Before You Call God Father, Part 2 | How to Pray Well

Luke 11:2

Let’s go back to Exodus chapter 3. Let’s pick up the story in verse 10 of Exodus chapter 3. Verse 10, “God said to Moses, ‘Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.’ But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?’ And God said, ‘But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.’”

So by this time Moses has aged somewhat, forty years in the desert, he’s now about 80 years old. He’s a shadow of, of his former impetuous, younger self. He’s no longer interested in taking charge, delivering Hebrews, murdering Egyptians. The desert has really withered away all his impetuousness and his drive and resolve and he comes across several times, as we just saw here, he comes across as rather insecure. He’s got a heightened sensitivity to his own weaknesses. He’s not altogether wrong about that. It says in verse 11, “Who am I?” That’s not a faux humility. He has really come to have an honest self-assessment. He’s correct in seeing he has no reason in himself for self-confidence, no reason in himself to believe that he is anything, that he can deliver Israel from Egypt. He’s tried that; he’s failed.

The deserts of Midian have a way of humbling a man, revealing what he’s made of. So when he protests in the next chapter, chapter 4 verse 1, “What if they don’t believe me or listen to my voice?” Or in chapter 4 verse 10, “I’m not eloquent either in the past or since you’ve spoken to your servant. I’m slow of speech and tongue.” Even when his insecurity goes too far in verse 13 of chapter 4, he actually sins against God, refusing to submit to this call, “O, my Lord, please send somebody else!” But God said, No. I’m not going to send somebody else. Forty years in the desert has done what I intended it to do to you.

As Moses would learn, the deliverance of Israel does not depend upon Moses. As great as we want to make him in The Ten Commandments and Charleton Heston and all the rest, deliverance from Egypt was not because of Moses. The Exodus depends upon God and it will happen because God is God, and that is what Moses is about to learn, to see where the source of his confidence is going to come from, to see where his assurance is grounded.

Look at Exodus 3:13, “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?” Now like all of us, you know, we ask questions in public, that a friend has, but it’s really our own question. It’s kind of like this, here. “What if they ask me what is his name, what shall I tell them?” What’s Moses asking? Help me to understand. Right?

But listen, don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s asking God and God is about to give him the secret code name, like, Shhh! It’s, it’s Yahweh, don’t tell anybody. So that after hearing that secret code name, he comes to the people and says, hey, come on, gather around. They say, okay, yeah. What’s his name? [Whispering] “Yahweh.” All right, come on in. You’re our leader. It’s not like that. Trust Moses, follow him as their leader, march triumphantly out of Egypt with the secret code name. No. Moses is asking this question because he wants to know what assurance he can find for himself and what assurance he can give to the people so that they will be assured and follow. What confidence can they find in God? That is, what in the name of God, the name of this God, the one who is calling and sending Moses, what is it pertaining to his particular character, what about his specific attributes, what in the name of God will provide assurance to the people of Israel? 

So when Moses asked God, what shall I say to them about, that is about your name, about your attributes, he is asking about God’s ability to deliver. He’s asking for some anchor of assurance, to give the people some modicum of hope, just a ray of light that will shine through to, to lift their hearts, namely this: that the God who sent him to announce Israel’s deliverance, that he really can conquer all the deities Israel had come to fear. So verse 14, God answers. Look what he says, “God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’ And he said, ‘Say this to the people of Israel,” and you listen carefully too, Moses, “I AM has sent me to you.”’”

God declares his name to Moses. It’s a name that uses the Hebrew verb of, Being, which is hayah. So what God said sounds something like this in the Hebrew, which I’ll slaughter because I’m not Jewish, I’m not Hebrew, but it says, ′eh-yeh ′ā-šer ′eh-yeh. ′eh-yeh ′ā-šer ′eh-yeh. Our translation renders it “I AM WHO I AM.” More to the point, it’s I AM THAT I AM. What does that mean, I AM THAT I AM? To declare his name using a verb of, Being, means God is Being, itself. He’s saying, I am existence. I am Being. Why? Because he’s saying, it is in my nature to exist.

