“Thus says the Lord who made it, the Lord who formed it to establish it (the Lord is His name); Call to me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” Jeremiah 33:2-3
Generally, when we see a verse like the one above, we are excited that as we ask God to show us great and mighty things, He is willing to open our spiritual eyes and give us the things we are looking for.
However, verse 2 is critical to meditate on before we move into verse 3. The Lord reminds us of His name. When the Lord spoke to His prophets such as Moses, He didn’t come with His resume` and a list of qualifications, to prove His idea would work. When God told Moses to go to Pharaoh, Moses asked God a question. Let’s take a look at Exodus 3:13-14.
“Then Moses said to God, “Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
Instead of the Lord trying to prove to Moses and the Israelites who He was, He declared Himself as the “I AM”. This is the all encompassment of who God is, which is so much more profound and deeper than any man can comprehend. All truth, all knowledge, all power, & all insight belong to Him. He is the God who has formed all things, and the past, present, and the future belong to Him; man only continues to learn and discover what the Lord put in place thousands of years ago.
When we look at the book of Genesis, we find that Adam walked with God in the cool of the day. His knowledge came from his intimacy with God. He knew God and Adam had knowledge of how to live right because he was in relationship with the Lord of the universe. His knowledge was relational. The sin in the Garden of Eden brought about a curse. The curse was that we lost the privilege of fully knowing the Lord and being in relationship with Him. The curse also caused us to know things which we didn’t need to know.
We were born to know God and walk with Him, but when sin entered the world, doubt and unbelief entered the heart of man. As a result we entertained thoughts and actions apart from the will of God. Our eyes were opened to various possibilities of evil which defiled us and caused us to walk in sin. When sin entered our hearts, it caused us to become survival oriented and self focused rather than God focused. As a result we had a breakdown in our relationship with the God. Man became insecure. Sin also became a slave master that we had to either live under or try to overcome.
The majority of the years we walk with God has one of two characteristics. We are either asking Him to intervene in our lives and our circumstances, or we are asking Him to show us how to be useful in His kingdom. As a result, if we allow ourselves, we can have a tendency to focus on what our natural eyes see, and our prayers become shallow prayers for God to save us in a situation.
As Jeremiah 33 reminds us, the essence of our relationship with God is to call out to Him and He will show us great and mighty things. Those great and might things could be; a) God’s wisdom and counsel for a tough situation at work, b) His protective power over you, c) a new understanding for a person who has been difficult to love, d)His acceptance of you in the midst of opposition, and a whole host of other revelations that He desires for you. We come to Him calling out to Him inviting Him to reveal Himself.
The more we have a revelation of the “I AM”, the more settled we are with the circumstances of our lives. Unless the issue of knowing the “I AM” is continually part of our prayers, we will be addicted to a lifestyle of looking at what He can do for us, and using Him as our butler and missing out on knowing Him as our LORD. When we continue to seek Him for the” I AM” He is, He will show us great and mighty things because that is part of His nature. If we ask the right question, He will gladly reveal and expose what He desires so much to give us. How does your prayer life look? Do the majority of your prayers revolve around seeking His hand in your life? Or are you seeking His face and to know the “I AM”?