Exodus 3:16-22 – Our wonderful God

God’s answers to Moses’ initial two questions assure us, believers, that the Omniscient God is never absent from our lives. He is the great “I AM”, the ever-present One who will always be with us. However, people often forget this truth and conduct life as if He is not around at all. To live effectively, we should learn to live in the perpetual presence of God. The secret to King David’s confidence was his realization of God’s presence with him all the time. So, in Psalm 16:8 he said, “I have set the Lord continually before me; because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.”  

In Exodus 3:16-22, God outlined His deliverance plan to Moses. There were four steps in this plan. Firstly, Moses was to go to the elders of Israel and make known to them that God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had appeared to him. And that this God was totally concerned for them and their plight. He would be bringing them out of Egypt to a land of great promise, the land He had promised to the Patriarchs. God assured Moses that the elders would believe his words.   

Secondly, Moses and the elders would then go to Pharaoh and let the king know that God had appeared to them. They were to request for a three-day journey into the desert to make sacrifices to their God. But He warned him that Pharaoh would resist the proposal. Thirdly, He told Moses that He would then judge the Egyptians with great wonders. The deliverance they would experience would be through the mighty hand of God. And finally, God said that they should plunder Egypt. This was the wages owed to them for the years of work without pay.

Four things about God can be known from these four steps given to Moses. Firstly, our God makes known His purpose. His instruction to Moses was: go to the elders and make known God’s plan. Hence, we confidently conclude that He communicates His purpose and plan before it happens so that we will know nothing happens to us by coincidence. We can be assured that nothing happens to us by chance. In everything, God works together for good to them that love Him and are called to His purpose.  

Secondly, our God desires our worship. Interestingly, Moses and the elders were supposed to tell Pharaoh that they would go on a “three-day” journey into the wilderness to worship God. Was the request ruse? If it was then wouldn’t it impinge on the character of God? The answer is no. The expression, “a three-day”, was a common expression for a long journey. It was not literally three days. Anyway, in that instruction, there was no indication that they would return. What’s more important was their intention and not the duration of travel. God’s intention was for them to go and honor, offer sacrifices, worship and glorify Him. Today, there are some people prevented by distance from going to church. Think of what the Israelites had to go through to honor and worship God. It is true that when our heart is rightly oriented, worshipping God is a life priority, and distance is not a problem. Between us and God distance should not dissuade us.

Thirdly, our God delivers through great wonders. He knew beforehand that Pharaoh would resist and not let the people of God go, not even if it meant just three days. He said to Moses in verse 19, “But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion.” He knew exactly what it would take before Pharaoh would let the people go. God was in effect setting us the condition for what would take place in the next eleven chapters of Exodus. He is indeed the God of wonders. Know it or not, we are all God’s miracles going somewhere to happen. 

Fourthly, our God shows justice. In what the Israelites should receive from the Egyptians for the years of unpaid wages, God told them to claim it on their way out. He would deal with the hearts of the Egyptians and make sure that they release what was due to the Israelites. God will not let us suffer injustice. The way He had shown justice for the cruelty the Israelites endured, also gives the assurance that He will ensure we are justly rewarded. God will never allow us to be short-changed. He makes sure that whatever is due to us will be given in ways beyond our wildest dreams. So, take heart, trust the just God! 

Exodus 3:13-15 - Our LORD, the Great I Am

It was quite obvious that fear had led Moses to ask his first question. And God knew it well, that’s why He was not angry with his first question but promised to be with Him. Moses’ greatest plus to accomplish the mission God wanted him to do would not be in his status or his training. If it were, God would have used him while he was strutting as a prince of Egypt. Or God would have reminded him of how he was trained in Pharaoh’s court and even helped him to identify his gifting and talents. But God did not. Instead, He totally ignored that part of Moses’ life and went on to promise His own presence in the task. The reason is simple. The mission he was about to do has nothing to do with Moses’ ability but everything to do with God and His ability. The question was not about Moses as it was about God.

The established goal for the mission entrusted to Moses was twofold. Firstly, he was to deliver the people out of Egypt, the land of bondage. Secondly, he was to lead them to the mountain of God’s presence and there to worship Him. But who is this God? This was precisely Moses’ second question. He could go and tell the children of Israel that God had sent him to lead them out of Egypt, and to lead them to Sinai to worship Him. But what should he do if they wanted to know who this God really was? Moses anticipated that the people would ask that question, so, he asked God what should he tell them should that question pop up. Let’s rephrase what Moses said in verse 13. He asked God, “Supposed I go to the people and tell them exactly what you have just asked me to say to them. And they ask me in return, ‘Who is this God who sends you?’ What am I supposed to say to them?” God then revealed His covenant name to Moses.

