more than He gave us at any one time.

If they presented the ideas taught in advanced chemistry course in the class intended to be a basic introduction to the discipline for beginnings, the students would all fail the class. They would get discouraged by the difficult of the subject matter and quit before they even got started. Had God presented Himself and His character in full to us from day one, we wouldn’t have been able to handle it. We were so steeped in sin that we would have rejected Him out of the gate. So, He revealed Himself slowly in bits and pieces. He revealed what He in His infinite wisdom knew we could grapple with in a given moment and then gave us time to get our minds and hearts wrapped fully around it. Then, when He knew we had that part of Him down fairly well, He introduced a little more.

The thing about this kind of progressive revelation, though, is that we are a rut-creating people. Once we had gotten used to a certain picture of God, His revealing more was often not received as a good thing. It was a challenge to the prevailing ways of thinking and knowing that tended to be perceived by most people as an attack on what was right and good and true about God. New revelation always took time (and usually a lot of fighting) for us to adjust to it. Then, once we finally got our heart and minds wrapped around the new stuff, fully integrating it into our thinking, He revealed yet more of Himself to us. This was a pattern He kept all the way through the Scriptures until Jesus who was the final revelation of Himself to us. The sending of the Holy Spirit was to help us understand this new picture and live in light of it. We still see only incompletely because our perspective is limited by the very finitude of our lives here in this world. But that will one day be addressed when Christ returns in glory, creation is made new, and we are given our resurrection bodies that are fit for eternity in His kingdom.

One more thing here is necessary to say. This progressive nature of God’s revealing Himself to us that we see played out over the course of the narrative written across the Scriptures is not something that still continues through to today. In Jesus God revealed the final and fullest picture we will receive of who He is. There are not a few voices today who argue just the opposite. They will “discover” some new principle that fits within the framework of morality embraced by the progressive element of the culture and announce that God has revealed it as a new way of understanding who He is. The trouble is that these new “revelations” are often contradictory with the witness of the Scriptures and in a way that conveniently matches some novel cultural more. Yet as we see God’s progressive revelation unfold across the narrative of the Scriptures, the new revelations never contradict the old ones. They complement and continue them forward. The all build on each other. Modern “revelations” consistently reject the old in favor of something new, which is really just something old that was rejected in the narrative of the Scriptures but which is now dressed in shiny, new packaging. God’s revelation of Himself is complete until Christ returns and we are made able to grasp Him fully. Even that, though, will not be a departure from what we already have, but a completion of it.

What all of this means for us is two things. First, we have the incredible opportunity to understand who God is in a way our forebears could not. We can see the whole development of our understanding of Him played out from beginning to end allowing us to appreciate the consistent line of growth and development. Second, we have everything we need to know about God contained for us in a single place: the Scriptures. We don’t need any other revelation. He preserved everything we need right in one convenient package. If you want to know God more and better, study them carefully and well and in the context of a community committed to the same ends. Then, go and put into practice what you find there. Then you will always be right in the center of God’s will. That’s a very good place to be.