The Holy One
Tonight’s subject is “The Holy One.” We are told in the Book of Isaiah, the 43rd chapter: “I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior. I, I am the Lord; and beside me there is no savior.” Read it carefully, only one savior: I am the Lord. I am the Lord, and there is no other savior. One has to dwell upon it, and really dwell upon it to extract from it its message. One cannot discover the true character of God by investigating or discussing him. One must let him save; then one knows. He’s a savior in every sense of the word, so one must let him save. And only then does one really know the character of God. You can discuss him, investigate him, from now ’til the ends of time, but you will never really know God.
So tonight we’re discussing this Holy One, and this Holy One is I AM. God has clothed himself with humanity, completely clothed himself with man. He’s put man on as you would an outer garment, and so with the garment on say, “I am.” That’s God, the only God, there is no other God. Is he really God? Well, he tells that he is a savior: “I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior. I, I am the Lord: and beside me there is no savior.” Is this really true? Well then, I should really test it. If when I stand here and I say “I am” before I say I am this, that and the other, is that really God? Is he really a savior? Well then, test him. See if he really can save me from my present restriction in this world. Just test him. Well, I’ve done it unnumbered times. I’ve been trying since I discovered it to share it with these aspects of my own being, for they’re only my being pushed out. There’s nothing but God in the world.
We think the Bible is something that records the past. It’s contemporary. We think that the Israelites were saved from Egypt by some miraculous act of God unnumbered years ago, thousands of years ago, and we don’t know it’s taking place now. We think the pharaohs died thousands of years ago and we don’t know that they are in our present; that any tyrant in this world who can enslave you, who can restrict you, he is a pharaoh, and he will not let my people go.
So without my consent, without any desire on my part, I was picked up, like millions of others when the world thought it needed manpower, and put into the army. Then at that very moment instead of making, say, $10,000-12,000 a year, I was told from now on until they would let me go I’ll make $50 a month, not a week. They’ll give me my clothes. I had clothes. They’ll give me my food. Well, I had food, much better food. They’ll give me shelter. Well, I had shelter. I had a home. I had everything I wanted. No, they didn’t listen to that, so they put me into a compound, they called it camp, and here, in this area, reduced from $12,000 a year income to $50 a month, without my consent. And I had a lease that ran for quite a while, with a wife and child to support, and all these things. They didn’t consider that. Who is pharaoh in this world?
But then I believed in scripture. I believed that with God all things are possible, and I firmly believed that God is I AM. There is no other God. I will not in eternity know another God. But the God that I know is a present-tense, first-person experience: “I am the Lord thy God”—first person, present—and so I firmly believed him and I trusted him. So he clothed himself in me and made me alive, that’s how I became alive. And now I will trust him implicitly. His name is I AM, he has no other name. There are other names but the real name is I AM. And so I will now trust him and test him.