Listen, humanity does not depend on me or you. We’re just instantiations of humanity, right, individual evidences of humanity. But if I die, humanity does not go away and neither do you. If you die, humanity does not cease to exist. Now if God dies, no more deity. It is his essence to exist. It is his essence to Be. That’s what he’s saying here. To Be and to exist it’s his essence to exist; divinity depends on his existence. Existence depends on divinity and so therefore, what he’s saying is, I am life itself. I am life. Jesus said it this way, “The Father has life in himself.”

So the name God, Yahweh, the Hebrew verb of Being means God is existence, God is life. Being, therefore, the source and the giver of life, existence, and Being. He is life itself. God is, as the philosophers and theologians say, God is pure act, as in it is God’s Being to exist. So since he is absolute Being, since he is absolutely existence itself, he is absolutely independent of all other things. He has no need. When he gives, he does not deplete himself. He is. He is absolute existence, self-existent, independent, he is utterly without need. 

The theological term that summarizes this doctrine I’m talking about is the word, aseity. If you want to just capture it there. It captures the idea that God exists. As Louis Berkhof puts it, “God exists by the necessity of his own being, and therefore necessarily. Necessarily, God exists.” Several truths follow from this doctrine. It’s all packed into I AM. God is eternal. He’s without beginning or end. He’s outside time. He exists beyond the limitations of time. God is eternal.

God is also infinite, that is to say, he is not finite. He’s outside of space. He exists beyond the limitations of space, limitations of the physical, material world. God is eternal; God is infinite. And the fact that he is infinite and eternal necessarily infers and means that God is spirit. God is by nature of his being spiritual, non-corporeal, without a body. He is immaterial; he is pure spirit. Jesus said that, John 4:24, “God is spirit,” speaking of God’s essence.

Obviously, this means God is not like us. He is different. We’re creatures; he’s, our Creator. We’re humanity; he is deity. He’s the only deity. And we exist in the time-space world that he has created for us. We live within the limitations and the boundaries of the time-space world that he designed. That’s his purpose for us. And it is in him that we “live and move and have our being.” We are mutable, doesn’t mean able to be silenced, it means changing.

We are mutable; we are changing creatures. That is captured right there in “we live and move.” So the movement from one place to another means we change. We go from this space to that space; we move, and we have our Being. We have our Being in God, in him, because God has life in himself, he’s the source of our life, he’s the source of our world. But he, himself, is independent of that world, independent of need. He is completely self-existent; he is completely self-sufficient.

This is a fundamental truth about the nature of God, Acts 17:24, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” Again, Berkhof says it well when he writes, “As the self-existent God. He is not only independent in himself. He also causes everything to depend on him.”

We all depend on him. We’re created that way. We’re designed to be dependent on him. So if you’re trying to live an independent, autonomous life, you’re living completely outside of your design. You might as well go out to your car in the parking lot, this is the same kind of folly, and go fill your tank with water and try to drive your car that way. It wasn’t designed to run on water. And so when you try to live outside the maker’s design, you will not drive anywhere. Your life will be vanity and futility and hopelessness.

He causes everything to depend on him. Why? Because he’s all goodness itself. God is not only our Creator, he’s, our sustainer. He cares for us. He’s the one who’s self-existent and independent. He has life in himself, and that means, beloved, that he never, ever, ever, ever changes. He is immutable, that’s the proper term to assign to him and not to us. He is immutable. He’s eternal, infinite, and therefore unchanging. Immutable.

All of that, that I’ve said so far, and so much more besides, is contained in that one name, the name Yahweh. So Yahweh, to Moses, he intended to demonstrate his faithfulness, that a promise that he made 400 years prior is going to come to pass; nothing is going to stop him. Humanly speaking, all the odds, of all the power of the earth stacked against him, God’s going to do it. He’s strong, and he will deliver. He is faithful. He is going to, he’s going to rip Israel out of the grip of Egypt, and Egypt will be destroyed in trying to hold on.

In spite of Pharaoh’s hardness of heart, in spite of Egypt’s power, unhindered by Moses’ inadequacies, and really even unhampered by Israel’s hesitancy to believe, and really its sustained unbelief, God doesn’t care about that. He’s going to do it. He’s going to overcome small-minded doubts. He’s going to overcome unwarranted fears. He’s going to completely overwhelm the pantheon of Egypt, Isis, Osiris, Ra, Sekhmet, all of it which sounds really dark and foreboding, but it’s really just…air, right? It’s nothing.

