Bible Commentaries
Exodus 3

Verse 2

The Burning Bush

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto Moses in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.— Exodus 3:2.

1. It was a very sharp descent from Pharaoh’s palace to the wilderness; and a shepherd’s life was a strange contrast to the brilliant future that once seemed likely for Moses. But God tests His weapons before He uses them, and great men are generally prepared for great deeds by great sorrows. Solitude is “the mother-country of the strong,” and the wilderness, with its savage crags, its awful silence, and the unbroken round of its blue heaven, was a better place to meet God in than the heavy air of a palace, or the profitless splendours of a court.

2. Among the desolate solitudes of Horeb, occasional fertile spots are to be found. A thin alpine turf covers the soil, whose verdure forms a delightful contrast to the awful sterility of the naked rocks around. A perennial spring oozes up in some shady cleft, and sends its scanty rill down the mountain-side, marking its course among the crags by a green streak of moss and grass which its life-giving waters have nourished. To one of these little oases Moses led the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, at the close of his sojourn in this secluded region. He had probably given up all thought of Israel’s deliverance, which had been the dream of his youth; and in the peaceful and monotonous occupation of a shepherd hoped to end his days. But God had a higher destiny in view for him, for which he had been insensibly trained by his meditative employment amid the solemn influences of the lonely hills. This was, unknown to himself, to be the last day of his shepherd life. The skill and fidelity which had been exerted in tending sheep were to find nobler scope for their exercise in guiding and training men.

I

The Preparation of Moses

1. “In process of time the king of Egypt died,” probably the great Rameses, no other of whose dynasty had a reign which extended over the indicated period of time. If so, he had while living every reason to expect an immortal fame as the greatest among Egyptian kings, a hero, a conqueror on three continents, a builder of magnificent works. But he has won only an immortal notoriety. “Every stone in his buildings was cemented with human blood.” The cause he persecuted has made deathless the banished refugee, and has gibbeted the great monarch as a tyrant, whose misplanned severities wrought the ruin of his successor and his army. Such are the reversals of popular judgment; and such the vanity of fame.

Nought but a gust of wind is earthly fame,

Which blows from this side now, and now from that,

And, as it changes quarter, changes name.

Renown of man is like the hue of grass,

Which comes and goes; the same sun withers it,

Whereby from earth the green plant raised was. 1 [Note: Dante, Purg. xi. 100–2, 115–17 (trans. by Paget Toynbee).]

2. “The children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried.” Another monarch had come at last, a change after sixty-seven years, and yet no change for them! It filled up the measure of their patience, and also of the iniquity of Egypt. We are not told that their cry was addressed to the Lord; what we read is that it reached Him, who still overhears and pities many a sob, many a lament, which ought to have been addressed to Him, and is not. Indeed, if His compassion were not to reach men until they had remembered and prayed to Him, who among us would ever have learned to pray to Him at all? Moreover He remembered His covenant with their forefathers for the fulfilment of which the time had now arrived. “And God saw the children of Israel, and God took knowledge of them.”

3. While this anguish was being endured in Egypt, Moses was maturing for his destiny. Self-reliance, pride of place, hot and impulsive aggressiveness, were dying in his bosom. To the education of the courtier and scholar was now added that of the shepherd in the wilds, amid the most solemn and awful scenes of nature, in solitude, humiliation, disappointment, and, as we learn from the Epistle to the Hebrews, in enduring faith. Wordsworth has a remarkable description of the effect of a similar discipline upon the good Lord Clifford. He tells—

How he, long forced in humble walks to go,

Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,

His daily teachers had been woods and rills,

The silence that is in the starry sky,

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

In him the savage virtues of the Race,

Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts were dead:

Nor did he change; but kept in lofty place

The wisdom which adversity had bred.

There was also the education of advancing age, which teaches many lessons, and among them two which are essential to leadership—the folly of a hasty blow, and of impulsive reliance upon the support of mobs. Moses the man-slayer became exceeding meek; and he ceased to rely upon the perception of his people that God by him would deliver them. His distrust, indeed, became as excessive as his temerity had been, but it was an error upon the safer side. “Behold, they will not believe me,” he says, “nor hearken unto my voice.”

It is an important truth that in very few lives the decisive moment comes just when it is expected. Men allow themselves to be self-indulgent, extravagant, and even wicked, often upon the calculation that their present attitude matters little, and they will do very differently when the crisis arrives, the turning-point in their career, to nerve them. And they waken up with a start to find their career already decided, their character already moulded. As a snare shall the Day of the Lord come upon all flesh; and as a snare come all His great visitations meanwhile. When Herod was drinking among bad companions, admiring a shameless dancer, and boasting loudly of his generosity, he was sobered and saddened to discover that he had laughed away the life of his only honest adviser. Moses, like David, was “following the ewes great with young,” when summoned by God to rule His people Israel. Neither did the call arrive when he was plunged in moody reverie and abstraction, sighing over his lost fortunes and his defeated aspirations, rebelling against his lowly duties. The humblest labour is a preparation for the brightest revelations, whereas discontent, however lofty, is a preparation for nothing. Thus, too, the birth of Jesus was first announced to shepherds keeping watch over their flock. Yet hundreds of third-rate young persons in every city in this land to-day neglect their work, and unfit themselves for any insight, or any leadership whatever, by chafing against the obscurity of their vocation. 1 [Note: G. A. Chadwick.]

