Lessons from Moses' Meeting with God

(Read Exodus 3:1-6)

The time: Moses is already 80 years old. He has every good reason to suppose that the story of his life is pretty much written and, indeed, he is now living out its epilogue, which goes: "And Moses lived out his remaining days as a shepherd in the family of a Midianite priest. The End."

And back in Egypt, Pharaoh sits at peace, secure in his power and glory, fully supposing the whole world with all its creatures belong to him and the gods who stand behind him. He sees no threat coming on any horizon.

Neither Pharaoh nor Moses imagines how the whole world is about to be turned upside down, for them and for their nations. And neither of them imagines the roles to be played in all this by their personal qualities, whether humility, pride, obstinacy or meekness, in the rise and fall of their people.

The lesson for us: God chooses times and circumstances that seem unremarkable to us to do astounding things. God displays His might and will just when we are expecting nothing, and who we are, what sort of children we are of His, will play a key role in the materialization of His will. This lesson applies even to the final, ultimate consummation of things in this world, as the New Testament repeatedly exhorts us, in a manner of speaking, to have our character in order, in top form, ready for Christ's appearing whenever it might come. (Read 1 Thess. 5:2; Matthew 24:43; Mark 13:33) The moment God breaks into the scene, it's too late to start playing catch-up; when He acts, all the choices have already been made.

Without warning the Voice resounds in the desert, "Moses! Moses!", and instantly Moses' entire accustomed order of things disappears.  What looked like life's epilogue has suddenly turned into its whole purpose and essence; a series of events is being launched that will change the entire world, and "this old man", Moses, finds himself in the very middle of it all.

We need to grasp this so we can better understand the ensuing conversation between Moses and God, to better understand just how astounded and stupefied Moses was by all this. In terms that are not very King-James-ish, we might well say Moses was flabbergasted! This is the state he's in when he desperately begs God not to send him to Pharaoh. I don't think any of us is any different from Moses; we'd have all responded in shock and confusion at the appearing of this majesty and glory and the summons to turn our whole world upside-down on the spot. 

(Read Exodus 3:5) This is a meeting with holiness. What's very interesting is that this is the first place in the whole Bible where the word "holy" appears. That's hard to believe, isn't it! It seems incredible that, in everything the Bible recounts before this—when Man defied God's holiness in the Garden; when a holy God destroyed a sinful world in the Flood; when God made a holy covenant with Abraham, promising to make him the father of a great nation, yes, a holy nation in a holy land—that in all of that the word "holy" never actually came up! But it comes up here: "the place where you are standing is holy."

This first appearance of the word "holy" tells us a lot. The simple fact that the word didn't show up earlier reminds us that God doesn't immediately reveal literally everything to Man about His divine being and ways. That's for two reasons: first of all, Man can't possibly comprehend, absorb everything at once—he's finite, limited; in the second place, logic dictates that the eternal God cannot reveal, to the uttermost, to the nth degree, the depths of his infinite Being at all, never mind to a finite creature like man. How can what's endless be completely revealed? It takes an eternity to reveal the eternal! And in this vein we Christians must admit, must embrace, the truth and reality that, though we have come to "know" Jesus Christ, we are more unfamiliar with God than we are "familiar" with Him, since He is eternal and infinite. It is an inescapable truth that there is infinitely more in God we don't know about than we do know about.

The first appearance of this word "holy" serves, furthermore, as a hint and foretaste of what this dramatically new manifestation of God means after the "silent" passage of four centuries. God is in a new way revealing Himself and His purposes on the world stage. He is about to do the unprecedented. Here He is summoning, to minister to His holy nation, a chief, a teacher, an intercessor/priest, a prophet, a lawgiver. Take note: this has never happened before in the history of God's dealings with Man, not even in the history of God's dealings with the family of Abraham, before this moment. Before this moment, the people of Israel have been a family, with patriarchs. Now, here, in the desert, with Moses and the burning bush and the voice of God and the declaration of a new order, the people will be a nation, in every sense of the word—with rulers and laws and, yes, a country of their own. God is summoning Moses to lead His people into a holy land, where the Israelites won't be merely Jacob's family anymore but a genuine state—yes, a kingdom.