God said His name shall be “I AM WHO I AM” or just simply “I AM”. Notice God’s name is not “I was” or “I will be” but the “I AM”. He is the ever present-one and self-existing one. He is also the timeless one, the eternal God with no beginning or end. God further established in verse 14 that He is the covenant-keeping God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This name “I AM” has since been translated as Yahweh or Jehovah or the “LORD” with all capital letters in the Bible. It is by this name, the LORD, Yahweh or Jehovah that the Israelites would identify Him for all generations henceforth. The “I AM” is the unfinished name of God. Notice this name has a noun, a verb but no object. Perhaps God had left it that way for the sake of His people. He will be the God to His people whatever their needs may be. He will be Jehovah-Jireh, our provider; or Jehovah-Shalom, our peace; Jehovah-Rapha, our healer; or Jehovah-Tsidkenu, our righteousness and etc, according to what our needs may be. Glory to His name!

Exodus 3:10-12 – God qualifies the call

Right there at Horeb, after revealing His knowledge of the plight of His people and their indescribable oppression, God told Moses He was sending him to deliver them. Moses did not exactly seize the opportunity at God’s call to leadership. Instead, he showed great inhibition. He was no longer that person, who so boldly took matters into his own hand and killed the taskmaster who ill-treated a fellow Hebrew. No longer was he that self-assured person who tried to resolve a dispute between two Hebrews. After 40 years of looking after sheep in the wilderness, he must have been humbled. He was not so cock-sure as he was. Moses felt he lacked the social standing to accomplish the task. The purpose of these verses is not to show the unwillingness of Moses to serve God, but that he needed a proper orientation concerning serving God.

So, in verse 10, we see his doubt over his own social standing. His response to God’s call was, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” He doubted his personal standing. He did not even take the time to process that call before he responded. The reality of God’s call is that He is no respecter of a person’s social status. Like Moses, we need to know that it’s not our status that will commend us to the work of God, but our availability. We need to know that there is nothing in us that will qualify us for God’s call, not our education, not our capability, nor our position. Our qualification to minister on God’s behalf is found in Him alone. He Himself qualifies the call into any ministry.

God did not buy Moses’ reason. He gave Him the key qualification that he needed to succeed, i.e. His own presence. The surest key to success in any ministry is the presence of God Himself. Let’s hear again what God said to Moses, “Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you….” This is the surest sign of a God-sent, God-approved ministry. People tend to look at the wrong measuring yardsticks. Some think that the attendance at a meeting is the yardstick to measure success. Others use the activities or the programs as a gauge. But the true yardstick is really His presence. God’s personal attendance at any gathering will be the marked difference between what’s of God and what’s not.

One more thing needs to be clear. The objective of any call of God is always a call to lead others from their “Egypt” or bondage to the place where they can experience God personally and worship Him. That is the objective God gave to Moses. He was to bring the people out of Egypt to the mountain of God’s presence, to worship Him. This defines the goal of our ministry: to lead others to God to worship Him.

Two things to bear in mind as we seek to serve God. Firstly, the most important qualification is not our position but His presence. Secondly, the key objective and goal of our ministry are to lead others from the peripheral to the core, to leave the mundane to the crux. We must lead others to worship Him and Him alone. That’s the measure of success!   

Exodus 3:7-9 – God will come to our rescue

So right there in Horeb, Moses had a deep encounter with God. He didn’t meet Moses just to let him know what a supernatural God He was. He wasn’t there just to inform him that He was aware of what was happening to the children of Israel. He was there in all His glory, holiness and perfection, not only to make known His deep compassion for His people but also to initiate His plan to rescue them. Many of us do not even know the depth of love our awesome God has for us fallen sinful man. Yet He took the trouble to manifest Himself to us in order to set the rescue plan He has for us in motion.

Hardship has a way of making us lose our perspective about God. How often have people who professed to love God would doubt Him in a moment of despair? Many have even wondered if God really even cares. But the truth is that He does and He loves us beyond words. He had all the plans worked out long before the foundation of the world. God knew exactly what the descendants of Israel would go through long before the events that had happened to them, happened. To fulfill His promise, God was now initiating the move in His call to Moses. He said, “So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey….”

In verse 6, we are already told that God not only heard their cries but remembered the covenant He had made with their forefathers, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He could see how they were being oppressed by the Egyptians. He knew their plight in every facet and in all its precise details. What God said to Moses leaves us with a deep assurance that just as He knew about the affliction of the descendants of Israel, He also knows all about our present pressure and affliction. And like the Israelites, every single prayer that we have uttered to Him in our desperation has not gone unheard.