4. When the hopes of his youth were dead, buried, and forgotten, when his fiery spirit was tamed into patience, and his turbulent passion stilled into solemn repose—at last, Moses came out of school. Then, but not until then, was he openly consecrated as God’s missionary to rescue the Israelites from their grinding bondage and their great despair; to organize them into a nation, to give them their holy laws, and to be their leader along a pathway of miracle to the Promised Land. Not a lesson had been left, not a moment had been lost, for he needed the weary discipline and gathered force of all those quiet years before he could obey his high vocation and do his great work well.

In darkness, underneath the January rime and frost, God is getting ready the royal glories of June. The flower that is to burst open to the sun at a certain hour six months hence, He has even now in hand. By silent and mystical touches He is already educating the tree to bear its autumnal clusters, and it is His ordination that there shall be eleven months of husbandry for one month of harvest. In the spiritual field you may trace the action of the same law. Man is often in haste; God never. We would give the largest measure of time to results; He gives the largest measure to preparations. We burn with eagerness to bring our instrumentalities into action, for we are apt to value that agent most whose work makes most show in a report, or whose life is longest before the public eye. He, on the contrary, often brings His most honoured servants through a long strain of trial and a long path of obscurity to fit them for some short service that is, after all, unknown to human fame; for a single word spoken in a breath, or a single deed, over and done in a day, may heighten the joy of heaven, and break into issues that will flow on for ever. Years may be needful to prepare you for saying “Yes” or “No” in some one critical moment, and many a man may be in training all his life for the work of life’s last hour. We sometimes try to reap in sowing time, but He never sends forth fruit until the season is fitted for the fruit, and the fruit for the season. 1 [Note: C. Stanford.]

Look not thou down but up!

To uses of a cup,

The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal,

The new wine’s foaming flow,

The Master’s lips a-glow!

Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what need’st thou with earth’s wheel?

But I need, now as then,

Thee, God, who mouldest men;

And since, not even while the whirl was worst,

Did I,—to the wheel of life

With shapes and colours rife,

Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:

So, take and use Thy work:

Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

II

The Approach of God

1. When in this or in any other scene of holy story we meet with One who wears the supreme name, yet holds a subordinate office; who is God, yet sent by God; God, yet seen; God, yet heard—who is this “Traveller unknown”? Not the Divine Father, “for he dwelleth in secret.” Besides, in the economy of grace the Father is evermore the sender, the Son the sent. It must, therefore, be the Son. This thought is our only outlet from a maze of contradictions. Through all time, at first by His visits to our world as a celestial stranger; at last by His life as a man, Christ has been “the angel of the Lord.”

It would be absurd to seek the New Testament doctrine of the Logos full-blown in the Pentateuch. But it is mere prejudice, unphilosophical and presumptuous, to shut one’s eyes against any evidence which may be forthcoming that the earliest books of Scripture are tending towards the last conclusions of theology; that the slender overture to the Divine oratorio indicates already the same theme which thunders from all the chorus at the close. 1 [Note: G. A. Chadwick.]

Too often the term “angel” has for us a cloudy and indeterminate meaning; but we should resolve to make it clear. We are apt to use it as a term of race, and to distinguish the natives of heaven as angels, just as we distinguish the natives of earth as men. But it is in reality a term of office, simply meaning an envoy, a messenger, one who is sent. Doubtless any heavenly being who is sent on an errand of love to this globe is for the time an angel; but One there is above all others who deserves the name of angel. Sent not only out from the unknown heavens, but out from the very essence and depth of the unknown God; sent to reveal God’s heart; sent to translate the Divine nature into the conditions of human nature, and to make the Divine Being not only conceivable by that which is finite, but approachable by that which is fallen; sent to discover and accomplish the Father’s purposes of grace, and to fetch home to Him each lost and wandering child—Jesus is the Prince of Missionaries, “the Envoy extraordinary, the Evangelist supreme,” the angel whom all other angels worship, and round whose throne thunders at this moment the mingled music of a numberless company, ceasing not day or night to ascribe to Him all the glory of redemption. 2 [Note: C. Stanford.]

2. “Behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.” Here we approach a study in symbols. The vision of a bush burning with fire which did not consume it was full of symbolic meaning to Moses. What he saw outwardly with the natural eye, he was able to discern inwardly with the spiritual eye, because he was ready to see and hear what God would teach him.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.

A bush on fire with no human hand to set it alight, no fuel to keep it burning—it was just a picture to Moses of what God could do with him, and a picture to the people of God for all time, of the grace of Him who is willing to dwell in human beings as lowly, as insignificant, as the little thorn bush on the Mount of Horeb. 1 [Note: Mrs. Penn-Lewis, Face to Face, 39.]

It needed no great flame to reduce a bush quickly into a heap of white ashes. If, as in that arid region might well have been the case, the bush was scorched and withered—its leaves dead and limp, its branches dry and sapless—the flame would make all the speedier work with it. But the thorn was not consumed; no branch or twig or leaf was even scorched or singed; the flame played round it as innocuously as the sunset glory burns in a belt of wood. The Alpine traveller is familiar with one of the most beautiful sights of that beautiful region. At sunrise the serried pines projected against the sky on some mountain-ridge appear robed in dazzling brightness. The stems and branches lose their opacity, and shine with a transparent glory; while the leaves are burnished till they seem like angel’s wings or fragments of the sun itself. As harmlessly as the sunrise glows in the Alpine pines, so harmlessly did the mysterious flame envelop the bush in the desert, because the Angel of the Covenant dwelt in it. His presence restrained the devouring fire, as afterwards it held in leash the stormy winds and waves of Gennesaret. The law of nature was subject to the stronger law of the Divine will. He made His minister here a flame of fire, and the fire fulfilled His word. 2 [Note: H. Macmillan.]

