Did Jesus Say He Was God? – I AM WHO I AM
Did Jesus ever say He was God? Well, yes and no. He never explicitly said, “Hey everyone, I’m God!” That would have been nice for those of us that aren’t Jewish and only read English Bibles. However, Jesus was Jewish and He actually did claim to be God, but He did so in various Jewish ways that are often missed. Today we’ll see that Jesus claimed to be the great “I AM” of Exodus 3:14.
I Am Who I Am – Exodus 3:14
In the book of Exodus there’s a guy named Moses who has an encounter with God. Moses was a Hebrew man that through a series of events ended up living in luxury as the son of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter. But unlike Moses, his own Hebrew people had been enslaved by the Egyptians for 400 years.
Moses eventually fled from Egypt and went to Midian where he met a woman, raised a family, and tended to his father-in-law’s flock. One day while Moses was walking with the flock, he came to Mount Horeb (aka Mount Sinai) and was startled by something strange… There was a bush… on fire?
Moses decides to approach it but before he could take another step, the bush called out to him! The scriptures tell us that it was God who was in this bush. God told him not to take another step because the place where he was standing was holy ground. So, God introduces Himself and proceeds to inform Moses of His plan of how He was going to use Moses to free the Hebrew people from the Egyptians.
Moses was to go back to Pharaoh and approach him with a message from God. But Moses was quite reluctant to go back to the nation that wanted him dead! God assures Moses that there’s nothing to worry about because He will be with Moses. Moses was also concerned about what his own people would think. He said:
“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?” 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.’”
That’s God’s name! God said, “This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.” The Hebrew of “I AM WHO I AM” is a way of saying that God is the self-existing one. His existence doesn’t depend on anyone or anything. However, it would be odd for Moses to only say, “Hey everybody, I AM sent me.” So check out the next verse:
“Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—appeared to me…”
The word LORD in all caps is “YHWH” [יְהוָ֞ה] in Hebrew, which we pronounce as: “Yahweh.” That’s God’s personal name revealed for the first time in recorded human history to Moses at the burning bush (more on that in the video below).
What’s important for our discussion is that Jesus used this designation of “I AM” for Himself!
You may have heard before that there are seven ‘I am’ statements of Jesus. There are actually many more than that – scholars suggest there are over 20 in the gospels. But there’s one in particular that’s really important for our discussion. This one comes from John 8:58 where Jesus says:
“Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am!”
Aside from the fact that this claim alludes to Jesus’ eternality, how do we know this “I am” links to God’s name? Well, reactions from people in a narrative can often inform the reader. When Jesus made this claim, the people that heard it tried to kill Him by stoning Him to death! They were upset because they knew the scriptures forward and backward, and they knew full well that Jesus just claimed to be the same God that Moses was talking to at the burning bush. The problem was that if a person claimed to be Yahweh God to Jewish religious leaders, their knee jerk reaction was to put that person to death (John 10:33).
There’s another instance (not usually listed in the famous 7 ‘I am’ statements) in John 13:19 where Jesus predicts that He will be betrayed by one of His disciples. He didn’t need to let them know what He knew, but check out why He did anyway:
“I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am who I am.” (NIV)
Admittedly, if you were to look up other translations of this verse, most will say, “I am he.” But the reason the NIV translators use “I am who I am” is because the Greek Septuagint uses the exact same phrase [Ἐγώ εἰμι = I am] in Exodus 3:14. The NIV translators are helping their readers know in John 13:19 that Jesus is claiming to be the great “I AM” of Exodus 3:14. And actually, that’s why I’m writing this series! I want you to not only know that Jesus claimed to be God, but that when you believe Jesus was who He said He was and give your allegiance to Him, you will have eternal life with Him (John 14:6, 1 John 5:13).
To sum up: Jesus claimed to be the great “I AM” of Exodus 3:14. That’s quite the claim! And it’s a claim that eventually put Jesus on the cross for claiming to be Yahweh God (Mark 14:62). And speaking of Yahweh, next week we’ll see what Jesus meant by saying that God the Father has put His name in Jesus – yet another way that Jesus claims to be God. Stay tuned!