7/8/26

The Burning Bush

Commissioned from Emptiness

"There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the middle of a bush. Moses stared in amazement. Though the bush was engulfed in flames, it didn't burn up. 'This is amazing,' Moses said to himself. 'Why isn't that bush burning up? I must go see it.' When the Lord saw Moses coming to take a closer look, God called to him." — Exodus 3:2-4 (NLT)

Moses was eighty. Forty years in Pharaoh's palace — educated in every wisdom of the most sophisticated civilization on earth, trained in leadership, strategy, court politics. And then forty years in the desert, tending his father-in-law's sheep, a man who had apparently given up on any larger story about his life. The palace dreams were forty years gone. Moses was a nobody in a nobody place, and the text gives no indication that this bothered him anymore.

That second forty years is the theological key to the burning bush. God did not appear to Moses when his gifts were at their peak and his confidence intact. God did not commission Moses at thirty, when the palace had sharpened everything in him to its finest edge. God waited for the desert to do what the desert does to human self-sufficiency. He waited for the man who had been confident enough to kill someone and start the deliverance himself to become the man who genuinely did not know whether he could stand before Pharaoh. And then He appeared. In a thornbush. On a hillside. In the middle of no-man's land.

The bush burns but is not consumed. This is the promise for those who have been through the desert: you can be engulfed by God's fire and not be destroyed by it. The fire of God's presence does not destroy what has yielded to it — it only consumes what has not. The Moses who came to this mountain forty years earlier would have brought something into the fire that would have had to burn first: the palace-formed confidence, the Egyptian education that told him he knew how to handle large problems, the self-assurance that said I can do this. The Moses who came now brought nothing. And into that nothing, the fire could burn freely, because there was nothing left competing with it.

Moses argued against his commissioning three times. He genuinely did not want it. He genuinely did not believe he was the right person. This is not false modesty from a man who secretly believed he could pull it off — this is the honest self-assessment of a man who had tried on his own forty years ago and had a dead Egyptian and a burning exile to show for it. He had been emptied of the confidence that had made him dangerous to himself and others.

And God's response to every objection is not to dismantle the objection but to redirect Moses' gaze from his own adequacy to God's. Not 'You are more capable than you think.' I AM WHO I AM is sending you. I will be with you. I will be with your mouth. The commission was never going to be rooted in what Moses could bring. It was always going to be rooted entirely in who God is. The desert had simply made Moses desperate enough to need that to be true.

The palace trained the leader. The desert formed the man the leader needed to become. The fire on the hillside commissioned the formed man into the thing he had always been heading toward — not despite the forty years of obscurity, but through them. Your desert years are not wasted years. They are the years in which the fire can burn without consuming, because the material that would have caught fire has already been burned away.

Reflection: Where are you in the Moses story? In the palace — capable and confident in your own ability? In the desert — reduced, genuinely uncertain, no longer sure of the story you thought your life was telling? Or at the bush — being recommissioned from a place of genuine weakness rather than strength? And where are you still arguing? What inadequacy are you presenting as a reason not to go, when the I AM is the only adequacy required?

"God waited for the desert to empty Moses before He commissioned him with fire. The emptying was not wasted time. It was the preparation without which the fire would have consumed rather than filled him. — F.B. Meyer"