Rob Morgan - The Angel In The Bush
The Angel In The Bush
A Pocket Paper
from
The Donelson Fellowship
______________
Robert J. Morgan
May 9, 1999
Today we are continuing our studies on the subject of Christ in the book of Exodus, and our text from Exodus 3:1-12 is the story of Moses encountering God at the burning bush.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Median. And he led the flock to the back of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of the bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said, "I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn."
So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am."
Then He said, "Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground."
Moreover He said, "I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.
And the Lord said, "I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from the land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.
But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?"
So He said, "I will certainly be with you. And this shall be a sign to you that I have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain."
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Just as a law professor might hold up a legal brief and ask his class what could be learned about the judicial system from the documents in his hand…
As a doctor might discover a great deal about the state of your health from a sample of your blood…
As an astronomer might learn about the heavens by fixing his telescope on one star…
Even so, we might learn a great deal about Jesus Christ from a study of this one passage. It was written by Moses, the author of the first five books of the Bible. In Luke 24, Jesus, speaking to his two wayfaring friends, explained to them what the Old Testament had to say about the Messiah, and he began with the books of Moses. In other words, the Bible, from its beginning books, is all about Jesus Christ. He fills the pages of Genesis and Exodus.
So, what can we learn about Jesus Christ from this passage? The answer to that question comes when we begin to establish the identity of the one who is speaking, the one here who is called the "Angel of the Lord." Verse 2 says, "And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of the bush." Who was this angel?
Well, we have several clues. First, it's important to remember that the word angel means messenger. So we could say that there was a messenger from God who appeared in the form of a crackling, blazing fire in this bush. He was a messenger of God the Father whose purpose was to reveal the thoughts and intentions of God the Father to a human being, to Moses.
The second clue is hardly a clue at all, for it is so obvious. Whoever is speaking, this Angel or Messenger of God, is, in fact, God Himself. Look at verse 4: So when the Lord saw that he (Moses) turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, "Moses! Moses!" And down in verse 6: I am the God of your fathers. Moses confirmed this fact later, for Deuteronomy 33:16 gives us an interesting name for God, referring to the Lord as "Him who dwelt in the bush."
So we have God the Messenger speaking for God the Father from the burning bush. Our third clue comes to us as we compare this text with previous passages in the Bible where this "Angel of the Lord" shows up. In Genesis, for example, he appears to several people at different times and with different messages. You might remember that one day in Genesis 18 Abraham is sitting in the door of his tent during the heat of the day when suddenly three mysterious travelers show up. Two are angels who proceed to Sodom to rescue Lot and to destroy the city. The other is called "the Angel of the Lord" who converses with Abraham face to face, man to man, and he is referred to in the text as the Lord Himself. Abraham offers to him the first intercessory prayer in Scripture, praying for the people of Sodom. Later, in Genesis 32, this same "Angel of the Lord" confronts Jacob in the desert and wrestles with him until the break of day. In every case, the figure seems to be divine.
So here are our clues.
- He is a Messenger for God.
- Yet He is God Himself.
- He appears repeatedly in the Old Testament to communicate with human beings like you and me.
Now, the Bible teaches that there is one God who eternally exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God the Father is invisible. No one has seen God the Father at any time. And nowhere in the Bible did anyone ever see the Holy Spirit except in symbolic form such as the dove that descended from the sky at the baptism of Christ, because, being Spirit, He, too, is invisible. But several verses in the New Testament tell us which member of the Holy Trinity reveals or manifests God to mankind:
John 1:18 says, "No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has (revealed) him."
John 6:46 - "No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has see the Father."
1 Timothy 6:16 says, "God...dwells in unapproachable light whom no man has seen or can see."
Colossians 1:15 says that he—Jesus Christ—is the image of the invisible God.
For 2000 years, church theologians have understood that when God appeared in human form in the Old Testament, it was a manifestation of God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. Dr. Raymond Scott in his book on this subject, wrote: "It is a well-known fact that the Old Testament predicts the coming of the Messiah. But what is not common knowledge among Christians is that Jesus Christ actually appeared on this earth on numerous occasions prior to his incarnation."
So I would like to suggest that when God appears as "the Angel of the Lord" in the burning bush was no one less than God the Son Himself.
The Symbol of the Bush
Now another question: Why does he appear in this way, as fire in the midst of the bush? What is the meaning or significance of this symbol? I want to suggest four possibilities.
First, it is possible that there is no deeper meaning to it at all. God just wanted to draw Moses aside to speak with him, and this was the way He choose to do it.
But some people suggest that God chose to appear in a burning bush because it is a picture of the nation of Israel, forever going through suffering, forever going through fire, yet never consumed. The people of the Jews, the nation of Israel, are indestructible. No matter how Pharaoh may try to subdue them, no matter how Haman the Agagite may plot to annihilate them, no matter how Antiochus Epiphanes may try to exterminate them, no matter how Adolf Hitler may seek to obliterate them, no matter how the coming Anti-Christ may seek to utterly destroy them, the Jewish people are indestructible. They will never by consumed by the fires of persecution.
