Where God Comes From

By Callie Grant

When someone asks you where you are from, what they often want to know is who are your people, or even more, what is your kind?

Conditioned as we are from birth to seek out origins of people and things, it’s often one of the first things children want to know about God, too. A parent once posted on our Web site a question from six-year-old John. He asked, “Who are God’s parents?” Origins are how we see our world and make meaning of it.¹

God’s self-existence might be the hardest aspect about him to grasp. This truth about God, that he has no beginning and no ending—no origins—is far more outlandish and hopeful, or dreadful, than anything we can know or imagine. It means he has unlimited power, inside and outside his created order, which is contained by him.

But God is not an amorphous entity, abroad and aloof watching our world from the dark reaches of space. He who always was, is, and always will be, has ordained a creation of love because he is Love. That means Love is the life force of today and all eternity. It is stronger than death, and it never fails.²

In love, God’s grace pervades time and space from the farthest unknowable place to the tiniest heart where he reveals himself with the intimate voice of Jesus, fully God and Man.³ This self-existent God of Love sees and hears and feels and acts.

God first told Moses, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them.”⁴ Then, through the shepherd’s staff of a reluctant Moses, the mighty hand of God freed his people.

We shake our heads at Moses for trying so hard to talk God out of his assignment. Moses put up five barriers to God choosing him when he finally begs, Please send someone else!⁵ Parents are amazed by God’s fatherly patience with Moses.

However, something much more life-giving is offered by God through Moses’ stalling. God uses it to give all generations a sweeping view of who he is and who we are in him—an assurance for which we all thirst. He tells us his kind.

In reply to Moses’ first barrier, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt,” God’s immediate reply was, “I will be with you.”⁶ That’s who Moses was. God said, you are the one that I am with.

And it’s what makes you who you are. You have a self-existent, self-determined God who is with you. Emmanuel.

But Moses countered, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”⁷ It was Moses who wanted—and needed—to know God’s name, and what was his kind.

“A more positive assertion of selfhood could not be imagined than those words of God to Moses: I am that I am,” A. W. Tozer writes. “Everything God is, everything that is God, is set forth in that unqualified declaration of independent being. Yet in God, self is not a sin but the quintessence of all possible goodness, holiness, and truth.”⁸

So the first triumph of Moses was accepting what God said about himself. Amazing power and works proceeded from that kind of life with God. They can from your life, too.

Here is a suggestion: When you wake up in the morning, sit on the side of your bed and willfully bend your first thoughts on who God is, the eternal Being who contains and loves your world. Hold that thought while you shuffle down the hall. Start your day like that for a week, and see how it affects your spirit. Share your experience with others here.

Holy Father, help us to hold an elevated, proper view of you that is worthy of your Name.

1. A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, (New York: HarperOne, 1961), 25-26.

2. Song of Songs 8:6, 1 Corinthians 13:8.

3. John 1

4. Exodus 3:7-8

5. Exodus 3:11-4:13

6. Exodus 3:11-12

7. Exodus 3:13-14

8. Tozer, 29.

Newborn Promise Project co-author Callie Grant heads Graham Blanchard Inc, which creates children’s and parent’s books for building families up in Christian faith. Learn more at http://www.grahamblanchard.com.