This is a turning point—a turning point of dimensions and depths we can barely absorb—in the history of the "people of God" and everything that "people of God" means. It is a moment when all things become new. And it all begins in an encounter with holiness, the holiness that defines everything.

But even when God reveals Himself and His purpose in stunningly new ways and dimensions, He always reveals that He is the very same God, not a different or new one: (read verse 6). He is the very same God Who spoke, long ago, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He knew then, even if the patriarchs didn't, that His will and ways then would, dear Moses, lead to this meeting with you, now. God is one, His whole purpose is one and its ultimate fulfillment will be the consummation of all its meaning and substance in the one Person of Jesus Christ!

As we read further, we notice an interesting series of verbs (read verses 7-9). "I have seen, I have heard, I know, I am going...." This is the God of Man, the Creator of Man, who condescends to identify with Man and relate   to him "humanly", in human terms comprehensible to His creation. "I have seen… I have heard…": such terms don't limit God, on the contrary they demonstrate the eternal God's right and freedom to relate to Man, created in His image, in whatever way He wishes. To deny that God may do this, even to assert that God cannot possibly experience "human" feelings and emotions—that actually is to limit God. It is God's love to know us and suffer our sufferings, and such love was consummated in the Incarnation of Christ, who endured all human sufferings and bore our sins to the cross.

And now I want to look at Moses' four objections to the summons of God. Moses takes four stabs at dissuading God Almighty from sending him on this outlandish quest.

First Moses offers what I call the Political Objection (read verse 11). In other words, Who am I, Lord? I'm a nobody in the world. I have no status, no title, no geopolitical weight. Pharaoh doesn't have the least reason even to grant me an audience, much less take anything I have to say seriously!

To Moses’ “Who am I?”, God replies, “I will be with you.” End of argument. You will be the one who God is with. What other status would give you more authority? And when you and I and the nation of Israel meet again here, on this mountain, you will look back on your question “Who am I?” and realize how foolish it was.

Moses, however, has more objections to try out before caving to the divine mandate! So next he tries what I call the Social Objection (read 4:1): Maybe the people won’t like me, won’t want to listen to me, won’t believe me! Now Moses isn’t worrying about Pharaoh; he’s worrying about his own people.

God settles this objection in a no-nonsense way. See that staff in your hand, Moses? Oops, now it’s a snake, how about that? And, oops, now it’s a staff again, how about that? And look at your hand…covered with a leprous disease! Look at it again…healthy as a newborn’s! And if that isn’t enough, Moses, just wait till they see the power I will reveal over the forces of Nature. They will believe, you, Moses, because they will have to believe Me.

So the Political and Social Objections have flopped completely, but Moses is stubborn. He’s going to reach into his bag of objections to see whether one or two others might not work better. The next one he whips out is the Handicap Objection (read verse 10). Lord, I have a handicap—I can’t do public speaking! I freeze up! I get stage fright! I’m a total dud on the dais! I get all tongue-tied. You definitely don’t want a disastrous orator like me to be your spokesman. It’s a terrible fit.

In His mercy, God continues to dispense with Moses’ objections one by one, rather than dismissing Moses out of sheer impatience. His answer to the Handicap Objection (verses 11-12): I am the Maker of everything. You can’t possibly have a weakness, a handicap, a failing, an imperfection, an anything that I don’t know about and can’t use exactly as I see fit. Did Moses imagine that God was unfamiliar with Moses’ “speaking career” prior to this encounter? Again in His mercy, God assures Moses, “I’ll help you; it will all be okay.” When God says “I’ll help you”, that pretty destroys the Handicap Objection, doesn’t it.

And, finally, the final objection. There is still one left in the bag. I call this the Will Objection, that is, the objection based on will. (Read verse 13).