God does know our plight. He cares everything about us. As the Apostle Peter wrote in his letter that urged the church in affliction on what to do, we too can “…cast out cares on Him for He cares for us.” The truth is that God cares everything about us. He not only had heard our prayers but He is concretely working something to set us free from our dilemma and predicament. The unchanging truth is this: the God who rescued Israel from the affliction of the Egyptians is the same God who can and will rescue us from our afflictions today. He is the same God we worship and serve today. He will hear our cry as He had heard the cry of the children of Israel. He will come to our rescue as he had rescued them. So, let us draw near with confidence. There is no place too deep that God cannot reach and no trouble too big that God cannot help us solve. He will see us through if we let Him.  

Exodus 3:4-6 – Don’t take God’s presence for granted

As Moses drew near to look at the burning bush that the fire did not consume, the Lord called out to Him. Notice how God called him. He addressed him personally by name, and he called his personal name two times. More than catching the attention of Moses in calling his name twice, this tells us that God knew Moses personally. We cannot remember a time someone told God who Moses was. God just knew him. The reality is this, not only does God know Moses, He knows every one of us by name. He is a personal God. But it’s one thing to hear God’s call, but quite another to respond. We must be attentive to God and more importantly, we must respond when He calls to us.   

Once Moses’ attention was arrested, God then gave him a word of caution. He was told not to come any closer but to take off his sandals, for where he was standing was holy ground. This is the first time the word holy is used. The word “holy” simply means to ‘set apart’. We serve a holy God, one who is set apart from all that He had created. There is a distinct difference between the Holy God and sinful man. To draw near to Him, we sinful man must set ourselves apart from the world and yield to Him. So, like Moses, we must also set ourselves apart for God, if we are to draw near to Him.

In telling Moses to take off his sandals, God was calling for submission. God still requires vessels to be yielded to Him for the work He wants to do in the world. Like Moses, if we are to be His instrument, we must yield to Him. Taking off the sandals is also a call to respect God. As the Holy One, whom we worship and serve, He certainly deserves the highest honour and respect. And we must yield to Him wholeheartedly as Moses did.

In verse 6, God then told Moses, saying, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” First of all, He identified Himself to Moses as the God of his father. He was telling Moses that He was the One whom his biological father, Amram taught him to worship and serve before he was returned to Pharaoh’s daughter. Remember Moses’ childhood, after he was recused from the Nile, was raised in Amram’s home. God was referring to Himself as the One whom Moses’ father, as the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob worshipped and served. On hearing this Moses immediately hid his face from God, for he was afraid to look at Him.  

These verses instruct us on how we should approach our holy God. There must be a total surrender of ourselves to Him. Then there must be the attitude of reverence and holy fear for this awesome God. No matter how sincere and familiar we may be with God, we must never forget that He is still the holy God, and where we meet Him is holy ground. We must not take Him and His anointed presence for granted. We come to Him with sincerity and honesty. We cannot come into His holy presence carelessly. Meet God by all means, but remember that He is still the Holy God and we must not take Him for granted.  

Exodus 3:1-3 – Don’t be deprived by spiritual indifference

Prayer was what the Hebrews did for years under the unremitting oppression of Pharaoh’s taskmasters. For 400 years, they work with every last ounce of their energy under the sweltering, scorching desert sun of Egypt, building huge monuments for Pharaoh. For years the cracking sounds of the whips of their Egyptian oppressors never ceased. Yet in the long hours of their prolonged desperation, they prayed. The good news is: all the while God heard their groanings..., and He remembered..., He saw..., and He took notice. So, regardless of what we think about God, the best avenue in prolonged anguish is still prayer. We need to pray regardless of how long prayer may seem unanswered. Remember, even our Lord Jesus resorted to prayer in His hour of desperation. Hebrews 5:7 says that the Lord, “In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety.” 

In answer to the Hebrews’ groanings, God initiated the process of delivering them with an encounter with Moses at Mount Horeb. Another name for Horeb is Mount Sinai. What made this mountain unique was the burning presence of God. If not for this presence, Horeb would be just like any other mountain. It was right here that the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire, coming from within a bush. The uniqueness of the whole scene was that the bush was not consumed by the fire. However unusual the sight might be, it would amount to nothing had Moses lacked any wonderment. It was his divine curiosity that led him to turn aside to look at the inimitable manifestation of God. Without divine inquisitiveness he would have given the scene a pass, thinking and seeing nothing of it. 

