In the book of Exodus chapter 3, I know we were just in Joshua a moment ago, but in that particular moment that we just read, Joshua and the people of Israel were by Jericho. They saw the commander of the army of the Lord, whoever he was, he had a sword in his hand, and they were terrified by seeing that angel, the messenger of God. And he was told to remove the sandals from his feet because the place where he was standing is holy.
Now, that's the lesser known version of remove the sandals from your feet because the place where you're standing is holy. The more well-known passage is found in Exodus 3. What we find there is an account of this guy named Moses.
Have you heard of him before? Moses, a great mediator between God and the people of Israel when they were slaves in Egypt. He was the one that had the staff in his hand that could perform miracles and signs and part the Red Sea and lead the people.
And so Moses, before he was known by all those great deeds, was just simply a shepherd. It's a little bit of irony here in Scripture that all the great people of the Old Testament and even the New Testament really were shepherds. They were taking care of these large groups of really dumb animals.
And God chooses them to lead the people of God. I wonder if there's a connection, right? So, of course, King David was a great shepherd.
We had the shepherds that were told about the birth of Jesus. And then here we have Moses as a shepherd keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law. So to kind of introduce the text where we are thus far, we have the generation of Pharaoh that knew Jacob and knew his sons.
They have passed on. And now we have about one to two and a half million of the Israelites living in Egypt, and they are enslaved. And they are being persecuted.
And the great actions done against them, against the people of God, has not gone unnoticed. Moses' life can be broken up into three different parts, which is pretty convenient for us who are liking to put them in categories. You have the first 40 years, after which he sees that his Hebrew brethren are being mistreated by an Egyptian taskmaster.
He kills that taskmaster and tries to hide the body. And then, of course, Pharaoh hears about what took place and Moses runs from Egypt out into the wilderness of Midian. And then he becomes married to a woman, Zipporah, and the father, or his father-in-law Jethro, was a priest of God.
And he had flocks that Moses would look after for another 40 years. After that 40 years of period is done, he then is called in Exodus 3 and 4 to go back and be the Moses that we recognize, looking just like Charlton Heston, no doubt. So in Exodus 3, we are at the end of this time period.
He's no longer in Egypt. He's now a shepherd taking care of his father-in-law's flock. And something significant is going to happen.
The thing of significance that we're going to focus in on today, next week and the week after that, Lord willing, is that Moses has an encounter with God. Now, often in Scripture, God communicates through prophets. He will use someone who's able to speak the Word of God, and they begin their message generally with the idea of listen to what the Word of God says and then just lays it out.
People can either listen to it or ignore it. Most of the time, they usually ignored it, right? Historically, in the Hebrew Bible.
Sometimes, you would have God speak through a messenger. He would send an angel, we would say in the English, to go and relay a message from God the Creator himself. Sometimes, he would speak to people through visions or dreams.
He would allow them to see things while they were dreaming, and this vision or this dream would be interpreted to kind of discern what the will of God was in that particular moment. But three times in Scripture, God himself shows up. And so we're going to discuss one of those moments this morning and talk about the burning bush, encountering God.
What I'd like to do is, if you can bear with me, go through the entirety of our text this morning, reading it word for word, and then we'll go back and make comments about what we learn about God from that passage and what we learn about Moses from this passage. In doing so, there's going to be a Dave slide following what we learn about God and what we learn about Moses. Now, if you weren't here for my Bible class, the infamous Dave slide is, here's some information that you should know.
Then Dave always says, so what? Very politely, what do I do with that information? That's the Dave slide, the application, in other words.
That's the slide just for Mr. Dave over there. You're welcome. Hey, whatever I can do.
All right, Exodus chapter 3, let's turn there together. Now, if you've been here before, you know I struggle every week with making the font legible. So if you can't read this, and I don't think you will be able to, go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Exodus chapter 3, beginning in verse 1.
It's not that big. Maybe you can read it, maybe you can't. Okay.
