3 Days of Prayer and Fasting (2022/03)

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. 2 And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. 3 And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” 4 When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 And 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 at God.

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, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the other Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “But I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” 15 God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.

After calling out “Moses, Moses,” God says something unexpected. Usually, when someone calls out your name and gets your attention, you might expect him to walk over to you or motion for you to come closer, but that’s not what God does. Look at verse 5 with me, “Then [the LORD] said, ‘Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” In the Ancient Near East, removing the sandals, much like removing a hat nowadays, was a gesture of respect and humility (cf. Josh. 5:15; 2 Sam. 15:30; Isa. 20:2; Ezek. 24:17, 23). But this is about more than just showing respect. God gives the reason, “for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” “Horeb, the mountain of God,” and the ground beneath the flame of the LORD has been made “holy“ by the presence of the LORD. In the Old Testament, God’s people were taught to “distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the unclean and the clean“ (Lev. 10:10). The holy place, holy vessels, God’s chosen, holy people were all things that were specially set apart for God. They were consecrated things. The opposite of what is “holy” is what is “common.” Because the holy God has graced this plot of land on the Mountain of Horeb with His presence, it is no longer common, ordinary ground that Moses can tread on without a second thought. It is holy ground.

God cannot let Moses approach Him on his own terms. Moses must take his sandals off. The LORD is not someone we can speak to or approach glibly or flippantly. He is not someone to trifle with. He will not be mocked. He cannot be fooled. In Leviticus 11:44-45 (cf. Lev. 19:2; , God says repeatedly “be holy, for I am holy.” Habakkuk 1:13 says that God is “of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong.” He is the One who dwells in unapproachable light before whom all our hidden sins and shortcomings, all our faults and foibles, all our past, present, and future, are nakedly exposed. He is the Consuming Fire who will condemn sinners and consume all unrighteousness.

At the end of Chapter 2, it said that when the Israelites cried out for rescue from their slavery in Egypt, “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.” There, we saw that God remembered His people; here, we see God intervene on behalf of His people. Verses 7-8 repeat the verbs from 2:24-25, “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, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…”

Notice the repetition of the pronoun ‘I,’ which demonstrates God’s personal commitment to His people. God is saying: “I myself will do this!” God will fulfill the promise that He made to Abraham in Genesis 15:13-16, and bring His people to possess the Promised Land of Canaan. God knows that we cannot climb up to where He is, but He graciously condescends. He “comes down to deliver [us]” and “to bring [us] up out of [the] land [of slavery].” The LORD who dwells on high comes down, that He might lift us up from our slavery and squalor. Our God is not detached from, or disinterested in, our plight. Out God is not distant. Our God draws near to us, and He intends to dwell with us.

This promise of God’s abiding presence is contained in the very name of God. The words and phrases, “I AM WHO I AM,” “I AM,” and “YHWH” all play on the Hebrew verb “to be,” which hearkens back to God’s promises to Moses in verse 21, “I will be with you.” God’s name contains God’s promise that He will be with His people. God says in Hebrews 13:5, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” In the midst of our darkest hours and hardest seasons, before the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that we face in our relationships, in our work, in our own personal fight for holiness, we are not alone! The Great I AM is with you!

And the ultimate proof of this is found in the coming of Jesus Christ. Matthew begins his Gospel by telling us that Jesus is called “Immanuel (which means, God with us)” in Matthew 1:23, and he concludes his Gospel with Jesus’s promise in Matthew 28:20, “behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We know from Exodus 7:7 that Moses was “eighty years old” when he confronted Pharaoh, that means forty years has elapsed since we last heard of Moses in Chapter 2. Most of us haven’t even lived for forty years, and Moses has spent that long in the wilderness of Midian. The former prince of Egypt has by now grown accustomed to his life as a shepherd. He has a wife now, Zipporah (2:21), and kids too, Gershom and Eliezer (1 Chron. 23:15). Moses, the Egyptian princeling, who, in his youthful impetuosity, struck and killed an Egyptian man who was beating his fellow Hebrew, is long gone. He is now a weathered shepherd, who knows landscape of Midianite wilderness like the back of his hand. Here he is, as usual, wandering the wilderness and leading his father-in-law’s flock, looking for nothing but a good strip of grass when he, unwittingly, stumbles onto “Horeb, the mountain of God.”

“When the LORD saw that [Moses] turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am'” (v. 4). This is a standard pattern in Scripture, when God appears and addresses someone. in Genesis 22:11, the LORD called out “‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.” In Genesis 46:2, the LORD called out, “‘Jacob, Jacob.‘ And he said, ‘Here I am.'” In both of those instances, God intervened at critical junctures of the patriarchs’ lives to direct and guide them, and so He does here with Moses. In the New Testament also, we see the same pattern, In Luke 10:41, Jesus calls out, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.” And in Acts 9:4; 22:7; 26:14, the risen Lord Jesus calls out, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” When someone is addressed by name like that twice, there is a sense of earnestness and urgency in the call. God is still calling His people to Himself today. “Moses, Moses!”