Exodus 3
Exodus 3 is one of the most sacred moments in Scripture: God speaks from a burning bush on Horeb, and nothing is the same afterward. Moses, tending his father-in-law's sheep in the desert after forty years, is drawn to the strange sight of a bush that burns but is not consumed. He is told to remove his sandals — the ground is holy — and then God identifies Himself: I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. Moses hides his face. God announces that He has seen the affliction of His people, heard their cry, and is coming down to deliver them. Moses is sent. The excuses begin immediately — who am I? — and God's answer is not a resume but a promise: I will be with you. When Moses asks God's name, he receives the most profound answer in religious history: I AM WHO I AM, the self-existent, covenant-keeping God whose name is forever. Acts 7:30–34 and John 8:58 draw directly from this encounter, identifying the God of the burning bush with the God who becomes flesh.
Exodus 3:1
Moses is tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he leads the flock to the far side of the wilderness and comes to Horeb, the mountain of God. The mountain of God — also called Sinai — is here named before the revelation that makes it holy, as if the narrator is letting the reader know that this geography has already been marked in the divine purposes. Moses has spent forty years in Midian, keeping sheep in the same wilderness where Israel will later camp and receive the law. His work is humble, unhurried, and invisible. Acts 7:30 notes that forty years passed before God appeared. The long preparation was not wasted; it was the formation of a man patient enough to lead three million people through a wilderness for another forty years. Psalm 23, which Moses may well have authored, opens with the same scene: a shepherd leading a flock beside still waters. Moses is learning from the inside out what he will one day say to a nation.
Exodus 3:2
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.