Today’s Passage: Exodus 3
Of all the chapters in the Old Testament, this is one I would have you take off your shoes to read, for we are coming to holy ground. An old man is here, eighty years old now, a fugitive prince turned desert shepherd, leading another man’s sheep across the back of the wilderness as he has done for forty long and silent years. Nothing in his life suggests that anything is left to happen to him. And then he sees a strange thing, a bush wrapped in flame yet somehow not burning up, and he turns aside to look, and out of that fire the living God calls his name. On that mountain God tells Moses who He is, first as the God of his fathers, the God who kept faith with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob across all the centuries, and then, when Moses dares to ask for the name behind the covenant, God gives the answer that has echoed through every age since: I AM WHO I AM. It is the name of the God who simply is, who was not made and will not fade, who depends on nothing and holds up everything. And this God, high and lifted up and self-existent, bends down to say that He has seen the misery of His people, heard their cry, and come down to deliver them. Hold that near as you read, because the whole gospel is folded up in it: the God who is everything came down to rescue those who had nothing.
As you read, hold this: The eternal I AM stooped to a burning bush to make His name known and to come down and deliver His people.
Context The world of Exodus 3
To feel the weight of this meeting you have to remember where Moses has been. Once he was raised in Pharaoh’s own house, a Hebrew boy drawn from the Nile and given a prince’s name and a prince’s future. But he struck down an Egyptian who was beating one of his own people, and when it came to light he fled for his life into the desert of Midian, and there he stayed. Forty years he has kept the flocks of Jethro his father-in-law, a priest of that far country, and forty years is long enough for a man to bury every dream he once had. So it is no accident that when God finally comes to him, He finds him not in a palace but on the far side of the wilderness, at a mountain the Bible already calls Horeb, the mountain of God, the very ground where the law will one day be given.
There the shepherd sees the sight that stops him: a bush ablaze with fire and yet not consumed. Fire that burns and burns and never eats up the wood it feeds on is a fire that needs nothing to keep it going, and that is the first quiet word this chapter speaks about the God inside it. When Moses turns aside to look, the voice warns him to come no closer and to take the sandals off his feet, for the place where he is standing is holy ground. The ordinary dirt of a Midianite pasture has become holy, not because of anything in the ground, but because the holy God has drawn near to it.
And the God who speaks names Himself first as a keeper of old promises. I am the God of your father, He says, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Centuries have passed since those men walked the earth, and their children have groaned as slaves in Egypt for generation upon generation, and God has looked as if He had forgotten. He had not. The same God who swore the covenant to the fathers is standing in this fire, still holding every word of it, ready now to make good on the ancient promise that He would bring His people into a land of their own.
Then comes the great disclosure at the heart of the chapter, when Moses asks what he should say if the people ask God’s name, and God answers, I AM WHO I AM. Behind the covenant name we render LORD, the name YHWH, stands this deeper truth: God is the One who simply and forever is, the self-existent, ever-present Lord who owes His being to no one. And it is this very God, needing nothing, who says that He has come down to rescue a nation of slaves and bring them up out of their misery into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
Exodus 3:1-3 (BSB)
¹ Meanwhile, Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ² There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from within a bush. Moses saw the bush ablaze with fire, but it was not consumed. ³ So Moses thought, “I must go over and see this marvelous sight. Why is the bush not burning up?”
See where God chooses to appear, and let it comfort you. Moses is doing nothing remarkable, only what he has done ten thousand mornings before, leading another man’s sheep out to another day’s grazing on the far side of the wilderness. He is not seeking a vision. He has, as far as we can tell, given up expecting his life to matter. And it is right there, in the middle of the most ordinary and forgotten stretch of his days, that the fire appears and the whole course of his life turns. God has a way of breaking into lives not in the palace years when a man thinks himself somebody, but in the wilderness years when he has learned at last that he is nobody, for that is when he is finally ready to listen.
And notice the wonder of the bush itself, because everything else in the chapter grows out of it. Fire ordinarily lives by devouring; it eats the wood and dies when the wood is gone. But this fire burns and burns and does not consume, needing nothing outside itself to keep it alive. That is a picture, drawn in flame, of the God who is about to speak, the God who lives from Himself alone and is never diminished and never uses Himself up. Moses does not understand any of this yet. He only sees a marvel he cannot explain and says the honest thing, I must go over and see why the bush is not burning up. Sometimes faith begins with nothing grander than the willingness to turn aside and look when God sets a wonder in our path.
Exodus 3:4-6 (BSB)
⁴ When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called out to him from within the bush, “Moses, Moses!” “Here I am,” he answered. ⁵ “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” 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, for he was afraid to look at God.
