“The bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed.”

(Exodus 3:2)

The Bible tells us that Moses in the wilderness of Midian, while tending the flock of his father-in-law, saw a burning bush. It was like all the other scrubby underbrush on those barren hillsides he knew so well and had seen so often — yet this particular bush looked different. It burned and yet it didn’t burn up. As Moses watched in fascination, this old, yet new phenomenon, he heard a voice announcing that God was in that place, yes even that God was aflame as the bush was afire with sympathy and righteous indignation at the injustices his people, the children of Israel, were suffering from their oppressors, the Egyptians. Then came the divine call to Moses to serve as God’s agent in the deliverance of His people, and Moses began to give his excuses of why he couldn’t serve.

Tradition has it that Constantine, the Emperor of Rome in the fourth century of the Christian era, had a vision of a fiery cross in the sky and beneath it the words: “In this sign conquer.” So Constantine made Christianity the official religion of his empire and propagated the faith by imperial power.

Much of the religious life of man has been a struggle between the symbols of the Burning Bush and the Fiery Cross. Man has an incurable habit, it seems, of wanting to replace the Burning Bush of the Bible record by the fiery cross of man’s own tradition.

Take for example, the Biblical record of the way God chooses to reveal Himself to man, of how the divine confronts the soul of man with the purposes of the Eternal. See the contrast between the record of the scriptures and the traditional notions of men. It is the old battle of the Burning Bush and the Fiery Cross.

Man has always had a penchant for the spectacular and the dramatic. Modern man has expanded to tremendous proportions this old inclination. Important events among us are heralded with screaming headlines and important persons are perpetually enveloped with an aura of light from blinking flash bulbs. The greater importance of the event or the person, the greater the attendant ballyhoo.

Recently, when a quiet, unostentatious announcement was made of the United States’ intention to build an atomic power plant in the Philippines, it created an international situation, not because of the joy or consternation at the news — but because the expected spectacular build-up in mediums of public information was lacking.

Well, the simple scriptural fact is that when God confronts man, His usual method of revelation is symbolized by the burning bush rather than the fiery cross. To Moses, God does not come in the unfamiliar glow of the Northern lights in the brazen, torrid sky of the Arabian desert. It is a familiar bush which suddenly glows with a new dimension of glory for Moses.

Elijah, the frightened prophet in the mountain, heard the thunder crash, saw the lightning flash, felt the earthquake shake the mountain, but the Lord was not in the rumble of the thunder, the blinding flash of the lightning, or the quaking earth. When these had passed, Elijah heard God speaking to him in a voice of gentle stillness within his soul.

In the supreme moment of this earth’s confrontation by Eternal God, the Lord of the universe came not with trumpet blast, or atomic explosion, nor parade of planets, but in a plain man’s love and gentle sympathetic service, and courageous death. That is how it was the Eternal God pleased to reveal Himself on earth and confront man with His glory.

You see, the Biblical record of God’s confrontation of man runs after the Burning Bush model, for the most part, and the real transformation is always inward in the spirit of man, rather than outward in the world of nature. When God touches our hearts and whispers in our souls, we see all His creation aglow with a new dimension of eternal glory.

Saul Kane, the sinner, after God had opened His eyes, saw old familiar sights, had new unbelievable meaning he had never glimpsed before.

“O Glory of the lighted mind,” rejoices Kane,
“How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind.
The station brook to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise;
The waters rushing from the rain,
Were singing Christ is risen again,
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the mist, into the light,
O blessed gift of inner sight.”And furthermore, the confrontation of man by God nearly always follows the Exodus pattern of the Burning Bush in that God reveals to man in that moment of confrontation His blazing concern for human righteousness, injustice, welfare in the contemporary scene. God tells Moses His heart aches for the injustices His people are then suffering, not the injustices Joseph has suffered long ago at the hands of his jealous brethren. Man’s traditional religious inclinations have tended toward revering in the present an ancient powerful act of a righteous God. This men have always tried to do with their religion — lock God up in a pious past, in an attempt to fence Him off from the burning now.

Then again, the old symbols of the Burning Bush and the Fiery Cross, set in contrast the difference between God’s way and man’s way of influencing human action. The Burning Bush symbolizes the persuasive moral power of God burned into the spirit of man by the flaming conviction that justice, mercy, humanitarian sympathy are the eternal qualities of God’s unchanging character and so the unvarying principles for human relationships. While the Fiery Cross symbolizes man’s way of using physical force, threats of violence, to burden men’s heads with fear and against their wishes force them to submit to another human power.

Constantine perverted the Savior’s cross of redemptive love into a military standard and achieved conversions by conquest. Some of our contemporaries put blazing crosses in the front yards of their fellow citizens for purposes of influencing their conduct through intimidation. In Africa, witch doctors thrust thorns through the bodies of dolls made in the image of their enemies and hang the impaled puppets in front of their enemies’ doors to hold them in the bondage of fear. In Holland, during the Nazi occupation, Jews were compelled to wear sewed to their clothes, yellow stars of David in order to single out the members of this particular race for contempt, abuse, and so making them walk in fear, tyrannize over them. In churches, sometimes, God forgive us, teachers and preachers of religion resort to threats of fear to secure obedience, loyalty to church and a show of faith in God. It is all the same thing — you see, the way of the fiery cross, from Constantine to our century, for influencing human conduct, and how far away it is from God’s way of the burning bush.

