And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.- Exo_3:2-3.
The Burning Bush is one of the most striking incidents in the story of the Bible. It held, as we know, a prominent place in the thought and study of the Hebrew people. The passage in which the episode is recorded was commonly cited as “the Bush.” It occupies a leading position in the development of the interrupted speech which forms the defence of Stephen before the Sanhedrin. And the celebrated argument by which our Lord unexpectedly silenced the Sadducees in the controversy concerning resurrection was drawn from this experience of Moses, the great lawgiver. Had they never read “in the Bush” how Moses speaks of the God of his fathers? Abraham was indeed departed, but dead he could not be, for God “is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
Nor is it wonderful that the incident should have impressed the imagination of succeeding ages. It is the critical, personal experience in the life of a great leader, which, as happens again and again with the world's men of action, was to find its interpretation in the sphere of public history. The refined and cultured personality within which smouldered the fire of a generous enthusiasm; the rolling uplands of the lonely Sinaitic desert for which he had exchanged the pavements and palaces of the crowded city; the black mountains of Horeb against which the clump of wind-swept acacia glowed with steady flame; the revelation of the nature and name of the Eternal which became the impulse at the back of those wonders in Egypt that brought the house of Jacob from among a strange people-these have all combined to make the burning bush one of the most inspiring symbols with which the history of religion has enriched the race.
A little stunted bush, low-placed and desert-bound, a trivial thing giving no rest from glare, no shade from sun, a thing outside the common use of life, child of a day, creature of circumstance: raising no thought above the commonplace, devoid of mission, message, comfort, anything that makes life happier to men around.
Then a breath of inspiration, flash of light, a wave of holy influence, touch of miracle: God daring the unusual. Everything defined, enthused under the wonder-change, the desert-prophet drawn to see the sight, the stunted Bush the centre of attraction.
A message echoing down the centuries, words of encouragement and comfort, hope for the hopeless, freedom for the slave, Moses for leader: he who yesterday was desert-ranger now the Friend of God, recipient of His Law, Vision and Glory.
Desert transfigured, commonplace relieved, the Bush no longer common but glorified, inspired, type of the Incarnation-God in the passing phase, the casual thoughts of men: God in the desert drear, the common things of life: God in human life. God of the burning hearts and cleansed lips, God of the busy hands and thoughtful brow, God of the Altar-fire. God of our highest hopes, our motives pure: God of our strongest and our weakest hours: God of our manhood's will, our woman's love, our children's innocence and merry play. God of the hills and valleys, stormy sea and desert wild: God of surprises, God revealed in fire.1 [Note: A. Daintree, Studies in Hope, 21.]
1. The bush.-The burning bush has traditionally been supposed to be a kind of bramble (Rubus), of which Palestine has several varieties; but one of the thorny shrubs of Sinai of the acacia family would seem more probable. Sacred bushes and trees are common in Palestine and Arabia.
Transfiguration is for Thompson the most familiar of mysteries. Good faith needs no Burning Bush. Or, rather, for the faithful every bush is alight. For this faithful poet the seasons were full of the promise of Resurrection. In spring he calls
Hark to the Jubilate of the bird
For them that found the dying way to life!
The rebirth of the earth after winter is the figure of the future life:
Thou wak'st, O Earth,
And work'st from change to change and birth to birth
Creation old as hope, and new as sight.
And-
All the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.
In the same poem he is seen at his daily business, the routine work of co-ordinating and synthesizing. Light-the light of the sun-is also
Light to the sentient closeness of the breast,
Light to the secret chambers of the brain!
Arguments that go from heaven downwards are the commonplaces of his poetry.1 [Note: E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 203.]
2. The bush burned with fire.-Throughout Scripture, fire is a symbol of the Divine nature, as in the smoking lamp and the blazing fire that Abraham saw, or the pillar that lighted the darkness over the sleeping camp, or as in the prophet's word, “The light of Israel shall be a flaming fire,” or as in the Baptist's prophecy of a baptism in the Holy Ghost and in fire, or as at Pentecost with its fiery tongues, or as in the great saying, “Our God is a consuming fire.”
In almost every religion on earth a sacred significance attached to fire. That significance is not primarily destruction, as we sometimes suppose-an error which has led to ghastly misunderstandings of some Scriptures, and of the God whom they reveal. When, for instance, Isaiah asks, “Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” he has been supposed to be asking what soul can endure the terrors of God's consuming and unending wrath. But a little attention to the words would have shown that the “devouring fire” and the “everlasting burnings” mean God and not hell, and that the Divine nature is by them represented not as too fierce to be approached but as the true dwelling place of men, which indeed only the holy can inhabit, but to inhabit which is life. Precisely parallel is the Psalmist's question, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in his holy place?” Fire is the source of warmth, and so, in a sense, of life. It is full of quick energy; it transmutes dead matter into its own ruddy likeness, and changes gross earthly dulness into flame aspiring towards the skies. Therefore it is fit symbol of creative and cleansing power. God is the fiery Spirit of the universe, a spark from whom irradiates and vitalizes every living thing. But the felicity of the symbol is that, along with blessed thoughts of life-giving and purifying, it suggests potentiality of destructive energy. The same God is the fire to quicken, sanctify and bless, and, if rejected, to consume. “What maketh heaven, that maketh hell.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Leaves from the Tree of Life, 85.]
