John 8:48-59

Be Still: Lord, you are the beginning and the end of everything. Let me rest in that knowledge and know you surrounding me today. Amen

Read: John 8:48-59

'Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, 'before Abraham was born, I am!'  (v58)

Encounter: The other day my daughter asked how we had decided on her name. She wanted to know the meaning and thinking behind our choice. Names are important to us and in the Bible book of Exodus, God has introduced himself to Moses with a very peculiar name: ‘I Am’. In the Hebrew language the word for this name denotes past, present, future, so perhaps it's a little more like: I was, I am, I will be – simultaneously expressing all three states. As Rabbi David Fohrman notes, ‘That’s not just being eternal; that’s a whole new way of being altogether.’ * I AM. 

Some people say that they believe Jesus was just a good teacher; they say it is all he claimed to be and anything divine was attributed to him by later adherents of the faith. In John 8 Jesus announces to the crowd that he, too, is ‘I Am’. It is an astonishing statement as he is directly claiming to be God. The crowd that day knew exactly what he meant, and immediately tried to kill him for blasphemy. They had absolutely no doubt what he was claiming. Jesus was claiming to be the One who led the people of Israel out of the wilderness, he was claiming to be in existence before Abraham the patriarch of the faith, he was claiming to be nothing less than the God of Creation, the God who was, who is, who will be.

Apply: It is a key question for us to answer: who do we think Jesus is? A good man, a teacher or the Saviour of the world? If it is the last of these, then we are called to repent and believe, to put our trust in him: the great I Am.

What might it mean for us today to know that we travel with one who holds the past, the present, the future in his hands? What might we let go, perhaps with great relief, into the power, presence and love of Jesus Christ