III

The Symbolism of the Burning Bush

“Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight why the bush is not burnt.” We must, like Moses, turn aside to discern the symbols which lie beneath the vision. The symbolism of the Burning Bush has been variously explained.

1. Some regard it as typical of the incarnation and the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. The thorny bush represents the humiliation and degradation of the Son of God when He came into our world and assumed the likeness of sinful flesh; the flame that enveloped it is an emblem of the intensity of suffering which He endured in our room and stead from men and devils, and from the Father Himself; while the fact that the bush was unconsumed shadows forth His triumph over all His sufferings—over death and the grave. In visionary form we have here pictured to us the altar, the victim, and the sacrifice of the great atonement.

2. But the Burning Bush has also been taken to represent the condition of the Church. It was exactly suited to the circumstances of the children of Israel at the time. It was the true likeness of their sufferings in the furnace of affliction in Egypt. The thorny bush was a fit emblem of their character and position. As the plant was stunted and depressed by the ungenial character of its situation, creeping over the barren rock, scorched by the sun, and seldom visited by the kindly dew and rain and breeze, its stems producing thorns instead of graceful leaf and blossom-laden branches; so the Hebrew slaves, in their dreary bondage, were morally and intellectually dwarfed, and developed, under the influence of these unfavourable circumstances, the baser and more abject aspects of their nature. The thorn in the wilderness recalls the primeval curse upon man; and we have in the sufferings of Israel a repetition of the sufferings of our first parents after their expulsion from Paradise. The same cause which produced the one produced the other. The thorns of Adam’s lot were the very same as those that stung the Hebrews in Egypt. And, by God’s appearance in the thorn bush, we have the great fact of redemption shadowed forth, that God Himself has gone with us into the wilderness to be the sharer of our doom while redeeming us from it. It is a striking thought that in the very thorn of man’s curse appeared the shining Angel of the Covenant to bless him; that out of the very wood of the thorn bush, which was the symbol of man’s degradation, was constructed the tabernacle which was the symbol of his exaltation through the incarnation of the Son of God.

Thou art burning on, thou ancient tree,

With unabated flame;

The fires of earth have beat on thee,

And thou art still the same:

Thou art not lessened in degree,

Nor tarnished in thy name.

Thou hast two sides of thy life on earth;

One has in dust its share,—

It blends with scenes of pain and dearth,

It touches common care:

The other seeks a higher birth,

And branches arms of prayer.

Oh, Church of the living Lord of all,

Like Him to thee is given

A common life with those that fall,

And an upper life in heaven;

A being with the weak and small,

And a path where stars are driven.

Thy starlight’s glow shall put out the fires

That check thine earthly way;

The burning of thy pure desires

Shall burn thy dross away,

And in the love thy Christ inspires

Thou shalt endure for aye. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Sacred Songs, 138.]

3. Another aspect in which we may consider the parable of the Burning Bush is in the light it casts upon the nature of God. That light has been broadening and brightening from the time of Moses down even to our own age. Consider how God reveals Himself here, as the fire which burns, but does not consume.

(1) In the world of matter.—To the careless eye it seems that the fire of decay is for ever burning up and destroying the material things we see around us; but science teaches us that this is quite false, and that there is no such thing as destruction possible in God’s universe. You may grind a stone to the finest powder and dissipate it to all the winds of heaven, but it is not in your power to annihilate the finest atom of it; it is conceivably possible to gather together all the infinitesimal fragments, when the weight would be found to be exactly what it was before its cohesion was interfered with. You may take solid iron and heat it till it becomes first soft as wax, then fluid like water, and next is changed into vapour; but by so doing you only alter its condition; you cannot destroy the least particle of it. The pool of water, when the sun has dried it all away, is not non-existent, it is only expanded into mist: it becomes part of the cloud which anon will descend again upon the earth in the shape of rain. The tree which after standing for centuries slowly dies and crumbles beneath the withering finger of decay, though it disappears from the visible universe, is not really destroyed; in the shape of carbon and silica and of various gases every particle of it is as certainly in the universe as ever it was, and will be worked up anew into flower and pebble and living thing. And so it is with all that is to be found in God’s creation. In his popular lecture on the burning of a candle, Faraday shows that when the candle has burnt to its socket and apparently been annihilated altogether, every particle of its constituent elements can be gathered together again and weighed and measured.

When Goethe makes Nature sing—

Here at the roaring loom of time I ply

And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by;

and when Tennyson asks—

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains—Are not these, O soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

they are only putting into poetic form that which is a distinct truth of revelation. And if the material universe is thus a manifestation of God, science has made it abundantly evident that the fire which burns but does not consume, is the aptest possible symbol by which its nature, and the nature of the God who made it, can be set forth to Man_1:1 [Note: A. M. Mackay.]

