I AM: Moses, the Burning Bush, and the Name That Cannot Be Contained

Come Follow Me 2026 – Week 12 • Exodus 1–6 • Mar 23–29

Israel in Bondage: Covenant People in a Hostile World

The book of Exodus opens with a genealogy — the sons of Jacob who came to Egypt — and then a sentence that marks the pivot of Israel’s history: “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph” (Ex. 1:8). The covenant favor that Joseph’s memory had secured is gone. Four centuries of memory can be erased in a single political transition. The people who had been guests of Pharaoh are now a threat to be managed — “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we” (Ex. 1:9).

The oppression escalates through Exodus 1 with terrible logic. First: “They did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens” (Ex. 1:11). Then, when affliction does not reduce their numbers but increases them, comes forced labor: “They made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field” (Ex. 1:14). And then the final, horrifying decree: “Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river” (Ex. 1:22). Pharaoh’s response to uncontrollable growth is genocide.

But Exodus 1 also records the resistance. The midwives Shiphrah and Puah disobey Pharaoh’s command to kill the male children (Ex. 1:17). Their reason is simply stated: “they feared God.” This is the first act of civil disobedience in scripture, performed by two women whose names we know while the Pharaoh who commanded their obedience is unnamed. The fear of God is more powerful than the fear of Pharaoh. God rewards them: “He made them houses” — he established their families. Those who protect covenant life are themselves given covenant life.

Moses: The Preserved Deliverer

The birth and preservation of Moses (Ex. 2:1–10) is one of the most beloved narratives in scripture. Jochebed hides her son three months, then places him in a papyrus basket waterproofed with bitumen and pitch, setting it among the reeds at the edge of the Nile. The Nile is where Pharaoh commanded Hebrew boys to be drowned; it becomes the instrument of Moses’ preservation. The very mechanism of death becomes the means of salvation — a pattern that will recur in the Passover and in the cross.

Pharaoh’s daughter discovers the child and recognizes him as a Hebrew (Ex. 2:6). She has compassion. Miriam, Moses’s sister who has been watching from a distance, seizes the moment: “Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee?” (Ex. 2:7). The result is that Jochebed, Moses’s own mother, is paid by Pharaoh’s household to nurse and raise her own son. The irony is divine: Pharaoh’s household unknowingly funds the education and formation of the man who will destroy Pharaoh’s power. God’s sense of providence operates at a level of detail that can appear, in retrospect, almost playful.

Moses grows up “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds” (Acts 7:22). He receives the finest education Egypt can offer while remaining connected to his covenant people. At forty, he kills an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew and flees to Midian. This is the first death in Moses’ story — not the death of Moses, but the death of his Egyptian identity, his place in Pharaoh’s court, his former life. The deliverance of the Hebrews will not come through Egyptian power. It will come through a man who has been stripped of everything Egyptian and rebuilt in the wilderness.

The Burning Bush: Holy Ground and the Divine Presence

After forty years in Midian tending Jethro’s flocks — eighty years old, his ambitions presumably long extinguished — Moses comes to the mountain of God, Horeb (Sinai). There he sees something that contradicts the ordinary rules of the physical world: a bush burning but not consumed (Ex. 3:2). He turns aside to look. And God speaks.

The first command is to remove his sandals: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Ex. 3:5). This is the doctrine of holy ground — that God’s presence transforms the physical environment. Where God dwells, the ground is set apart. Bare feet on holy ground is the posture of radical vulnerability and reverence — no barrier between the covenant person and the earth that God has sanctified by his presence. This posture will be replicated in temples: the place where God meets his people requires the removal of what separates us from sacred ground.

God introduces himself by covenant lineage: “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex. 3:6). The covenant chain that runs from Abraham through Isaac through Jacob — the same chain we have been tracing for six weeks — now arrives at Moses. The God who is appearing at the burning bush is the same God who walked between the pieces in Genesis 15, who stayed Abraham’s hand on Moriah, who gave Jacob a new name at Jabbok. The continuity of covenant identity is the God who introduces himself by naming the patriarchs.

Exodus 3:14

“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

The Divine Name: I AM THAT I AM

When Moses asks for God’s name — knowing that the Israelites will demand to know who has sent him — the answer he receives is the most theologically dense statement in the entire Old Testament: “I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14). In Hebrew: “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh.” From this same verb — to be, to exist, to cause to exist — comes the divine name YHWH, the tetragrammaton that Jewish tradition held too sacred to pronounce.

The name resists translation because it exceeds the capacity of language. “I AM THAT I AM” means: I am the one who always is. I exist without cause, without limit, without beginning or end. I am not defined by anything outside myself. I am not subject to the categories that define everything else. The philosopher’s “uncaused cause” and the theologian’s “necessary being” are attempts to describe in abstract language what God names in a burning bush in Sinai: I AM.