All these gods and goddesses, what is that but make-believe. Because as he said through the prophet Isaiah, as we read earlier, Isaiah 45, he said this four times in Isaiah 45, “I am Yahweh, and there is no other.” There is no god, goddess, there’s nothing. “I am Yahweh, and there is no other. Besides me, there is no god.” That’s what God wants Moses to anchor his confidence in. That’s what he wants Israel to anchor their confidence in.

So now, with that in mind, turn ahead from the book of Exodus to the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 6. Yahweh delivered Israel, just as he said, from the iron grip of the greatest superpower on earth. But before he sent them in to make that redemption complete, before he sent them in to take possession of the land of Canaan, sealing and fulfilling his promise to Abraham, Moses taught Israel a creed. He taught them a propositional statement of faith. We know this creed as the Shema of Israel. It takes its name from the first word of that creed, Shema, which is the imperative form of the Hebrew verb Shama, which means to hear, to listen. So it’s a command to hear, listen.

So before entering into the Promised Land and in order to seal the faith of Israel, and embolden them, encourage their hearts, strengthen their resolve in the face, really, of a ferocious number of Canaanite peoples and face them in battle, Moses wanted to stop, here, anchor their hearts in God’s unchanging nature and character with the words of this creed.

Look at Deuteronomy 6:1, “Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules, that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping,” How do you fear him? By keeping, by doing, by obeying, “his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life,” That is, don’t stop obeying. Do this “so your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, so that it may go well with you, so you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Look at the creed, verse 4, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” That is the heart and center of the Jewish confession of faith and that is what separates true worship from all false worship. That’s what separates the God of Israel from all other false gods. “šə-ma’ yiś-rā-’êl; Yah-weh ’ĕ-lō-hê-nū Yah-weh ’e-ḥāḏ.” “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God; Yahweh is one.” Obviously, that’s an affirmation of strict monotheism; One God, there is one and only one God.

Clear from Isaiah 45 and many other portions of Scripture, God is one, but that is not just a unity of singularity, that is, numerical oneness of God or the divine essence. Which, that is true, it’s at least that, but more essentially, this about what we call the simplicity of God, or we might say the indivisibility of God. He is not divided up into parts. 

When we talk about divine simplicity, we don’t mean to say that God is simple, that’s the deceptive thing about the word simplicity. Divine simplicity, it’s not about God being simple, being easy to understand or in any way elementary. Rather, divine simplicity refers to God, as I said, God’s indivisible essence, that is, God cannot be divided up into parts.

Another way to say it, God is not a composite being. He’s not joined together, composed of parts. Even, I’m not talking about physical and material parts, like atoms, I’m talking about even immaterial parts. As creatures we are composite beings. We’re made up of parts. We consist of composite attributes. At least two of them, at the very least, we are composed of material parts and immaterial parts; an immaterial part and a material part, right? We without a body, not human; without a spirit, not human. Both body and spirit, required to make us what we are. We depend upon God, who is the divine composer of our parts, that is, he knit us together in the womb, to use David’s language, Psalm 139. We depend upon God, the composer of the parts, to make us what we are.

God is not like us. He’s radically different from us in that regard. He is simple being, that is, not composite. He’s not made up of parts. He’s not composed of even, we might say, attributes, like theologians use the word attributes or perfections. Individually, those attributes not being God in and of themselves. So in other words, we don’t go to our systematic theology books and make a list of all attributes of God, the incommunicable attributes and the communicable attributes, the holiness, love, justice, omniscience, omnipotence and all the rest of those list attributes. We don’t take all of those, add them together, this plus this plus this plus this, that’s God. Why not? Because to say that, God is composed of parts.

That he’s composed and knit together of attributes that would deny what we’ve earlier said about divine aseity, the independency and self-sufficiency of God, because if God is composed of parts or attributes, then God is dependent upon the parts, and he needs all those parts to exist as he does. But he does not, because he’s not composed of parts. If God is composed of parts or attributes, then God is dependent upon a composer of the parts to make him to be what he is, that is, to put those parts together, so that he comes forth as God. He needs something outside of himself to put the parts together, all the attributes.

