There is a name God gave Himself that Israel was forbidden to speak carelessly, and there is a phrase Jesus spoke in a Jerusalem courtyard that nearly cost Him His life on the spot. They are the same name. Most readers never catch the connection, because it hides across three languages and fourteen centuries of revelation — a Hebrew verb at a burning bush, a prophetic refrain against the idols of Babylon, and a Greek phrase placed deliberately in the mouth of Christ. Traced together, they form one of the most tightly woven threads in all of Scripture, and they end somewhere no reader expects: not merely in a doctrine about who Jesus is, but in the shape of what is happening inside every believer united to Him.
The Name From the Fire
When Moses stood before the bush that burned and was not consumed, he asked God a simple question: who shall I say sent me? God did not answer with a title. He answered with a sentence built out of His own existence.
Ehyeh asher ehyeh — “I AM WHO I AM,” or, just as faithfully, “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE” (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew ehyeh comes from the verb hayah, “to be,” in what grammarians call the imperfect aspect — a form that carries motion rather than planting a flag in a single tense the way English does. It expresses ongoing existence, unfolding presence, action still coming to bear. Two verses later, God removes any ambiguity by using the same word again: “Certainly I will be [ehyeh] with you” (Exodus 3:12). Not merely, I exist. Rather: I will be present. I will act. I will prove faithful to what I have promised.
This is not a God whose being is incomplete and reaching toward something greater — Scripture will not permit that reading. “I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6). The future carried inside ehyeh is not the future of a God still becoming what He is not yet. It is the future of a God who is sovereignly free to reveal Himself, in His own time, according to His own eternal purpose. He does not need history to complete Him; history is the stage on which He chooses to display who He already, eternally, is.
Out of ehyeh comes the covenant name Israel would not pronounce — YHWH. God speaks of Himself in the first person: “I am.” Israel speaks of Him in the third: “He is.” Same root, same fire — a name that functions not as a label but as a declaration of self-existence: the One who receives being from no one, and gives being to everyone else.
That declaration does not stay sealed in the Torah. It resurfaces deliberately, repeatedly, six centuries later — in the mouth of a prophet standing in the ruins of a nation that had forgotten who its God was.
The Reassertion in Isaiah
By the time Isaiah writes, Israel is surrounded by idols — gods of wood and stone that cannot speak, cannot save, cannot even remember yesterday. Into that silence, YHWH speaks a phrase again and again that functions almost like a signature: two bare Hebrew words, no verb required — ani hu, “I — He.”
“I, the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he” (Isaiah 41:4). “Even to your old age I am he; even to grey hairs will I carry you” (Isaiah 46:4). And at the center, Isaiah 43:10 — the verse the New Testament will quietly build on: “that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he… before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.”
When Jewish scholars translated this Hebrew into Greek roughly two centuries before Christ, ani hu became — in Isaiah 41, 43, and 46 alike — the exact same two words: ego eimi, “I am.” Strip the surrounding clauses from Isaiah 43:10 LXX and the bare grammatical shell reads: that you may believe… that I am. Turn to John 13:19, and Jesus tells His disciples, in nearly identical Greek: that you may believe… that I am. This is not accidental convergence. John is placing Isaiah’s ani hu — YHWH’s own self-identification against the idols of the nations — directly into the mouth of Jesus of Nazareth.
The name from the burning bush did not remain a historical artifact. It kept being reasserted, kept being sharpened against the darkness of every generation that heard it, until it was finally spoken by a man standing in a body.
Was, and Became
John opens his Gospel with a verb that should stop every careful reader. “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1) — ēn in the Greek. Not began. Not came to be. Simply was: continuous, uncreated, without a starting point — the same eternal is-ness that spoke from the fire to Moses.
Thirteen verses later, John reaches for an entirely different verb: “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) — egeneto, from ginomai, to enter a new state, to come to pass. The aorist tense marks a real, dated, historical event.
Notice precisely what John does not say. He never writes that the Word became God — the Word already was God, established and unretracted since verse one. What the Word became was flesh: true humanity, genuinely assumed, without any surrender of what He eternally was. This is among the deepest confessions in the church’s history, stated as plainly as it can be stated: He became what He was not, without ever ceasing to be what He was. This is the wonder Paul calls “the mystery of godliness” — the One who eternally was, manifested in flesh (1 Timothy 3:16): not deity becoming something less than deity, but the eternal Son truly assuming what He had not possessed before, a human nature, while remaining without interruption all that He eternally is. The Incarnation was therefore no diminishment of deity, no contracting of God to fit inside a manger, but the infinite God freely uniting a human nature to His own eternal Person — an act of omnipotence, not its limitation. Only the One who eternally is could freely enter into becoming without losing anything of who He is.