Only when Moses turns aside does God call his name, and He calls it twice, tenderly and urgently at once, the way you speak to someone you love and must not lose: Moses, Moses. And the shepherd gives the answer of every servant God has ever truly reached, the same answer Abraham gave on the mountain and Jacob gave in the night: here I am. Then the very first word out of the fire is a word about holiness. Do not come any closer, God says, take the sandals off your feet, for this is holy ground. Moses must have thought this was common desert like any other, and so it was an hour ago. But the holy God has drawn near, and His nearness makes the ground beneath Him sacred. This is our first lesson at the bush, that we do not stroll into the presence of God as we please. We come, when He calls us, with reverence and with our shoes in our hands.
And then God tells Moses who He is, and it is not first a lesson in philosophy but a word of covenant faithfulness. I am the God of your father, He says, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Think what that meant to a man whose people had been enslaved so long they must have wondered whether the God of their fathers still remembered them at all. Here He is, naming those fathers one by one, declaring that the promises spoken over Abraham centuries before have not been forgotten or set aside, that He is still the same God, still keeping the same word, still on the same errand of mercy He began so long ago. It was too much for Moses. He hid his face, afraid to look at God, and that fear was right, for a sinful man cannot gaze on the holy God and think it a small thing. The nearer God comes, the lower we bow.
Exodus 3:7-10 (BSB)
⁷ The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the affliction of My people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their oppressors, and I am aware of their sufferings. ⁸ I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. ⁹ And now the cry of the Israelites has reached Me, and I have seen how severely the Egyptians are oppressing them. ¹⁰ Therefore, go! I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring My people the Israelites out of Egypt.”
Now hear the heart of God poured out in a single stream of tender verbs, and let each one land. I have seen the affliction of My people. I have heard them crying out. I am aware of their sufferings. For four hundred years it must have looked to Israel as though heaven were shut and silent, as though their groaning rose and fell back on them unheard. It was not so. God had seen every lash, heard every cry, known every sorrow of every long day of their slavery. He was not distant and He was not indifferent; He was watching and listening the whole time, storing up their tears, waiting for the hour He Himself had appointed. There is a comfort in that for any soul who has ever felt that God had stopped noticing. The God of the bush is a God who sees, and His seeing is never idle.
And what His seeing leads to is the greatest word in the passage: I have come down. The high and holy God, who could have spoken a word from heaven and never stirred, instead comes down, stoops down, bends the whole weight of His mercy toward a nation of slaves in order to rescue them and carry them up out of their misery into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Keep that phrase, I have come down, close to your heart, because it is the shape of everything God does for sinners. It is what He did at the bush, and it is what He would one day do at Bethlehem, when God came down not in flame but in flesh to rescue a people who could not rescue themselves. And then, having said all this, God turns and says the one thing Moses never expected: therefore, go, I am sending you. The God who has come down chooses to work His rescue through a trembling eighty-year-old shepherd, for that is His way, to pour His great deliverance through weak and willing hands.
Exodus 3:11-12 (BSB)
¹¹ But Moses asked God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” ¹² “I will surely be with you,” God said, “and this will be the sign to you that I have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, all of you will worship God on this mountain.”
And here is Moses’ first objection, and I confess I understand it. Who am I, he says, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? Forty years ago he had been sure enough of himself, a prince of Egypt striking down a man in the confidence of his own strength. The wilderness has cured him of that. Now he knows exactly who he is, a fugitive, a nobody, a keeper of sheep with a price still on his head in the very land God is sending him back to. And in one sense his question is entirely right. Who is he, indeed? He is no one for such a task. The trouble is that he is asking the wrong question, measuring the errand against himself, as if the weight of it rested on who Moses is.
So God does not answer the question Moses asked. God does not say, you are stronger than you think, or you have gifts you have forgotten. He says something far better: I will surely be with you. The whole matter never depended on who Moses was, but on who would go with him, and the answer to who am I is always, in the end, simply this, that God is with us. And then God gives him a sign that asks for faith before it gives proof, for the sign lies on the far side of obedience: when you have brought the people out, you will worship God on this very mountain. Moses will only see that sign come true after he has already stepped out and trusted. That is how God often works, giving us the confirmation on the other side of the going, so that we must walk by faith to reach it.
Exodus 3:13-15 (BSB)
¹³ Then Moses asked God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is His name?’ What should I tell them?” ¹⁴ God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” ¹⁵ God also told Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation.
Now we come to the height of the whole chapter, and I would have you slow down and take it in as you would a great vista opening before you on a mountain road. Moses asks the question that will settle everything for his people: when they ask me your name, what shall I tell them? And God answers with the words that stand at the summit of the Old Testament, I AM WHO I AM. Sit with the strangeness and the majesty of that. Every other name tells you what a thing is like, what it does, where it came from. This name tells you only that God is. He does not say, I am the God who is strong, or the God who is above, or the God who does this or that. He says simply, I AM, the One who exists in Himself and from Himself, who was never brought into being and can never pass out of it, who needs nothing and no one and holds all things up. This is the God the burning bush was picturing all along, the fire that lives from itself and is never consumed.
