Who is the Lord? (Exodus 5-11)

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For many of you, maybe for most, as you were growing up, when you heard the word “God,” you knew exactly what that word – that name – meant. In the American South, until the later part of the 20^th Century, as in many Christianized societies, the name “God” only and always represented the all-powerful deity who speaks and acts in the pages of the Bible. In fact, even when I was an atheist, no one ever asked me, “Which God do you not believe in?” No one assumed that I meant that I did not believe in Vishnu or Shiva. It was the God of the Bible whose existence I rejected, and everyone understood that without qualification. Today things are a bit different in America. Today, when someone says the word “God,” we have to be more specific. We live in a society filled with devotees of every known, and a few unknown, deities … just like those who live in many of the world’s cultures today and throughout history.

The Egyptian pantheon was crowded, like the more familiar hierarchies of gods and goddesses in later Greek and Roman cultures. There were deities governing every imaginable facet of life. Even the Pharaoh himself was venerated as the incarnation of one of  the gods, and the son of the most high. So, had Moses come into Pharaoh’s presence and said, “God says, ‘Let My people go’,” Pharaoh may have responded, “Which one? I never said that. Did Horus say that? Osiris? Isis? Which God said this?” And that is why when God gave Moses the message to deliver, it was specific. Our English Bibles do us a disservice here. In Exodus 5:1, when you read, “the Lord,” notice the capital letters there. Don’t ignore that anomaly in the text. Pay attention. Those capital letters are the conventional way that the primary English translations render the divine name of God, YHWH. And to be more specific, He is identified as “the God of Israel.” So, the message Moses has for the one who asserts himself as the incarnation of Horus, the son of Hathor and Amon-Re, is that another deity, YHWH – the one worshiped by the Israelites – has decreed that His people must be set free. And Pharaoh’s response sets the tone for the remainder of the book of Exodus. “Who is YHWH that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know YHWH, and besides, I will not let Israel go.”

Everything that follows this question and statement of Pharaoh is a direct answer to him from heaven. YHWH wants there to be no mistake about His identity, His authority, and His exclusivity. He makes it clear in no uncertain terms that His purpose in all that He does in bringing judgment upon Egypt and deliverance for Israel through these plagues is to make sure that Israel, Egypt, and Pharaoh know exactly Who He is! Let’s just do a quick run down:

·         7:5 – The Egyptians shall know that I am YHWH when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the sons of Israel from their midst.

·         7:17 – By this you shall know that I am YHWH.

·         8:10 – That you may know that there is no one like YHWH our God.

·         8:22 – In order that you may know that I, YHWH, am in the midst of the land.

·         9:14 – So that you may know that there is no one like Me in all the earth.

·         9:16 – In order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth.

·         10:2 – That you may know that I am YHWH.

So, as we survey quickly the account of the plagues unleashed on Egypt preceding the Exodus of the Israelites, we want to observe how God showed Himself to His people, to Egypt and to Pharaoh. What was it that He wanted them to know about Him? Because around the world today there are many who will say to us, “Who is YHWH? Who is Jesus? Why should we care what He says or what He wants us to do?” And we must be prepared to give them an answer, even as we ourselves are drawn into deeper intimacy and experience with this very same God.

I. The Lord is the God Who Acts on Behalf of His People.

Who are God’s people? There are some of course who would suggest that every person is a child of God, and in some sense, that is true. We are all God’s children by creation in the sense that He made us all. But, as even human family relationships illustrate, there is more to a parent-child relationship than just biology and genetics. There is relationship. And so it is spiritually. When the Bible speaks of God’s people, it seldom if ever does so in terms of creation. That’s too broad. The overwhelming emphasis is on relationship – a relationship between God and those people whom He has chosen as His own and redeemed by His grace. But there’s another view which is too narrow. It would suggest that ethnic Israel is God’s people. There are plenty of Bible verses that can be understood that way, and certainly God chose Israel in a unique sense to be His own covenant people. But that covenant always included some who were not ethnic Jews, and never included all who are. And by faith in Jesus Christ, we have been adopted into this family of God’s people (John 1:12). As God’s people, we need to know that our God acts on our behalf in the same ways today. And when He does, the world comes to know who He is as well.  

He acts according to promise for His people. Chapter 6, verse 2, God takes Moses back into Hebrew history and reminds him that He is the one who revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He established His covenant with them, promising them possession of the land in which He had chosen for them to dwell. That is not where they were now. Conditions were not consistent with those God had promised in His covenant, and were much harsher. But God says to His people, “I have not forgotten what I have promised.” Chapter 6, verse 5: “I have heard the groaning of the sons of Israel, because the Egyptians are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered My covenant.” So, as He delivers on the promise made in the past, notice the promises that He makes for the future. How many times does He say, “I will,” in verses 6 through 9? “I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession; I am the LORD.” When you read the Bible and see all that God has promised to you in Christ, you know that you can trust what He says and be certain that He will never forget what He has promised. He will always come through, no matter how things look now. If He has spoken it, He will do it.

He acts for the protection of His people. As the plagues begin to be unleashed on Egypt, God declares to Pharaoh that He will make a distinction between His people and the Egyptians, so that His people will be protected from the destruction that ensues. For example, during the plague of flies in 8:22, God says, “I will set apart the land of Goshen, where My people are living, so that no swarms of flies will be there.” In the plague of cattle death in Chapter 9, again the distinction is made: “nothing will die that belongs to the sons of Israel” (9:4). In 9:26 we see that the plague of hail did not touch the land of Goshen where the Israelites lived. And in Chapter 11, when God announces the coming of the ultimate plague of the death of the firstborn, He says on that horrific night, “against the sons of Israel a dog will not even bark … that you may understand how the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel” (11:7).

In all these events, God’s people enjoyed a protection that that those who are not His did not have. Now, this should not be understood to mean that God will always protect His people from bad things happening. That’s not true. But the plagues about which we are reading are not merely “bad things” that happen in the course of life in this fallen world. They are acts of divine judgment. These aren’t “bad things,” these are the “worst things.” Hebrews 10:31 says “it is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” And that is exactly what Pharaoh and the Egyptians have done. But this is the very thing that God’s people are protected against. Romans 8:1 says that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. This means that no matter what you might have to face in this world, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus, you will not face the eternal judgment of God because He has rescued you from that by His grace.

God acts according to promise for His people, and for the protection for His people, and He acts in response to the prayers of His people. In Chapter 8, we find the plague of frogs, which might be comical if it were not so horrific. God brought frogs up from the Nile and they filled the land, filled the houses, including the bedrooms and kitchens, of the Egyptians. And, as if to show that this was no big deal or something, Pharaoh’s magicians duplicated the feat. But this merely made matters worse. The last thing Pharaoh needed was more frogs! So Pharaoh says to Moses, “Entreat the Lord that He remove the frogs” (8:8). Pharaoh didn’t deserve that, but Moses prayed for him anyway, and God answered. We read in 8:13 that “the Lord did according to the word of Moses.” That’s remarkable. Throughout the Bible, we are accustomed to reading that a person did according to the word of the Lord. We find it repeatedly in Exodus concerning Moses and Aaron. But here, it is the Lord who acts in accordance to what Moses says. And this is not the only time. In fact the entire Exodus is brought on by the Lord saying, “I have heard the groaning of the sons of Israel” (6:5). When Pharaoh pleaded for relief from the plague of flies, Moses prayed, and “the Lord did as Moses asked” (8:31). In Chapter 9, Moses prayed for a reprieve of the plague of hail, and God granted it (9:33), and the same happened in Chapter 10 regarding the plague of locusts.

How much more assurance do we need to know that God answers the prayers of His people? He is willing to act in response to the prayers of Moses for the most undeserving person on earth that time, the Pharaoh of Egypt. How dare we believe that He will not answer us when we call upon Him to carry out His purposes in our lives and in the world?

And we must also mention that when God acts on behalf of His people, He acts to make provision for them. Chapter 11 – the Lord tells Moses to instruct the Israelites to ask their Egyptian neighbors for articles of silver and gold. Now just imagine that. Imagine going to your neighbor and saying, “Hiya. Umm, God says to give me all your silver and gold.” How do you think your neighbor would respond? How would you respond if your neighbor asked this of you? But Exodus 11:3 says that the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians. Their entire 40 year pilgrimage through the wilderness to the Promised Land, and the construction of the Tabernacle and all of its furnishings was paid for by the divine provision of silver and gold for the Israelites from their neighbors.

