Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 1-3.

I thought about writing about how the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites because they feared them and parallels with other instances of slavery in history.  Then I thought about writing about how Pharaoh’s daughter almost certainly knew that the wet nurse she hired for the baby whom she named Moses was his mother.  I thought about other themes as well, but then I came to the account about the burning bush.  The reason I decided to focus there is because it starts out in a way which follows on from what I wrote about yesterday.  The account begins by saying that the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire.  Moses saw the bush burning, but not being consumed.  So he went to look closer, and when he did the passage tells us that God spoke to him.  So, is it an angel or is it God?  I know.  I already talked about this yesterday.  The word translated as angel in the Old Testament means messenger.  Once again, we have the messenger of God, who is God, appear.    In the New Testament, and, to a degree, later in the Old Testament, the Spirit of God often brings messages from God.  Further, the “angel of God” appears in a flame of fire.  This reminds me of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit came down upon the disciples in tongues of fire.  I believe that that comparison is not an accident.  It seems to me that God purposefully used tongues of fire to remind His disciples of when He appeared to Moses.  So, what we have here is the Old Testament portraying the Holy Spirit.  The point I want to make is that the New Testament portrayal of God as a Trinity is not foreign to the Old Testament Scripture.  Even before the birth of Jesus, God’s people understood that there were different aspects to Him.  I will try to show how the prophets expanded on this as we go through the Bible this year (I will note that I have had similar ideas about a theme I would touch on throughout the year where God has had other ideas…or, perhaps I just lost focus).

I was going to stop there, but then I was struck by the way in which Moses asked, “Who am I, that I should go?”  In much the same way, Jesus’ disciples had to wonder who they were to be sent with God’s message of the new covenant.  They were not men of great learning.  They were not men with a gift for oratory.  They were not men of standing in their community.  But they WERE the men whom Jesus had chosen.  In the same way that Moses was the man God had chosen, in the same say that the people gathered in that place on Pentecost were the people God had chosen, we are the people God has chosen to speak His message.  I do not know to whom you have been called to speak, but I know that you have been called.  I do not know to whom I have been called to speak, but I know I have been called.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.