Moses took the time to turn aside to scrutinize the scene. If he hadn’t, he would have totally missed the call of God. He could have raised many excuses for not turning aside. For he was busy shepherding his father-in-law’s flock. There could be so many "so-called reasons" in the things he needed to do. He could excuse himself by saying that time was not freely at his disposal. And it was not as if he was sitting idly by and doing nothing. Yet we can see that Moses chose to draw near deliberately to the burning bush to scrutinize what was taking place. He did not let the opportunity pass. Are we like Moses? Do we have any wonderment that will increase our divine inquisitiveness to go after God? Are we so caught up in the mundane activities of our life that we presume that we don't have time to seek God? We can never know what true life is really all about until we have an encounter with God. And we can never encounter God if we don’t take the time to draw near.  Let us not be so consumed with other activities that we have no time to encounter God.   

The burning bush unconsumed by the fire was not just a natural phenomenon, it was a supernatural sign. In his many years as a shepherd in the desert, Moses must have seen many bushes burnt into chaff many a times. Yet this one was unusual. The fire that surrounds that bush did not consume it. Why? God has control over the fire. And only He has the power to keep a bush unconsumed by His all-consuming fire. As the consuming fire, God’s glory will never be extinguished. His attractiveness will never diminish. He will always burn brightly and fervently. We can never experience God as the all-consuming fire if there is no desire or divine curiosity. What is our desire quotient today? Do we yearn to encounter God so much so that we will spare no effort and time to draw near to the presence of God? Know that at God’s right hand there is victory. And in His presence, there is joy forevermore. Decide not to let our spiritual indifference deprive us of the rich experiences we can find in encountering God!

Exodus 2:23-25 - Take heart, He hears our prayer

In these closing verses of Exodus 2, we see a shift of scene from Moses in Midian to the condition of the Hebrews in Egypt. Forty years had elapsed and we see that duration of intense suffering summarised in verse 23. Here we are told that the King who started the indescribable oppression had died but they were still in bondage. The name of that Pharaoh was not given but his death made possible for Moses to return to his birthplace and to the mission he was born to fulfill.

We cannot imagine the intensity of the bondage. It was a daily pressure of unutterable, agonizing afflictions. They must have yearned for the slightest relief which seemed far and remote. For centuries, they went through unrelenting pressure under the hot desert sun, toiling and building remarkable monuments for Pharaoh’s glory. It was not as if they did not pray, in fact, they did. Their prayers were so intense that they were described as groanings. The more they groaned the more it seemed that their cries went unheeded. In the course of our journey in this life, they will come a time when we find it hard to endure. Like it or not every one of us has our fair share of affliction though not as intense as that which the Hebrews had to endure. It is so encouraging to know that our groanings are prayers to God when we direct it to Him in faith. What’s more encouraging for us is that in our affliction we have the Holy Spirit to assist us in prayer! Romans 8:26-27 tell us that in circumstances when “we do not know how to pray as we should…the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words….” And because the Holy Spirit “who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, He is able to intercede for the saints according to the will of God.”

For several decades, their cries incessantly arose to God and seemed to go unheeded. They yearned deeply for liberation that was not forthcoming. They must have wondered whether God had heard their prayer. If He had, then they must be wondering when was God going to answer their constant plea. Like them, we need to know that every delay in answer to prayer is not an indication of God’s denial. In fact, verses 24-25 tell us that “God heard their groaning; and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  God saw the sons of Israel, and God took notice of them.” Beloved, there is not a difficult situation in our life that God does not know. If there seems to be a delay in His answer to our prayer it’s because God is working out the best plan for us.

Notice the four verbs used to describe God’s awareness of the plight they were in. God not only heard their groanings, but He also remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And He saw their afflictions and took notice or knew of their plight. We take courage to know that when we pray, not only will God hear, but he will also remember us. He can definitely see all that is happening to us and knows our plight. In the situation of the Hebrews, God sent Moses into the desert to prepare him and he was about to be used for the deliverance. The liberation of the Hebrews was not about Moses but God, the real Liberator. Moses was only part of His larger plan. Like him, we must see ourselves, in whatever capacity, as only a part of God’s larger strategy. We are not the end, we are the means to an end.  

These three verses assure us that God hears and answers prayer. He not only hears us but also remembers that we are His people, even though at times, we may behave as if we are not. God can see everything that has happened to us for He is the all-seeing God. And He does take notice of everything that we are going through. Just remember that the answer to our prayer may not always be in the way we hope things will happen, but it will always be according to His perfect will and timing. God’s answer to prayer will always result in bringing Him the glory. Take heart, He hears our prayer!