Please understand me, God is not saying that you should expect others to give you whatever you ask for. The Israelites could have never thought of the idea of asking their neighbors for silver and gold. They didn’t even know why it would be needed. But what God is making known to us about Himself here is that He knows our needs long before we know of them, and He will act to meet those needs in ways that we could not expect or imagine. You can trust that because, He is the God who acts on behalf of His people.

II. The Lord is the God who is sovereign over all creation.

I am not a handyman in any sense of the word, but there are times that I see a job that needs doing at the house, and think to myself, “I bet I could fix that.” And then I start thinking it through. I don’t have the tools, I don’t have the skills or know-how, I don’t have the materials. But, when God has a job to do in the universe, He does not have this problem. He does not have any problems. And that is because He is sovereign. He is the unaided maker and unrivaled ruler of all creation, and therefore has the unlimited authority to marshal every element of the universe for the furtherance of His purposes. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Exodus and the plagues that preceded it.

We observe in the biblical account how God is sovereign over time. Past, present, and future are all ever present before Him and all march to the beat of His will. Therefore, He alone is able to foretell the end from the beginning of any matter. In Isaiah 46:10, He will say of Himself, “I am God and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning.” In Exodus 6:1, He says authoritatively concerning Pharaoh, “he will let them go, and under compulsion he will drive them out of his land.” This is not an educated guess or speculation. This is certain knowledge of a future unknown to everyone but God. But His sovereignty over time also means that He operates by His own timetable, which He sets for His own purposes. Chapter 9, verse 5 – “The Lord set a definite time, saying, ‘Tomorrow the Lord will do this thing in the land,” speaking of the plague of cattle death. Prior to the final plague, He says, “About midnight I am going out into the midst of Egypt, and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt will die” (11:4-5).

We find Him not only sovereign over time, but sovereign over nature. With the possible exception of the first and last plagues, the other eight all involve His use of natural phenomena for supernatural purposes. Frogs, gnats, flies, cattle, dust, bacteria, hail, locusts, and even the light of the sun all operate according to His command and purpose.

Now, how could one possibly think of defying or outmaneuvering one who can call upon every living thing and every element of the universe to do His bidding? And yet we have all tried, therefore we must not be surprised that Pharaoh did as well. Notice God’s message to Pharaoh in 9:13-17. “Let My people go, that they may serve Me. For this time I will send all My plagues on you and your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is no one like Me in all the earth. For if by now I had put forth My hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, you would then have been cut off from the earth. But, indeed, for this reason I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth. Still you exalt yourself against My people by not letting them go.” The unsettling reality that Pharaoh will discover is that God is sovereign even over every human being, including himself. Though Pharaoh may believe that he is a god with matchless authority, he will learn that there is a King above all kings who raises men up and brings them down, who moves upon their hearts according to His will, and who uses those who worship Him and those who rebel against Him alike to accomplish His purpose and show forth His glory.

We are introduced to a somewhat troubling expression in 7:3. God says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” It seems to indicate that God will make it so that Pharaoh is actually unable to repent, believe, or obey the Lord. This causes many to object, because it flies in the face of the cherished notion of so-called “free will.” If God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, does Pharaoh no longer have the freedom to choose to respond to the Lord as he pleases? And if he does not have freedom, can he be morally culpable and accountable for his actions and attitude? After all, would it not then be God’s fault that Pharaoh responds as he does? These are all important questions, but a careful reading of the text helps to ease the tension. The phrase in 7:3 does not indicate that God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart; only that He would do it eventually. So what takes place between this statement and the actual divine hardening of Pharaoh’s heart?

In 7:13, we read that “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he did not listen.” This does not say whether Pharaoh hardened his own heart, or if the Lord hardened it. It just describes his spiritual condition at that moment. In fact in verse 14, the Lord attributes his hardness to Pharaoh’s own stubbornness. Again in 7:22, we read that “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened,” and again no cause is stated. But we find Pharaoh in a state of spiritual indifference at this point. He “did not listen” and “he went into his house with no concern.” In Chapter 8, we see what appears to be the beginning of a softening of Pharaoh’s heart. In the midst of the plague of frogs, he asks Moses to pray for relief, and promises to let the people go. Verse 15 says, however, “But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and did not listen to them.” So who hardened Pharaoh’s heart? Pharaoh did.

Again in 8:19, there is the simple statement that his heart was hardened, with no reference to cause, but in verse 32, we find again that Pharaoh hardened his own heart once more. In 9:7, again there is the statement that his heart was hardened with no cause, but in verse 12, for the first time we read, “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” But this hardening was not permanent or final, for we see him soften once more, pleading with Moses to pray for relief from the hail. But once more, 9:34, “when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned again and hardened his heart.” And it is from this point forward, in 10:1, 10:20, 10:27, and 11:10, that the condition is permanent – the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.

So, is it God’s fault that Pharaoh’s heart was hard? Did God overpower Pharaoh’s will and force him to do things he would have otherwise not done? By no means. What this cycle of repetition indicates to us is that by his own sinful attitudes and actions, Pharaoh repeatedly hardened his own heart, until the Lord closed the window of opportunity for repentance to him, and made his hardened condition permanent. At any point prior to the final time when Pharaoh hardened his own heart, he could have turned to the Lord in repentance and faith. He could have been saved from the worst of the judgments. But the Lord knew the end from the beginning, and knew that no matter how many plagues Pharaoh experienced, he would never turn to the Lord in sincere repentance and faith. Therefore, the Lord sovereignly determined that Pharaoh’s opportunities for repentance had come to an end. This is why we are repeatedly warned in Scripture, “If today you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Psa 95:7-8; Heb 3:7-8, 15; 4:7). You never know when that moment will come when the Lord will cause the concrete you pour into your own spiritual heart to set and harden irreversibly. You never know when you may have turned away from Him for the last time and forever forsaken your window of grace to return to Him in faith and repentance.

He is sovereign over all creation. Pharaoh, Egypt, and Israel alike all had to learn that and so must we! Time moves according to His marching orders. All nature is sustained in existence that it might do His bidding at the speaking of His Word. And even every human life is held in the palm of His all-powerful hand, that He might accomplish His purposes with or without our cooperation. The Sovereign God of the universe has the authority to act as He pleases in the midst of all that He has created; and all that He does is good, furthering His purpose and His glory in the world.

So the Lord is showing Himself by these plagues as the God who acts on behalf of His people and the God who is sovereign over all creation. Now finally, He shows us that …

III. The Lord is the God who alone is God.

The existence of YHWH, or any other deity for that matter, is not contingent upon our belief, the sincerity of our belief, or the vehemence of our denial. If Osiris or Amon-Re do not exist, then all the belief that Pharaoh and the Egyptians can muster will not summon them into existence. And on the flip side, if YHWH exists, then no one can deny Him out of existence. This was one of the alarming realities with which I had to grapple as I came to faith in Christ. I had the sudden realization that my denial of God’s existence had not made Him go away! And YHWH sets out to demonstrate to Israel that He is the living God in whom they can trust, all the while demonstrating to Pharaoh and Egypt that their multitude of deities are nothing more than figments of their depraved and idolatrous imaginations. When He finishes His work, there will be no doubt that He alone is God.

Prior to the first plague there is a spiritual showdown in the court of Pharaoh, as Aaron’s staff is miraculously transformed into a serpent. The serpent was a symbol of Pharaoh’s power. Look at the headpiece of any Egyptian sarcophagus and you will likely find a symbol of a cobra or other snake emblazoned upon it. And to demonstrate the power of Egypt’s deities, Pharaoh’s magicians were able to duplicate the feat, causing their own staffs to turn into serpents as well. There are various explanations for this – perhaps it was a parlor trick, as some Eastern snake charmers today can still dazzle a crowd by pinching the neck of a snake in just the right spot to cause its body to become as rigid as a staff. We cannot rule out the possibility that Satan, the great deceiver, enabled these staffs to be transformed into serpents. All idolatry is fueled at some level and to some degree by demonic power. But in order to demonstrate that YHWH alone is God, the Bible says simply and without explanation or commentary, “But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.” The power of God Almighty devoured the impotent idols of Egypt.

