Moses and the burning bush

By the time the bush catches fire, Moses has been a nobody for forty years. It's worth sitting with that number before anything starts burning.

He had been somebody once. Raised in Pharaoh's palace, educated in Egypt's best rooms, a Hebrew with royal access. At forty he made his move: saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, looked both ways, and killed the man. If it was an attempt to launch a liberation, it lasted one day. The next morning his own people wanted nothing to do with him, Pharaoh wanted him dead, and Moses ran for the desert.

Then, nothing. Four decades of it. He marries, keeps his father-in-law's flocks in Midian, names his son Gershom, "a stranger there," which tells you how he saw himself. The man who was going to matter becomes a man who has quietly agreed with the world's verdict: that chapter is closed. He is eighty years old, on the far side of the wilderness, when he notices a bush on fire that ought to have burned out already.

The bush burns, and nothing is lost

Desert scrub catches fire all the time; the sun is enough. What stops Moses is duration. The fire keeps going and the branches stay green. He says, in one of Scripture's great understatements, "I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." And only when the LORD sees that he turned aside does the voice call his name. Twice, the way the Bible does when everything is about to change: Moses, Moses.

Exodus 3:2 (KJV)

"And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed."

Take off your shoes, the voice says. Ordinary ground has become holy because of who is standing on it.

Readers have loved that unburnt bush for three thousand years, and for good reason. God does not announce himself in a cedar of Lebanon; he fills a common desert shrub, the least impressive plant on the mountain, and the fire that fills it doesn't destroy it. That is a picture worth keeping. When God's calling lands on an ordinary life, it doesn't consume the life. The bush stays a bush: still Moses, still eighty, still a shepherd with a past. But it carries fire now, and it doesn't burn out.

Plenty of things in this world run on fuel; they use you up and leave ash. The call of God, this scene insists, is not one of them. What God fills, God sustains.

Five excuses, five answers

Then God states the plan: I have seen the affliction of my people in Egypt, I have heard their cry, I have come down to deliver them. And now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh.

What follows is one of the most relatable negotiations in the Bible. Moses, standing barefoot in front of a miracle, produces five objections in a row. They deserve to be read as a list, because most of us have prayed at least three of them.

• "Who am I?" (3:11) The identity objection. God's answer ignores the question entirely: "Certainly I will be with thee." Who Moses is turns out to be the wrong variable.
• "Who are you? What is your name?" (3:13) The authority objection. God answers with the name itself: I AM THAT I AM. More on that in a moment.
• "They won't believe me." (4:1) The credibility objection. God gives him signs: the staff that becomes a serpent, the hand made leprous and healed.
• "I'm not eloquent — slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." (4:10) The competence objection. God's reply is bracing: "Who hath made man's mouth?... Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say."
• "Please send someone else." (4:13) No longer an objection, just a plea. And here, the text says, the LORD's anger was kindled — yet even then the answer is a concession, not a dismissal: your brother Aaron is already on his way; he can speak for you.

Notice the pattern in all five answers. God never once corrects Moses's low self-assessment. He never says, "Nonsense, you're very eloquent." Every answer is some form of the same sentence: I will be with you. The excuses are all about Moses; the answers are all about God. That is the entire argument of the chapter, conducted in dialogue.

Exodus 4:11–12 (KJV)

"Who hath made man's mouth?... Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say."

What this story is actually about

The second excuse gets the answer the rest of the Bible never stops quoting. Moses asks for a name, because in Egypt gods had names and names had leverage. The answer he receives is in a category of its own: "I AM THAT I AM... Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you."

Every other name defines by comparison. A name says: this one, not that one; this tribe, this territory, this specialty. I AM refuses the whole system. God names himself with the verb "to be," present tense, unqualified. Not "I was," a founder to be commemorated. Not "I will be," a hope to be awaited. I AM: the one who simply, always, is. The Hebrew behind it gives us the name YHWH, rendered LORD in capital letters in most English Bibles, and it appears there thousands of times. Every time you see it, you're looking at the burning bush.

And this is what the story is actually about. Not Moses finding his confidence. He never does find it, not in these chapters; he goes to Egypt still protesting. The story is about which name carries the mission. Pharaoh will ask, "Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice?" and ten plagues later he'll have his answer. Moses's question, "Who am I?", is never really answered because it never really mattered. The sending God, not the sent man, is the story's engine. Centuries later, a Nazarene would say "Before Abraham was, I am," and his hearers would pick up stones, because everyone knew exactly which name he had just claimed.

The forty years were not wasted

One more thing, for anyone who is deep into their own Midian years and suspects the interesting part of life is behind them.

Consider what the wilderness actually gave Moses. Forty years of desert navigation, in the exact wilderness where he would soon lead two million people. Forty years of shepherding, the Bible's own training program for leaders; David came out of the same school. Forty years for palace arrogance to die, so that the man who once solved problems by burying an Egyptian in the sand could become, by Numbers 12:3, the meekest man on the face of the earth. Egypt taught Moses to be somebody. Midian taught him to be usable. Both educations were necessary, and only one of them felt like progress while it was happening.

The bush was not God's plan B after four decades of divine forgetfulness. "I have surely seen the affliction of my people," the voice says. Seen, heard, known, the whole time. The delay was preparation wearing the disguise of obscurity, which is what it usually wears.

So if the current season feels like sheep and sand and a story that stalled, take the long view this chapter takes. Nothing about you has burned out. Some ground you walk past every day may yet turn out to be holy.