“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.”
The angel of the Lord appears to Moses in flames of fire from within a bush, and Moses sees that though the bush is on fire it does not burn up. The angel of the Lord throughout the Old Testament often functions as a visible manifestation of God Himself — the divine presence in a form that can be seen — and here the fire and the bush together communicate a theology: God is present in the unlikely, the ordinary, and the undestructible. A thornbush was the most common scrubby plant of the Sinai wilderness, not a cedar or a mighty oak. God chose the smallest, most unremarkable thing in the landscape to house His glory. 1 Corinthians 1:27 captures the principle: God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. The bush burning without being consumed is also a picture of Israel itself: a people passing through the fire of Egyptian slavery yet not destroyed. And it is a picture of the holiness of God: a fire that consumes nothing it does not intend to consume.
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