(2) Amid the play of the forces that are in the world.—Almost the most important truth which science has demonstrated is that which is known as the Conservation of Energy; it establishes the fact that force, like matter, is indestructible, and that it is a fixed quantity in the universe. To the uninstructed mind it seems that energy is always being not only dissipated but destroyed; but this is just as impossible as that matter should be destroyed. When the blacksmith strikes his anvil till his arm grows weary, the force expended is not lost; it has simply changed its form from animal energy to heat, as is proved by the anvil growing hot. The energy residing in the steam which drives our locomotives and our machinery existed in the shape of heat in the glowing fires which created the steam; and before that it lay for centuries latent or hidden in the coal, which was dug out of the bowels of the earth; and earlier still, long, long ages ago, it manifested itself in vegetable energy, for what is now coal was once living forest; and earlier still it was manifested in the heat of the sun, which was taken up into the growing trees: so that in one sense the light and heat which our fires give forth are just the sunbeams which have been for ages imprisoned and hoarded up for the use of man. And while we can thus trace backward the force which drives the engine, we can follow it after it has done its work. It is neither lost nor destroyed. It is dissipated into the atmosphere in the form of heat, and perhaps will next manifest itself in an electrical form, in the tempest which rends the air and wraps the heavens in flame. All this is not mere conjecture. Just as it can be shown by delicate experiment that the candle which has burnt to its socket is still in existence in its every atom, so it is shown by the dynamometer that force never is and never can be lost. There is always the appearance of the annihilation of energy; there is never the reality. Force also resembles the bush which Moses saw; it is ever burning, yet it is never consumed. And when we remember that all energy, as all matter, comes from God and is a manifestation of God, we perceive how truly the vision which Moses saw was a symbol of the nature and the mode of operation of the Great “I AM” who creates and sustains all things.

There is unity amid all diversity, persistence amid all the ebb and flow of the visible universe. Let us once truly grasp this truth, and we shall no longer be moved to melancholy by the reflection that “change and decay in all around we see.” We shall be able believingly to say to God—

Though earth and man were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee:

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom his might could render void;

Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

(3) In the sphere of life.—Life, we know, comes from God. His is the Spirit which animates all living things; in Him we live and move and have our being. In fact, He is the Life: it is only when He letteth His breath go forth that the face of the earth is renewed, and men and the lower creatures are created. And of life we may make exactly the same statement as we have made of matter and of force: it is indestructible. It may change its form and its mode of manifestation: but it cannot be annihilated or destroyed. Life in the universe—like matter and like force—seems to the uninstructed mind to burn to the socket and to go out; there seems to be such a thing as death: but in sober reality we may well accept the poet’s dictum that “There is no death; what seems so is transition.” Nature herself gives us a hint of this. In autumn there seems to be a final decay and dissolution, but it is only life disguising herself and going into hiding; spring shows that there has been no real diminution of the vital forces in our world, but probably rather an increase.

Nature gives us no such unassailable proof of the indestructibility of life as she does of the indestructibility of force and of matter. Rather, at first glance, she would seem to show us that the individual life can be destroyed, for we cannot trace it as we can the individual atom of matter and of force; its place in this world knows it no more. But this only points us to the fact that there is an invisible, a spirit world, which we cannot reach by our material senses. For the analogy of Nature will not let us for one moment suppose that life can really be annihilated. If science teaches one thing more clearly than another it is this, that there is Unity in Nature. If matter cannot be destroyed, if force cannot be destroyed, we may feel certain that neither can life. If it be objected that we cannot see what has become of the soul after death, it is a sufficient reply to say that neither could men in Moses’ time have known what became of material substances when they were burned with fire and disappeared from all human cognizance.

The flame may rise, the bush may burn

In deserts lone and bare:

There is no waste of any bloom

While God is present there.

The sun of human joy may set

Behind the stormy Cross:

While faith within the twilight kneels

There is not any loss.

Some homeless prayer may be at night

A wanderer on the moor,

But while it names the Blessed Name

It never can be poor.

(4) We find a meaning for the vision in history.—This vision would teach Moses, and surely it should teach us, that—in spite of all appearances to the contrary—there is permanence underlying God’s purposes and will, and the love which informs those purposes. Moses may have heard of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, concerning their descendants, that they should become a great nation and should be a blessing to all the world. How had God kept His promises? The Israelites for centuries had been degraded and ill-used as hardly any other nation before or since. Would it not seem that God had changed His intentions and had forgotten to be gracious? But no, it was in appearance only—as the bush burned but was not consumed. And now at last the time had come which was to explain the past and make glorious the future.

Let us believe that God’s will is unchangeable, and at the very moment of seeming frustration is completing itself. Exercise this faith with regard to any question that perplexes. It is not the will of our Heavenly Father that one of earth’s little ones should perish. He willeth that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Believe that He will have His will. If it is written that “our God is a consuming fire,” it must be a fire that consumes only the chaff, only the evil in men. This is the meaning of all sorrow and discipline on earth, and I believe it will one day be seen to be the meaning of what we speak of as eternal punishment. So far as there is a spark of good left in a bad man, the fire of God’s love will burn, but not consume. Believe that God’s purpose will not be frustrated in the accomplishment of that “one far-off Divine event to which the whole creation moves.” And believe meanwhile

That nothing walks with aimless feet;

That not one life shall be destroy’d,

Or cast as rubbish to the void,

When God hath made the pile complete.

Literature

Banks (L. A.), On the Trail of Moses, 33.

Campbell (R. J.), Sermons Addressed to Individuals, 207.

Davies (D. C.), The Atonement and Intercession of Christ, 162.

Gunsaulus (F. W.), Paths to Power, 9.

Liddon (H. P.), Bampton Lectures (Our Lord’s Divinity), 53.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers , 19.

Macmillan (H.), The Garden and the City, 80.

McNeill (J.), Regent Square Pulpit, i. 97.

Neale (J. M.), Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, iv. 251.

Norton (J. N.), Short Sermons, 305.

Parker (J.), The City Temple, ii. (1872) 51.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, 2nd Ser., 95.

Penn-Lewis (Mrs.), Face to Face, 34.

Stanford (C), Symbols of Christ, 61.

Vaughan (D. J.), The Days of the Son of Man, 209.

