A failure, and the mercy that met it
Moses the Fugitive, Called
Moses tried to rescue his people his own way, killed a man, and fled into the desert to spend forty years as a shepherd and a stranger. When God finally called him from a burning bush, Moses was an eighty-year-old failure who no longer believed he could do anything.
“Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.”Exodus 3:10
The failure or loss
The failure or loss. Moses knew he belonged to Israel, and one day "he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren" (Exodus 2:11). He looked this way and that, thought no one saw, and killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. But the next day two Hebrews were striving, and when Moses tried to intervene, one threw it back at him: "Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?" (Exodus 2:14). The secret was out. Pharaoh sought to kill him, and Moses fled to Midian, far from the palace and far from the people he had meant to save. There the rescuer became a shepherd, tending another man's flock in the wilderness. Forty years passed. Stephen sums up the collapse: Moses "supposed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them: but they understood not" (Acts 7:25). His impatience and his violence had ruined his standing with Egypt and with Israel alike. The would-be deliverer was now a nobody at the back of the desert, and the dream looked dead.
The second chance
The second chance. God had not forgotten. "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" (Exodus 3:2). There God recommissioned the fugitive: "I have surely seen the affliction of my people... and am come down to deliver them... Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people" (Exodus 3:7-10). Moses, once so bold, now protested at every turn: Who am I? What is your name? They will not believe me. I am slow of speech. God met each objection, not by flattering Moses but by promising his own presence: "Certainly I will be with thee" (Exodus 3:12). The call came on God's timing and by God's power, not on the strength of Moses' zeal. The same man whose self-appointed rescue had failed became, by divine sending, the deliverer of a nation, standing before Pharaoh with a staff and a word from God.
How it points to Christ
How it points to Christ. Moses learned that deliverance comes not by human effort seized ahead of God, but by God's own coming down to save. "I am come down to deliver them" is the pattern the gospel fulfills: in Jesus, God himself came down to rescue a people he had heard groaning under a heavier bondage than Egypt. Moses foreshadows Christ the deliverer, the mediator who stands between God and the people, yet he does so as a flawed and forgiven man, which only magnifies the grace. God delights to take those the world has written off, the failures and fugitives, and make them instruments of rescue. Where Moses fled his failure into the desert, Jesus walked toward our failure and bore it. And the God who was not too holy to speak from a common bush is the God who was not too holy to be born in a manger, calling the broken by name and sending them out with his presence: "lo, I am with you alway" (Matthew 28:20).
Questions people ask
Why did God wait forty years to call Moses?
Scripture does not give every reason, but the long wilderness years stripped Moses of the self-confidence that had led him to kill and flee. The bold man of Exodus 2 became the reluctant, God-dependent man of Exodus 3. God's timing prepared the servant as much as the mission.
Did Moses' murder disqualify him from serving God?
It cost him dearly and drove him into exile, but it did not place him beyond God's call. God met the fugitive and recommissioned him, showing that past sin, honestly left behind, does not end a person's usefulness to God when God chooses to send them.
What does the burning bush reveal?
It reveals a God who comes down to a common place, speaks his name, and sends a broken man with the promise of his presence. The bush that burned without being consumed pictures a holy God who draws near to save rather than destroy.