The God who said “I will be” at the bush now stands at the center of that becoming — Immanuel, God with us. The promise of presence is fulfilled in flesh and blood.
Stones in the Courtyard
Here the argument stops being a matter of grammar and becomes a matter of blood in the street.
In John 8, Jesus stands in the temple courtyard disputing with religious leaders about Abraham, and says something that, read flatly, makes no grammatical sense: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Not I was. I am — the timeless, unpredicated declaration, ego eimi with nothing following it. The exact bare formula of Isaiah 43:10. The exact name from the burning bush.
The response is immediate: “Then took they up stones to cast at him” (John 8:59).
That reaction is the evidence this connection is not a modern scholar’s clever typology imposed on the text after the fact. These were men who had heard Isaiah read aloud in synagogue their entire lives. They recognized ani hu; they recognized ego eimi. They understood, in half a second, without a lexicon or a seminary degree, precisely what Jesus had just claimed for Himself — the covenant name of YHWH, spoken in the first person, in front of witnesses. That is why they reached for stones. Not because He had said something confusing, but because He had said something they understood perfectly, and to them it was unforgivable.
Everything preceding this moment has been philological — Hebrew imperfects, Greek translation choices, verbal parallels across centuries a modern reader must be walked through carefully. This moment is where the argument becomes witnessed. The connection between Exodus, Isaiah, and John was not invisible to the first century audience most qualified to catch it. It was legible enough to nearly get a man killed for it.
(It is worth noting, for the careful reader: a small minority of older translations render John 8:58’s ego eimi in a past tense — “I have existed,” “I was already.” The majority and best-supported reading is the timeless, unpredicated present, consistent with the Isaiah 43:10 formula it echoes. Even on the minority reading, the claim to pre-existence before Abraham remains extraordinary; the argument of this article does not depend on disputing the minority position, only on the well-established majority reading and its connection to Isaiah.)
Being, Becoming, and the Life Inside You
Why does any of this matter beyond settling a Christological question?
Because the pattern Christ enacted in the Incarnation — becoming what He was not, without ceasing to be what He eternally was — echoes forward into the shape of what happens inside every believer united to Him. This is an echo, not an identity claim: the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures in one divine Person is not the same kind of union as the believer’s new nature indwelling alongside the old. Scripture does not present the believer as undergoing a Chalcedonian union. What it does present is a genuinely parallel grammar — being and becoming held together without one erasing the other — and it is that pattern, not the precise theological mechanism, that carries forward.
You did not stop being who you were when you were made a new creation in Christ. Neither did you simply remain who you were. Something was joined to you — a new nature, a new life, Christ Himself dwelling in you by His Spirit — without the old nature evaporating on the spot. That is the substance of the conflict Paul describes across Romans 7 and 8: two natures, one person, a real becoming that has not yet swallowed up everything of the old. The believer lives inside an echo of the same grammar as the Incarnation — being and becoming, held together without contradiction — because the same God who united deity and humanity in one Person is the God who unites His own life to yours without erasing you in the process.
This is not a distant doctrine. It is the architecture of your own sanctification. The I AM who entered becoming for your sake is the same I AM presently becoming something in you that was not there before, and He will finish what He started, because He does not abandon what He has joined to Himself.
The Name That Seals the Canon
Scripture opens this thread at a burning bush in the wilderness. It closes it on an island called Patmos, in the mouth of the risen Christ Himself: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8).
Which is. Which was. Which is to come. Ehyeh asher ehyeh, spoken one final time from the far end of redemptive history, looking back across every page in between. The God who told Moses His name is the God who told John His name — and the fire has not gone out, and the name has not changed. He is not a God still forming, still developing into something greater. He is the God who was, who is, and who is to come — and He has never once stopped being faithful to the name He gave from the fire.
I AM. I WAS. I AM COMING. He is He.
See also: Only He Who Is Could Become — a companion study on why the omnipotence of God is what makes the Incarnation possible in the first place: only the One who already is, was, and is to come could enter becoming without loss.
