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Then Moses said to God, If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO AM.’ And he said, Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’ God also said to Moses, Say to the people of Israel, ‘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, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations (3:13-15). Everything turns on the name, the truth and invocability of which will alone assure the freedom of Israel to trust in the Lord their God. Thus God’s promise to be present to his people in bondage, the assurance that he will break the chains that bind them, that will not be enough if God does not first tell them his name. Yet that will not be enough, not for Moses and certainly not for the Jews whom destiny has determined he will speak for. Including even the very words he will need to speak in order to wrest freedom for his people: “Now therefore go,” God tells him from out of the burning bush, the bush that burns but is not consumed, “and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak” (4:12). “I will be with you,” he tells Moses again and again in his struggle against the powers of Egypt, the awful oppressions of Pharaoh. Time and again God had shown unto Israel the graciousness of his heart, looking after his people with the warmth and constancy of a lover - a Supreme Someone, as it were, on whose word of promise they could depend. Thomas Aquinas, who was the first to unpuzzle the great theophany of Exodus 3, wherein God spoke to Moses his very name: I AM WHO AM.
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Which is precisely why, among all possible names given to God, the best possible, the most proper of all, is “He Who Is.” So says St. God’s own essence, in other words, which is absolute and eternal, is nothing other than the pure act of existence. Ipsum Esse subsistens, citing the formula for Being subsisting in its very self. Or, to push the envelope right to the edge, God is that being whose entire essence or substance is to be, to exist. John Damascene, “is an infinite and boundless ocean of substance.” Does that sound like anyone you know? No, it does not. In fact, as creatures, we are not even remotely like God, whose being, to quote the description found in St.
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But the fact that we are not God, nor are we ever likely to become God. The differences are simply too vast, too incommensurable, to permit natures as sadly ill-equipped as our own to scale that metaphysical cliff.Īnd so it is not only sin that keeps us at an infinite distance from God - although it certainly complicates things, driving ever deeper the wedge between us. Only grace will enable us to smash through the wall that separates us from God, that sheer divide between contingent and necessary being. Between the omnipotence of God, who holds all creation in being, and the nothingness of man, there is an impassible barrier which no creature may breach.Įven the best and the brightest are forced to submit to that exigent fact.