In every plague that followed this serpentine spectacle, God was swallowing up the idols of Egypt, proving His unique authority over all of these false gods. When the Nile was turned to blood, God was pronouncing the defeat of Hapi, Isis, and Khnum, the gods of the Nile. They bled out under the judgment of God. When frogs overcame the land, YHWH showed Himself as victorious over Heqet, the frog-headed goddess of Egypt. When the dust became gnats (or some other flying, biting insect), God was pronouncing the death of Set, the Egyptian god of the desert. In the plague of flies, rendered in Hebrew simply as swarms, God showed Himself the victor over Khepri, the Egyptian god depicted as a scarab beetle. When the livestock were killed (perhaps by a plague of anthrax), God rendered Hathor, Apis, and Mnevis (all of whom were depicted as cows or bulls) defeated and impotent. When the people broke out in boils, God was showing that their faith in Sekhmet and Isis, the healing goddesses, was futile. When the hail and locusts came and destroyed the crops, YHWH showed Himself to be all-powerful over the nonexistent deities, Osiris and Seth, protectors of the crops. When “a darkness that can be felt” swept over the land, the great sun-god Horus, of whom Pharaoh was deemed an incarnation, was pronounced dead and defeated. And when the plague of the firstborn came, killing even the son of Pharaoh, God was proving that no human being may lay claim to the glory that belongs only to Him, and all the deities of fertility, reproduction and childbirth, could not be rallied against the power of the One True God.

Because YHWH is alone God, He is therefore worthy of complete obedience from all humanity. Moses and Aaron were not to be excused from obedience because of their advancing ages – 80 and 83 respectively. Israel was not to be excused from obedience because of the harshness of their circumstances. They had to comply with all the words of the Lord as were spoken to them through Moses. The Egyptians were not immune to the command of obedience because of their ignorance of YHWH, nor was Pharaoh exempt as though he could abide in his own authority and power. At various points, Pharaoh attempted to render partial obedience to the Lord. He made four attempts to compromise with Moses. He offered them the opportunity to stay in the land and worship their God (8:25). He offered them a chance to leave the land, but not very far (8:28). He offered the men the freedom to go if they would leave the women and children behind (10:8-11). And he offered them the freedom to go without their livestock (10:24). But God was not in the business of bargaining with Pharaoh. The command was clear: Let My people go! And anything other than complete and uncompromising obedience was subject to judgment. Partial obedience is total disobedience, and God does not accept plea-bargains.

And because the Lord alone is God, He is the one to whom every person must ultimately give account. Because we are all sinners, every single one of us is as morally guilty before the Lord as Pharaoh was. But in His grace, God has made available to us the offer of repentance and redemption. If we will but turn to Him by faith in the sincerity of our hearts, we can be saved! Pharaoh attempted at various points to render unto God an artificial repentance, but the Lord could see through it and would not accept it. Ultimately Pharaoh’s hardened heart was divinely fixed and his opportunity for repentance expired. And he had no further consequence but to face the unmitigated wrath and judgment of a holy God. He experienced the full force of all these plagues, and then some. And when he died, a hell of eternal torment awaited him.

When we consider this in light of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, the picture of our redemption becomes all the more clear. Each of us, like Pharaoh, is guilty of idolatry, and stubborn, hard-hearted, sinfulness. We stand deserving of the full outpouring of the inescapable plague of God’s wrathful judgment. But this sovereign God has acted on behalf of the people of His own gracious choosing, and stepped into time in the person of Jesus Christ. He has received in Himself all the plague of judgment that we deserve. When the death of the firstborn occurred, God spared Israel’s firstborn sons from the judgment. But on the day when Jesus was nailed to the cross of Calvary, God did not spare His only Son, but delivered Him over for us all (Rom 8:32). Christ died for our sins, once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor 5:21). Christ bore the plague of judgment for us, that our redemption and deliverance could be fully accomplished in Him, that we may have our Exodus from this sin-enslaved world. If today you hear His voice beckoning you to repentance, to faith, to obedience, do not harden your hearts.

The Power of God's Word (2 Timothy 3:1-5, 3:14-4:5)

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If this were a creative writing class, and I were to ask you to write the most ludicrous news headline you could imagine, what would you write? If I were to let my imagination run completely wild and come up with the strangest possible notion, it would pale in comparison to this actual headline which I read a few weeks ago: “Lesbian bishop in Sweden calls for church to remove crosses and install Muslim prayer space.”[1] This headline encapsulates the changing religious landscape of our day and time better than anything else I have read recently. Though it represents what we might call “the lunatic fringe” of political correctness, we could provide ample evidence from our own daily news of seismic shifts in cultural ideologies affecting us all for better and for worse. To hear some people talk, these developments seem to have come as a shocking surprise. But in reality, they should not be surprising at all. We have had it on good authority that difficult days were coming.

In the first verse of 2 Timothy, chapter 3, Paul tells his young protégé that difficult times are coming. He tells Timothy in the first five verses of this chapter that men are going to become lovers of self and lovers of money; that they will be boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Yet in spite of all this, he says that somehow they are going to hold on “to a form of godliness.” We find ourselves living today in a world that can be characterized by all of these ills and evils, and yet never before in our lifetimes have people claimed to be more religious and more spiritual. Walk into any bookstore and browse the “Bestsellers,” and you will find numerous titles that deal with spirituality, many of which are written by those with nominal affiliation to Christianity. Our culture is holding on to a form of godliness, a kind of spirituality that is in fact spiritually and morally bankrupt. Our culture has ceased trying to be good, and begun looking for ways to feel good about being bad. Paul said it like this: people are “holding on to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power.”

Today people are trying to build their lives and their society on some semblance of pseudo-godliness, pseudo-religiousity, and pseudo-spirituality which is completely void of power. But what is this power that has been denied so widely? The power to build a life, the power to build a church, the power to build a society is the power of God’s Word. We are living in the midst of a famine like the one spoken of by the prophet Amos, through whom God said, “Behold the days are coming when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord.” What is most tragic about the famine of our day is that it is entirely self-inflicted. God has not become silent. His Word is more readily available to people today than ever before. But more and more people are choosing to build their lives apart from it, thereby denying the power of His Word.

The Bible is the Word of God. Paul tells us in 3:16 here that “all Scripture is inspired by God.” That phrase “inspired by God” translates one Greek word – theopneustas. The NIV captures it with precision here: “All Scripture is God-breathed.” This book is not like any other book. This book is the written revelation of God that He has given us to be our infallible authority and guide for all of life. And by and large it is ignored by many. The terrible irony is that it is not just the people “out there” who are ignoring it. This sacred treasure is being ignored by many inside the church today – in both the pew and the pulpit. And so what is true of the culture at large is also true of many churches today – they hold to a form of godliness, but by neglecting the Bible, they deny the power.

What is needed today in our culture is an awareness of the power of God’s Word. But the culture is never going to understand that until the church returns to that awareness. We live in difficult days, yes. But the days in which Timothy was living were difficult as well. And in the midst of those days, the apostle Paul declared with great force and authority that the only help and the only hope for that culture was the power of the God’s Word. And the same is true for us today. Why is that? Why, in the midst of our times, is the Bible our only source of help and hope? Three points jump off the page of this passage to inform us.

I. The Bible has the power to save our souls. (3:15&)

We first meet Timothy in Acts 16, where he is described as the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer in Jesus. In the first chapter of 2 Timothy, Paul refers to Timothy’s mother and his grandmother by name. His mother is Eunice and his grandmother is Lois. And Paul says that the faith Timothy has in Christ was first found in Lois and Eunice. We do not know when these ladies came to faith in Jesus, but it is not hard to imagine that they had been well taught in the Hebrew Scriptures, and when they heard the Gospel message proclaimed, they recognized it as biblical truth. They could see that Jesus was the fulfillment of all the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament and accepted Christ as Lord and Savior of their lives. Now, from early in his childhood, these two precious ladies had taught Timothy the things of God from the pages of Scripture, and upon coming to faith in Christ, they shared that message with him as well. The sacred writings had given him wisdom into God’s purposes and plans, and when he heard the message of Jesus Christ, he responded by turning to Christ in faith and was gloriously saved.