And we just said, that’s not true. If God is composed of parts, he depends on what is not God in order to be God. Stephen Charnock put it this way, “If God had distinct parts, then he would depend upon them. Not only that, but if God had parts, then God would be dependent upon the composer of the parts in order to be all that he is.” So as Charnock says, “His essence would be the effect of those distinct parts, and so he would not be absolute, entirely the first being.” But we know that that’s not true, not only would parts be put before him, but the composer of the parts would be put before him that, that means that if God were composed of parts, then we would be wrong to worship God.

We should be worshipping the composer of the parts of God, instead, whoever that might be. We know that’s not true because there is no composer of the parts, because God is not composed of parts, and there is no one prior to God. Isaiah 45, “I am Yahweh, and there is no other.” Isaiah 44:6, “I am the first.” And the last, but “I am the first,” God is the first, therefore nothing is before him, nothing precedes him, no composer of the parts, who then takes the parts and puts them together to make him all that he is. God is not the sum of his attributes, eternal plus infinite plus spiritual plus love plus holiness, etc. Rather, we confess that all that is in God is God. All that is in God is God or God is all of his attributes.

Now let’s come up for air. Let your brain cool off for a few minutes. Let’s see the impact of this. I’m guessing that, like me, you didn’t know the Shema of Israel contained all of that; one creed and all that stuff comes out and I didn’t even tell you the half of it, but it does come out of that. Necessarily, all of that and more comes out of that creed and I want you to appreciate, apprehend, even if you struggle to comprehend it, I want you to appreciate, even though we struggle to understand this, when Moses taught Israel to confess, “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one,” he taught his people a creed of the greatest theological depth, one that provided an unshakable bedrock of assurance and that creed rests upon the name of God revealed to Moses back in the desert of Midian, “I AM THAT I AM. Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

So beloved, before you call God, father, learn to appreciate what it means to confess the name of God, not only to learn what it means for the name of God to be hallowed, but also so we can appreciate what an incredible gift we have received, to address God as father. He’s the source of all existence, the source of being. Of course, he overcomes our mortality. He’s the source of all being. It is his being to exist. Why would we doubt that, that he can give us life from the dead? When we learn that God is good, and he cares for us such that we ought never have anxiety, to have anxiety is an indication of our lack of faith, our distrust. It’s actually a, a very deep and profound sin.

Well, we can see now that God, by the definition of his essence, is unchanging. He’s the source of and the sustainer of all of our life, and he does not change. He seems to rejoice in overcoming great odds to care for his people. He will always remain faithful because, by virtue of his essence, God is immutable. He never changes. He is pure spirit. He is eternal and infinite and nothing, bounds his power. He’s the bedrock of our faith.

So when we pray “Father, hallowed be your name,” we’re compelled to do so because of the depth of understanding that defies the superficiality of this age. Oh, beloved, may it never be true of us, that among us God’s name is inconsequential, that he is weightless to us, that he lives at the periphery of our existence. No, no, no, no! “In him we live and move and have our being.” Upon him we stand. In him we live and in him we have all hope. Bow with me in prayer.

Our Father, you are God. You are Yahweh. You are life itself. You exist. You are. It is by definition divinity to exist. And we’re so grateful for that being the fountain of every other truth. We thank you that you are the source of all being, and you are the sustainer of all that you have created. But most particularly, that you, through Christ, command us to come and call you father, that you’ve adopted us into your family by faith in Jesus Christ, that for all those who look upon Christ and see in him the satisfaction of your wrath against our sin by his death upon the cross, that we see in Christ the perfection of righteousness, and that by faith in him we know that you will impute or reckon his righteousness to us, that you’ll treat us like you treat him, call us beloved because we are united by faith to him, and we are therefore your beloved. Oh, God, we thank you so much for who you are, and that we have the privilege of calling you father. Help us to understand that, in deeper and deeper ways, as the weeks and months and years go by, that we may bring all glory and praise and worship to you. In the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.