Exodus 3:13-14

Moses said to God, “Behold, when I come to the children of Israel, and tell them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you;’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ What should I tell them?”

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM,” and he said, “You shall tell the children of Israel this: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

It’s completely inappropriate to define a God that we can understand. If we could understand God, then He would not be a big enough to be the Creator of our minds. In the culture of Moses, when you asked for someone’s name, you were asking for a description of that person. You could say that Moses was asking, “But God, how will I describe you to them?” In a loose interpretation of this passage you could say that God answered: “I am everything that I am.” That’s what we call a circular reference.

It is, of course, not an error in the worldview of the Bible because God is beyond description by man. Some might argue that defining something circularly is itself illogical, but that is also incorrect.

Every good dictionary is also circularly defined. What I mean by this is that every word in a dictionary is defined by other words in the dictionary. If circular reference was not logical, then, in order to stay logically consistent, we would have to stop using dictionaries, but we clearly gain benefit from a dictionary!

I believe it is far more logical to say that that when you reach circularity of reference, you have reached something that defines itself. That’s exactly what God does. He defines Himself. He is also infinite which tells me that a finite person cannot finish describing Him. The best a finite human can do is to get to know God more. Thank God, He was in the process of making that possible.