The Bible is very clear that there is only one way for a person to be saved, and that is through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; NO ONE comes to the Father but through Me.” But one does not arrive at a personal decision to receive Christ by his or her own human reasoning. In fact, often the wisdom of this world stands in the way of one coming to faith in Christ. Humans have never had more access to information and education than they do today. A couple of college courses, a few good books, and a few hours on the internet can provide someone today with an education that our ancestors never imagined possible. But all the wisdom accumulated is really foolishness if it does not point us to Christ. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that the world did not come to know God through its wisdom, but rather, God determined to destroy the wisdom of the wise and rather save humanity through a message that the world around us by and large thinks is foolish. The message is Christ and Him crucified, and it is, according to Paul, foolish and offensive to those who hear it. But this is the message of the Bible. When Paul summarized the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, he said that it consists of the facts that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. Notice the repetition there: According to the Scriptures!!! The power to make men right with God was not found in Plato’s Academy or in Alexandria’s Library. It is not found by accumulating academic degrees or traveling the world. One could read every book ever printed and not find this power, this wisdom, in any of them except one. This power to save was and is only found in the Bible. Only therein do we find the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

God spoke through the prophet Isaiah saying, “My word … will not return to Me empty, without accomplishing what I desire, and without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it out.” When the truth of the Bible goes forth, the Spirit of God works powerfully through the Word of God to turn lost sinners into saved saints. Satan is fully aware of this truth, and it seems in recent days he has been hard at work to lure Christians and churches into a snare of trusting other things to save the souls of human beings. As we witness the exponential growth of sister churches, Satan capitalizes on our sense of envy and tries to convince us that we will see great numbers of people come into our church if only we change our music style, employ a more savvy marketing strategy, or offer the latest programs. We may draw a crowd with those things, but unless the Spirit works through the Word to move upon the hearts of these individuals, that crowd will remain lost in their sins, eternally hopeless apart from Christ. Recent surveys and statistics have shown that many inside the church today live no different from those who never darken the doors of a church. John Piper commented on these statistics by saying that they do not indicate “that born-again people are permeated with worldiness," but rather "that the church is permeated by people who are not born again."[2] This should come as no surprise to us when, one-by-one, churches have abandoned the soul saving power of the Word of God and resorted to unbiblical means of marketing and salesmanship with a view only toward growing their crowds, their buildings, their budgets and their staffs. If we have a view toward seeing souls saved as people come to know Christ as Lord and Savior, then we will cling to the powerful Word of God and trust God to work through it to accomplish His purposes. 

Most of you know that before I became a Christian, I was an atheist. You may also know that my Masters Degree concentration was in Christian Apologetics. So, often I am asked, “What did the trick for you? What argument did someone share with you to win you over? What can I say to my lost friend to get them to believe?” And most are dumbfounded by the simplicity of my answer. Two words: “The Bible.” I came to faith in Christ as I simply read the Bible. I didn’t make a decision to start believing in God or trusting in Christ. Rather, faith began to arise within me. I discovered myself believing what I was reading. Suddenly God and the Lord Jesus Christ became living beings in my awareness. Faith “happened” within me as I read the pages of God’s Word.

I don’t know of any other way for a person to be saved than to confront them with the Word of God about Christ and let the Holy Spirit do His work of regeneration in their hearts. Do you have a lost friend, loved one, neighbor, coworker that you have been trying to reach? How many times have you lovingly shared with them the Word of God? Have you given them a Bible? Have you challenged them to spend time reading the Bible or offered to study it with them? True saving faith, Paul says in Romans 10:17, comes by hearing; and hearing by the Word of Christ. We read in 1 Peter 1:23, “You have been born again, not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God.” Or as Paul tells Timothy here, “the sacred writings … are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

II. The Bible has the power to sanctify our lives. (3:16-17)

Graduation services are joyous occasions that mark the completion of some level of a person’s educational journey. At the end of the ceremony, often students will hurl their caps into the air in celebration of the fact that it is OVER! However, I have always found it interesting that graduation ceremonies are called “Commencements.” To commence is not to end something, but to begin something. The end of one’s educational pursuits marks the beginning point of the rest of his or her life when they must put into practice the things they have learned. We are mistaken if we think graduation is the end; it is actually a new beginning. We often make a similar mistake when it comes to thinking of our Christian lives. When a person finally comes to faith in Christ, often we lead them to believe that they have reached the end of the road. Many people in many churches have been saved, but never taken one step toward spiritual maturity. They think they have come to an end, failing to recognize that they have embarked on the beginning of a brand-new life. 2 Peter 3:18 commands us to “Grow in grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ.” The Great Commission, as you well know, is not a call to simply make converts, but rather to “make disciples.” Therefore, the church of Jesus Christ must take this task of becoming and making disciples with all seriousness.

A disciple is a “learner,” a person who begins to actively follow Christ in the way he or she lives and thinks and speaks. The theological term for this is “sanctification.” At its root, it carries the idea of being set apart. Sanctification is a work that the Holy Spirit begins to perform in our lives at the moment we come to faith in Christ. He graciously and gradually shapes us into Christ-likeness, so that as we live for Him and serve Him others see Christ in us. And how does this take place in our lives? It happens as we immerse ourselves in the Word of God. Jesus prayed in John 17 that the Father would sanctify the followers of Jesus in the truth, and He said, “Thy Word is truth.” The Bible is the truth which sanctifies us. Paul says here not only that the Scriptures are able to make a person wise unto salvation, but they are also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

As we use the Bible in our lives and in our church, we are using God’s chosen means of teaching. The Bible teaches us the right way to think, the right way to believe, the right way to worship and live. As we are taught by the Scriptures, a foundation is laid in our lives to build upon for Christ. Paul also says that the Bible is God’s chosen means of reproof. All of us will fall short and sin as we go through life, and we need to be shown where we are in error. The Bible does this for us. As we read it, it reproves us, showing us our sin. When we read it, it is like looking in a mirror. We see ourselves as God sees us, and we see those areas where we need to change. Next, Paul says that the Bible is profitable for correction. It isn’t enough just to know where we are wrong – we need to discover how to make those wrongs right. We need correcting. As we study God’s Word, we find the way to do just that. And then Paul says that the Bible is God’s chosen means of training in righteousness. It does not merely show us our errors and how to correct them, but it trains us to live in such a way as to avoid those errors in our lives as we live for Christ. As we study it, we are trained in righteousness, equipped to live in the way God intends for us to.

Over the last three weeks, I drove 2,251 miles in a rental car around California and Arizona and hiked a hundred miles or more in some amazing places. On our visit to Yosemite, we set out on a thirteen mile hike that turned into a twenty mile hike. How did that happen? Well, we began in the visitors center looking at a map of the trail. The map taught us the way to go. But along the way, some portions of the trail were washed out by flooding, and directional signs were nowhere to be found. We found ourselves in one place where a volunteer was manning an information station, and asked where we were and how to get where we wanted to be. The volunteer reproved us – he showed us where we had gotten off the trail and where we were in relation to the trail. By using a GPS map on my phone, I was able to plot a course back to the trail to resume our hike, so I was corrected – set back on the right path. And once we did that, we were able to spot the major landmarks to look for on the trail in order to prevent wandering off again. Those landmarks trained us in right hiking, and helped us to avoid errors in the future. Friends, this is what the Bible does for us as we discipline ourselves in the regular study of it. Just as the Holy Spirit works through the Word to bring us to salvation, so He continues to work through the Word to make us more like Jesus. The Bible teaches us, reproves us, corrects us, and trains us in righteousness.

The end result of this is that we are “adequate, equipped for every good work.” You see, along the way as you grow in Christ, someone is going to come along and say, “Hey, we need someone to teach 3^rd Grade Sunday School,” or “We need someone to assist us with snacks in Vacation Bible School,” or they may say, “We’re going to take a mission trip to South Asia and we’d really like you to go along.” They might say, “You know we’d like you to serve on a committee.” Someone may come along and say, “Tomorrow night, I’m going to go visit my lost friend to share Christ with him. Will you go along with me?” For most of us, when we hear those words, all we can think about is how inadequate and ill-equipped we are to do those things. You might think, “I’m not a theologian. I don’t know anything about church administration. I am a picky eater, I can’t go to South Asia. I don’t know what to say to a lost person.” So on and so on, we make excuses for ourselves and try to find a way out. We live in defeat and feel useless and spiritually inferior. But if we would devote ourselves to the understanding of God’s Word, the Bible, Paul says here that we will not be inadequate, but adequate; not ill-equipped, but equipped; and not just for some small menial tasks, but for every good work.

