Exodus 3

Exodus 3
Some boys and girls get anxious to be through with school before their parents think they should say a final good bye to teachers and school days, but Moses went to school for eighty years, or nearly that long. For most of the first forty years he was going to an Egyptian school, and that they taught him well. you will see if you turn to Acts 7:2222And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds. (Acts 7:22).
But when the Egyptians finished with him, God as we might say, had just begun; for Moses had still to be taught how to lead the children of Israel from Egypt to Canaan. He needed, among other things, to learn to depend on God, and to be ready to do what He wished, and not to please himself. Moses, too, needed to learn to be meek and patient, so that God could use him. None of these things could have been taught in the schools of Egypt, and he learned them alone with God and the sheep in the desert.
But how long the years must have seemed to Moses, those forty years with the sheep in the desert! At last they came to an end, when one day he saw a very strange thing. He had taken the sheep to Mount Horeb (which is also called Mount Sinai), and there saw a bush burning, but not burned away.
Moses said, just as we would have, “I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” Then there was something more wonderful.— a voice, calling him by his name, “Moses, Moses!” It was no less than God Himself, come down to speak to him. Moses had to take off his shoes, and not to come too close to the burning bush, for it was the place where God was.
To come near to God, we must be like Him, but we are born sinners, and sometimes, especially those who are not saved, sin a good deal. God never makes friends with sin, but He loves ‘the sinners, and long after” Moses’ time, He sent His Son, the Lord Jesus, to bear the punishment of our sins, as many as believe in Him.
Do you remember how God came to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden? And then to Abraham as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day? After this visit we read of yet other visits: one in the end of the fifth chapter of Joshua shows us God as the head of an army. Every time, it is in a way that just suits the occasion, and so here, it is that God is seen as a fire out of the middle of a bush, but the bush not consumed. The children of Israel were like a poor desert bush, but God would make His home among them.
Had the poor slaves in Egypt suffered so. cruelly as we have been reading, and God did not notice, did not care? No indeed; He’ had seen the affliction of His people, and had heard their cry, as the seventh verse says.
But there was more to be told to Moses: God was “come down” to deliver them, and to bring them to a good land, even the one promised hundreds of years before to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. Moses, too, was to be sent to tell Pharaoh, and to bring the people out of Egypt, but he who was, forty years before this, quick to act for his people, now said, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?”
From verse 13, we learn that the people had about forgotten the true God, who now called Himself the “I AM.” Pharaoh would not willingly let them go, but when God had punished him, he would permit them to leave, and the Egyptians would even give them jewelry and clothes when they left Egypt, so glad would they be to get them away out of their country. In verse 22 where the word “borrow” is used, we should read “ask”, because that is the true meaning of the word translated “borrow.”