All that the LORD is, I am. Just as God told His people He would be everything they needed then and forever, so did Yeshua. And His promise wasn’t limited to His earthly lifetime; He makes it to us still.

In the ‘I AM Sayings,’ Yeshua reveals deep truths about who He is, how He relates to us, and even how He understood His own ministry. When we look at the Jewish background of His Words and how they were received by His hearers, it can enrich our understanding of these famous words.

The last of His I AM sayings is the most unique, because unlike the others, He doesn’t qualify it by saying I am … the vine, or the door. He simply states: Before Abraham was, I AM.

The First I Am In The Bible – God’s

This statement takes us back to the first I AM in the Bible, when God reveals Himself and His Name to Moses at Horeb, the very mountain where he will later lead Israel, and where the whole nation will hear God’s voice for themselves (Deut 5:2). What draws Moses in is a bush ablaze but not consumed; what he hears is the voice of the LORD.

God introduces Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and reveals His heart: He has seen His people’s pain, heard their cries of anguish, and the time for deliverance has come, with Moses as His instrument. But Moses, afraid, asks: what shall I tell them when they ask me for your name?

God answers, ‘I am who I am,’ and tells Moses to say to the people, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ In Hebrew this is represented by YHVH (Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei), related to the Hebrew root of the verb ‘to be.’ It is the name that speaks of His eternal, self-existent nature — and because it is His covenant name, it is also the name that points us to relationship with Him.

Who Am I?

If each of God’s names is a manifestation of His divinity, teaching us not only who He is but how He act; what was God saying to Moses when He called Himself ‘I Am who I Am’? The rabbis teach that this Name speaks of His Being and existence. Rashi, the great Jewish commentator, adds that it can equally be read in the future tense — Ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I will be what I will be.’

I found this really helpful, because as Rashi suggests, the LORD is saying more than ‘I am, I exist, I have always existed, take me as I am or leave me.’ There is a deeper meaning hidden here. God has chosen to reveal Himself, and He chooses the how and the when; He decides what meaning to ascribe to Himself. But this isn’t what God is saying. He wasn’t offering Moses a take-me-or-leave-me God. He was sharing Himself with Moses, and in effect saying: as Rashi explains: My name ‘I am who I am,’ or ‘I will be who I will be,’ means that I will be to My people what I deem they need Me to be, in any given situation

This revelation continues in Yeshua, as the LORD has chosen to reveal Himself further through Him.

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

2 Cor 4:6  

The Father And I Are One

The I AM sayings of Yeshua are His personal statement about not only what He does, but who He is. So, to answer the question — what was Yeshua really saying when He said, before Abraham was, I am? He was speaking about His eternal existence. Not only is He eternal, not only was He pre-existent, there even before creation began.

But His declaration is more than just a simple statement of His pre-existence. I believe that what Yeshua was saying, by using this declaration, is that He is the same as the God who revealed Himself at the burning bush, and that He shares the same eternal nature as the LORD. It’s no wonder they tried to stone Him.

In this one statement, Yeshua is declaring, just as His Father did to Moses, that He can determine who He is and how He acts. However, in His humanity He was obedient to the will of the Father; that was His calling. But He wanted His hearers to know that He wasn’t limited by His humanity, because He was also fully divine. Remember His words that He spoke: ‘The Father and I are one,’ and ‘if you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.’ (Jn10:30)

Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So, they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.

John 8:58–59 

We miss how shocking these words were to His hearers. They understood exactly what Yeshua was saying about His nature and His divinity: to them it was heresy.

All That The Father Is

All that the LORD is, I am. Just as God was telling His people that He would be to them all that they needed, both then and forever, so was Yeshua and like His Father, His promise wasn’t limited to just His physical lifetime, to His hearers, because He made this promise to us all.

And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’

Matt 28:18–20.

The reason He can make this promise is that He has the authority to make it.