Chapel and Conference
Messages

Bob Roberts opens with three pieces of classic artwork depicting Moses at the burning bush before turning to Exodus 3 and a focused meditation on God's personal covenant name — Yahweh — and what it reveals about who God is and how he relates to us. His goal is to send students into the weekend as worshipers who know their God more deeply.

Scripture Texts

Exodus 3:1-14; John 8:56-58; John 20:26-28; Philippians 2:9-11; Acts 4:12

Main Points or Ideas

• God's name invites us to know him – When Moses asks God for his name, God reveals the Tetragrammaton — YHWH — translated in English Bibles as LORD in all caps. The name derives from the Hebrew verb ”to be,” meaning I AM THAT I AM. It is a state-of-being verb with no expiration date, communicating that God exists eternally, self-sufficiently, and without need. This name was so sacred that Jewish scribes would not write or speak it, substituting Adonai or Hashem instead. Roberts argues that the name itself is an open door to exploration — a standing invitation to ask, What are you, God? — and that the pursuit of that question is enough to captivate a human heart for eternity.
• God's name tells us he is everything — to the max – Whatever God is, he is that always and completely. He is loving, faithful, all-knowing, merciful, all-powerful, immutable, and righteous — not some of the time or partially, but to the max, twenty-four hours a day, with no expiration date. Humans share some of these qualities in partial, inconsistent measure; God possesses all of them infinitely. Roberts illustrates this through the audience: students call out attributes, and he repeats each one — faithful to the max, merciful to the max — to drive the point home.
• God's name points ahead to Jesus – The pictographic roots of the Hebrew letters in YHWH (yod-hey-vav-hey) correspond to hand, behold, nail, and behold — an evocative foreshadowing of Christ crucified, though Roberts is careful to note this is not on the same level as direct Scripture. More exegetically, when the Septuagint translators rendered I AM THAT I AM into Greek, they used ego eimi. John uses the exact same words in seven I AM statements of Jesus, and most explicitly in John 8:58 — ”Before Abraham was, I am” — a direct claim to the divine name that the crowd immediately understood as blasphemy. The name Jesus (Yeshua) itself means Yahweh saves — a state-of-being God whose action verb is salvation. At the name of Jesus every knee will bow, and there is no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.

Conclusion

Bob Roberts calls students to go into the weekend as secret worshipers — letting the truth of God's name take root in their hearts, pointing all faith and hope like a laser beam at the resurrected Christ, and letting that intimacy with God be seen on their faces and heard in their words throughout the week.