The Great "I AM" Declares Himself

When Jesus said "I AM the bread of life," every person listening understood exactly what He was claiming. Today we're diving into the most audacious claim anyone has ever made – and why it changes everything.

John 6:35 "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life; he who comes to me will not hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst.'"

To understand the weight of what Jesus just said, we need to take a field trip to Exodus 3. Picture an 80-year-old shepherd doing the same thing every single day for 40 years – taking his sheep to the base of Mount Horeb and back. Moses was unseen by every human eye other than God.

Then God appears in a burning bush – a bush that was burning with fire yet was not consumed. When Moses asks God what His name is, God responds: "I AM WHO I AM... Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'"

In Hebrew, this is "Yahweh" – the verb for being, static, unchanged, unhindered, never diminished being. When God says "I AM," He's revealing His nature as self-existent, self-sustained, and eternal.

God is self-existent – He was never made. He doesn't derive His being from anything or anyone. If my daughter asked me "Who made God?" the answer would be: No one. God was never made. He's self-existent.

God is self-sustained – He never needs to recharge. He doesn't have a backup generator keeping the solar system spinning. He plugs into no external source of power, but everything in creation plugs into the power He provides.

God is eternal – He is the God of your grandfather and your grandfather's grandfather because He's the only eternal God. He doesn't have a birthday. He didn't become. He never entered the scene. As Moses writes in Psalm 90, "From everlasting to everlasting, You are God."

Now, 6,800 times throughout the Old Testament, God's name appears as Yahweh, which means "He is." The Jewish scribes and Pharisees were so afraid to even pronounce this name that they would change it by adding vowels, giving us "Jehovah" or "Adonai," because they never wanted to take the name of the Lord in vain.

In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, when you get to Exodus 3:14 and God introduces Himself as "I AM," those words are "ego eimi" – representative of the absolute, sovereign, powerful, kingly nature of God.

Now here's why this matters: In John 6:35, when Jesus says "I am the bread of life," He's using those exact same words – "ego eimi." Every single person listening to Jesus understands that He is claiming to be the self-existent, self-sufficient, eternal God.

Yes, He was born of Mary, but Jesus is saying, "I AM God. I was with God. I AM God. I created the universe, and everything you see is under My power."

Jesus is claiming to be the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush. This is the first of seven "I AM" statements in John's Gospel: I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the door, I am the Good Shepherd, I am the resurrection and the life, I am the way the truth and the life, I am the true vine.

In John 8, He says, "Before Abraham was, I AM." They looked at Abraham as one of their spiritual fathers, and He says, "I begot Abraham. Abraham lived by My power."

This isn't just a nice man teaching moral lessons. This is the eternal God of the universe declaring His identity and His sufficiency to meet our deepest needs.