Jesus the 'I AM'

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was, I am!” John 8:58
In John’s gospel we encounter the seven so-called ‘I am’ statements of Christ. To readers familiar with the Old Testament, this resonates with Ex. 3:13-14, where Moses asks God His name, and God replies, “I AM Who I AM.” By those two little words, ‘I am’, Jesus is claiming to be God, who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. No wonder the Pharisees got so upset with Him, and tried to stone Him (John 8:59).
In John 8:24, Jesus expands upon this: “If you do not believe that I am... you will indeed die in your sins.” In many Bibles, after ‘I am’ there are additional words in brackets (for example, the NIV has ‘the one I claim to be’; other versions have ‘I am He’). These words are not in the original Greek text, but have been added by well-meaning people to make grammatical sense. What Jesus is saying is that if we do not believe that He is the I AM, we will die in our sins.
A similar instance is seen in John 18:5. The soldiers and temple guards came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He asks them who they are looking for, and they reply, “Jesus of Nazareth.” He responds, ‘I am He’, which caused them to fall backwards on the ground. Again, what Jesus actually said was ‘I am.’
As we look at the seven ‘I am’ statements of Christ over the next week, we will see that they all tie in to God’s nature. These two little words cannot be overlooked, because they are His identity. He is not the ‘I was’ only, but He lives, and today He is still ‘I am’.