The church is an amazing thing, you know. God has pieced us together according to His sovereign purposes. And He knows what this church has and what this church needs. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul likens the church to a human body. Just as in our bodies, every part has a role to play for the healthy working of the body, so it is in the church. You have a part to play in the service of God. You are growing in discipleship as the Holy Spirit works through the Word of God to perform His work of sanctification in you, and He is equipping you, making you adequate to do your part. And when every member does his or her part in the church, it is a beautiful, God-glorifying thing. And the power to make it all happen is found here in this book – God’s Word, the Bible.

III. The Bible has the power to transform our culture (4:1-5)

Remember the condition of the culture that Paul warns Timothy about in verses 2-5 of Chapter 3. People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness although they have denied its power. Although Paul says that this will come about “in the last days,” he makes it clear that these days had already begun. It is obvious that he does not have in mind some unknowable time period hundreds or thousands of years in the future, for he tells Timothy in 3:5, “avoid such men as these.” These conditions were already around at that time. And in order for people to cling to this empty form of religion and spirituality, he says in 4:3 that they will “not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” If this is not an appropriate description of our own culture, I don’t know what is. The most popular so-called Christian preachers on television and in some of America’s largest churches today are those who do not address the important subjects of sin and salvation, but rather focus on happiness, purpose, success, health, wealth, and prosperity. This sounds so nice, doesn’t it? But it is not sound doctrine. It is the tickling of people’s ears, telling them what they want to hear. It is mythology, not theology.

So, we see from these descriptions given here in this text, that for all the change that’s taken place in the world in the last 2,000 years, some things haven’t changed all that much. The human depravity that affects our culture is the same that affected that of Paul and Timothy’s day. Yet in the midst of these conditions, what advice does Paul give this young pastor? Does he tell him that the solution is electing proper leaders to government positions? Hold a public demonstration? Get a petition going? Withdraw from society altogether and cluster up in holy huddles to avoid being contaminated by the world? No, rather, Paul gives Timothy one charge. In 4:1-2, he says, “I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom: PREACH THE WORD!” Timothy was admonished by his mentor to confront the ills of his society by boldly proclaiming the inspired and authoritative Word of God.

He tells him in 4:5 to do the work of an evangelist. This doesn’t mean that Paul expects Timothy to get a TV program, or to use a lot of hairspray and ask people for money. NO! This word evangelist has as its root the word evangel, the Greek word for “Gospel.” It is as if Paul is saying, “Brother Timothy, I know the world around you is going to hell in a bucket, but the only hope for changing it is for you to proclaim the message of salvation to everyone you know.” And as Paul has already said, that message of salvation is found where? In the Bible. So he tells him Preach the Word!

Are you concerned about the problems of the culture around you? Immorality, addictions, a breakdown of the family, increasing vulgarity and perversion, the disappearance of any sense of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, the seemingly growing tolerance of evil as good, and the increasing categorization of good as evil – do these things concern you as Christian people? I hope so. They concern God, they should concern us too! So what are we going to do about it? You know, if you walk into a dark room, you can do three things. You can say, “Well, so what? It’s dark. Big deal, I’ll just learn to adapt to the darkness.” Or you can complain about it: “Why is this room so dark? I hate darkness. I wish it weren’t so dark.” Or you can do something else: you can turn on a light. And so in our culture, we can just adapt and go with the flow. Or we can gripe and complain about it. Or we can do something about it. But what? Paul told Timothy what to do, and that advice is just as fitting for us today – Preach the Word. Be an evangelist. The ills of our society are not the core issue; they are symptoms of a disease. And that disease is lostness. People act the way they act because they are what they are. So what can we do? Present God’s word to people and share the Gospel of Christ with them. The culture will only change as individuals are changed, and individuals are only changed by the Gospel. 

Do you believe that the faithful proclamation of God’s word by the people of God can change this city, this county, this state and nation? Consider this: In the early part of the 1500s, the city of Geneva, Switzerland was a wicked place, widely known for rioting, gambling, indecency, drunkenness, adultery, and so on. It was said that every third house in Geneva was a tavern. There was a prominent “red-light district,” and people were known to run drunk and naked through the streets shouting blasphemies against God. No matter how the city council of Geneva tried to curb this activity, it continued and worsened over time. In 1536, a man named John Calvin came to Geneva as the pastor of the reformed church there. And John Calvin began to preach the Bible straight forward; verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter, every single day of the week. After a very short while, this began to get on people’s nerves. Eventually, the city council banished him from the city. Over the next three years, the conditions in Geneva got increasingly worse, until the city leaders decided to beg John Calvin to return to his ministry there. In 1541, Calvin came back to his church in Geneva and began preaching again day-by-day, picking up in his preaching at the point he left off three and a half years earlier. And gradually, change began to occur in that city. As people sat under the faithful teaching of God’s word, lives were changed, and as a result the city was changed. There were sweeping moral reforms, regulations were adopted for safety and sanitation, the economic infrastructure was overhauled so radically that Calvin is sometimes called the father of capitalism. That once wicked city was transformed as the Bible was proclaimed every day, and as a result, hundreds of missionaries were sent out from Geneva to the rest of the world, impacting many other cities and nations as well including those earliest settlers of our own nation.  

These are difficult days in which we live. The culture is in need of transformation. And the power to transform it is found in the Word of God. Souls are lost and in need of salvation. And the power to save them is found in the Word of God. Christians are living defeated lives of spiritual immaturity. And the power for their sanctification is found in the Word of God. So today, if you find yourself in one of those categories I would point you to the Bible as God’s solution for your needs. Perhaps you find yourself today lost in sin, being swallowed up by the sinking sand of this godless society. The Bible tells us the wonderful message that Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead so that you could be forgiven and made righteous before God and receive eternal life. I pray that as you have heard this Word today, God’s Spirit may have begun to deal with your heart about your need to be saved. Perhaps you are a Christian, but you know that you have not made much progress in discipleship. You have not spent time in the Word to allow the Holy Spirit to cultivate a Christlike character in your life. Would you allow God’s word to have its full effect in your life by recognizing it as the solid rock on which God wants you to build your life? And then as a church, we need to consider, what would you have this church built upon? Will you have it built upon a style of music, or a slate of programs, or the personality of some leader, or will you rather have the church built on the solid rock of God’s powerful word? Every member of the church must be united in that commitment and must hold one another accountable in keeping the church anchored to the rock of the Bible. And as the church is anchored on the Word of God, and every believer is built up by it, and we begin to proclaim it far and wide, lives will be changed, families will be changed, communities will be changed, societies will be changed, and nations will be changed. This is the power of the Word of God.

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[1] https://carm.org/lesbian-bishop-calls-for-church-to-remove-crosses-install-muslim-prayer-space. Accessed June 22, 2017.

[2] John Piper, Finally Alive (Christian Focus, 2009). 

The Call of God (Exodus 3:1-4:17)

Audio

I can distinctly recall the conversation I had with a fellow church member many years ago in the hallway of another church. I was talking to him about spiritual disciplines and serving the Lord, and he said, “Well, we are not all called like you are.” Now, to be perfectly clear, I wasn’t talking about preaching sermons or pastoring a church. I was talking about basic things that are essential to the Christian life – things like prayer, Bible study, godly living, and sharing the love of Christ with others in practical ways. But in his mind, these were things with which “normal Christians” need not concern themselves with. In his opinion, these things are reserved for the “professional religionists,” like pastors.

The mindset that this man had is unfortunately all too common. In fact, one of the greatest contributions of the Protestant Reformation to church life today is the tearing down of the wall of separation between the so-called “Clergy,” and the so-called “Laity.” Fundamental in the ideals of the Reformers was the priesthood of all believers. While we may not have a vocational call to serve the Lord as a full-time career, all Christians have a calling to know the Lord and to grow in our relationship to Him, to serve the Lord and one another in His name, and to live for Him in faith and obedience. These should not be considered the subjects of seminary courses for the initiation of a class of spiritual elites. These should be the subjects of Sunday School classes and regular discussion in church life. The ministry does not belong to the pastor alone, but to all Christians. According to Ephesians 4:12, God has called teaching pastors to, among other things, “the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry for the edifying of the body of Christ.” That means that the work of ministry and the edifying of the church is not something the pastor does alone, but something that his teaching and preaching should be enabling every Christian to do. And fundamental to that instruction is understanding the call of God.

