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| Volume 28 Number 4 April 2026 |
Page 8 |
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| Volume 28 Number 4 April 2026 |
Page 8 |
Gary C. Hampton
God heard the groaning of His people and remembered His promise to deliver them. “Remembered” is not in the human sense of the word. He had told Abraham that his descendants would be held in bondage and oppressed for four hundred years (Exodus 2:23–25; Acts 7:6). The Egyptians dealt with the Israelites in a harsh manner, and it certainly seemed to some of them that God had forgotten them. The Almighty was actually preparing a leader for His people in the land of Midian, a now eighty-year-old Moses.
Moses was tending the flocks of his wife’s family in the area around Horeb. That name “is not restricted to one single mountain but applies to the central group of mountains in the southern part of the peninsula” (Keil and Delitzsch). Moses was tending the flocks “to the back of the desert,” which Cook indicates would be to the west side, since the Hebrews viewed the east as being before a man (Exodus 3:1).
The Angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in the middle of a burning bush that was not consumed with fire. Moses turned aside to see this amazing sight. God spoke to him out of the bush, or as Stephen says, “the voice of the Lord came to him” (Exodus 3:2–4; Acts 7:30–32).
He required Moses to show reverence by taking off his shoes because he was standing on holy ground. The presence of the Lord made the ground holy. God identified Himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Jesus seized on the tense of this verb to show there is a resurrection of the dead. God said, “I am the God of” Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Each man was spoken of in the present tense. Thus, God was, at that moment, the God of each of them. All Moses heard caused him to hide his face lest he look upon the face of God. The Lord explained that He had seen the suffering of His people and come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:5–8).
[Editor’s Note: It is quite probable that what we perceive as “good” (Romans 8:28) for us is different from God’s definition of the word, especially since His vantage far exceeds perhaps even our lifetimes. For many years, for instance, assuredly Joseph didn’t think it was a good thing for his brothers to sell him into slavery, followed by prison. Yet, God had a plan whereby He providentially used bad—even evil and sinful—intentions and actions by others to bring about the perseverance of the family from which the nation of Israel would arise, and through which ultimately the Messiah, the Son of God, came (Genesis 50:20). Certainly, we see the little picture whereas God views the big picture. Again, consider the grave disappointment of Christians at the martyrdom of Stephen, and yet, that sacrifice brought about persecution of Christians, which led to the taking of the Gospel beyond Jerusalem, even as Jesus Christ had instructed prior to His ascension (Acts 1:8). ~ Louis Rushmore, Editor]