Wilson (S. L.), Helpful Words for Daily Life, 197.

Woodrow (S. G.), Christian Verities, 34.

British Congregationalist, July–Dec., 1908, 102 (Jowett).

Christian World Pulpit, xliv. 20 (Mackay); lviii. 246 (Muir); lxvi. 267 (Cleal).

Verse 13

The Eternal Name

And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.— Exodus 3:13-14.

A new day was dawning for Israel—the day of exodus—the era of national development—in which each man was to have a part unknown before. National expansion always involves new views, new terms, fresh adjustments, and changed ideals. And as Israel faced a new life, there was given a new view of God and new terms were chosen for its definition.

The text suggests three things—

I. The Necessity for the Name.

II. The Meaning of the Name.

III. The Revelation in the Name.

I

The Necessity for the Name

1. Why did Moses ask to know the name of God?—The reason, as the text tells us, was not primarily to satisfy himself, but that he might possess credentials wherewith he could approach this stubborn people. He had just been gazing at the burning bush, and by that sight he had been taught that the place where God reveals Himself is holy ground and that His presence should ever inspire reverence and holy fear. God appeared to Moses with a message, and Moses was charged to deliver it. Whereupon, overwhelmed by the commission, he urged: “But who am I that I should go in to Pharaoh and that I should bring forth the Children of Israel out of Egypt?” Moses recognized his own insufficiency. Unless he could tell the Israelites and Pharaoh in whose name he was sent, he knew that it would be useless to undertake the commission.

The naming of an heir to a throne is regarded as not unworthy of debate and argument by grave and aged ministers of State. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, on succeeding to the throne, styled himself Edward vii., thus making an appeal to the noblest traditions of the English past. It was with deliberate intention that the late Emperor of Germany called himself Frederick William, and that his son, the present Emperor, chose the name of William. So the assumption of a title by the Popes, who at their accession to the tiara drop their own names, and choose a new one from those borne by the first Bishops of the Roman See, is watched with great interest as affording an indication of the probable policy and character of the coming pontificate. It was with relief that the world heard Cardinal Ricci take the style of Leo xiii., rather than that of Pius, or Gregory, or Clement, or Sixtus. No one can imagine that the late Emperor of the French could have held his throne for sixteen years had he, whose baptismal appellation was Louis Napoleon, preferred to be known as Louis xix., instead of Napoleon iii. 1 [Note: C. C. Edmunds.]

2. What did the commission of Moses mean?—The Israelites without faith could not come near to God. Sinful as they were, they could not, if they dared, behold the glory of God. They could not even behold the face of Moses when it shone with the radiance of God’s glory; still less could they understand the revelation of God’s loving, ever-abiding presence which He vouchsafed to His true servant. This, then, was the commission given to Moses first of all— to interpret God—in so far as he could understand and interpret the incomprehensible—to this faithless people.

When the people of Israel crowded for the first time into the House of God which Solomon had reared, the king, on bended knees and with uplifted hands, exclaimed: “Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee, how much less this house which I have builded.” It is the spirit in which the Infinite should ever be approached by the finite. As no space can enclose Him, so no name can contain Him. Human speech, which can clothe the things of man in pompous attire, is poor, ragged, and beggarly when brought near the throne of God. Even the holy angels, whose faculties have never been beclouded by sin, and who know the nearest and fullest revelations of God, bow before the Ineffable Unknown, the Unutterable One. Our words, then, which only glance superficially at earthly things and never reach their depths, how can they fitly describe or contain the Infinite, the Holy God, in whom is all fulness of perfection, whom we have never seen, and whom by faith alone we approach? 1 [Note: R. V. Pryce.]

3. To interpret God in any degree a name is necessary.—No name indeed can ever set God forth, yet some name we must have. Accordingly we revere the name of God as well as God Himself, and say: “Hallowed be thy name”; for though the name is only a name, as in any other case, yet it sets before us what no other name can—it sets before us a living God.

My father named me after Boardman, that dauntless hero who preceded Judson in missionary work among the Karens. When I was old enough I read the history of the struggles, sufferings, and achievements of that brave young man. His name, which I so unworthily bear, has been to my soul an abiding and unfailing inspiration. Luther, Calvin, Knox, Bunyan, and Carey were long ago gathered to their fathers; but the power of their names is still invoked wherever Christian workmen need a higher courage, a steadier purpose, and a more fervent zeal. But there is a name above every name—a name which is reconstructing our disordered planet, re-creating our fallen and ruined humanity, and which stands everywhere for the sweetest charities of earth, the synonym of the purest life, and the symbol of the highest civilization; a name which carries healing to the wounded, rest to the weary, pardon to the guilty, and salvation to the lost; a name which makes the dark gateway of the tomb the portal to a temple resplendent with the glory of celestial light, where the music of golden harps by angels’ fingers touched is ineffable and eternal. 2 [Note: J. B. Hawthorne.]

II

The Meaning of the Name

1. It is probable that the name Yahweh was not new to Moses or the Israelites. An entirely new name would have meant to them an entirely new God. It is extremely unlikely that the name is of Babylonian origin. If the supposed traces of it in Babylonian literature are genuine, they only point to the introduction of foreign ( i.e. Western Semitic) cults. Some maintain that the name is found as an element in early North Syrian proper names. But, if so, this only implies that the name became known to Semitic tribes other than the Israelites.

