Moses then asks how he is supposed to explain to the Israelites who has sent him. Again we need to remember the situation. Only Moses had seen God in the burning bush. There was no established religion among the Israelites in the way that there was once the nation was set up, though there was an identity among the people.
God then introduces Himself as "I AM WHO I AM". Then He goes on to expand on this by saying that He is the God if Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Israelites would probably have folk stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and about how they came to be in Egypt. So God makes a new revelation to them (I AM) and then shows how it fits in with what they already knew. In a sense this is what happened with Jesus and the gospel. Jesus was a new revelation, but then Jesus and the apostles showed how He was in fact the fulfilment of the Old Testament.
In our own lives when we need delivering in some way God may well follow the same pattern, ie He may give us a new revelation of Himself, showing us something we didn't realise about before about Him.
"I AM". It can be interesting to compare this to what science says. It is increasingly common today for some atheists to claim that science negates religion. This is actually nonsense and quite the opposite case can be made equally well (in fact even evolution is not necessarily anti-God, only the way that Dawkins and the like portray it), but leaving that aside, cosmological views seem to come down at some point to saying "it just is". Big bang theories get down to fraction of a second after the big bang, but are then still at a loss as to why. When science tries to explain everything (rather than what is) it eventually comes down to having to say something just is. So even in its own terms, science is no better an explanation of the ultimate questions than the Bible. The Bible tells us that God is the reason, the difference is that this God has made Himself known to us in Christ.
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