Leslie Tizzard, minister at Carr’s Lane Church in Birmingham, England, tells of the moving, transforming experience that turned his decision to enter the ministry. He was walking one cold night through a poor section of Birmingham at the time of the tram strike. He saw a man stumble out of a pub and fall with a dead, sickening thud on the cobblestone street. It was certainly not the only drunk who had fallen on the pavements of Birmingham, nor even the first one Leslie Tizzard had seen. But that night something happened to the young man who was seeking God’s guidance for his life. Tizzard says that suddenly that poor huddled creature symbolized all the desperate helplessness of all human kind caught in the meshes of sin apart from the grace of God in Christ. He felt in his own heart — “There, but for the grace of God, am I.” He saw that figure in the light of another world’s glory. For years afterward when the memory of that moment returned, he could distinctly hear the thud of that limp body on the cobblestones and a shudder would run down his backbone. It was God, you see, in his confrontation — that burning bush of his soul — which set the course of his life and influenced the pattern of his conduct.

Finally, the burning bush, is, as Dr. Lewis Sherrill in his book The Struggle of the Soul points out, a scriptural revelation of the common experience of every man and woman — the encountering of unexpected reality.

Moses was a man of middle age, who presumably had worked out a more or less satisfactory philosophy of life which had taken him through days of luxury, sustained him in trouble, and was now holding him together in the monotonous routine of a commonplace life. Then there came this unexpected experience — the burning bush in Midian — the revelation of a new reality, a new dimension of life — the discovery that the God of His fathers was concerned about the welfare of his people right then and wanted him to do something about it. Moses was confronted by a fact that would not fit into his old philosophy of life. What should he do? Disregard it altogether, push by it, hold on to his view of life protecting it from further disturbance, or stop, look the thing squarely in the face and, if necessary, let the thing take him into a deeper philosophy of life which could deal with the unanticipated reality?

As you know, for a while, Moses is quite at sea about what to do. First, he excuses himself. He suddenly, in God’s presence, becomes very meek and humble and self-depreciating about his talents. “I am not eloquent,” whines Moses. “I cannot stand before Pharaoh, or do this job of leadership you ask of me.” Moses complains that he cannot be a hero, not comprehending that God called him to be a servant. So Moses excuses himself. And haven’t we all? Forgetting that “excuses are the unconscious humor of the unwilling.”

Oh, how God’s church has developed a spirit of self-excuse. We cannot give, because of the pressures of the times. We cannot engage in active benevolence abroad because charity begins at home. We cannot enter active controversies because we prefer the comfort of inaction. How the church excuses herself!

But see how God answers Moses’ excuses: When he begs, “I am not eloquent,” God says, “I will be your mouth.” By this, God does not mean that in crises Moses will suddenly become fluent. Rather, since Moses’ God will be master in these crises, Moses’ stammering as God’s faithful servant will be adequate enough. God is equal to His own purposes and knows how to make His creatures serve His ends. The adequacy of resources that seem futile in themselves draw attention to the power and centrality of God. The sufficiency of the weak for the purposes of God runs like a red thread through all the Bible.

But ultimately, Moses reaches his decision to make room in his philosophy of life for this new reality that has come unexpectedly.

All of us like Moses, will come upon our Burning Bushes — we will have our confrontation by some fact or condition or situation which does not fit nicely into our view of life. In that moment, one of the gravest temptations will be upon us — to protect such peace of mind as our view of life affords, refuse to face the new fact of the burning bush.

What is our burning bush? It may be anyone of many things that will not fit into the view of life we’ve had: it may be for example, monotony, when we had counted on life filled with interesting experiences; it may be a catastrophe, sharp, crushing, terrible, which befalls us or our beloved, or it may be adversity and poverty when we had counted on comfort and prosperity; or it may be that God does not fit into the neat theology we had constructed.

Sometimes it is an illness in the middle years, and a man’s whole life is turned quite around and about. When before he was shrewd, calculating, and careless of what happened to those he met in life as competitors, contenders, and rivals, afterward he was compassionate, kind and less hurried and intent on his own success and more interested in the well-being of those about him. What had happened? His illness, just a common bush along the roadside of life which every man one day must pass, which people are passing every day and not noticing as remarkable at all, has for him glowed with a burning fire of eternal meaning, and the voice of the Lord has spoken reaching through to the ears of his own soul and he has responded, perhaps after much argument, excuse and fight, but at last he has responded and then there was the change, a life shaped and molded and transformed by the hand of the Almighty.

And of course, the conclusion to the whole business is just this — that whatever your Burning Bush, however or wherever your divine confrontation occurs with you — though you are just another person, (you will have to admit that in your secret personal opinion you are a rather special sort of important person), God wants you to serve Him as a Burning Bush of His glory for someone else.

John Mackay says of Robert E. Speer that he first saw him in 1910, when Speer came to Scotland for the World Mission Conference at Edinburgh and then traveled over to Aberdeen for some lectures which young John Mackay, as a student, attended. “He was the first American that I had ever looked on in the flesh,” writes Mackay, “and I thought as I listened to him speak he was the greatest man I had ever seen. After nearly forty years, during which circumstances brought me into the most intimate relationship with the man who, under God, was destined to shape my life more than any other human being, I have had no occasion to alter my youthful judgment. Robert E. Speer was the greatest personality I have ever known.”

You are the first Christian someone is ever to know. It is God’s purpose that the light of His love may go out to another through you and be for him a burning bush — “for the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord” — not a thing of wonder in itself, but an instrument to point another to the center and source of all being, God Himself.