Exodus chapter 3, verses 1 through 6. Now, Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush.
He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, I mean, of all things, I will turn aside to see this great sight while the bush is not burned. Now, we all know that if you put a dry, tender bush on a bonfire, how long does that last?
Not very long. I mean, it's not quite as fast as gasoline, kerosene, or diesel, but it's not that far behind it, right? A dried up bush in the middle of the desert on fire.
Well, Moses is thinking, well, I'll be over quick. And it's not over quick. It's still burning.
So Moses says to himself, I'm going to go figure out what's going on over there, right? This is a very heavy paraphrase of the mind of Moses. Verse 4, When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, which I suppose was the intended purpose, God called to him out of the bush.
Now, keep in mind here we have the angel of the Lord appearing in the midst of the burning bush, but then you have God calling him from the midst of the burning bush. I wonder if that's significant. Calling to him out of the bush, Moses.
Moses. He said, Here I am. Now, again, if you want to imagine yourself in his sandals for a moment, here you are just taking care of some sheep in a deserted place near a mountain range, and you see a bush on fire.
Well, that's kind of weird, and it's not over. And so you say, Well, let me just go over there and see what's going on. So you walk over to the midst of this fire in this bush that's not burning up the actual tender that is there.
And so you've got a voice saying, Allan, Allan. Like, yeah, I'm right here. What's going on?
It's a weird situation, right? This is God trying to speak to Moses. He said, Do not come near, take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.
Let me just pause right there. Now, this particular mountain range, before God's presence is known to be there, was not a holy place to the Lord, as far as we know scripturally. There was no tabernacle yet.
There was no temple there. There was no place of an altar to sacrifice, like Bethel would be there before this, but this is not that location. The only thing that could have made this ground holy ground was the Holy God being present at that moment.
This is very unusual in scripture, because when an angel appears, everyone tries to worship the angel. The first thing they say is, don't worship me, because there is one God above me. Try to worship an apostle of God in the book of Acts.
They say, don't worship me. I'm a man just like you. This place where he is walking, he's told to remove his sandals.
Likely, historically, because of their culture, he was a shepherd. And if you're walking around following sheep all day, guess what you might step on?
Can you imagine, right? And so God is here at this mountain range. He's speaking to Moses from the midst of a burning bush, and he's saying, don't bring unclean things onto this ground.
Why? Because that which is the most clean is present, the Holy One of Israel. Verse six.
And he said to him, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. Moving on to verses seven through 10.
The Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and I've heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I've come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hiavites, and the Jebusites. We all know them, don't we?
Verse nine, and now behold, the cry of the people of Israel have come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppressed them. Verse 10, come, I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring out my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. God is there, remove your sandals, the ground where you're standing is holy because of the Holy One's presence at this location.
He says, I've got the perfect job for you, Moses. You tried to save your Hebrew brethren from an Egyptian taskmaster, and you murdered him. All right, and now you've been taking care of a large group of really dumb animals here in the middle of nowhere for the last 40 years.
You're the perfect guy for this job. You're gonna go back to Egypt and save the people. I have come down, he says, to deliver them.
Looking on to verses 11 through 15, but Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? He said, I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you when you have brought the people out of Egypt. You shall serve God on this mountain.
Verse 13, then Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them that God of your fathers has sent me to you, they ask me, what is his name? What shall I say to them? I mean, fairly a good point.
If you say that God spoke to me in the midst of a burning bush that was not consumed at the middle of Mount Orab while I was taking care of sheep, and they said the God of who? What's his name? Verse 14, God said to Moses, I am who I am.
Now, this can be rendered in two different ways in the English. I am who I am, or I will be who I will be. That does not really matter for the text when it comes to our purposes, because when we look at this, it's just simply four letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
When we look at this, we see the I am who I am, I will be who I will be, the tense of if he's presently that which he is, or he will be that which he is, or he was who he always was, God is infinite. And so the I am who I am is the most popular rendition of this Tetragrammaton, the four letters of the Hebrew alphabet that describe Yahweh. He said, say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you.