And there is such comfort in that name, not only such majesty. To a people who had known nothing but the shifting cruelty of Pharaohs who rose and died, God gives a name that never changes and never fails. I AM, He says, not I was and now am fading, not I will be if all goes well, but I AM, the same forever, present in every moment, as fully God tomorrow as He was to Abraham a thousand years before. When God tells Moses to say that I AM has sent him, He is handing the slaves the one thing that can steady them, a God whose very name is His unchanging, ever-present being.
Then, tenderly, God ties this towering name back down to the promises Moses’ people already knew. Say to them, He goes on, that YHWH, pronounced yah-WEH,. Strong's H3068, the LORD, the covenant name of God (YHWH). It stands close beside ehyeh, “I AM,” of verse 14, drawn from the same verb hayah, “to be.” When God says in the next breath, “the LORD, the God of your fathers, has sent me to you,” the word behind that small-capital LORD is this name, YHWH, so sacred to Israel that in time they would not even speak it aloud. It is the name that grows out of “I AM.” Where ehyeh is God saying of Himself “I am,” YHWH is His people speaking of Him as “He is,” the One who was and is and will be. So the covenant name itself is a standing confession that our God is the self-existent, ever-living Lord. And here is the wonder that a Christian cannot read past. Long centuries later the Lord Jesus stood among men who thought Him nothing but a carpenter’s son, and He said, “before Abraham was born, I am.” He did not merely claim to be old. He took the very name of the burning bush onto His own lips, the name of the God who simply is, and laid claim to it as His own. The great I AM who spoke to Moses out of the fire is the same Lord who came down at last in flesh, and the name that Moses was afraid to hear is the name at which one day every knee will bow. , the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me. The eternal I AM is the very same God who befriended their fathers and swore the covenant to them. He is not a cold and distant force but the faithful, promise-keeping Lord who has bound Himself to a people in love. This, He says, is My name forever, and this is how I am to be remembered in every generation. The name given here at the bush was never meant to stay on this mountain. It was given to be carried down through all the ages, to steady the faith of every generation that would ever have to trust the God who simply, gloriously, unchangeably is.
Word study "I AM WHO I AM": ehyeh asher ehyeh
Hebrew: אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (ehyeh asher ehyeh), pronounced eh-YEH ah-SHER eh-YEH. It is built from the verb הָיָה (hayah), “to be, to exist, to become,” Strong’s H1961.
This is one of the most freighted sentences in all of Scripture, and every word of it turns on the simple Hebrew verb for being. Ehyeh is that verb spoken by God of Himself, “I am,” or “I will be,” and God binds it back to itself, I am who I am, I will be who I will be. It is God’s own declaration that He is utterly self-existent, that He is defined by nothing outside Himself, that He depends on no one and answers to no one for His being. Everything else that exists was made and is held in being by another; God alone simply is, the fountain of all being, needing nothing to sustain Him. And He is not only self-existent but ever-present, the God who is fully and equally present to every moment of time, the same yesterday, today, and forever. When God draws the name into the third person as a title for His people to use, that verb of being becomes the covenant name we render LORD.
Exodus 3:16-17 (BSB)
¹⁶ Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—has appeared to me and said: I have surely attended to you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt. ¹⁷ And I have promised to bring you up out of your affliction in Egypt, into the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites—a land flowing with milk and honey.’
Having given Moses His name, God now gives him his message, and it is all promise. Go, He says, gather the elders of Israel and tell them what you have seen and heard. And notice the first thing Moses is to say to a people worn down by four hundred years of bondage: the God of your fathers has surely attended to you, and has seen what has been done to you in Egypt. Before a single word about what God will do, there is this word about what God has already done, which is that He has looked, and He has seen, and He has cared. To a soul in long suffering, the first mercy is not always rescue but the knowledge that God has not overlooked us, that our affliction has been seen by the only eyes that finally matter.
And then, on top of that word of seeing, comes the promise of delivering: I have promised to bring you up out of your affliction into a good land, a land flowing with milk and honey. God does not merely intend to end their pain; He intends to bring them up into abundance, out of the brick pits of Egypt and into a land rich enough to be described by its milk and its honey. This is the pattern of our God, that He does not save us only halfway. He does not draw us out of the misery and then abandon us in the wilderness. He brings us up and out and in, all the way to the good land He has promised, and the God who has attended to His people is a God to be trusted for the whole of that journey, not merely its beginning.
