Walking With Christ

(Part 3 of 12)

Exodus 3:7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings,

There’s a bush on fire. But it isn’t burning up.

Moses notices. He turns aside to look. God calls his name. And suddenly, one of the greatest stories of deliverance in Scripture seems to begin.

“Moses, Moses!”

Here we go. Egypt. Pharaoh. “Let my people go.” Plagues. Passover. The Red Sea. Freedom.

If we’re telling the story of the Exodus, the burning bush feels like a pretty good place to start.

Except Moses is already about eighty years old. Israel has already been suffering for generations. And God has already been at work.

The bush is where Moses finally realizes there’s a story. It isn’t where the story began.

Before Moses Was Born

Exodus doesn’t begin with Moses. It begins with names.

Exodus 1:1 These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household:

Israel is in Egypt because of another story.

Joseph. The famine. The grain. Jacob bringing his family into Egypt.

The previous story becomes the setting for the next one.

Then Joseph dies. His generation dies. A new Pharaoh rises who doesn’t know Joseph.

The Israelites multiply. Pharaoh becomes afraid of them. So Egypt enslaves them. Their lives become bitter.

Then Pharaoh orders the Hebrew midwives to kill the newborn boys. They refuse. Then Pharaoh commands that every Hebrew son be thrown into the Nile.

That’s the world Moses is born into.

Before Moses takes his first breath, the circumstances surrounding his calling already exist. He doesn’t know it. His parents don’t know what he’ll become. Pharaoh certainly doesn’t know. But the story is already moving.

Before the Basket

When Moses is born, his mother hides him for three months. Eventually, she can’t hide him anymore. So she does something desperate.

She takes a basket. She coats it with bitumen and pitch. She places her son inside. Then she puts the basket among the reeds along the riverbank.

We know what happens next. She doesn’t.

That’s worth remembering.

We read Exodus 2 knowing the baby survives. His mother places him in that basket without having Exodus 3.

She doesn’t know about the burning bush. She doesn’t know about the plagues. She doesn’t know about the Red Sea. She doesn’t know that this child will stand before Pharaoh. She’s simply a mother trying to keep her son alive.

Then Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river. She sees the basket. She hears the baby crying. She knows exactly what he is.

Exodus 2:6 When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”

And she has compassion on him. Of all people. Pharaoh has ordered the Hebrew boys killed. A daughter of Pharaoh rescues one.

The House of Pharaoh

Then comes one of those details that almost feels impossible. Moses’ sister approaches Pharaoh’s daughter and offers to find a Hebrew woman to nurse the child. She gets Moses’ own mother. So the woman who put her son into the river receives him back.

And Pharaoh’s daughter tells her: “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.”— Exodus 2:9 (ESV)

The mother who was trying to hide her illegal child is now being paid from Pharaoh’s household to care for him. Eventually Moses is brought into Pharaoh’s house and becomes the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.

Think about where the future deliverer of Israel is growing up. Inside the house of the ruler whose government enslaved Israel.

Moses will eventually walk into Pharaoh’s court and demand the release of God’s people.

But long before that confrontation, Moses knows Egypt from the inside. The story is already moving.

Then Moses Gets It Wrong

Eventually Moses sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. He looks around. He kills the Egyptian. He hides the body in the sand. The next day, Moses discovers that what he did is known.

Pharaoh wants him dead. So Moses runs.

If we were looking for evidence that Moses is the future deliverer, this would be an awkward chapter.

He sees oppression. He intervenes. He kills a man. He becomes a fugitive. Then he disappears into Midian.

The man who’ll eventually lead Israel out of Egypt has just left Egypt alone. That doesn’t look like progress.

Then Come the Sheep

Moses settles in Midian. He marries Zipporah. He has children. He tends the flock of his father-in-law.

And years pass. Not days. Not months. Years.

Acts 7 divides Moses’ life into roughly forty-year periods. Moses is about forty when he flees Egypt and about eighty when God calls him back.

That means there are decades between Moses running from Pharaoh and Moses standing before the burning bush. Decades.

We can compress them into a few verses because we’re reading the story.

Moses had to live them. Imagine waking up year after year. Sheep. Desert. Family. Ordinary life.

Egypt is somewhere behind him. Whatever Moses once imagined his life becoming, this probably wasn’t it.

At forty, perhaps Moses looked like a man whose story had collapsed. At eighty, God calls his name.