God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the Lord, so Yahweh here in the original language, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. We then go on to verse 16 through 20.
Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and Jacob has appeared to me, saying, I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt, and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Parasites, the Hyibites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey. Verse 18, And they will listen to your voice, and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, The Lord, Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. And now, please, let us go three days' journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.
But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand, verse 20, so I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it. After that, He will let you go. So again, a precursor to what we recognize as the Exodus story, right?
The idea of them being led out of slavery, being led to the Promised Land, this is the introduction for basically the rest of the book, the book of Exodus. God is being very forthcoming, personally, with the man Moses to prepare him for what he is to do and what God will do through him. Rarely do we see God being so plain with mankind.
Rarely. Small glimpses, small information, you ask a question, you get a small answer. Here is God himself communing and conversing with the man Moses, the mediator between God and his people, the Israelites.
And he is laying it all out for what the mission is. Verses 21 through chapter 4, verse 5, 21. I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, and when you go, you shall not go empty.
But each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and any woman who lives in her house for silver and gold and jewelry and for clothing, you shall put them on your sons and your daughters, and you shall thus plunder the Egyptians. You're leaving there with something, because you have some things to do when you're out of Egypt to prepare for the Lord. Chapter 4, verse 1.
Then Moses answered, but behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, because they'll say the Lord didn't appear to you. The Lord said to him, What is in your hand? As if God did not know what was in his hand.
Right? What's in your hand? A staff.
He said, Throw it on the ground. So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent or a snake. Moses ran from it, as would I.
I'm not scared of much in this world, but that's it. That's the one. That's the one.
Anita, is that true? We were over at Anita's, and there was a little dog running around out backyard, and there was a small little snake, and it was a water moccasin. And I was going to go out there with a shovel, and I was going to remove the head from this water moccasin's body.
And then Miss Anita said, Do you want a gun? I go, Yeah, I want a gun. Let me go get one.
She gave me a little pistol, went outside and popped that guy right in the head, and he was no longer a water moccasin, right? So, Amen, Moses ran from it. He's a smart guy.
I'll give him that, okay? But the Lord said to Moses, Put out your hand, catch it by the tail. I wouldn't recommend it, but God said to do it.
So he put out his hand and caught it. It became a staff in his hand. Verse 5, that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob has appeared to you.
Again, the Lord said to him, put your hand inside your cloak. He put his hand inside his cloak. When he took it out, it wasn't a snake this time, thankfully.
Behold, his hand was leprous like snow. Then God said, put your hand back inside your cloak. He put his hand back inside his cloak.
Have I left you behind? I sure have. I kept reading.
Put your hand back inside your cloak. He put his hand back inside his cloak. He took it out.
Behold, it was restored like the rest of his flesh. If they will not believe you, God said, or listen to the first sign, they may believe the latter sign. Verse 9.
If they will not believe even these two signs or listen to your voice, you shall take some water from the Nile, pour it on the dry ground, and the water that you shall take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground. Our last reading, verses 10 through 17. But Moses said to the Lord, Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, which is kind of an interesting detail I love.
He goes, I've not been known for being an eloquent person before, and I'm definitely not now speaking to God Almighty himself. I'm not eloquent. But I am slow of speech and of tongue.
Verse 11, the Lord said to him, who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?
Good point.
Verse 12, now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak. But he said, oh, my Lord, please send someone else.
Then, and only then, the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said, is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he's coming out to meet you.
When he sees you, he will be glad in his heart. You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth, and will teach you both what you shall do. Verse 16, he shall speak for you to the people, he shall be your mouth, and you will be as God to him.