Well! Now that’s honest! Maybe we could call this “Will Objection” the “Won’t Objection”, as in “I won’t do it”! Or at least the “I Don’t Wanna Objection”. When he has run out of every other plausible argument and good reason why God really should pass him up and find a better candidate, Moses finally admits the core issue: he just doesn’t want to do it. “Please find somebody else, not me!”

Indeed, had Moses known from the outset that this was something he wanted, or at least was willing, to do, then there never would have been a Political Objection or a Social Objection or a Handicap Objection. He would simply have said, “Yes. I’ll do this.” Because it always comes down to a matter of the will. Of willingness to yield to God.

But before we think of severely judging Moses in our hearts, let’s remember that Moses went out that fine morning to pasture his flock without the least suspicion that, this very day, Almighty God would appear to him with a summons to be Israel’s Deliverer from the power of Egypt. I suppose I’d have responded in bewilderment and confusion as well!

God demonstrates mercy and understanding in His love. For each problem Moses conjures up in his mind, God patiently supplies the perfect solution. And He does so beyond anything Moses could have anticipated. Even before Moses thought of telling God he couldn’t handle public speaking, God had already dispatched Aaron in Moses’ direction, returning Moses’ brother to him, and not only a brother but the spokesman Moses needed for the job ahead. (Read verses 14-17). It reminds us of Ephesians 3:20, where Paul speaks of God as the one who “is able to do far beyond all that we ask or think.”  

But take note! This same loving, generous, magnanimous God suddenly appears strange, dangerous, frightfully unfamiliar and, certainly, less than “tame” only a very short while afterwards, as we read in 4:25, 26 (read).

And the unavoidable question is why. And, how? Why would God act this way, and how can it even make sense in light of God’s explicitly revealed calling and purpose for Moses?

Remember what it says in 4:14: “The the LORD’s anger burned against Moses.” Yes, providing Aaron was generous, compassionate, merciful and beyond anything Moses could have imagined. But—the Lord’s anger “burned” against Moses.  Why? Well, it seems pretty obvious. All these handy objections Moses was pulling out of Objection Bag represented, at root, a rejection of faith, a refusal to trust, an implicit charge that God was less than God and somehow making a terrible mistake.

I don’t think that God Almighty was “miffed” the petty way you or I might get miffed. I don’t even think He was outraged or indignant the way you or I might be…usually out of a sense of insecurity and insult to our ego. But—the Lord’s anger—the fire of His holiness as it confronts sin—burned, at that moment, in response to the sacrilege of Moses’ disbelief and testing of God.

So there is a precedent, a theological precedent, to the strange, confusing encounter on the way to Egypt, when the Lord Himself wants to kill Moses.

Moses had failed to fulfill the conditions of the Abrahamic covenant. A slight, unimportant detail? Obviously not! Should God have talked with Moses about it first…the way He did through the burning bush…rather than pounce without warning? Well, in the first place, Moses’ wife knew perfectly well what the problem was; therefore, Moses must have known as well. And in the second place, when God spoke with Moses on the mountain, Moses presented God with a laundry list of objections.

There are moments when the children of God need a fresh, stark reminder that God is not, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “a tame lion”. He is, the writer of the epistle the Hebrews says, “a consuming fire”. A fire of absolute purity and holiness. Could God have killed Moses that day on the road to Egypt but still have fulfilled His purpose some other way?

Do we even need to ask?

Yes, God loves, but that doesn’t make Him a “tame lion” that we play with. Yes, God loves, but God’s love isn’t what might naively and simplistically sum up as a “mutually satisfactory arrangement”, acceptable to us as long as we find it comfortable and unthreatening. God’s love is the manifestation of His unfathomable holiness, and you don’t come to a “mutually satisfactory arrangement” with such holiness, but only to a surrender and self-abandonment that magnifies and glorifies God and transforms, dare I say transfigures, our own lives. We come in the self-abandonment and surrender that embraces whatever He wills to do with us.

God says, “I AM, and the place where you are standing is holy.”