The ultimate etymology of the name is quite uncertain. The primary meaning of hawah was perhaps “to fall” (cf. Job 37:6, hwç’,? “fall thou”), which is found also in Arabic. Hence some explain “Yahweh” as “He who causes rain or lightning to fall”; or “He who caus es to fall (overthrows) by lightning”, i.e. the Destroyer. In this case Yahweh in primitive Semitic times would be somewhat equivalent to the Assyrian Adad or Ramman. It is quite possible that the name Yahweh may in the far past have had a physical meaning, and have been a product of nature-worship. 1 [Note: A. H. McNeile.]

2. Hebrew writings tell us much as to the character and attributes of the God of the Old Testament, yet the exact meaning which the writer of Exodus 3:14 attached to the name Yahweh is far from clear. Yahweh, however, may be considered as (1) causative imperfect of hawah, “to be,” which would express “He who causes to be”—either the Creator or the Life-giver, or “He who brings to pass”—the Performer of His promises. But an objection to this interpretation is that this tense of the verb is found only in late Syriac. (2) The ordinary imperfect of hawah, “to be.” The Hebrew imperfect denotes either habitual action, or future action, and therefore can be translated either “He who is,” or “He who will be.” The name “He who is” represents to modern thought the conception of an absolute existence—the unchangeable, self-consistent, absolutely existing One. And this has been adopted by many writers both in ancient and modern times. But the early Hebrew mind was essentially practical, not metaphysical. Professor A. B. Davidson (in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, ii. 199 b ) says that the verb “does not mean ‘to be’ essentially or ontologically, but phenomenally.” He explains it as follows: “It seems evident that in the view of the writer ’ehyeh and yahweh are the same; that God is ’ehyeh, ‘I will be,’ when speaking of Himself, and yahweh, ‘He will be,’ when spoken of by others. What He will be is left unexpressed—He will be with them, helper, strengthener, deliverer”; the word is explained by the “I will be with thee,” of Exodus 3:12.

Among other interpretations Davidson’s is the most attractive. The passage receives a simple and beautiful explanation if the expression, “I will be what I will be,” is taken as an instance of the idem per idem idiom, which a speaker employs when he does not wish to be explicit. Moses asked for God’s name, i.e. for a description of His nature and character (cf. Genesis 32:29; Judges 13:17 f.); and he was taught that it was impossible to learn this all at once. God would be what He would from time to time prove to be; each age would discover fresh attributes of His Being. 1 [Note: A. H. McNeile.]

3. The new name of God was no academic subtlety, no metaphysical refinement of the Schools, unfitly revealed to slaves, but a most practical and inspiring truth, a conviction to warm their blood, to rouse their courage, to convert their despair into confidence and their alarms into defiance. They had the support of a God worthy of trust. And thenceforth every answer in righteousness, every new disclosure of fidelity, tenderness, love, was not an abnormal phenomenon, the uncertain grace of a capricious despot; no, its import was permanent as an observation of the stars by an astronomer, ever more to be remembered in calculating the movements of the universe. In future troubles they could appeal to Him to awake as in the ancient days, as being He who “cut Rahab and wounded the Dragon.” “I am the Lord, I change not, therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”

Therefore I trust, although to outward sense

Both true and false seem shaken; I will hold

With newer light my reverence for the old,

And calmly wait the births of Providence.

No gain is lost; the clear-eyed saints look down

Untroubled on the wreck of schemes and creeds;

Love yet remains, its rosary of good deeds

Counting in task-field and o’er peopled town;

Truth has charmed life! the Inward Word survives,

And, day by day, its revelation brings;

Faith, hope, and charity, whatsoever things

Which cannot be shaken, stand. Still holy lives

Reveal the Christ of whom the letter told,

And the new gospel verifies the old. 2 [Note: J. G. Whittier.]

4. Two thoughts are evidently contained in the Name.

(1) There is the thought, first, of the permanence of God. We have often heard an expression concerning the “Great I Am,” as if, in popular esteem, it involved only the thought of self-sufficiency; that God is complete in Himself, having no real need of others to augment His pleasure or to complete His world; that He rules alone, absolute Master and Dictator of everything, and in no way bound to listen to any earthly voice or make change in the operation of ordinary laws or sequences. But that is not the idea He was giving to Moses. It is all that some men claim to see in Him, and so they ignore Him and live alone. God had come to each of the old Hebrew saints, being to each of them what He was not to the others, and yet being the complete answer to the needs and aspirations of all. And it was in just this sense that He wanted to come into touch with the individual lives of His people through all succeeding time. Along with the spirit of adaptability which would make Him of value to each life, regardless of its eccentricities, was to go the thought of permanency. He lives perpetually in the present tense. “I AM,” is His name. We live, so often, in other tenses. Some of us in the past, perhaps, when life was serener and we had other difficulties to combat; a past for which we long, because it was easier and more triumphant. Or, perhaps, we are living in the future, and feeling that all the blessedness of God’s presence will be given to us then. This is the view that so many of us get, of a God who is to be ours by and by, when we shall have struggled through the world by dint of hard endeavour and have saved our souls—that the vision of God will be ours when heaven begins. But the personal presence, personal co-operation, personal blessing, is to be ours all through the years.

(2) But there is a thought here, also, as to the permanence of life. Our Saviour quoted this text and gave such emphasis to His interpretation that St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke have noted it. St. Matthew quotes Him as saying: “But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Christ emphasizes the eternal presence, and means us to note the tense. There is no statement which suggests that the personal relation of God to these men was merely a matter of history—that it is entirely a thing of the past. Every past moment was once present, and so the statement of this perpetual presence reaches back into the past. But every future moment will at some time be present, and the eternal presence reaches forward through all coming time.