And take in your hand this staff, with which you shall do the signs. Moses, the man who 40 years prior murdered an Egyptian to try to save the Hebrew people by his own power, his own skill, his own might, was thwarted because of fear, a pharaoh. He now, for the last 40 years, has been tending the sheep, it seems, of Jethro, his father-in-law, a priest of God.
And God has been preparing him, it seems, every step of the way to be the exact right person for this particular job. What we find here is Moses being a type or a symbol of a person who needs to stand in between the sinful people and the holy God to speak on their behalf from the people to God and to speak on his behalf from God to the people. Now, this image, this symbol, this individual, this metaphor is best culminated in only one person.
Jesus, the Messiah. But what we learn about God from God descending and speaking to Moses from the midst of this burning bush tells us so much about who our God is today. If we look at our text with a bird's eye view and we highlight some significant things that stand out in this text, we learn so much about our Lord and our Creator.
We learn from verse 6 that He is the God of His Father. He's introducing Moses to who He is. He's the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.
God says in verse 7, I have surely seen, I have witnessed what's taking place down there in Egypt. Verse 8, I have come down to deliver, He says. Verse 9, I have seen the afflictions that are being performed against my people.
And verse 10, I will send you, God says. Verse 12, and I will be with you. Verse 14, He identifies His name as I am who I am.
Verse 17, He says, I promise to the people of Israel, I will bring you up. Verse 19, I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go. And verse 20, against that particular cause, I, God says, will stretch out my hand.
And at the very last excuse, in chapter 4, verses 11 and 12, He says, Who is it that made the seeing, the blind, the hearing, and the deaf? I have made you, I am the Lord. So God is identifying what Moses needs to know about God at this particular scene.
God says about himself so many things in this particular text. Now, when we look at this, we don't live in Orab. Our people aren't in bondage and slavery in Egypt.
God doesn't speak to us through the midst of a burning bush. When we look at how God identifies himself to Moses, how does he identify himself to us? He says that he is the God of our world.
He introduces himself that he is the God that made the heavens and the earth, Genesis 1 and verse 1. God is clear in Scripture that he sees what takes place in our lives. He is someone that didn't just spin the world on his axis and step away from his creation.
He is intimately engaged and involved with what he made here on earth. He knows what is going on. In verse 8 of our text, God said, I have come down to deliver my people from slavery.
God lets us know through the good news of Jesus the Messiah that he has given his son to come down from heaven to this earth to deliver us from sin and death. In verse 9 of our context here in the book of Exodus chapter 3, God told Moses to tell the people, I have seen what you are going through. That means that God knows about our struggles intimately.
The things that you suffer through, the struggles that you have, God is very much aware of them. In verse 10, Moses is sent to the people to give them the message that they will be delivered and redeemed and freed by the work of God. We are sent to share the message of the good news or the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, who has set us free from the law of sin and death.
God encouraged Moses in verse 12, I will be with you. We have the assurance from Jesus himself at the end of the Great Commission. I am with you even until the end of the age or the world.
God is with us every step of the way. His existence and His name being I Am Who I Am gives us the confidence to know that His existence and His very nature of being eternal gives us hope. Mankind can fail us.
God is always there. He has always been. He will always will be.
I am who I am. He told in verse 17 the Israelites, I promise to bring you up. Jesus promised us eternal life with Him.
God knew that the Pharaoh of Egypt would not let them go easily. And God knows that our enemy is against us and will not make it easy for us. God will stretch out His hand against Pharaoh and give them the victory of redemption from slavery.
God has already assured us the victory over death because of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. He made us the way that we are with our gifts, with our talents, even with our deficiencies. He knows who we are, and He knows that we can complete the mission.
We've learned about God from Exodus 3 and 4, and we learned about how His eternal nature tells us who He is even still today. I have one more thing to share with you from this text. Moses wasn't super stoked to have this mission.
He wasn't ready with anticipation. He wasn't giddy. He wasn't excited.
In fact, we have a couple of reasons, or five of them, why he wasn't the right guy for the job, as if God picked the wrong person. He says, who am I? I'm nobody special.