Our only possible human response, in order to be truly human and truly His, is to surrender, adore, and love Him.

The Endless Labyrinth of the Finite Heart

God's child, shaken awake in the deep grave-like night, stumbles blearily, at first, into the starlit dark, imbibes the bracing air, and throws body and soul into the long, hard march, steered by the Light of the World

 

---

 

 Conversion

 

     'Twixt Then and Then

     In the fusion of Will and will

     A Kingdom comes

     Creating Now.

 

     And Past and Future

     Are born

     Of Love's immediate

     Sway and instant

     Soul's attendance,

 

     In conquering sacrament

     Of holy presence.

 

---

 

Death knocks, demands entry, the house is roused, the child quakes, playthings and whims are forgotten, the Master rises, opens the door, and Death, prostrate before the living Presence, begs to serve

 

---

 

In the Son of Glory God the Sum of Glory unfolds, unveils, life's 'primal Sun' and Morning Star, the soul's native shore and everlasting patria

 

---

 

Though it jar the soul and prod our deepest fortress fears, the knocking at the door is the sound of Pity's hand, Compassion's urge, of holy, reclaiming Cure

 

---

 

Love surges from the expansive center to encompass horizons all around and from that infinite aspect embrace life's boundless reaches within

 

---

 

From the withering, world-cobbled dominion of things into the life-stirring ebullience of Kingdom brotherhood

 

"He who has seen Me..."

 

---

 

Intense discernment--essential to maintain

For distance from the darkened perception

That itself is distance

From the All-Occupying Life

 

The essence of Man supremely aspires

(If truth be told)

To the place of certain contemplation

And unbarred adoration

Of the Risen Reigning Presence

 

Weary storm-blown spirit-craft

Unfurl your sails

Till now too weakly presented

To the Master's deathless fervent sway

 

And begin to share the deep power

 

---

 

Our being begets our seeing, which sparks our striving, which ordains the destination

 

---

 

It is not inevitable that we should populate and demarcate life's inevitably vague horizons with fearsome phantoms and hopeless verdicts

 

---

 

As He in thought, perception, word and deed,

So we, with heart, eye, mouth and hand

Answer true, by Love and His agony freed

To run sure, grow deep, and alive to the Uttermost—stand

 

"I will run the way of Thy commandments, when Thou shalt enlarge my heart."

 

---

 

Through desert wastes and thorns, on sorrow's fiery sands, under the strident sun of Law, from driven self to Promised  Self--a hopeful trek if, only, life's thirst is slaked by the living Source beneath

 

---

 

There is a Strength, an undiminishable locus of Life, a holy Power that illumines endurance, a radiant Region of Imagination's birth, truth and materialization in Love; there is and because there is we say, 'I must....'

 

---

 

In a world where the firmament declares His glory and the hills skip for joy, grace beyond feeling guides our faith to a home past imagining

 

---

 

The royal highway from Sinai to Zion, from Alpha to Omega, from Epiphaneia to Parousia, runs its course and measures its meaning through the valley of drudgery and humiliation, Christ-illuminated with faith-charged, radiant might.

 

---

 

The will to wake,

The will to take

The broken steps

On,

No matter the dream or draw

Of backward glance

Or sideways glimmer.

Be it the dark you see

Clearly ahead,

Keep on, keep straight,

In faith and hope,

And love the Light

In which, in Whom

You clearly see.

It is not the dark

Sees the dark,

But Light infused—

Sees, steps, pierces,

Masters in simplicity,

And knows itself there.

 

---

 

Blessed are they who ascend through crisis to poverty in spirit, where nothing's left to own or treasure than Majesty's Ingress and Audience at their humble, transfigured table

 

---

 

Praise God--He gave the Church, His Bride, a sure and gushing spring of life, the living gauge of truth and Eternity's 'oil of gladness': The Paraclete, Who curbs pernicious pride, Who chides the stale distracted heart, Who tugs the drooping spirit up again to go and grow and flame with primal joy.