There is much mystery that unnecessarily surrounds the idea of the call of God. Some would liken it to the NFL draft, in which God is looking for some especially gifted and talented people to select to help Him round out his lineup. In their minds, those who have been “called” are the spiritual elite, while the “normal Christian,” just sits on the sidelines as a spectator. Nothing could be further from the truth. The normal Christian life is not a spectator sport. Every believer is an active participant in the work of God’s kingdom. The specific gifts and roles that we have will vary from person to person, but God has called every Christian to serve Him. Ephesians 2:8-9 is the favorite passage of many Christians: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” But we must keep reading, for verse 10 of the same passage (the very next sentence!) says of all who have been saved by grace through faith, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” Similarly, Jesus said to all of His followers, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matt 5:16).

There are few, if any, passages of Scripture that are more informative for us in understanding the call of God than Exodus 3 and 4, in which Moses received a clear call from God and responded to it. So as we look at this text today, it is our goal to understand more about how God calls us to serve Him, and what that call entails for every one of us.

I. The call to serve God comes in the course of normal life and work (3:1-4).

When you survey the vast and diverse landscape of world religions and belief systems, you will find that there are some common threads that all of them (or many of them) share. One of the most obvious, which is counter to biblical Christianity, is the notion that one must work hard to gain God’s favor. By the performance of a regimen of religious duties and rituals, one becomes favorable to God and is thereby granted a reward. Christianity stands alone in proclaiming that God’s favor comes by grace alone and is received by faith alone apart from any works that can be done by us. Christians are not those who are trying to work their way up to heaven, but rather those who have trusted in the God who has come down to save us because we could not work our way to Him. It is not the exalting our ourselves before God, but the condescension of God to us, the laying down of His own life on the cross as the payment for our sin-debt, that we may be saved from sin and reconciled to Him.

Another common thread found in many belief systems, particular in cults, is the notion of an exalted spiritual leader who received some special revelation from God when he or she withdrew from the world and went on a quest of spiritual discovery. The accounts of the visions of Muhammad and those of Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), to name but a few, are eerily similar to one another in that way. But in the Bible, we do not find the call of God coming to those who are waiting for it or preparing for it. A biblical notion of the call of God does not discount or exclude preparation, but that preparation comes in response to the call, not as a prerequisite for it. In fact, just as we see with Moses, the call of God typically comes to those who are engaged in the normal course of life and work.

We find Moses in the opening verses of Exodus 3 “pasturing the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law.” He wasn’t up on a mountain top waiting for the clouds to part or for the heavenly tablets to fall into his lap. He was busy working hard at the same job he’d been doing for 40 years or so in Midian. Remember, he had an inkling that God was calling him to a special role of service before he went to Midian. He had tried to begin the task of liberating Israel by killing off an Egyptian and intervening in a dispute between two Hebrews. Imagine, when his father-in-law first said to him, “Go out and shepherd my flock,” if Moses had said, “Well, I’d love to, but you know, I don’t want to get tied down to anything like that, because I think God has bigger plans for me.” Just a tip – if someone wants to marry your daughter, and has that attitude, you might need to have a long talk with him, and your daughter!

I dropped out of college after my sophomore year. I was beginning to sense God was calling me to ministry, but I didn’t know what to do with that. So I thought I’d just come home and loaf until God made it clear. Well, I soon found out that I needed money to survive, so I got a job. My pastor asked me why I got a job instead of enrolling in a Bible college or something, and I said, “Well, I’m just going to do this until God makes His calling more clear for me.” And my pastor said, “Then He never will!” He gave me some of the best advice I have ever gotten. He said, “Don’t do this job until you go into the ministry; make this job your ministry and work hard like you are going to be the next president of the company.” By God’s grace, I did just that. In a couple of weeks time, I went from being a part-time sporting goods salesman to being the manager of the store, and took every opportunity I could to be a witness to my employees. I found myself being something of a “chaplain” to them. And within a year, I had the top store in the company. And it was then that God made the next step of His calling more clear to me. When I gave my notice that I was leaving to enroll in Bible college to prepare for a ministry career, the owner of the company told me I could have any position I wanted in the company if I would stay, and promised me I would always have a job if I ever changed my mind. 

What’s the point of telling you all of that? It is this: I learned from my personal experience what I see here in the biblical account of Moses. God’s calling comes in the course of normal life and work. God is not looking for lazy mystics on mountain tops. He is looking for people in the trenches who are not afraid of or allergic to hard work. And though He has a calling for each of us, He will not disclose it to us until we begin to serve Him in our everyday lives with every opportunity in front of us. People ask me all the time, “Can I take a test to discover my spiritual gifts?” Or they might say, “I don’t want to serve in any role in the church until I know for sure what God is calling me to do.” That is not how it works. God reveals Himself and His calling to us as we do what is already before us. My service in the church began with my friend asking me to help him pass out bulletins and take the offering one Sunday. Next thing I knew, I was being asked to read the Scriptures and pray in the service; then to teach Sunday School; and so on. And I never said no to any opportunity. But through all of that, I began to discover my gifts and God’s specific calling began to grow clearer in my heart. Step up and show up! Do the ordinary things, the mundane things, the routine things, and in the course of so-doing, God will reveal the next steps of His calling to you.

II. The call to serve God begins with a call to intimacy with God (3:2-6).

In the doing of ordinary things, Moses observed an ordinary sight – a bush on fire in the desert. That’s not unusual. Moses had spent enough time out there in the desert to know that, no matter how hot it got in the daytime, it often got cool in the evening. So it was not unusual for a shepherd or a Bedouin to set fire to a bush for warmth. It was not the burning bush that captivated Moses’ attention and beckoned him to inquire more closely. It was the fact that this bush was burning unattended, and the fire was not dying out. You have perhaps seen how quickly fire will consume a dry twig. This one was not consumed. That was odd. Moses could not avoid checking this out.

Of course, God knew that Moses’ attention would be captivated by this phenomenon. That is why He orchestrated it this way. He doesn’t always confront us with burning bushes, but He confronts us all in ways that are suited to what He knows will impact us as the bush did for Moses. But it was not the bush or the blaze that was important here. What was important was the presence of God within the burning bush.

Verse 2 says, “The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush.” So, we have a question: Did Moses encounter God, or did He encounter an angel of God? Well, in short, the answer is “YES.” Now, I need to explain that a bit. To begin with, let’s be clear about the meaning of the word, “Angel.” It does not mean, strictly, a winged heavenly being who looks like a beautiful woman or a naked baby strumming a harp. In fact, none of the Bible’s descriptions of angels are remotely similar to those ideas. And the word means, quite literally, “Messenger.” So, in some cases where the context does not clearly indicate otherwise, the “Angel” could be a human being who is bringing a message from God. The “angels” of the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 seem to be the pastors of these churches. Throughout the Bible, we find accounts of heavenly, spiritual angels doing God’s work – not as many accounts as we may assume are there, but there are enough to notice. Now, in a small number of these angelic accounts, there is a specific Hebrew phrase used to describe the angel. It is literally, “THE Angel of YHWH.” That is what we find here. When we compare all of these passages with each other, it seems clear that “the Angel of the Lord” is a special and unique being.

When people interact with “the Angel of the Lord,” they do not reflect back on it as an encounter with a heavenly, spiritual being, but rather as an encounter with God Himself. And in these encounters, it is not the “angel” who is said to speak, but the Lord Himself who speaks. Just look throughout this passage. After introducing the figure as “the Angel of the Lord” in verse 2, the rest of these two chapters describe interactions between Moses and God. So, from all of the available biblical data, “the Angel of the Lord,” seems to refer to a Person who is at the same time God, and distinct from God. The Angel of the Lord represents a merciful “accommodation or condescension” of God into the midst of sinful people. He is fully divine, and yet veils His deity in part so that He may confront and interact with sinners. And it is worth noting that “the Angel of the Lord” who figures so prominently in several critical texts of Old Testament Scripture never shows up again on the scene after the birth of Jesus Christ. Therefore, it is with a large degree of confidence that we may concur with Alec Motyer, who says,

There is only one other in the Bible who is both identical with and yet distinct from the Lord. One who, without abandoning the full essence and prerogatives of deity or diminishing the divine holiness, is able to accommodate himself to the company of sinners and who, while affirming the wrath of God, is yet a supreme display of his outreaching mercy. Such indeed, is the Angel of the Lord as revealed in the Old Testament, and, consequently … understood as a pre-incarnate appearance of Jesus Christ.[1]

Some use the term “Christophany” to describe these appearances of the eternal Son of God coming into the world to deal with the people of God prior to the incarnation and birth of Jesus. And so we should understand this interaction of Moses with the Angel of the Lord here at the burning bush. Moses was not interacting with a bush, with an angel, or with any other created being, but with God Himself, and more particularly with the God who would take upon Himself human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.

