Watumishi wa Neno

We argued previously that the burning bush is not a 101 in personal development but a revelation of God. We meet the true God face to face and we find he’s nothing like how we might imagine him:

1. He’s the God who takes the initiative.

If we’ve read Exodus 2 we know that Moses is set up to be the deliverer  – he’s had an amazing birth, he’s had a go at liberating his people (that went a bit wrong), and he saved his future wife and sisters in law. But that was forty years ago. Now he’s just taking his father-in-laws sheep to new pasture – nothing special – he didn’t know it was about to become the mountain of God. And then the angel of the LORD appears to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of the bush. Did Moses go looking for this? Was he in fervent prayer and fasting? Was he praising God or invoking heaven? No – God came to him and called to him – “Moses, Moses.”

You know the children’s game where everyone hides and someone seeks? God is the seeker – we are the hiders. Salvation is God’s initiative – it was his plan from before creation, he revealed it to Abraham hundreds of years before (Gen. 15), he saved Moses as a baby and now he’s coming to start the great salvation of his people. We do not have a God like Baal who we need to scream and shout at for hours to get him to move – he’s already moved – he always makes the first move. He has to make the first move – we are enslaved, we are dead, we can’t help ourselves, we’re in a pit so deep we will never be able to climb out of it. We need a God who takes the initiative to rescue us.

2. He’s the God who relates.

Why a burning bush? What exactly does it mean when it says the Angel of the LORD appeared “in flame of fire”? What exactly is the significance of the bush burning and yet not being consumed? Do you know? Moses doesn’t know (v3) so he goes to have a closer look. We could ponder for a long time what exactly the burning bush means – a lot of learned folk have spilt a lot of ink debating the various possible significances – but I’m not sure how helpful that is. Moses could have spent a long time pondering that burning bush – I don’t think it would have helped him a lot. He could have stared at it for a long time without being any the wiser. What makes the difference? God speaks! (3:4-4:27) He relates, he communicates, he reveals himself – and then we start to know what he’s like. You get same thing in Exodus 19 and 20. Chapter 19: fire and smoke – what does that mean? Is this just a crazy angry God? And then we get chapter 20: God speaks his mind, his love, his law. The point is: miracles and fireworks on their own don’t reveal God. We have a speaking God – a God who addresses individuals by name –”Moses, Moses”, just as he had once called out “Abraham, Abraham”, “Jacob, Jacob” and later would call “Samuel, Samuel”, “Simon, Simon”, “Martha, Martha”, “Saul, Saul”.

And how does God introduce himself? (v6) “I am the God who called Abraham his friend, who walked with Abraham, who Abraham put his faith in, the one who provided a substitute for Isaac, the one who wrestled with Jacob” – he is the God who has related, walked and talked and grappled with these men . And especially he is the God who made promises to them. The great promise of a people, blessing, land – spoken to Abraham (Gen. 12) and then repeated several times to him and Isaac and Jacob. And even more than that, he is still relating to these men – as Jesus said on this text (Mk. 12:26-27) – he is not the God of the dead but the living. He is their friend and Lord even after death. He is a relational God – not an idea or a force, or a magic word – not a distant abstract God but a face-to-face relating God.

But there’s a problem in the relationship – “Do not come near… the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (v5). If you’ve been reading through the Pentateuch, the last time you heard ‘holy’ before this was when it was used in Genesis 2 to describe the Sabbath – the perfect, beautiful rest of God, Eden – the place where God walked with man in the cool of the day, where they related to one another in perfect joy.  But what happened Genesis 3 – not just disobedience to the law – it was the rejection of that relationship – and so Adam and Eve had to leave God’s presence and the tree of life and the fiery swords of the cherubim guarded the way back into the holy place. Now we’re having an echo of that in Exodus 3 – God is present, there’s a tree but there is also fire and you can’t get close. This is the problem the sacrificial system and the tabernacle will be all about – how can you get into the most holy place, the presence of God and live?  Or to put it the other way round – how can God dwell with and relate to his people without destroying them.

It’s really important that we see that God is relational and sin is relational – the problem is relational. It’s not a pragmatic problem – like I’ve got a plumbing shida and I call in the fundi wa maji and he fixes it and off he goes but I don’t have a relationship with the fundi. I need a restored relationship with the author of life.

And fortunately he is a God who takes the initiative in restoring relationships…