And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.- Exo_3:4.
“The call of Moses,” says Professor Westphal, “is the central event of Hebrew Jehovism, just as the vision of St. Paul on the road to Damascus is the central event of the Apostolic Church. There is no more reason to question the reality of the burning bush-flagror non consumor-than to throw doubt upon the great light which struck down the Apostle of the Gentiles. And, as the vision of Saul was accompanied by a revelation which the Apostle afterwards called his gospel, so Moses also received, in this spiritual meeting with God, the gospel which was to be the key-note of all the preaching of the prophets.”
1. It is a call. It is a call from God. God is first. And He is first in this call because of His sympathy. Before the call of Moses we have the statement of God's sympathy with the children of Israel in the sufferings in Egypt. Four statements are made-God heard; God remembered; God saw; God knew.
(1) God heard.-“Their cry came up unto God.” Probably it did not articulate itself in petition. It was just a cry of misery, in which the deeper voice of manhood blended with the anguish of the bereaved mother and the wail of the babe. But God understood it, and was able to trace each formative element to its source. In the graphic language of the chroniclers, it “came up unto God.”
(2) God remembered.-“God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.” We are carried back to that solemn watch of two nights and a day that Abraham kept, when, conforming to the wont of the sons of the desert, God gave visible confirmation of the validity of His covenant: “And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; and also that nation, whom they serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.” That covenant was afterwards solemnly ratified with additions, and is described as an everlasting or eternal covenant. In some respects it still lies at the basis of all God's dealings with those who, by faith, are the children of faithful Abraham. Though four long centuries had passed, that covenant was as fresh as at its inauguration in the heart of Jehovah; and, not because of the worthiness of the people, but because of the two immutable things that made it impossible for Him to lie, when the time of the promise drew nigh, He began to carry its provisions into execution.
(3) God saw.-“And God saw the children of Israel.” “And the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt.” To realize that He sees and knows, that nothing which concerns us is hidden from Him, that the darkness shines as the day, and the lowest part of the earth conceals nothing from His omniscience-this carries with it all the rest; for He cannot see without coming down in pitying help. When in after days the children of Israel were assured that Jehovah had seen their affliction, “then they bowed their heads and worshipped,” as though they had nothing more to ask; and the result justified their act.
(4) God knew.-“And God took knowledge of them.” He notes all things in His book, puts every tear into His bottle, counts the hairs as they fall from the head or turn white with anguish. “I have surely seen the affliction of my people.… I know their sorrows.” God knows with a personal knowledge. It has been truly said that the word “masses” does not occur in God's vocabulary. We are not masses, but units; not a forest, but trees; not a race, but individuals. It is as though there were but one child in the Father's house, and each of us that child. He also knows with a sympathetic knowledge. He is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and whatever is done to us is accepted as done to Him. “I was in prison, and ye visited me not.” “He that rejecteth you rejecteth me; and he that rejecteth me rejecteth him that sent me.” Just as the head suffers with each throb of pain in any of its members, so does Christ suffer through the centuries each slight or wrong meted out to one of His own. God knows with a knowledge bathed in love.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
In the groaning and travailing of creation she bore her part, but never alone; always God was there bearing His part and the part of every one. Across the whole world there lay for her the light of the glory of Divine sacrifice. Not for her was any picture of a serene and far-away God without “parts or passions,” looking on at the world's pain; it was the glory of her God to share all pain. There was nothing, no weariness of hers or any man's, no suffering, even of the beasts, that was not His. And faith in God gave her also faith in suffering, in the value of a sacrifice to be accomplished, of a travail that should bring forth fruit to all eternity, of groaning that was the utterance of slaves working towards their manumission and the freedom of Divine sons. “Lo, how I loved thee!” All men shall hear this when their own sacrifice is indeed accomplished, and their “sin-glazed eyes” open to see who it is that has sacrificed Himself in them. This was her strength.1 [Note: Michael Fairless: Her Life and Writings, 67.]
“I know their sorrows.” The saintly and scholarly M‘Cheyne described this as “a sweet word.” Such it assuredly is. Of all the sweet words of the Bible surely none is sweeter than this. As the captive Israelites sweated and groaned under their relentless taskmasters, the sympathizing Jehovah said, “I know their sorrows.” And as He beholds us in all the tragedy of our inner life and of our outer life, He still exclaims, “I know their sorrows.”2 [Note: Dinsdale T. Young, The Unveiled Evangel, 205.]
2. And now the time is come for the deliverance of Israel, and the first step is to call the leader. “God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses.”
