Main Focus: After saving Moses, God draws him to his presence and calls Moses to follow him into purpose (mission).

This week we’ve got the burning bush story, though our main focus will be on God’s character as revealed through his exchange with Moses. It’s this unchanging God that we interact with in our own lives, this exact same being who spoke from the burning bush, so we’ll finish out discussion talking about how God’s character informs the way we relate to him.

In discussion we’ll start at Exodus 2:23 to get the whole context. While Israel is languishing in Egypt under brutal slavery, God comes to Moses out in the wilderness. There Moses witnesses an unearthly sight, a solitary bush engulfed in flames, the leaves still green and the branches still healthy within the blaze, and there he hears an unearthly voice commissioning him for the work of the exodus. This is the background necessary to understanding Moses’s encounter with the God of his fathers—God takes this opportunity to reveal himself to Israel in name, promise, and deed. By this name, by this promise of liberation, and by this redemption from slavery, Israel’s God would be “remembered throughout all generations.”

This is particularly evident given the name by which God revealed himself to Moses. When Moses asks for God’s name, God responds quite mysteriously with, “I am who I am.” The name by which he will be known, Yahweh, is taken from the Hebrew word for the verb “to be.” It is, in one sense, a reference to his otherness, his self-existence as Creator—he simply is. In Deuteronomy 4:32-40, Moses will explain to Israel that God revealed himself this way and rescued Israel out of Egypt so that this truth could sink down deep into their hearts, “that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deut 4:39).

But the Hebrew word for “I am” can also be translated in the future tense—“I will be what I will be”—which is perhaps the stress on it given the amount of times that God promises a future event in the rest of Exodus 3 (ex. “I will bring you up;” “he will let you go”). In discussion we’ll look at this latter aspect of the passage to see that God reveals himself to Moses, and to Israel through Moses, through the promise of liberation from Egypt. This in turn reveals God’s faithful love for his people. Israel’s God has both heard their cries and knows their sufferings (3:7), and though they haven’t yet witnessed it, he’s prepared to rip apart the very fabric of creation in order to make good on his promises. You can hear the steel in his voice when Moses falters, saying, “Who am I that I should go?” God replies, “But I will be with you.”

We’ll then touch on how Moses must’ve felt in this moment. You can imagine his wonder at the sight of the burning bush and fear at hearing the voice of the Lord, even before receiving what must have sounded like a terrifying mission, to go back to Egypt and confront Pharaoh. Hearing about God’s faithful love for his people and powerful promises of deliverance is one thing; encountering this infinite, holy God is a whole different thing. We’ll use Moses’s experience to transition into talking about how this passage informs the way we relate to this same God.

Of course, you and I don’t encounter many flaming bushes, but again, our God is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8). We live our lives with him dealing with these same two truths, that Yahweh is an infinitely loving God and also “a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29). We’ll follow the stress of this passage by finishing with a question about how God’s holiness affects the way we live our lives. And of course this affects everything, considering one of God’s repeated commands in the Old and New Testament is, “Be holy, for I am holy.” God’s holiness affects the way we relate to God in humility and awe-filled love, the way we relate to others in obedience to Christ’s commands, and the way we relate to ourselves in taking holiness seriously in our fight against sin.