Reformed Spirituality: A Spirituality letting God be God.
Exodus 3: 13-15
But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.”’ God also said to Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you”: This is my name for ever, and this my title for all generations.
Reflection
Moses, fresh from the mystery of the burning bush, called to be the liberator of God’s people enslaved in Egypt, asks God’s name. The answer, as Churchill once said of Russia, is ‘…a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.’ God is God – ‘I AM WHO I AM’, or perhaps ‘I will be who I will be’. God’s ‘name’ is mystery. God is beyond human understanding, but God tells Moses to tell the people ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ In other words, God is known by what God does in the journey of faith from Abraham onwards.
Reformed spirituality and theology has always attempted to let God be God. Isaac Watts wrote of God ‘…immortal, invisible / in light inaccessible hid from our eyes’. Holy, majestic, juggling universes, playing with sub-atomic subtlety – God is God, free, sovereign. If we are to find God, we must do as God told the Israelites – look to the history of Israel, and to Jesus, for by a miracle of grace, God became God for us in Jesus Christ.
In a lecture tour in America in 1962, Karl Barth was asked if he could sum up the massive volumes of his theology in one sentence. He thought, and said ‘In the words of a song I learnt at my mother’s knee: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” ’ If we would know God, it is to Scripture we must go, and more particularly to the Cross of Christ, for it is in that awful suffering and death, in that moment of sacrifice, that we see with most clarity who God is – the God of unbounded love.
Prayer
Holy God
You hold universes in being,
yet your signature
is also found in the sub-atomic.
Truly, You will be who You will be.
Direct our eyes we pray
to a distant hill and a gaunt cross,
for you are as you are in Jesus our Lord,
Your wounded hands
offering us bread, wine, and life eternal.
Amen