The Burning Bush Wasn’t the Beginning

Exodus 3 opens with Moses doing what he apparently does all the time.

Exodus 3:1 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.

Another day with sheep. Then he sees the bush.

The extraordinary appears in the middle of the ordinary. God tells him to remove his sandals. This is holy ground.

Then God says: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings.”

Notice the tense. I have seen. I have heard. I know.

Israel’s suffering didn’t become real when Moses noticed the burning bush. Their cries didn’t finally reach God that afternoon. God wasn’t receiving breaking news from Egypt. He knew.

God Had Heard Them

At the end of Exodus 2, before the burning bush, we’re told: “and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God.” — Exodus 2:23 (ESV)

Then: 

Exodus 2:24–25 (24)And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. (25)God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.

God heard. God remembered. God saw. God knew.

Then Exodus 3 begins.

Moses is tending sheep. Those two scenes are happening without either side seeing the other.

Israel is crying in Egypt. Moses is walking through the wilderness.

The slaves don’t know what’s happening in Midian. Moses doesn’t know what God is about to ask of him. But God knows both.

Moses Doesn’t Feel Prepared

Then something fascinating happens. God tells Moses what He’s going to do. And Moses immediately starts explaining why Moses is the wrong person.

Exodus 3:11  But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?”

Then:

What if they ask Your name? What if they don’t believe me? I’m not eloquent. Please send someone else.

Moses doesn’t stand before the burning bush and suddenly recognize eighty years of careful preparation.

He sees inadequacy. That’s important here.

Sometimes when we say that God prepares people, we imagine preparation should produce someone who feels completely ready.

Moses doesn’t. After everything behind him, he still asks: Who am I?

God’s answer isn’t a résumé review.

He doesn’t say: Moses, consider your palace education. Think about your knowledge of Egypt. Think about your years surviving in the wilderness. Think about your experience leading sheep.

God gives Moses something much simpler: “But I will be with you.” — Exodus 3:12 (ESV)

That’s the answer.

Moses thinks the question is whether Moses is enough. God’s answer is His presence.

Forty Years Weren’t Wasted

It’s tempting to look at Moses’ years in Midian as an interruption. Egypt mattered. The burning bush mattered. Midian was just the gap between them. But those years were Moses’ life.

He learned to live outside the palace. He raised a family. He tended animals. He lived in the wilderness.

The man who had once tried to solve oppression by killing an Egyptian would eventually return carrying a staff. But we should be careful here too.

Scripture doesn’t give us a detailed explanation of everything God accomplished in Moses during those forty years.

We don’t need to invent one. We can simply observe that the years weren’t outside God’s reach.

Moses may have left Egypt. God hadn’t lost Moses.

While Israel Waited

There’s another perspective we shouldn’t miss. While Moses was living in Midian, Israel was still enslaved.

They didn’t know Moses was coming. They couldn’t see a deliverer being prepared. They couldn’t see the bush that would eventually burn. They couldn’t hear God’s conversation with Moses.

They only knew Egypt. Brick. Labor. Taskmasters. Pain. Generations of it.

And that creates one of the hardest realities in this entire series.

Sometimes God’s working in places we can’t see. That doesn’t make the waiting painless. It doesn’t make oppression less evil. It doesn’t mean we know when deliverance will come.

But our inability to see what God is doing isn’t evidence that God is doing nothing.

Israel couldn’t see Midian from Egypt.

Before the Deliverer

By the time Moses walks back into Egypt, an enormous amount of the story has already happened.

A mother has hidden a baby. A sister has watched from the riverbank. Pharaoh’s daughter has opened a basket. Moses has grown up in Pharaoh’s household.

He’s failed. He’s fled. He’s married. He’s raised children. He’s tended sheep. Israel’s cried out. God’s heard.

Years have passed.

Then one ordinary day, while Moses is doing an ordinary job, a bush burns without being consumed.

That’s where Moses discovers what God’s about to do.

It isn’t where God first saw Israel. It isn’t where God first heard their cries. It isn’t where God first remembered His covenant. And it certainly isn’t where Moses’ story began.

The people in Egypt couldn’t see the wilderness. Moses in the wilderness couldn’t see what was coming. Neither could see how the pieces would eventually meet. But God could.

Long before Moses stood before Pharaoh and said, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go,’” there had already been a basket.

There had already been a palace. There had already been a failure. There had already been a wilderness. There had already been forty years of sheep.

And while Israel was still asking God for deliverance, the deliverer was already on the way.