Exodus 3 brings us before Jesus Christ, the Holy Lord. Let us remember our sin, remove our shoes, and hide our faces.

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. Some eighteen-thousand Scottish Christians perished or fled.

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, 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.

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