How God brings salvation (Exod 3:7-12)

As a young adult, I remember a Billy Graham rally in Budapest in the early 1990s, where one of our youth group members came to accept Jesus’s forgiveness of her sins. To start with, she was jubilant, but after a week or two, the initial glow faded and she felt disillusioned. She said that the Christian life was too hard. I often wondered what went wrong. Perhaps, it was like the parable Jesus told about a house swept clean but left empty (Matt 12:43-45).[1] In contrast, the Lord not only redeems us from our enslavement to sin but also fills us through His Spirit with LIFE.

This two-fold process of deliverance is reflected in what God says to Moses at the burning bush. The Lord will not only deliver Israel from the power of Egypt but will bring them into a good and spacious land (v.8). God tells Moses in v.7 what we have heard from the narrator, that He has indeed seen His people’s oppression, heard their cry and knows their suffering (the Hebrew repeats ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘know’ from 2:24-25). Observing what has been happening leads God to action. He will save in both taking Israel out, as well as bringing them in. To be sure, there will be obstacles along the way for Israel and we get a hint of this from the description of a land that is already occupied by the Canaanites (v.8), yet, the point is that it is God who will make it happen.

At the same time, it is also worth noting that when God acts, it also involves actions from us. Israel is not moved miraculously to a new land; they will have to pack their bags and go. Our co-operation is necessary, even as God is the one who enables it to happen. Likewise, in Moses’s call we see that God acts (‘I will send you…’), but Moses has a part to play too (‘so that you may bring My people… out of Egypt’ – v.10).

Many of us can relate to Moses’s response when God called him, whether we feel challenged to be involved in a particular ministry in the church or called into full-time Christian work. The sense of inadequacy when God calls us can be overwhelming, so that we might be saying with Moses, ‘Who am I to do this thing?’. Moses, in fact, has come a long way from his earlier confidence when he had administered rough justice to the Egyptian or when he tried to arbitrate between two Hebrews. He knows the task is too big for him. However, recognising our own limitations is not sufficient. When Moses looks at himself with doubt, God replies with ‘I will be with you’ (v.12). Added to the equation, God trumps all. Moses is also given a sign (v.12), though this is more a way of saying that when he is back with the people at Sinai and they all worship God, then he will know retrospectively the truth of God’s promise. As so often, we are not given guarantees in advance – trust is the fundamental principle of our relationship with God.

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[1] Jesus’s parable speaks of an exorcised demon, who returns to his former ‘house’ to repossess it with the help of seven others after it has been swept clean but left empty. The point He is making seems less to do with the specific risks of exorcism and more about the general attitude of ‘this evil generation’. They have swept their house clean and made themselves ready for Messiah but have not accepted Him when He came. The vacuum this has left will attract worse evil into their lives. While my analogy with this is not an exact match, the image of an empty house swept clean is evocative of other situations, where the process of God’s work of salvation is not completed.