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My home church: Scots’ Church Fremantle, built in 1890. The Burning Bush is central and high, superimposed upon the Cross.

Flagror non consumor

French Protestant pastors chose this motto as they gathered in 1583 for their 12^th National Synod. It means “I am burning, I am not consumed.”

It was grimly apt. Just eleven years before so many thousands of Protestants were shot and slashed in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, August 24 1572, that the Seine ran red.

In 1540 King Francis I had declared Protestantism heretical and “high treason against both God and humanity.” French Protestants – Huguenots – would be more-or-less cruelly and violently persecuted and harassed right up until the Revolution.

In 1691 the Church of Scotland chose an almost identical motto. They printed Nec tamen consumebatur, “Yet it was not burnt up,” on the title page of the Acts of the General Assembly. They too had just emerged from thirty years of brutal persecution, “The Killing Times,” when the sons of Charles I tried to stamp out Scottish Presbyterians. Many who refused to swear allegiance to the king as head of the church were summarily executed. Eighteen-year-old Margaret Wilson was tied to a stake in the Solway Firth and slowly drowned by the incoming tide. It is estimated that about 18,000 Scottish Christians perished or fled.

John Everett Millais, The Martyr of the Solway, 1871.

My own church, Scots’ Church Fremantle, built in 1890, features stained glass pictures of the Burning Bush. Placed in the front and back walls, they can be seen during worship by both elders and congregation – a constant reminder of Jesus’ warning that all God’s people, whether Huguenots or Covenantors or Christians in any place or time, “will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and be hated by all nations because of me” (Matt 24:9).

Yet not consumed!

As the Exodus miracle of the Burning Bush so clearly displays. We pick up the narrative with the cries of the Hebrew slaves:

God Hears Our Cries

Exodus 2:23a During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out.

It’s now eighty years since Moses was a foundling among the bulrushes, and forty years since his botched first attempt to rescue the Israelites. The tender baby is now the grizzled old lion.

The enslaved Hebrews “groan” (אנח, anach), a word which conveys a “broken heart and bitter grief” (Ezek 21:6). Their agony breaks out in shouts and cries for help.

This is a microcosm of our godless world – our cities, friends, and families – enslaved to meaninglessness, frustration, egotism, greed, sin, condemnation, and death. This is the bitter agony of estrangement from God.

What is there left to do but to cry out to heaven?

Exodus 2:23b–25 And their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. ²⁴God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. ²⁵So God looked on the people of Israel–and God knew.

God is not the god of the deists: powerful but remote, a detached observer. Our groans and cries do not fall on deaf ears. “To know” (ידע, yāda) means to know relationally, personally, intimately: “Now Adam knew (yāda) his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore a son” (Gen 4:1).

Any man will run to help those who call for help. But the husband, having covenanted to love his bride ’til death do us part, will hear the cry of his suffering wife a thousand times more urgently.

The groans of Israel seize God’s heart because he had covenanted himself to them: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

God Comes Down

Exodus 3:1–3 Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ²There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.

Once pampered in Pharaoh’s palace, Moses has now shepherded sheep for forty years in the armpit of the earth. Midian today is the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia. A furnace by day, a freezer by night. Twice a year the hot, dry khamsin blows in from the desert bearing heat waves and dust clouds. Mars on earth, without the glamour.

Moses has led his flock to Horeb, “the mountain of God,” Mount Sinai. Today the Arabs call it Jabal Musa, the Mountain of Moses.

“Appeared” is the very first word in verse 2. In the midst of slavery, murder, tears, and groaning, he appears. Angels are God’s servants and messengers. The Angel of the LORD represents God and speaks on his behalf. He is the LORD himself appearing in person. Yet because God is Spirit and invisible he “wraps himself” in something visible, whether thick darkness and lightning, smoke and fire, or cloud and light.

Here the LORD manifests himself to Moses as a flaming bush – possibly a desert acacia – which is not burned up by the fire.

Paul specifies that it was the second person of the Trinity, the LORD Jesus Christ himself, who carried Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt (1 Cor 10:4). So Justin Martyr wrote that the Son “appeared in the shape of fire and in the likeness of an angel to Moses” (First Apology, 63); and Irenaeus said that it was Christ “Himself who said to Moses, ‘I have surely seen the affliction of my people’” (Against Heresies 4.12.4). Tertullian said that the Son of God “called out to Moses from the burning bush” (Against Praxeus 17). And Augustine, who puts Exodus 3 alongside Stephen’s Acts 7 speech, teaches that “the Son of God himself” spoke to Moses (De Trinitate 3.11.23–24). Calvin comments that “the Eternal Word of God, of one Godhead and essence with the Father, assumed the name of ‘the Angel.’”

The symbolism is multi-layered.

The bush is the Israelites themselves, burning and groaning in the fire of slavery and murder, but who are shielded by God’s grace. Calvin writes that “though surrounded by flames, and feeling their heat, yet they remained unconsumed, because they were guarded by the present help of God.”

True enough, but the text itself focuses on the character of the LORD himself who would dwell in and among his people.

God is Holy

Exodus 3:3–5 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this great sight—why the bush does not burn up.” ⁴When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.” ⁵“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Our Chinese friends place shoe racks just inside their front doors. You don’t wear your boots and heels, which pick up dirt, dust, and germs, into the space where people live and eat. Removing one’s shoes – no matter how clean or dirty – shows respect.

Similarly, Moses must remove his shoes because he is standing on “holy ground.”

Holy derives from the Old English hālig, from which we get hale, healthy, and whole. Certainly the Hebrew qādōsh (קדושׁ) includes the notions of health and wholeness, and especially moral health. So Paul likens holiness to blamelessness and contrasts it with impurity (Eph 1:4; 1 Thess 4:7).

But the biblical adjective holy overwhelmingly conveys a sense of separateness. The ground before the burning bush is utterly separate, distinct, and holy, because God is present there.

The two-thousand-plus Egyptian gods were earthy persons who stood for earthy things like the Nile (Khnum), war (Montu), embalming (Anubis), fertility and harvest (Thermusis), procreation (Sebiumeker), jackals (Sed), vultures (Nekhbet), frogs (Heqet), crocodiles (Maga), and so on.

But God is the self-existent Creator. “For you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being” (Rev 4:11). God is not empowered and moved by created things but instead “sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:3). He is not subject to earthly pharaohs and forces but rather governs and rules all. “The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will” (Prov 21:1).

God transcends his creation, which is why Solomon prayed at the dedication of the Temple: “But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you!” (1 Kgs 8:27)

God utterly transcends Egyptian materialism, autonomy, and immorality. He is perfectly good and just.

The fire proclaims God’s power, purity, transcendence, and holiness. Yet he has visited us; he has covenanted to help us:

Exodus 3:6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

The creature stands before the Creator; the sinner before the blazing holiness of the LORD. Moses is right to hide his face. Yet the God of the Patriarchs will keep his covenant with his people.

God Keeps His Covenant Promise

Exodus 3:7–10 The Lord said, ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.

⁸So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.

⁹And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. ¹⁰So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.’

God sees the suffering of his people, hears their cries, and has compassion.

Exodus 3 brings us before Jesus Christ, the Holy LORD.

Let us remember our sin, remove our shoes, and hide our faces.

Remember also that no matter what trials and persecutions his people will endure; he will protect and shield us. That we might say:

Flagror non consumor

I am burning, I am not consumed

– Campbell Markham