Exodus 3:18-20 (BSB)
¹⁸ The elders of Israel will listen to what you say, and you must go with them to the king of Egypt and tell him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Now please let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness, so that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.’ ¹⁹ But I know that the king of Egypt will not allow you to go unless a mighty hand compels him. ²⁰ So I will stretch out My hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders I will perform among them. And after that, he will release you.
God tells Moses in advance how the whole contest with Pharaoh will unfold, and there is great mercy in that foreknowledge. The elders will listen, He says, and you will go together to the king with a humble and reasonable request, to be let go a three-day journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to the LORD. But do not be surprised, God warns, when it is refused, for I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him. Moses is not sent out blind, expecting the road to be easy and then broken when it turns hard. He is told plainly that Pharaoh’s heart will be set against him, so that when the refusals come, they will not shake his faith but confirm the very word of the God who sent him.
And see where God locates the power in all of this, for it is nowhere in Moses and nowhere even in Pharaoh. So I will stretch out My hand, God says, and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders I will perform among them, and after that he will release you. The whole deliverance will be God’s own work, done by God’s own hand, and the mightiest king on earth will bend not before a shepherd’s arguments but before the outstretched arm of the LORD. Moses is only the man who carries the message; the wonders belong to God alone. It steadies a servant wonderfully to know that the outcome does not rest on his cleverness or his strength but on the hand of the great I AM, who has never yet been resisted when He rose to save His people.
Exodus 3:21-22 (BSB)
²¹ And I will grant this people such favor in the sight of the Egyptians that when you leave, you will not go away empty-handed. ²² Every woman shall ask her neighbor and any woman staying in her house for silver and gold jewelry and clothing, and you will put them on your sons and daughters. So you will plunder the Egyptians.”
God finishes His word to Moses with a promise that reaches even into the smallest detail of the leaving, and it is a promise of overflowing kindness. This people, He says, who have been slaves with nothing to call their own, will not go away empty-handed. I will grant them such favor in the sight of the Egyptians that their neighbors will press silver and gold and fine clothing into their hands, and they will go out laden with wealth. Think of the grace of it. For four hundred years Israel had built the wealth of Egypt with unpaid labor, and now, on their way out, the God who sees all things sees to it that they are not sent away as beggars but sent out enriched, as a people who have at last been given their due.
There is a quiet lesson in this last promise about how thoroughly our God saves. He does not rescue us grudgingly or by the barest measure. When He brings His people out, He brings them out fully and freely, with their arms not empty but full, provided for down to the clothing on their children’s backs. The same God who bent down to hear their groaning also stoops to fill their hands on the way out the door. From the first flame of the bush to this last word about silver and gold, the whole chapter has been the unveiling of one glorious truth, that the God who simply is, who needs nothing from anyone, has set the whole weight of His being toward the rescue of a people who could not save themselves.
Study notes Going deeper
The rest of Scripture never lets the fire of this bush go out, and the place we must listen hardest is the lips of the Lord Jesus Himself, who took the name given here and claimed it as His own. In a heated exchange with men who could not see who stood before them, Jesus reached back past Abraham and past Moses to the very name that spoke from the flame.
"Truly, truly, I tell you,” Jesus declared, “before Abraham was born, I am!" John 8:58 (BSB)
Hear what He is saying, and do not soften it. He does not say, before Abraham was, I existed, though even that would be a staggering claim from a man barely past thirty. He says, before Abraham was born, I AM, taking onto His own tongue the timeless name of the God of the burning bush, the One who has no beginning and no end and is fully present to every age. The men listening understood Him perfectly, for they took up stones to kill Him for blasphemy. But it was not blasphemy; it was the truth. The great I AM who told Moses His name at Horeb is the same Lord who walked the roads of Galilee, come down at last, exactly as He came down to Egypt’s slaves, to rescue a people who could not rescue themselves.
And the New Testament remembers not only the name but the whole tender heart of what God said at the bush, that He had seen His people’s affliction and come down to save them. Long afterward, when Stephen stood before his accusers and told Israel’s story back to them, he lingered over this very scene.
"Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have indeed seen the oppression of My people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to deliver them. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt.’" Acts 7:33-34 (BSB)
Read that with the bush still burning in your mind, and let it settle the one truth this chapter exists to give you. The God who is everything, who lives from Himself and is never diminished and never in need, is also the God who sees the oppression of the helpless, who hears their groaning, and who comes down to deliver. Holiness and mercy meet in the flame. Whatever affliction you carry, know that it has been seen by the eyes of the great I AM, and that the same God who stooped to a bush in the desert and to a manger in Bethlehem has never yet turned away from a people who cry out to Him. He is the God who is, and He is the God who comes down.