The Latter-day Saint reading of YHWH is specific: this is the premortal Jesus Christ. The Lord who appears to Moses at the burning bush, the Lord who delivered Israel from Egypt, the Lord who gave the law at Sinai — is the same Lord who was born in Bethlehem, crucified on Golgotha, and risen on the third day. The New Testament writers make this connection explicitly. When Jesus says “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), the Jewish leaders understand immediately that he is claiming to be YHWH — the God who spoke to Moses. They attempt to stone him for blasphemy. The “I am” sayings of John’s Gospel (“I am the bread of life,” “I am the light of the world,” “I am the resurrection”) are all riffs on the burning bush revelation. Jesus is not merely saying “I am these things.” He is saying “I am the I AM.”

Cross-References — The Divine Name

• John 8:58 — “Before Abraham was, I am” — Jesus claims the name of the burning bush
• D&C 38:1 — “I am the same which spake, and the world was made, and all things came by me” — Christ identifies himself as YHWH
• 3 Nephi 15:5 — Christ tells the Nephites that he is the giver of the law of Moses
• Mosiah 3:8 — Benjamin identifies Christ as “the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth,” connecting New Testament and Old

Moses’s Objections and God’s Answers: “I Will Be with Thee”

Moses’s response to his commission is a series of objections: “Who am I, that I should go?” (Ex. 3:11). “What shall I say unto them?” (Ex. 3:13). “They will not believe me” (Ex. 4:1). “I am not eloquent” (Ex. 4:10). “Send by the hand of him whom thou wilt send” (Ex. 4:13) — a politely phrased plea to send someone else entirely.

Each objection receives a divine answer, but the answers are not primarily arguments — they are presence. To “Who am I?” God does not answer with Moses’s qualifications; he answers: “I will be with thee” (Ex. 3:12). The adequacy is not in Moses; the adequacy is in God’s accompanying presence. To “I am not eloquent,” God answers: “Who hath made man’s mouth?... Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say” (Ex. 4:11–12). The pattern is consistent: God provides what Moses lacks by being the provision. “I will be with thee” is the answer to every objection.

This is the consistent structure of covenant commission throughout scripture. When Jeremiah says “I cannot speak: for I am a child,” God answers: “Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee” (Jer. 1:6–7). When Joseph Smith is young and lacks experience, God says: “Fear not to do good... and whatsoever ye do, do it with all your might” (D&C 6:33–36). The commission is not issued on the basis of existing capacity. It is issued on the basis of what God will provide. The covenant call is always larger than the person called — because the covenant is fulfilled by God, not by human competence alone.

The Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart: Does God Override Agency?

One of the most theologically contested passages in Exodus is the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. God tells Moses: “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 7:3). Does this mean God coerces Pharaoh to resist, and then punishes him for resistance that God himself caused? Does God override human agency for his purposes?

Careful examination of the Exodus text reveals something more nuanced. In the early plagues, the text consistently says that Pharaoh “hardened his heart” or that Pharaoh’s heart “was hardened” — passive constructions that do not specify divine agency (Ex. 7:13, 22; 8:15, 19, 32). Only later, after Pharaoh has repeatedly and freely chosen to harden his own heart, does the text say that “the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (Ex. 9:12; 10:20). The sequence matters: Pharaoh chooses first; God confirms the choice later.

This is not a contradiction of the doctrine of moral agency. It is a statement about the cumulative effect of repeated free choices: a heart that repeatedly chooses hardness eventually becomes hard. God does not create Pharaoh’s resistance; he honors it. The “hardening” is the divine ratification of Pharaoh’s own settled choice — confirming the direction in which he has already been moving. Paul uses this passage in Romans 9 to discuss divine sovereignty and human responsibility, maintaining the tension rather than resolving it simplistically: “He hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth” (Rom. 9:18). The mystery is not that God overrides agency but that God works within human choices, even resistant ones, to accomplish purposes that exceed what any individual can see.

Moses and Aaron Before Pharaoh: Divine Authority vs. Worldly Power

Moses and Aaron’s first audience with Pharaoh (Ex. 5) ends badly. Pharaoh refuses and increases Israel’s burden — removing the straw from the brick-making and requiring the same daily quota. The Israelites turn on Moses and Aaron: “Ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to slay us” (Ex. 5:21).

This is the pattern of prophetic ministry that will recur across the entire history of Israel: the prophet obeys God, the immediate result is worse than before, and the people blame the prophet. Moses turns to God with the complaint: “Lord, wherefore hast thou so evil entreated this people? why is it that thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath done evil to this people; neither hast thou delivered thy people at all” (Ex. 5:22–23). This is remarkably honest prayer — Moses holding God accountable to his own commission. And God’s response in Exodus 6 is to expand Moses’s understanding of the covenant: “I am the LORD: and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them” (Ex. 6:2–3).

The covenant chain is explicitly invoked: the same covenant God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is now being fulfilled in Moses’s generation. The six weeks we have spent tracing that covenant from Genesis 12 through Genesis 50 are the six weeks that set the stage for Exodus. The God who says “I have remembered my covenant” (Ex. 6:5) is the same God who walked between the pieces in Genesis 15. Four hundred years after Joseph’s bones were committed to Egyptian soil, the covenant is being redeemed. The deliverer is standing before Pharaoh. The confrontation between divine authority and worldly power has begun — and history already knows how it will end.