Most of us find ourselves in one of those situations where we're asked, what do you mean?

And we think a little like Augustine when he was asked to explain the nature of time and said,

I thought I knew what it was until you asked me.

And I sometimes wonder if the same is true when someone asks, what is God like?

From one point of view, the answer is, he's actually not like anything. He's God.

It works the other way around. What he creates and what he does

are like what he is. I mean, only when we begin with God and then move to what he creates and does,

are we really ready to move back again from those things

and understand how the Bible uses them to teach us what God is like?

That's a very basic principle. If we're going to think biblically and if our theology is going to be honoring to God,

then we should begin with God himself.

Yesterday we were thinking together about the great name of God in the Old Testament, the name I Am, the name Yahweh.

I said that some biblical scholars have thought, with some wisdom, that when God says I am who I am,

He's telling Moses and the people to keep their eyes and their ears open,

to listen to what God says about himself and to watch what He does in history.

From these two realities, God's acts and God's words interpreting his acts, they would get

to know who he really is.

Perhaps that helps us to understand what is meant later in Exodus 6 when God says to Moses

that although he appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, by my name the Lord, I am Yahweh.

I did not make myself known to them. And yet the name Yahweh is used dozens of times already in Genesis.

It's possible, of course, that the people didn't know it at all and had never heard it.

Perhaps Moses wrote Genesis

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