God cannot do without Moses. We are ready enough to assert that Moses can do nothing without God. He has, perhaps, tried and failed; and we had better hold by that principle. But we must be equally ready to assert that God will do nothing without Moses. He is the man, and no other will do. In mind and heart, by the education of the palace and the desert, he has been trained and fitted for this stupendous business, and no one else can do it. Most impressive is the dialogue in this chapter between a commanding and persuading God and a shrinking, fearful man. The Most High, who can lay Pharaoh's pride in the dust with a touch of His hand, waits and pleads and reasons with, assures and reassures, and almost drives this reluctant shepherd; and apparently will not move for the relief of Israel without him. It illustrates a universal principle. The lesson of history, the greatest lesson of the Incarnation, is that it is by humanity that humanity will be redeemed.
Thomas Carlyle complains concerning human sorrow that “God does nothing.” Perhaps He is waiting for Thomas Carlyle, who does nothing. For nothing is more certain than the fact that every movement for the emancipation and uplifting of the human race has had a man at the heart of it, and that God does nothing without the co-operation of man. John Wesley's saying has been often quoted, that “God buries His workmen but carries on His work.” It is true; only let it be realized that He carries it on by the hands of other workmen.1 [Note: Charles Brown, The Birth of a Nation, 120.]
3. Why Moses? There must have been some preparation in this man's life before this vision came. We cannot suppose that it would so suddenly have enabled him to believe in a calling so overwhelming in its difficulties, if God had not by the discipline of his former life awakened thoughts and feelings in his soul which this vision kindled into power. God never reveals to the thoughtless a great work like that. The prophets and messengers of the old time were constantly prepared by long hours of thought and doubt over the evils of the world, before they were summoned to action. The Lord Himself went for forty days of lonely conflict into the wilderness; Paul was sent for three years into the wild regions of Arabia; and Moses was trained by more than forty years of thought and sorrow, before God showed him his destiny. And so we may believe that all these years of Moses' life were a needful and gradual education for the wonderful hour when the bush burned with the presence of Jehovah and the work of his life became clear.
“Thy lot or portion in life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” So Miss Nightingale may have read in Emerson; and in homelier phrase her good Aunt Mai had said to her, “If you will but be ready for it, something is getting ready for you, and will be sure to turn up in time.” Which things Florence, I doubt not, laid up in her heart. When news began to arrive from the East, did she recall a prophecy which had been made about her by a friend long before the Crimean War was dreamt of? Lady Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, the “Ada, sole daughter of my home and heart,” had, before her death in 1852, written a poem in honour of her friend, Florence Nightingale. The piece ends with a presage:-
In future years, in distant climes,
Should war's dread strife its victims claim,
Should pestilence, unchecked betimes,
Strike more than sword, than cannon maim,
He who then reads these truthful rhymes
Will trace her progress to undying fame.1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 141.]
(1) Perhaps we may see signs of Moses' fitness in the exercise of curiosity: “And Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” It is an outward sign, something appealing to curiosity and wonder, that first seizes the attention of a man, whether he be a shepherd on a lonely plain or a dweller in a city, and that compels him to ask himself, “What is this? whence comes it?” He may turn aside to see the great sight merely as a sight. The impression it makes may be upon his senses, or, through his senses, upon his imagination. But if his mind has been much exercised with inward conflicts before,-if he has been seeking for something not to gratify his eyes, but to be a rest and home for his own being; if his thoughts concerning himself have been connected with thoughts of other men; if he has been labouring under a weight which is resting upon himself and upon them-then the visible object will not be that which takes possession of him or holds him captive. It will be but the sign to him of something behind and beneath. He will ask for that which is signified by the burning bush. Its terror, and its wonder, will be not in itself but in that.
We have all known men who have never in their lives been struck by a grand surprise; they are always so omniscient. If you tell them anything, they knew it before. If you could take them to the falls of Niagara, they would reply complacently and superciliously, “Ah, well, I thought they were better worth looking at than this.” They have never been moved to wonder, much less to admiration, in their lives. Whenever you meet with such a man, who has no more capacity for emotion in him, in the direction of wonder and admiration, than cast-iron, you meet with a man who has done nothing worth doing in God's world. One of the first conditions of noble manhood is that a man should be capable of wonder, earnest inquiry and intense admiration when there is a worthy object for wonder, inquiry and admiration. And thus, “hero-worship” (a word capable of misuse and sometimes representing what is sinful by its extravagance) is a condition of greatness. Teach your boy to admire some character in history, teach your daughter to fall in love with some grand heroine, not in a novel but in the story of the ages. One of the steps towards becoming a hero is to admire a hero.1 [Note: D. Davies, Talks with Men, Women and Children, iv. 33.]