So, the point we are trying to make here is that the call of God begins with a call to intimacy with God. It is a call to move beyond knowing about Him, to knowing Him more completely as He truly is in the fullness of His divine nature. And to demonstrate the intimacy into which God was calling Moses, He calls out to him by name in verse 4: “Moses, Moses.” Lest Moses make the mistake of believing that this divine condescension allows him to be overly familiar with God and less reverent toward Him, God gives to Moses an instruction on how He is to be approached.

First, He says, “Do not come near here.” Because God is holy and we are sinners, there is a necessary separation between us and Him. God tells Moses that “the ground” is holy. It is not the ground itself, but the presence of God that makes that holy ground. A moment before God showed up, and a moment after He departed, it was “regular ground.” But where God is holy, because He transforms all He touches into holiness, or else He consumes it with the fire of His wrath. The message to Moses is not that God cannot be approached at all, but that God must be approached His own prescribed way. And that way is to have our uncleanness made clean. For Moses, this was symbolized by the removal of his shoes.

Now, I’ve had opportunity to host several groups of people from other religious backgrounds here and discuss the Christian faith with them. When I stand on the front steps with them, I say, “In your religion, what should you do before you enter the place of worship?” They say, “Take off our shoes.” I say, “Right, but you don’t have to do that here. The dirtiest thing you bring into God’s presence is not your feet, but your heart. And you can’t take that out and leave it outside, but the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ can change your dirty heart and make it clean.” That’s the point here. Moses’ shoes were dirty, as all shepherds’ shoes would be. But they were just a symbol of God making a way for sinners to draw near to Him by being made clean. We cannot come into God’s presence or draw near to Him in intimacy without Him making us clean. And it was as Moses followed God’s instructions on how to draw near to Him that God began to reveal Himself and His call to Moses.

Friends, of greater importance than what God is calling you to do for Him is His call for you to draw near to Him in the intimacy of a personal relationship. When Jesus appointed His apostles, the Bible said it was so that they would “be with Him” first and foremost, and that “He could send them out to preach” secondarily (Mk 3:14). You will never do more for God than you are with God. Moses had to learn that, and we must all learn it to.

III. The call to serve God is rooted in God’s heart, not ours (Ex 3:7-10).

I suppose that there are many who are in the service of the Lord who began doing so because they saw great needs in the lives of people, and were moved with pity and compassion to do something to meet those needs. That is good and noble. But let me tell you from experience, your heart for people and their needs cannot – and better not—be the foundation of your understanding of God’s call to serve Him. Why would I say that? It is because people will hurt you, disappoint you, and resist you, and if you deal with that enough, the reservoir of your compassion will dry up and you will become cynical and jaded and walk away from serving the Lord. This is why, when Jesus called and commissioned Peter to serve Him following the resurrection, He did not say, “Peter, do you love my sheep? Then feed them.” No, the question to Peter was, “Do you love ME?” And it was on the basis of Peter’s love for Jesus Christ that the Lord said to him, “Feed my sheep.”

Peter was a lot like Moses. He had early on discerned God’s calling on his life, but he had blown it badly. Peter had denied the Lord. Moses had tried to God’s will his own way, resulting in a shady murder and causing him to lose the respect of those he wished to serve. But just as Jesus would later do with Peter, we see God here with Moses anchoring his call to service in the proper soil – the heart of God, not the heart of Moses. God did not say to Moses, “Have you seen the affliction of these people?” He said, “I have seen the affliction of My people.” He did not say, “Have you heard their cries?” He said, “I have given heed to their cry.” He did not say, “Are you aware of their sufferings?” He said, “I am aware of their sufferings?” And He did not say, “Will you go down to deliver them?” He said, “I have come down to deliver them.” “Therefore,” in verse 10, He says to Moses, “I will send you to Pharaoh, so that you may bring My people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.”

Of course Moses had seen their affliction, and he was aware of their sufferings. But God’s point to Moses is that Moses’ affection and compassion for his fellow Israelites was not enough to compel or sustain him in the service of God. These people would prove to be more obstinate than Jethro’s sheep over the course of the Exodus. If Moses’ call to service was rooted in his own heart for these people, he would have given up many times over. But his call to serve the Lord was anchored in a much more solid and unshifting bedrock – and that was the love of the Lord for His people. It was His heart and His compassion, His desire for His people that was the root of Moses’ call to serve Him. 

Being aware of a need that you can help meet is good, and it is good to act on that awareness. But, the call of God will become most powerful in your life as you move beyond your own compassion and affection for others and begin to see God’s heart for them. Moses had to learn that no matter how much he longed for the burden to be lifted from Israel’s neck, God longed for it all the more. You love the church and long to see God work in and through it? Good. But God loves it and has greater plans for it than you do! You have pity on a lost and dying world? I hope so! But until you recognize God’s love for the world as being far greater than yours, you will not be able to survive the mission to which God has called you. So the call to Moses was not to serve until the limited resources of his finite reservoir of compassion ran dry, but rather to serve in devotion to the God who loved him enough to give him a second chance when he had blown it in the past, and who loved others enough to send him to them.

IV. The call to serve God rests on God’s ability, not ours (3:11-22).

They say you cannot judge a book by its cover, but if you could then Jill Briscoe’s little study of Exodus might be one of the best books ever written. The title is simply this: Here Am I – Send Aaron. Moses has been personally encountered by the Lord God Almighty in an awesome and miraculous display of His holiness and glory. He has been drawn into intimacy with God, and God has opened His heart to Moses. By God’s grace, He has commissioned Moses to the high task of being Israel’s deliverer. But Moses doesn’t want to do it, so he makes a string of excuses here.

Now it should be noted that none of Moses’ excuses have anything to do with the enormity of the task. I suppose it would be somewhat understandable for him to say, “You want me to single-handedly go in and convince the Israelites to believe me, to convince Pharaoh to agree with these terms, and to lead this vast multitude out of Egypt and across this desert? No one can do that all by himself. It would take an army of men to pull this off!” But Moses never questions whether it can be done, or even whether it can be done by one man. He merely questions that it can be done by this man. All of his excuses center on his inability, his inadequacy, and his ineffectiveness.

In verse 11, immediately after God says, “I am sending you,” Moses says, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” Admittedly, this is a better response than if he had said, “Well, Lord, you got the right guy! I am completely able to handle this task.” The enormity of God’s call on any of us to serve Him should cause some introspection on our part. But God never gets the wrong guy. He sovereignly calls whom He will. The simple answer to Moses’ question, “Who am I?”, is this: “You are the one whom God has chosen for the task.” That is all the qualification needed. But in order to convince Moses of this, God gives him a promise and a sign. The promise is all-important. He says, “Certainly I will be with you.” Moses might be a nobody, but God is with him, and God is enough for any challenge or any task. So, when God calls His people to do something for Him, the question is never, “Who am I?”, but rather, “Who is God?” If we know the answer to that question, then we have no reason to back down.

The sign that God gives Moses is this: “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” Catch that – the sign comes after the fact, not before. Moses will have to walk by faith before the proof comes. There are rare occurrences in the Bible and, even more rarely in our experience, when God gives a confirmation of His call prior to us taking action. More often, however, it is in hindsight that we discover that we have been in the center of His will. It takes a step of faith to act on God’s call, trusting that the confirmation will follow.

Moses’ second excuse goes something like this: “What if the Israelites don’t believe me?” He figures that when he says to them, “God sent me to you,” they will say, “Oh yeah, who is this God who sent you? What is his name?” You see, the Israelites lived in a universe densely populated with deities. They were surrounded by pagans who worshiped all sorts of gods and goddesses, so there should be some hesitation to believe someone just on the basis of a so-called message from God. It is the same for us. We should never just implicitly trust someone who says, “God says,” or “God told me,” unless they can back up the claim. And that claim is backed up by pointing to prior revelation. We do that by pointing to Scripture. God will not say anything here and now that contradicts His word recorded for us in the Bible. And it was also true for Moses. So when he says, “What if they ask me Your name?”, God says “I AM WHO I AM.” Tell them “I AM has sent me to you.” Now, you could fill an ocean with the ink that has been spilled on unlocking the meaning of this statement. We can’t improve on the translation of it. God is identifying Himself as the self-existent One; the One who is what He is, and not what others say He is. He is not whatever you want Him to be or imagine Him to be. He IS Who He IS! And to explain that to Moses, He identifies Himself more specifically by pointing back to how He has revealed Himself in history.

