I Have Come Down

Moses is eighty years old, and his life has settled into a shape he never wanted. Once a prince in Pharaoh's house, he had tried to save his people with his own two hands and buried a man in the sand for his trouble; forty years later he is still on the back side of the wilderness, tending his father-in-law's sheep. He has not forgotten Egypt; he has stopped believing he could ever go back. Then one afternoon, at the far edge of the pasture, he sees something that stops him where he stands. A thornbush is on fire, and the bush is not being consumed.

He turns aside — “I will turn aside to see this great sight” — and Scripture pauses on the turning as if to hold its breath. If Moses had shrugged and walked past, the story of his life would have ended in the desert. But he turns, and out of the fire God calls him by name.

Look at where God has chosen to appear. Not in Pharaoh's court, where a king might be expected. Not on a mountaintop cloaked in cloud (that will come later). He comes down to a scrubby little desert bush — the most ordinary shrub in the wilderness — and sets it ablaze without burning it up. The fire that ought to have destroyed the wood was in the wood and did not. Even here, at the very beginning, the pattern is set: our God will make his home in the fragile and the flammable and leave it standing.

“Take your sandals off your feet,” the voice says, “for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” Not the temple, not Sinai, not any building. A patch of desert dirt has become holy because he is present on it. Holiness is not a property of places; it is the report of who is nearby. And then a claim of covenant: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” — long-dead men, long-promised things. God is telling Moses at the outset that this bush is not a new beginning but a very old promise being kept.

And now the sentence that makes the whole story break open. “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry… and I have come down to deliver them.” The God enthroned above the heavens — the One who is before all things, in whom all things hold together — sees, and hears, and comes down. He does not wave a hand from a safe distance. He descends. All of Israel's rescue, and in the end all of ours, will run on the current of this verb: he comes down.

Moses stammers. “If I come to the people of Israel… and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” It is not an idle question. To know the name of a god in the ancient world was to know how to summon him, address him, hold him. Moses is asking for something the neighbors might understand — a title he can carry back like a badge. And God gives him a name that will not fit in any pocket: “I AM WHO I AM. Say this to the people of Israel: I AM has sent me to you.” The Hebrew is a form of the verb “to be” — ehyeh asher ehyeh — and it says all at once: I simply am. I am not defined by anything else. I depend on nothing. I owe my existence to no one, and everything that exists owes its existence to me. It is not a name humans invented for God; it is the name he gave for himself, and the very sound of it stakes out a distance no false god can survive. From this one verb Israel would later come to write his covenant name, four consonants too holy to say aloud: the LORD.

We come to this text tempted to shrink God down to something we can handle — a helper we consult, a good-luck charm we shake, a pantry-God we open when the shelves are bare. The burning bush refuses to fit on any of those shelves. He is the eternal I AM, and he will not answer to anything less. And yet the wonder is that the same I AM stoops. The One who owes us nothing has bound himself to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The One who is dependent on no one has heard the groan of slaves. The bush that could have swallowed Moses whole lets him step near without being burned. Sovereign and near, at once, exactly as we needed.

Turn a page — many pages — and stand in a temple courtyard listening to Jesus argue with men who cannot bear him. They boast, “Abraham is our father.” He answers, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). Not “I was before Abraham” — the tense is a scandal on purpose. He is picking up the name from the burning bush and putting it on his own lips, and the men reach for stones because they understand exactly what he has claimed. The child of Nazareth is ehyeh. The face in the flame is his face.

Watch what he does with the name. “I am the bread of life.” “I am the light of the world.” “I am the good shepherd.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Seven times, John records the eternal I AM naming himself in terms of what our starving hearts need. The One who told Moses “I have come down” comes down further still — into a body, into a manger, into a working man's calluses, into a garden of sweat and a hill of nails. The bush that burned without being consumed is a picture, from a mile off, of the Incarnation: God dwelling in fragile human flesh and not destroying it. In the womb of Mary that same fire came to rest in human flesh — and, as with the bush, it did not consume what it filled.

And then the further, harder mercy. At the cross the fire was not held back. Jesus stepped into a burning that would have consumed us and let it consume him instead. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23) — a burning we cannot survive — and the great I AM was willing to be consumed for us, so that we, dry brush that we are, could be indwelt by the Spirit of God as the temple of the living God (1 Corinthians 3:16) and not be destroyed. The breath of God now rests in us — flammable clay that could never have withstood that fire — because the fire fell on him first.

So when the voice from the bush says “I have come down to deliver them,” it is not only about a plague of frogs and a parted sea. It is the shape of the whole gospel in one line. He sees. He hears. He comes down. He delivers. He gave Moses a name; he has given us the Name, for “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Let us take our sandals off. The bush is still burning, and the ground beneath us is holy.