(2) Another element in the fitness of Moses for his task was the capacity for reverence. There are many who have the spirit of inquiry without devotion. Moses said, “I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” Every man who has given his life to solve problems would have applauded this resolve on the part of Moses. But the next test of character is, “How is inquiry to be carried on?” Moses had probably now to learn this secret for the first time. Never had a mystery so startled him as at this moment. He would have plenty of mysteries by and by. The fire that set the acacia bush aflame would set the summit of Sinai ablaze very soon, and the man who was to be the leader of God's people must not stand in mere wonderment, but must know something about it. Thus God teaches him how to draw nigh to it.
There is a sentence in Mrs. Sellar's Recollections and Impressions conveying an aspiration which I think may be placed side by side with the experience of the burning bush. It was a sentence written by Susan Ferrier in one of those birthday books in which friends were asked to record their wishes: “That life may never lose its halo.” She desired that the mysterious, mystic light might always cling about everything, that everything might have a plus, that even the commonest thing might be the beginning of a lane leading to the infinite. It was a prayer that all her experiences might issue in wonder; that nothing might ever be completely analysable and measured and weighed, that always there should be a mystic something to make one hold the breath! It was a yearning that the bush might always be the home of a mysterious flame, and that the most lowly thing might be seen in relationship with the Eternal God.2 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]
Tread softly! all the earth is holy ground.
It may be, could we look with seeing eyes,
This spot we stand on is a Paradise
Where dead have come to life and lost been found,
Where Faith has triumphed, Martyrdom been crowned,
Where fools have foiled the wisdom of the wise;
From this same spot the dust of saints may rise,
And the King's prisoners come to light unbound.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 413.]
(3) But Moses was especially capable of sympathy. For Moses was not a shepherd. A fugitive in the wilderness, he had returned under stress of necessity to the ancestral occupations of his race. But he was “the son of Pharaoh's daughter,” educated in a civilized court, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He was a man of affairs and a philosopher, and more than this. If, like St. Paul in later times, he was “a citizen of no mean city,” like him also he was “a Hebrew of the Hebrews.” His contact with the court had not dulled his patriotism into cosmopolitan indifference. His heart was with his own folk, and their God was his God. His presence at the mount of God was due to the fact that he, the future lawgiver, had put himself outside the law in defence of his people.
When David saw the coward hosts of Israel terrified by the boastful giant, and the sore need of a champion to fight the battles of the Lord, there came home to his heart and conscience this clear personal call, “This is thy business; thou must do it; thou must thyself be the champion.” The same thing came to Carey, brooding over the midnight darkness of heathenism, and the miraculous apathy of the Church of God. He was driven to answer his own prayers, and to lay himself an offering on the altar of service. It is ever the way of God's working with men. The need which you see resolves itself into a call for personal service.2 [Note: Charles Brown, The Birth of a Nation, 119.]
4. In what form did the call come to Moses? God has a way of His own into the spirit which He has made. Standing over against all that is in the man, He lays His will upon him. The man wakens to realize that he stands summoned to specific submission and definite service by that Being in whom he lives and moves and has his being. Such a consciousness had Abraham, and Jeremiah, and Paul; and in the high places of the field, on Indian plains and Pacific isles, amid the most sunken of our cities, and among the throngs of men, are many who have been thrust out by the pressure of such a Divine call, and who are bearing the burden and heat of the day because of the overpowering conviction that they have been divinely chosen for, and are being divinely helped in, the work in which they are engaged.
We know that God does not speak to us as though He had vocal organs, and in speech modelled after ours, obeying the rules of our grammar books. We know that God does not talk English to an Englishman, and French to a Frenchman. We know He does not converse with Germans in gutturals, and with Hottentots in clicks, though these elements are essential in the respective languages. Yet we are equally certain that He does speak to us; and history certifies that men in all ages have believed they heard the voice of God, and many a noble work has originated in such conviction. How does He speak, then? He speaks in terms of human consciousness, the laws of which are the same in all ages and in all races.1 [Note: G. K. Grice.]
An old theologian says, “There are no Divine words except those that faith hears in the inmost sanctuary of the soul”; and the fact that the man who said that lived in an age that knew very little psychology makes the statement all the weightier. It is by the workings of a man's own mind that God speaks to him. It was so in the call of Moses: it is so in our own.2 [Note: G. K. Grice.]