He says, “The LORD.” Your English Bibles should have all capital letters there for LORD. That is a way of indicating in English the divine name, YHWH. This, He says, is His name forever, His memorial name to all generations. YHWH is the God who had revealed Himself to the patriarchs of Israel, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This was not the sun god or the river god, the bird or crocodile god of Egypt. This was the God who was known and worshiped by the very men from whom the nation of Israel descended. And He tells Moses to let the Israelites know that this God has not forgotten His people, and is concerned for them and ready to bring them up from Egypt and into the land He promised to His people. You see, He is pointing them back to how God had already revealed Himself in the past. Therefore, God says with confidence and authority, “They will pay heed to what you say.” Even Pharaoh will become convinced after he witnesses the actions of the mighty hand of God performing miracles of judgment and deliverance in his midst. Even the neighbors of the Israelites will be so convinced that God is with them that they will hand over their riches to them just for the asking.

Moses’ excuses go on: “What if they do not believe me? What am I going to say? Why don’t you just send someone else?” But to every one of Moses’ excuses, God has an answer, and the answer always points back to Himself. It is not Moses’ ability that will get the job done. It is the unlimited and infinite ability of the God who promises to be with Moses and to confirm Himself to Moses, to Israel and to Egypt. When God calls us to serve Him, we will come up with many excuses why we cannot do it. And left to ourselves, our excuses are probably valid. But, praise God, in the work of His kingdom, we are never left to ourselves. We have the promise of the presence and power of the very same God who has revealed Himself powerfully throughout history in mighty ways. He will be with us as we serve Him, just as He was with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – and yes, even with Moses. Our confidence, therefore, is not in our ability, but in His.

V. The call to serve God comes with the resources to follow it (4:1-17).

I don’t know what kind of answer Moses might have expected when he asked the Lord, “What if they will not believe me or listen to what I say?” I can only imagine that he did not expect the answer he received. The Lord responded to his question with a question of His own: “What is that in your hand?” And Moses said, “A staff.” It was not that the Lord was unfamiliar with a staff or needed information or explanation. He simply wanted Moses to recognize that what he already possessed could be used by God in ways he never imagined to accomplish the work to which God had called him.

A staff, you say? Well, then, “throw it on the ground.” And when Moses did, he was quite surprised to see that what was just a stick in his hand was something altogether different when God put it to work for Himself. It became a serpent, and Moses demonstrates his intelligence here by fleeing from it! And then the Lord said, “Now grasp it by the tail.” You have to understand, I am not a snake handling preacher. I don’t think Moses was either. But I know two things about grabbing snakes. One is, “Don’t do it!” But, if one must grab a snake, one must not grab it by the tail. You grab it by the neck so that it cannot wind back around and bite you. But God was showing Moses that human understanding must be transformed, even as this staff was transformed. God may call us to do things that are risky and dangerous, but if and when He does, we need not fear obeying Him. Moses snatched the serpent by the tail, and it became a staff once again.

He gave Moses two more signs. He could put his hand into his garments and draw it out again, and behold, it was like he had leprosy! But if he put it back in again, it was healed! He could take some water from the Nile and pour it on the ground, and it would turn to blood. What is the point of all these signs? There are many speculative theories, and surely some of them are more accurate than others. Likely, they all had to do with demonstrating God’s authority over Pharaoh, whose symbol of power was the cobra; over life and death, illustrated by the transformation of Moses’ hand; and over all the false gods of Egypt, chief of whom was the Nile river itself. But let us not miss this simple observation. Moses didn’t think he had what it would take to follow God’s call. God assured him that he did. He didn’t have much. But he had a staff, he had a hand, and he had the ability to draw water from the Nile. That will do. God can use all of those things to accomplish His purposes. Just as the little boy on the hillside offered to Jesus his lunch of five loaves and two fishes and watched Jesus multiply it into a meal that fed multitudes, God may ask of us, “What is in your hand? In fact, do you have a hand? And what is around you that I can make use of for My glory?” Whatever we have, if we allow God to use it, it becomes a tool for following His call.

But Moses’ calling was not to just go in and do parlor tricks to gain a following. He had to speak up and say something, and that was the thing that terrified him most. Notice in 4:10, he says, “Please  Lord, I have never been eloquent,” for he says, “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Does this mean he had a speech impediment? Or was it just a fear of public speaking, or a fear of speaking for God? We do not know. But we know how the Lord responded – again with a question of His own: “Who has made man’s mouth?” In other words, “Moses, do you think I don’t know how the mouth works? I made the mouth, the ears, and the eyes! I can make the mute to speak, the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and vice-versa!” And lest Moses think he has to be eloquent or some kind of wordsmith, the Lord says, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to say.” God is never at a loss for words, and He has the ability to put those words into any mouth He chooses to use. He used Balaam’s donkey to speak His words, so it is no stretch to think that He can also put words in Moses’ mouth, or mine, or yours. Jesus said that when we are thrust into a moment when we must speak for Him, we need not worry about finding the words, for the Holy Spirit will give us the words (Mk 13:11).

So, God promises Moses that He can use what Moses already has, including his hands, his staff, and his mouth. And then Moses says, “Please Lord, now send the message by whomever You will.” In other words, “Send someone else!” Couldn’t Moses see, God was sending the message by whomever He willed, and his name was MOSES! God doesn’t have backup plans. His patience wore thin with Moses at this point and the Bible says that His anger burned against Moses. That is an important point to remember when we see what comes next. God says, “I will give you a helper – Aaron, your brother.” Aaron was not “Plan B.” Aaron was a “consequence,” if you will, of Moses’ reluctance to accept “Plan A.” God says to Moses, “Look, if you don’t think you can deliver my message, just tell Aaron what to say. I will tell you, you tell him, and he will speak for you.” Now, as we read through Exodus, I hope you will pay close attention to how many times this happens. OK, I will give you a spoiler – not very often! In fact, Aaron will actually become more of a hindrance than a help to Moses in time – a reminder to him that if he would have just accepted God’s call willingly in the first place, he wouldn’t have to deal with the problems that arose because of Aaron!

Nevertheless, in God’s promise concerning Aaron, we have a very valuable illustration of how God imparts His word to and through us today. God says, “I speak to you, you speak to him, and he will speak for you. I will put the words in your mouth, and he will be a mouth for you, and you will be as God to him.” This is precisely how the Bible functions for us today. God has spoken His word to apostles and prophets, who have recorded those words under divine inspiration, providing for us an infallible and inerrant text of God’s Word. When we read the Bible, God is speaking to us. And when we proclaim what the Bible says to others, God is speaking through us. As we take it in, He is putting words in our mouth, and when we open our mouths, His words are what should come forth.

So, the call of God comes with all the resources we need to follow that call. He is able to use what we have. He is able to give us His word to speak on His behalf, and He has done so in the pages of the Bible. So we, like Moses, are left with no excuses not to follow the call that God sovereignly places on all of our lives to serve Him.

God has a calling for you, just as He did for Moses. How can you know what it is? Well, start by getting busy! Do something, do anything – shepherd sheep in the desert if you must. And in the course of so doing, God will confront you with how He intends to use you for His glory. But first He will call you into an intimate personal relationship with Himself. That relationship is possible because Jesus Christ has come down to deliver us from our sin, just as He came down to deliver Israel from bondage in Egypt. He will cleanse us and draw us into the fellowship of His holiness, even as He did for Moses. And from that relationship of intimacy with Him, He will send us forth to serve Him. We do not go because of what is stirring in our hearts, but because of what is stirring in His heart. Our work for God is rooted in the heart of God for a lost and dying world. And it is not carried out in our abilities, but in His. He has promised us His presence and His power, and every resource we need to be completely obedient to His calling.

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[1] Alec Motyer, The Message of Exodus (The Bible Speaks Today; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2005), 51.