There is a third possibility as well. In the Hebrew language, the word used here for bush means a thorny bush. We know from the book of Genesis that thorns and briars were a part of the curse. In Genesis 3:17, God cursed the ground because of the sin of Adam and Eve and said, "It will produce thorns and thistles for you." Fire, on the other hand, is also a biblical symbol, not only of holiness, but of judgment. Fire, in the Bible, is associated with hell. The Bible says that Jesus Christ became sin for us, and on the cross he faced the fires of God's justice in our place, yet was not consumed. He rose from the dead on the third day. Perhaps we have here a symbolic portrayal of the Gospel.
A fourth possibility is that the fire which Moses saw represented nothing more nor less than the holiness of God. Fire, in the Bible, is a symbol of purity and holiness. The book of Hebrews says that our God is a consuming fire. And this interpretation is born out by the context. Look at verses 4ff: When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses! Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am." "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground."
God The Son is Holy
And this is the first of four truths about Jesus Christ I want to share with you this morning. God the Son is Holy. Why did he tell Moses to remove his sandals? John MacArthur suggests that this command prevented Moses from rashly intruding, unprepared, into God's presence. The word holy means, among other things, without sin, pure. And we cannot be very healthy people until we begin to understand this aspect of our Lord's character.
Isaiah 6 gives us an interesting scene about this. One day the prophet Isaiah was going about his normal activities when suddenly he was given a vision of the magnificent holiness of God. He saw the Lord high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were the angels, singing: Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory. At the sound of their voices the building shook and the temple was filled with smoke. And what did Isaiah do? He fell on his face, crying, "Woe is me! I am undone! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty."
A. W. Tozer once wrote that we have too much learned to live with unholiness. We have too much learned to tolerate sin in our lives. But God hates sin like a mother hates the polio that would take the life of her child. And he says to us, "Be holy, for I am holy."
Tozer said, "God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of his universe. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must ultimately end in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning well, whole."
I want to say to everyone of you: "By the grace of Jesus Christ, keep yourselves pure. Separate yourselves from anyone or anything that would defile you. Come out from among them and be ye separate, says the Lord."
God the Son is Eternal
Second, we learn from this account in Exodus 3 that God the Son is Eternal. Read on: Then He said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."
God the Son spoke these words, and 1500 years later God the Son interpreted them to the Sadducees. In Mark 12, a delegation from the denomination of the Sadducees came to see Jesus. They didn't believe in eternal life or in heaven, and they asked Jesus a convoluted question about the afterlife. Jesus told them bluntly that they were in error because they knew neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. Then he said: But about the dead rising—have you not read in the book of Moses, in the account of the bush, how God said to him, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." He is not the God of the dead but of the living.
In other words, Jesus told the Sadducees to notice the tense of the verb used in Exodus 3. The voice from the burning bush did not say, "I WAS the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." He said, "I AM the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." Present tense. Moses, your father is alive right now. Abraham is alive, Isaac is alive, Jacob is alive. They are alive in heaven, and I am their God just as I was their God when they were on the earth. I am not the God of the dead, but of the living.
We do not realize how alive someone is the moment they die! When the Christian dies, he goes instantly to be with the Lord Jesus, for the Bible says that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
God the Son is Concerned
Now, there's a third thing we can learn here about God the Son. He is not only holy and eternal; He is concerned for us. Look at verse 7: I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of the land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
I have heard their cries. I am concerned about their suffering. I am coming down to rescue them. I will deliver them and I will rescue them. Perhaps you wonder sometimes if God knows what you are going through. Sometimes in suffering we feel very alone. Sometimes we don't think anyone else can really understand, or that anyone else can help. But there's an old song that says:
Never a trial that He is not there,
Never a burden that He does not bear,
Never a sorrow that He does not share,
Moment by moment I'm under His care.
Never a heartache and never a groan
Never a teardrop and never a moan,
Never a danger but there on the throne,
Moment by moment He thinks of His own.
God The Son is Before Us and Behind Us
But now I'd like to show you one other thing about this "Angel of the Lord." We see him here in Exodus 3 in the form of the burning bush. But he shows up again later as a column of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day, leading Israel through the wilderness. Exodus 13:20ff says, So they took their journey from Succoth and camped in Etham at the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light…
Exodus 14:19 says: And the Angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, moved on and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud went from them and stood behind them. So it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel. Thus it was a cloud and darkness to the one, and it gave light by night to the other.
How do you think the Israelites should have slept that night? The Angel of the Lord hemmed them in, behind and before. He surrounded them. He encompassed them.
Now compare that with these following verses:
Psalm 139:5 says: You hem me in—behind and before.
Isaiah 52:12 says: But you will not leave in haste or go in flight; for the Lord will go before you, the God of Israel will be your rear guard.
Psalm 34:7 says: The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them.
Psalm 5:12 says that God surrounds His people as with a shield.
We're surrounded! When we are in the center of God's will, when we are hidden in Christ, we have the Lord going before us, guiding us, and we have Him behind us, guarding us. The Eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.
So who is this "Angel of the Lord" who spoke to Moses from the burning bush? Who is this "Angel of the Lord" who appeared in the pillar of fire and in the cloud of glory? It is God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is holy, who is eternal, who is vitally concerned about you, and who hems you in—behind and before—and surrounds your life as with a shield.
That's our God. That's our Jesus.