I never so saw God, never had Him come so broadly, clearly out. He has not spoken to me, but He has done what is more. There has been nothing debatable to speak for, but an infinite easiness and universal presentation to thought, as it were by revelation. Nothing ever seemed so wholly inviting and so profoundly supreme to the mind. Had there been a strain for it, then it could not be. O my God! what a fact to possess and know that He is! I have not seemed to compare Him with anything, and set Him in a higher value; but He has been the all, and the altogether, everywhere, lovely. There is nothing else to compete; there is nothing else, in fact. It has been as if all the revelations, through good men, nature, Christ, had been now through, and their cargo unloaded, the capital meaning produced and the God set forth in His own proper day,-the good, the true, the perfect, the all-holy and benignant. The question has not been whether I could somehow get nearer, but as if He had come out Himself just near enough, and left me nothing but to stand still and see the salvation; no excitement, no stress, but an amazing beatific tranquillity. I never thought I could possess God so completely.3 [Note: Horace Bushnell, in Life, by T. T. Munger, 338.]
The discovery of her true vocation belongs to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life-perhaps, as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her sixth year-was the sense of a “call”; of some appointed mission in life; of self-dedication to the service of God. “I remember her,” wrote Fanny Allen, in 1857, to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, “as a little girl of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it was the Divine Spirit breathing in her.” In an autobiographical fragment written in 1867, Florence mentions as one of the crises of her inner life that “God called her to His service” on February 7, 1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit was to lead.1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 15.]
5. How did the vision affect Moses in regard to the work of his life? The narrative implies two facts.
(1) The vision of God prepared him for the work of his life. We are told that, after forty years of waiting in the wilderness, the shepherd saw a bush burning and unconsumed, and turned aside to see that great sight. Something told him that the answer to the question of his life was at hand. A voice broke the stillness, and, while listening to its awful utterance, the wonder of the unconsuming fire would be forgotten in reverence before a grandeur the eye could not see. The voice said, “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” An awful thought for the lonely shepherd! For these words, above all others, would make him feel the sublime eternity of God. The thought of One who had remained unchanged amid the changes of the human world-unchanged, while the generations of men passed like a morning dream away-unchanged amid the shifting and decay of races, and who would still be when Moses had passed and his work was done! Thus, he must have felt the everlastingness of God. Then came the sense of unworthiness. What was he-a poor vanishing creature, whose years were but as a hurried dream between life and death-to do His work? What had been his small effort to free the people, while He lived on, who had sworn that freedom to Abraham, in the old days before him? Then the last shadow of self-trust vanished from his soul, “and Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.” But then came the other voice that upheld him amid the overwhelming sense of his nothingness, and made him feel his vocation: “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.” Not unheard had been the wail of the oppressed-not unseen had been the cruelty of the king. The Everlasting Sympathy was with them, and that thought, upholding his sinking weakness, became a clear, strong call to action, and summoned him with the voice of the Eternal to his calling: “Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.”
(2) The vision of God gave endurance in fulfilling that work. Moses “endured, as seeing him who is invisible.” Let us see how that endurance came. At first, Moses was unwilling to go to Pharaoh. He had learned enough, during those strange years, to feel the difficulty of that task. Who was he that he should face the king and his armies? Then came that grand revelation of the name of God, which was to abide with him until his work was done-“I am that I am.” There is an awful power in these words to bring us face to face with God, conveying as they do the Reality of all realities, the Mystery of mysteries. And observe, this revelation of the name of God made him feel the glory of the vision as an ever-present power. The bush might burn no more; but the unchanging Presence would still be with him. Under that consciousness, the sense of his insignificance faded. His terror of Pharaoh passed away. What were human obstacles to him before whose eye were ever present the glories he had seen in the desert, and to whom had come that revelation of the Lord? Should the people sneer at, and reject him; should he have to stand alone; should he seem to fail; and should he die with his work undone-still, that mighty vision had given him a grasp on eternity which would keep him strong and true!
I quite agree with you that such things as these-God's goodness and grace in the hearts He has made-are the true stars we have to look to in our night, and if some of them have set sooner, they did shine for us, and are shining still. Our small horizon is not His universe. I think this is a conviction that grows on us the more we dwell on it, and how thankful we should be when God has given us in our history realities of life to help us to rise to the realities of faith. It is a way in which sight helps faith; for surely something akin to this lies in the words of Christ, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”-not merely that Christ is the image of God, but that a Divine life witnessed by us on earth is the evidence of a God. So that one may say, we can be as sure of God as if we had seen Him, and if we are sure of Him we are sure of everything.1 [Note: Letters of John Ker, 84.]
What bard,
At the height of his vision, can deem
Of God, of the world, of the soul,
With a plainness as near,
As flashing as Moses felt,
When he lay in the night by his flock
On the starlit Arabian waste?
Can rise and obey
The beck of the Spirit like him?2 [Note: Matthew Arnold, The Future.]
