Exodus 3:13 Meaning Moses Said to God

Moses asks for the name, and the whole account turns on that question. A name is what a thing answers to when it is called. So the search is for what the creative power answers to inside a human being. The reply is I AM. It names the plain awareness of being that every person carries and cannot escape.

That awareness is the sender behind every mission a man is given. Whatever a person joins to those two words, I am this, I am that, is what he is dispatched to become. The name was never a foreign syllable to memorize but the sense of being that precedes every claim. To know the name is to know that the one sending Moses and the one asking the question are the same presence, speaking as I am.

Moses is the awakening reason standing before the burning presence, and his question about the name is the mind reaching for the true nature of the power it has met within. To ask the name is to ask what this inner reality actually is, since in Hebrew a name carries the essence of the thing named.

The children of Israel are the scattered faculties of the person, waiting to be led up out of bondage, and they will not follow until the deliverer can say what governs him. The demand for a name is the inner powers requiring to know the essence of the self that would lead them out.

Moses: the awakening reason drawn toward the higher presence, sent to gather the inner powers Children of Israel: the scattered faculties of a person, held in bondage and awaiting deliverance Name: the essence of the inner divine reality, since a name holds the true nature of what it names

Sent on an errand larger than himself, a man reaches for a name to hold up like credentials, something to make the mission solid in front of a doubting crowd. Underneath the practical question sits a small fear, the wish to have God safely defined before stepping out. Certainty is being asked for where only trust was offered.

The cure is to go anyway, carrying the sending rather than a settled formula. God is present in the asking itself, near enough to be questioned, already the ground the man stands on while he wonders what to say.