I'm just a shepherd. Why are you picking me to go to the people from verse 11? He goes, well, even if I go, I tell the people that God came to me from the midst of a burning bush.
They say, what's your name? I'm not clear who you are. What's your name?
In chapter 4, verse 1, he gets right to the crux of it. Why would they believe what I had to say anyway? From verse 10, he says, I'm not eloquent.
I'm slow of speech. And then I love the one in verse 13. He runs out of really good reasons, and he just ends up with, you know what?
Hey, send anybody else to do this mission. I'm not the guy for the job. Now, if you know about the life of Moses, he definitely was the guy for this job.
To be the mediator between his people and their Creator. We are God's people today, and he is still our Creator, our Redeemer, and the God of our salvation. When we look at the excuses of Moses, maybe you think, well, if this happened to me, if I were in his sandals and God spoke to me directly, I wouldn't have these excuses.
Well, maybe. Good on you for being optimistic. If it were me, this is how I would reform the excuses that Moses had into my own life as to why I'm not the person God wants me to be in my life.
Here's our second day slide. Maybe you tell yourself, maybe I tell myself, why me? I'm not worthy.
Why put me in this position? I'm just someone who has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. I still feel that guilt about decisions that I've made in my life.
I'm not the right one. Why me? Maybe I tell myself, you know, if I just have time to learn more about God, I'll be more motivated then.
So let me just learn some more to know more about God, know more about the scriptures, and then I'll be better prepared to be the one to share the good news of Jesus the Messiah. And then we get to the big one. What if they don't believe me?
What if they think I'm wrong? What if they mock my belief in what I've seen in the scriptures? That's a big one.
It is for me anyway. It's embarrassing sometimes to try to talk to someone about God, and then they laugh at what you know to be true. Maybe you think to yourself, well, you know what, there are other people around me.
They're just way more qualified. He said, I'm not eloquent. That was most of the excuse.
Now, I know I'm not, but there are other people who can speak without stuttering, without missing a beat, without saying the wrong thing, who know more scripts than I had memorized. They're better. Others are more qualified to do the job of a preacher and a Christian.
He ends it with, send somebody else. And sometimes we may say to ourselves, well, that's just not my gift. You know, I can serve behind the scenes and clean up tables and buy things for the care building, maybe.
But it's just not my gift to be someone who talks to others about the saving gospel message. When we look at Exodus 3, Moses didn't just have an interesting experience. He encountered God, God himself.
And he was sent on that mission. And folks, we should have had an experience where we have encountered God, not in a literal way like this, but in a spiritual way, where we've come to be taught the Word of God enough to obey the good news of Jesus the Messiah, to have our sins washed away. And once we are Christians, we are given that same charge.
We are given that same mission. If we look at the Exodus account here in chapters 3 and 4, God reveals himself to Moses, but Moses also reveals himself to God. God says, here is who I am.
And Moses said, I think you got the wrong guy. When we become Christians, God is introducing himself to us. God says to us through our salvation, here is who I am.
I love you. I am full of grace. I am full of mercy.
I am full of forgiveness. And I have sacrificed myself, my son, for you to be with me. That's who I am, God says.
And our response sometimes to God is just like Moses. I'm just not, I'm not who you need. I'm not the right person.
Folks, you are the right person. I am the right person. This is the first time in Scripture when God reveals himself in a very literal way to someone, the encounter, who God is and his great holiness.
And it teaches us so much about who he is and who we ought to be on the inside. This morning, if you are someone who has a need to respond to the invitation of our Lord, if something in your life is not right, if you've not obeyed the gospel of Jesus Christ and you want to this morning, or you have obeyed, but you resonate with the attitude and the heart of Moses, and you want to change that within your heart this morning, you can come forward and talk to me for a moment, or you can see one of our elders at the door. If you have a need, respond now while we stand and sing.