 

---

 

Venturing home, shod with hope, girded with Promise, mustering heart's will against faithless comforts, pressing nearer the unseen all-penetrating Source

 

---

 

Infant expression of unseen root: the nascent scion's fire-born drive to inhabit the Heavenly Sire's fearless perfection

 

---

 

Memories and mourning, enfenced and tilled by Grace, marvelously become the rich medium and fertile earth of holy Kingdom joy, but the fence must encircle and lock fast, and the tilling go deep

 

---

 

God's child comes rushing back to Love's primordial axis: the sublime Mother-glow of the mighty Father-glory blazing from the Spirit's hearth in Son-concentric beams--to melt away the clinging flakes of Self-ish snow and thaw the child's pride-chilled limbs within

 

---

 

At life's core, a Power and a purpose, a crucible of mystery and light, and a primal drive to utter Manhood in the Love at life's core 

 

---

 

The familiar, comforting and commonsense

Raise a tumult to drown out His call 

To the unknown and awful, primordial and holy

The glory of His face pierces the tumult 

All is silent   

 

---

 

Christ, the heart and Way to the heart of things.

 

---

 

Arise and go to Him, Cry out to Him, and do; He will make sense, light, a kingdom... and you.

 

---

 

To chafe and brood 

Over wounded rights 

And tout my self-charged view 

Is to smother His 

Creating breath 

And drown, 

In proud confusion, 

The living hue 

Of Grace.

 

---

 

The contrite spirit--a sacrifice of will: ascent to the height only ever begins from wherever you are, if it is to begin at all.

 

---

 

The Beauty, Silence and Surrender: The infant soul clutches the beautiful thing to keep it forever, and grief follows; the soul grown deeper in Love surrenders to the Beauty that retreats and, by retreating, returns, and by returning remakes the soul for Its own forever.

 

---

 

Before appearances and non-appearances, circumstances and forces, I speculate and doubt... I run to Honesty's door and knock... harmonious percussion greets my touch... calling calls to calling in essential duet: 'Come in... and enflesh the purpose'.

 

---

 

The Awakened Anima is alive to the need that dawns in Redemption and flowers in Love; her contingency is revealed as Gift, her authenticity as Koinonia, her being as Worship

 

---

 

Imago Dei, inherently exalted, unique in place and response to Eternity's Only Presence, you truly cohere where, only, you truly inhere: the begetting bond in the Father of Mercy and the Sacrifice Lamb

 

'And... our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ' 

 

---

 

From the purging perimeter to the pervading center--the secret life in the depths of the fire.

 

---

 

The One who walks, risen, crowned, in brilliant glory among the lampstands, with every star, all heaven and earth--Death's keys and Life's wellsprings, too--forever fixed in hand, His hand... He whispers sovereign summons to a single holy Light, all-pervading Will, inexorably converging design

 

---

 

The Certainty we hunt for in panic sometimes--

It would destroy us, obliterate us;

It belongs to Holy Providence.

The doubts that wear and tear us at times:

They are the clattering echoes, the piercing reverberations, of a desperate scramble--

For Certainty--

In the endless labyrinth of the finite heart.

Their boon is to blare warning: 'Love forbids.'

'I know Him Whom I have believed':

He ordains to us no other certainty.

 

---

 

The human heart enfolded by the timeless Life will incorrigibly blossom and burst with Love's fruits and--yes!--with sweet joy trace the changeless Face displayed on Heaven's swirling sky.

 

---

 

Life's mornings, daytimes and evenings: a time for cracking the crust, a time for weathering the Power's storms, and a time for fitting, ripe weariness

 

---

 

The piping, percolating spring season of the spirit is hard to let go for the quiet, rich industriousness of autumn–bound summer; 

But the summer infiltrates the spring and fall displaces summer; 

The deep engulfs the surface and the 'always' diffuses the 'next'; 

Death impels the faltering will and Resurrection swallows up death for finally and ever 

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EXsLwO0Kvmb5e18tS5jz1lsZXTFKVqfi/view?usp=sharing

A Month of Sentences (1)

The Christian Life, the Faithful Yearning to Yield All to Him

Man's spirit cannot thrive without tenaciously yielding to God's vital dictate.