“I think,” said Dinah Morris, “when God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was-he only saw the brightness of the Lord.”2 [Note: George Eliot, Adam Bede.]
3. The bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.-That undying flame teaches the same great truth as the accompanying words, “I am that I am.” It burns and does not burn out, it has no exhaustion waiting on its energy, and thus is a symbol of the One Being whose being is its own law and its own source. He gives and is none the poorer; He works and never wearies; He “operates unspent”; He loves and loves for ever. We are that which we become; He is that which He is. We die because we live, but He lives by His own life. That fire burns, and needs no replenishing, and knows no extinction. Surely that great sight, which startled and strengthened the shepherd for his tremendous task, may well evoke our faith. Surely, in our fleeting days, the one means of securing for ourselves blessedness, rest, strength, and a life that, like His, can never die into cold ashes, is to grasp this great truth, and to knit ourselves to Him who lives for ever, and whose love is as lasting as His life, “The everlasting God, the Lord, fainteth not, neither is weary. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.”
Oh! if one had to depend upon the state of one's feelings, changes of one's temperament! If God left us to these? But He is, and therefore may we trust at all times, and in all places, and in all moods of minds. It does not signify much whether the body is weak or the mind weak; God can take care of both. Christ poured forth His soul to death, as well as gave up His body, and trusted under the sense of being lost. It is that trust which stands us in stead, trust when there is nothing in past, present, or future, in anything one can see, hear, remember in others or oneself to lean upon. Then we know God. The bush is burning and not consumed. He is in it.1 [Note: The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 515.]
4. The burning bush is an emblem of indestructibility.
(1) To the children of Israel it has always been an emblem of the indestructibility of the “People of God.” “God shewed unto Moses”-such was an ancient interpretation-“a fire that burned and caused no destruction, and said, Behold, as the bush is burned with fire and is not cousumed, so Israel cannot be destroyed by his enemies.” “Time,” so says a modern Jewish rabbi, “the great destroyer of all earthly things, has passed over Israel and his religion, and has not affected them. That people is not numerous, it is weak; rather than the cedar of Lebanon, it resembles the frail bush of the mountain which nothing can defend from the storm. Yet Israel exists. But there is Fire in the bush: a devouring flame envelops it. The earth has often been reddened with the blood of thousands of victims; it has been a battle-field on which the fire consumed everything it met. The kings of the world conspired against that people; they invented calumny, employed persecution, and attempted to efface it from the number of the living; and yet Israel exists: the bush was not consumed.”
(2) What Israel has said, so also may the Church of Christ say regarding her sufferings, her inheritance, and her destiny. She also has appeared to be enveloped in flame, to be involved in inevitable destruction; but she has been preserved through all, and in the midst of seeming ruin, the voice of God is heard, and the presence of God is discerned.
It was apparently in the year 1583 that the Synod of the Reformed Church of France resolved that a seal should be made for its use, wherewith all letters of importance written in its name might be sealed; and nothing better fitted to symbolize the “renowned and once flourishing, though now desolate, Church could be devised than Moses' vision when he fed his flocks under the mount of God, viz. a Bramble Bush in a flaming fire, having that essential incommunicable name of God-Jehovah-engraved in its centre, and this motto, ‘I burn, but am not consumed,' in its circumference.” The adoption of the seal is said to have caused much commotion among the enemies of the Church, and all documents which could be found bearing the emblem were seized and destroyed. From France, the device passed to Scotland, appearing first on the title page of a book, then on Acts of Assembly; and now, not only the Scottish Church, but most of her offshoots, both in this land and in other lands, have assumed the Burning Bush as their emblem, and the words Nec tamen consumebatur (“it was not consumed”) as their motto.1 [Note: P. M‘Adam Muir.]
(3) And so it is also with the life of the individual. For this is the very truth which Christ, with a depth of interpretation that put to shame the cavilling listeners, found in the words that accompanied this vision: “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” He said to the sneering Sadducees, who, like all other sneerers, saw only the surface of what they were sarcastic about, “Did not Moses teach you in” (the section about) “the Bush, that the dead rise, when he said: I am the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob?” A man of whom it can once be said that God is his God cannot die. Such a bond can never be broken. The communion of earth, imperfect as it is, is the prophecy of heaven and the pledge of immortality. And so from that relationship which subsisted between the fathers and God, Christ infers the certainty of their resurrection. It seems a great leap, but there are intervening steps, not stated by our Lord, which securely bridge the distance between the premisses and the conclusion. Such communion is, in its very nature, unaffected by the accident of death. Therefore Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still living, “for all”-those whom we call dead, as well as those whom we call living-“live unto him,” and though so many centuries have passed, God still is, not was, their God. The relation between them is eternal, and guarantees their immortal life. But immortality without corporeity is not conceivable as the perfect state, and if the dead live still, there must come a time when the whole man shall partake of redemption; and in body, soul, and spirit, the glorified and risen saints shall be for ever with the Lord.