One of the later scientific reinforcements of the philosophic argument for immortality has been drawn from the principle of continuity. This principle has been used by the authors of the Unseen Universe as the basis for the construction of an elaborate argument for the continuation of our life after death; and still further, with the help of other admitted physical truths, they have sought to render conceivable the possibility of another sphere of existence connected with this, yet superior to it, in which we have now our spiritual birthright, and into which after death our life shall without personal loss be transformed. According to this view, death would become a transference of individual existence from this visible universe to some other order of things intimately connected with it. The conclusion of their reasonings with regard to life in its connection with matter, they have expressed in this sentence: “In fine, we maintain that what we are driven to is not an under-life resident in the atom, but rather, to adopt the words of a recent writer, a Divine over-life in which we live and move and have our being.”

5. As the sublime and beautiful conception of a loving spiritual God was built up slowly, age by age, tier upon tier, this was the foundation which ensured the stability of all, until the Head Stone of the Corner gave completeness to the vast design, until men saw and could believe in the very Incarnation of all love, unshaken amid anguish and distress and seeming failure, immovable, victorious, while they heard from human lips the awful words, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” Then they learned to identify all this ancient lesson of trustworthiness with new and more pathetic revelations of affection: and the martyr at the stake grew strong as he remembered that the Man of Sorrows was the same yesterday and to-day and for ever; and the great apostle, prostrate before the glory of his Master, was restored by the touch of a human hand, and by the voice of Him upon whose bosom he had leaned, saying, Fear not, I am the First and the Last and the Living One.

The mysterious “I AM” who spake to Moses is the same “I am,” the ever-existent Christ, who speaks to us. He whom we adore as submitting to death was the Lord of Life. He whom men treated with such indignity was the Lord, the Creator of angels. He whom men falsely and unjustly judged was the Judge of quick and dead, the sole executor of judgment, for it is said by Him, that the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son. He, the “I AM” who thus, as recorded in Exodus, at the bush, spake to Moses, and declared His intention of redeeming His people from Egyptian bondage, now redeemed them from another and far worse bondage, not by plaguing their oppressors, and physically destroying them, but by submitting Himself on their behalf, first to ignominy and tortures, and then to death. Not by power, not by might, but by My Spirit—the Spirit of love, meekness, gentleness, goodness—not by superhuman power, but by superhuman humility. “Thou art the king of glory, O Christ: thou art the Everlasting Son of the Father: when thou tookest upon thee to deliver man thou didst not abhor the virgin’s womb; when thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death thou didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers.”

III

The Revelation in the Name

1. When God wants a man to do some good and useful work, He gives him a fresh thought about Himself, His character, and His purposes, a thought which tells him what He is, what He has done, what He is now doing, and what He wills to be done; and by that thought He not only illumines his mind, but also feeds his faith, sustains his patience, and fires his zeal, so that though he may never set foot in the land of promise, yets he keeps on, steadfastly climbing the slopes of Pisgah, and from its heights catches cheering glimpses of the lengthening issues of his toil.

Somehow the revelation comes! You see it written on the sheet let down from heaven to the startled gaze of the sleeper on the house-top at Joppa, assuring him that the creative energy of God cleanses all His work of commonness and makes it full of meaning and beauty; that He condemns the narrowness that would shut out from His infinite love any Cornelius who fears God and works righteousness, and that therefore prejudiced and reluctant Peter must initiate a new era in the religious thought and life of the world.

It comes to the perplexed Augustine, as, with wearied brain and agitated soul, eager to find pardon for his sin and freedom from the tyranny of his youthful lusts, he wanders in the gardens of his friend Alypius, at Tagaste, and says to him, “Tolle lege; tolle lege!” “Take and read; take and read!” And forthwith he opens the New Testament and reads the closing verses of Romans 13 and at once dedicates himself to the life of purity revealed in Jesus Christ.

Somehow it comes. See how it haunts the soul of Martin Luther, filling his youth with awe and firing it with the passion for holiness. Constraining him to listen to the spiritual counsels of Stanfutz, then goading him to undertake the pilgrimage to Rome, where, as he climbs “the holy staircase,” he swiftly learns that God does not require men to crawl up the “Scala Santa” repeating hollow phrases, but to accept His free forgiveness, and from the impulse it gives follow after that holiness without which no man can see the Lord. It comes to John Wesley from the Moravians, and makes him glad with a new joy and strong with a new power. It comes to Dr. Clarke as he meditates on the needs of the churches, and guides him in creating that latest and most effective instrument, the Christian Endeavour movement, for the training and culture of the young in robust godliness, fervent piety, and fruitful service to mankind.

2. Wherein lay the strength of this revelation of God to Moses?

(1) First, it identified God with the work he was given to do. It asserted, in effect, that it was a part of His work, belonged to God, and partook of His eternity; did not depend primarily upon the worker, but upon God Himself. The man was but as a cog in the mighty wheel of the progress of the world; a tool in the hands of the infinite. In that is security. Moses had lived in the midst of whirling change, and inherited a past crowded with trouble and sorrow. His own fortunes had passed through the splendours of a court, the privations of the desert and the anxieties of the criminal; but now, as he faced the responsibilities of leadership, it was with the assurance that God, the God of Abraham, his father’s God, endured, that He was the Eternal, the one fixed centre in a wide circle of ceaseless vicissitude, the “I am that I am”; and as He was, so was His work. Therefore the heart of Moses was fixed, trusting in the Lord, and he went to his task, body, soul, and spirit, with faith and insight, hope and endurance. He saw not the fleeting forms of service, but God’s invisible Israel, the regenerate future of humanity, the gold separated from the dross in the fires of trial, and man redeemed, ending triumphant over every obstacle, and feasting on the bounty of God.