This all-demanding way leads to our spirits' true home, so... reckon rightly!

The life-redeeming love of God admits only the all-surrendered.

Divine redemption is central to genuine humanity because He is the Center to Whom we belong. If we are headed toward Him we are becoming like Him; if headed somewhere else, then becoming something else.

Final belonging will be total exposure to the immutable God. To us in Christ it means, not terror, but a union of love; it means everything. 

Self's perfect heights do not exist outside surrender to freedom's Author, do not exist outside the flow of His love to all that is not self .

Within the Only God, the Only Love prevailed infinitely: surmounted and subsumed the Only Crisis. So, only, does fear turn to love within us. So, only, do all things become to us His goodness, gift and glory. 

To yield all to Him Who is All is to gain all. It is never by accident, only by open need, conscious appeal, intentional relinquishment. 

The faithful yearning, that will not betray, originates in God Who alone encompasses meaning. It leads into a fire, yes, but it leads through. Blessed is the soul that understands, responds, in time. 

The Christian life is no worship of a text and letter. It is a union with living fire. It is the creation grafted into, and made expression of, God's infinite Self-giving.

Our inmost longings cannot be forever out of sight. They inevitably create externally, for good or ill. The Father's desire is to be the gushing 'Source of the Inmost' and, so, to create His child's world. 

Disillusioned with self-authorship, we are compelled by need, not desire, to surrender to the awful truth: Life's very fabric is the freedom of inexhaustible love, in God alone. 

God's work in us reconciles and excludes in growing harmony with His fierce love and purity. In us 'there is no good thing' but 'Christ in you, the hope of glory.'

True longing for Truth serves the Truth, doesn't dictate to It. Constant devotion to God is constant having--having Him Whom none ever possesses. Patient endurance in the Truth is Love's constant arrival. 

Sovereign Love lays out a course for us to run--day and night, in sun and storm, over smooth track and looming obstacles. To keep running is our duty and a saving focus. And to run the course with joy--a choice. 

Awake, press on, change, become. Only life invaded and occupied by Love's Sire is life worth living, and life worth imparting. 

Our worth is rooted and fixed in a reality beyond our conjuring or control. To enter the Reality is to inherit the treasure: the worth of our belonging to God in Christ.  

Only thus does imperfect man reveal the perfect Maker Whose infinite facets, demanding myriad and pure expression, will unite us in the full-grown stature of Christ.

His miraculous intent is our pure unity in the infinite expression of love for which each of us is uniquely shaped. 

Necessary paradox: to chase what's inexorable, to enter what invades, to strain after what's given,  to discover God...and yourself...in the other who is not God or yourself.

What must be: Love's law sets the price and pays it; Love's power breaks fear's bonds; New Life rises, bound to Love's freedom.

Faithfulness is our "cruise control", a constant drive and "solid state", charged from the center and pervading the totality, through every twist, hazard and monotonous stretch of life's highway.

Our hearts' homing instinct is lit and fueled by the Life perpetually born--but never originated--in us at Love's decree.

To turn from heart's home is to turn from heart itself, from its substance, appointment and source. True fear of the Lord is courageous susceptibility--to the un-comprehended, uncontainable Majesty. 

God's fierce centrality never yields; it assaults our souls with love's hammer; it harries the spirit with life's merciless wonder. 

'In God': a flourishing wholeness of life and will; truth revealed is the believing soul healed.

The One Who knows that our liberation from withered, loveless inauthenticity as Man materializes only in union with Him will never 'play fair' with usurpers of His right and pretenders to His glory.

Crystal vision and perfect choice form in faith's helpless, obstinate resort to the supernal Designer. 

Fatal error flows from blind pride's refusal to unstintingly abandon self to the Only Light and Life of all things. 

Exulting in God's invincible rightness, Humility yields to His provision and will.