Where ordinary men see a stone and nothing more, the genius of Michael Angelo beholds an angel before hammer or chisel has touched it. To the eye of his companions John Newton is a drunken, swearing sailor; but God sees in him the redeemed, re-made, messenger of love and mercy. The people of Elstree see no more than a tinker, living a loose, irregular life, in John Bunyan; God sees the dreamer of the pilgrim journey from the City of Destruction to the land of Beulah. The call of God is so fraught with revelations of the possibilities of men and of man in God, that those who hear it go forth to their work with an unquenchable hopefulness and an all-subduing zeal.

Blind souls, who say that Love is blind;

He only sees aright;

His only are the eyes that find

The spirit’s central light.

He lifts—while others grope and pry—

His gaze serene and far;

And they but see a waste of sky

Where Love can see the Star.

(2) When a man feels that his work is God’s rather than his own, he is raised at once to the loftiest ranges of power by the development of his humility. The maximum of human force for any work is never reached till we are self-oblivious, absorbed in our task, heedless of ourselves and all besides, except the mission we have to carry out. At this height men are simply irresistible, for they are one with God’s eternal purpose and almighty power.

Ruskin says: “I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility doubt of his own power, hesitation of speaking his opinions, but a right understanding of the relation of what he can do and say to the rest of the world’s doings and sayings. All great men not only know their business, but usually know that they know it; they are not only right in their main opinions, but they usually know that they are right in them; only they do not think much of themselves on that account.… They have a curious sense of powerlessness, feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them—that they could not do or be anything else than God made them; and they see something Divine and God-made in every man they meet, and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” Kipling pictures the artist at the supreme moment of his success as realizing that his work is due, not to his own genius, but to a power that is working in him and through him. This is our strength. God works in us, to work not only our own, but also the world’s salvation.

Whither away, O brawling Stream,

Whither away so fast?

Fleeing for life and death you seem.

Speak, as you hasten past

Answered the Brook, with a pompous roar,

Tossing its creamy foam,

“I go, my flood in the Main to pour—

Listen, O Sea, I come!”

Whither away, O River deep,

Gliding so slow and calm?

Your gentle current seems half asleep,

And chanting a drowsy psalm.

Answered the River, with whisper low,

Swaying her lilies fair;

“Down to the measureless Sea I go—

The Sea will not know I am there.” 1 [Note: Augusta Moore, in Scribner’s Monthly, xiii. 30.]

(3) But the tenderest and strongest element in the new thought of God given to Moses is that God is the Redeemer, and is coming down to the lowest levels of the suffering life of Israel to save the people from all their troubles and raise them up to share His own life in its peace and joy for evermore. That is the sum of all God’s speech to us. Out of the burning bush comes the revelation of the Cross. God is Himself at the centre of the fires that burn humanity; He is afflicted in all our afflictions; He shares our lot so that He may redeem us from all our iniquities. 2 [Note: John Clifford.]

A living God means an active Redeemer. This is the interpretation of God which Moses is to set before the people. God chooses Moses to go and speak to Pharaoh on Israel’s behalf. He will be a Pillar of Fire, giving light by which an untrained, unarmed nation of hereditary bondsmen will see the way out of Egypt. He will, in the meek and slow-tongued Moses, confound the arrogance and assumption of the magicians of a mighty Empire. “Tell them that ‘I AM’ hath sent thee. Let them know that I have heard their cry. Say to the elders that ‘I have visited you.’ Tell them that certainly I will be with thee, and ye shall serve God in this mountain.” 1 [Note: J. G. Gibson.]

3. The credentials which God gave to Moses are the same as Christ gave to His Church. But how often we are loth to go without better credentials than these! And yet what better could we have? “As my Father sent Me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.” As we look upon the seething chaos of social hopelessness, we feel it to be well-nigh impossible to do anything great—we are so feeble, and in nature so insufficient. We feel much as Elijah did when he bent in abject despair at the brook: “I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life to take it away.” Considered numerically, what prospect is there that the few millions of aggressive Christians will ever win over the hundreds of millions who are at present almost altogether out of sympathy with the objects of the Christian religion? Surely all our ferment and prayer and testimony, our martyrdom and love and self-sacrificing thought are thrown away! We are only men as they are, and must be borne down at last by numbers!

A tiny volume of gas is not distinguishable from the gases we call air about it. But give to that gas in its tiny volume heat, and it becomes incandescent; and so long as gas remains with air about it, that flame gives light, in darkness ever so dense. One tiny volume enlightens many thousands of times its own space of air, because that very burning has taken place in connexion with it. So, though dark the social night in which we shine, our Gospel will be approved. We are Messengers of the King of Light, in whom is no darkness at all, and our presence is omnipotent for good, so long as He goes with us. 1 [Note: J. G. Gibson.]

Literature

Chadwick (G. A.), The Book of Exodus, 54.

Gibson (J. G.), Stepping-Stones to Life, 181.

Leckie (J.), Sermons Preached at Ibrox, 35.

Pierce (C. C.), The Hunger of the Heart for Faith, 71.

Sadler (M. F.), Sermon Outlines for the Clergy and Lay Preachers, 115.

Stanford (C.), Symbols of Christ, 74.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xxii. No. 1242.

Christian World Pulpit, xxx. 259 (Pryce); lix. 352 (Clifford).

Churchman’s Pulpit (Fifth Sunday in Lent), vi. 175 (Peabody).

Thinker, i. 324 (Lowe).