I receive a number of religious
periodicals every month. I received a paper yesterday,
and just glancing through it, an article caught my attention.
So while I was working on this message and a few other things,
I paused to read the article. It got my attention because the
fellow who wrote the article was urging preachers to return
to preaching the gospel, a subject I consider to be vitally important. You can imagine my disappointment
when I got to this paragraph. The man said, some argue that
the whole Bible is the gospel. That is plainly not the case. The law is not the gospel. nor
are the Proverbs, and there is no Gospel in Ecclesiastes. All the Bible is the Word of
God, he wrote, but not all the Bible is the Gospel. So a preacher,
in the middle of a series on the Sermon on the Mount, must
not imagine he is preaching the Gospel unless he chooses to introduce
it from somewhere else. He went on to argue that we should
have specified times for regular gospel preaching so that believers
will know when to invite their unbelieving friends and be sure
they will not be bored with something irrelevant to their condition. By the time I got there, my disappointment
had turned to rage, and I decided to put it down and let my mind
calm down a little bit. And so I put it down, went about
my work, and then last night picked up the paper and read
the entire article several more times, and asked Shelby, I said,
read that paragraph, what I just read to you, and tell me if I
misunderstand it. Is the man declaring that we
can find some portion of this book that is irrelevant? Is there something In this book
you can tear out and throw away as waste paper? Irrelevant? Well,
it's irrelevant to some people. Oh, no, it's not. Oh, no, it's
not. You may think it is, but you'll
wake up in eternity and find out it was very relevant. Is
he telling us that you can't find the gospel in the law, in
that which God calls the book of wisdom? That you can't find
the gospel presented anywhere in this book? Indeed he is. And that's shocking. That's shocking. Shelby said, aren't you shocked
to see that? And I said, I wish I was more shocked. Sadly, it's
common these days for many to read the scriptures and imagine
that this book is a book about history or church dogma are religious
moralisms and not a book about Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. When
I was 19 years old, I went to hear Brother Henry Mahan preach
the gospel in Western Southern North Carolina. He was preaching
on Christ, our kinsman, Redeemer, out of the book of Ruth. And
he introduced his message with a statement. I've heard him make
it many times since. But it's rung in my ears all
day long. For the Mahan said, any preacher
who cannot preach the gospel from the Old Testament does not
know the gospel. And that's exactly right. That's
exactly right. I don't mean go somewhere in
the Old Testament and find something and make it sound like it looks
like maybe it's going to talk about the gospel. I mean take
the scriptures, open them up, and declare the message of the
scripture, the gospel of Christ, from the Old Testament. Now my
message tonight will be taken from the second book of the law. If I knew this fellow's address,
I'd send him a copy of it. The book of Exodus. And I sincerely
hope you will not find it boring and irrelevant. The title of
my message is The Gospel of the Burning Bush. I first thought
I would call this The Gospel in the Burning Bush. No, The
Gospel of the Burning Bush. The message we have in the Burning
Bush is the message of the Gospel. Our text is Exodus 3, verses
1 through 6. Now, please listen carefully
to what I'm saying. I am not going to use this text
to preach the gospel. That may be commendable if a
fellow doesn't know any better. But just using a text to preach
what you want to say is not preaching the word of God. I am not going
to preach to you from this text of scripture. That, again, is
not declaring the word of God. It is my intent, and if God the
Holy Spirit will enable me, I am going to preach this text to
you. I'm going to show you exactly
the message God the Holy Spirit intends for us to learn from
these six verses of Scripture. Actually, we will only cover
the first three this evening. We'll come back and look at it
again. In these six verses, And these six verses, the Lord Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, our blessed Savior, did not merely perform
a supernatural miracle. I recall the times I used to
go to church and Sunday school when I was a boy and I'd hear
folks talk about those Bible stories, you know, the ark and
the burning bush and the manna and the loaves and fishes. I
thought, man, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. heard a few things, teachers
would read to us, from Aesop's fables and Jack London's tales. And I thought, buddy, this is
better than any of that. This is fantastic. But that's all
I got from it. If all you get from the scriptures
showing the supernatural, the miraculous, the wondrous, is
that God is powerful, God is great, and God can do anything
you want him to, you have totally missed the message of this book.
When we teach the scriptures, let us see what the scriptures
teach. Now, we must not spiritualize
the Word of God. By that, this is what I mean.
We must not go to a text in Scripture and say, well, this seems to
me to be, or I want to use this to say. But rather, we must preach
that which is intended in the Scripture and preach it with
such clarity that folks look at it and say, well, yeah, that's
what was there. Sunday night after the services,
Celeste met me at the door and she said, if I remember correctly,
she said, I never cease to be amazed at things you showed us
from that. Not things you saw, things you
showed us. That's what my job is. If I'm
called and gifted of God to preach the gospel to you, and God has
sent me to preach this message, when I get done, you're going
to see what I've got to say right here in this text. And if you
don't see it in the text, don't you believe it, because I said
it. All right, let's look together. Here, the Lord Jesus reveals
himself to his servant Moses as God our Savior. Exodus chapter
3, verse 1. Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro
his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock
to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God,
even to Horeb, or to Sinai. And the angel of the Lord appeared
unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. This
was not just a vision, this is something that happened right
in front of him. And he looked, and behold, the bush burned with
fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn
aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And
when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto
him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he
said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither,
put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou
standest is holy ground. Moreover, he said, I am the God
of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God
of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he
was afraid to look upon God. Now, let's look first at verse
1. Moses is keeping the flock of Jethro his father-in-law.
He's identified as the priest of Midian. And he led the flock
to the back side of the desert and came to the mountain of God.
He's here on the back side of the desert in the land of Midian. This is just a few miles outside
of Egypt. This land of Midian is the land
of a man by the name of Cush. You remember Moses was mocked
by Miriam and Aaron because he had married a black woman of
Cushite. This man Cush was the son of
one of Noah's sons, a man by the name of Ham, a cursed man,
cursed of God, and the indication of his curse is not the blackness
of his face. Let no one be so foolish. He
was cursed of God, as all the reprobate are, and left in their
cursedness, and they shall be, our God said, servants to Shem
and Japheth. That is, the Lord God tells us
that Ham, Noah's cursed son, would be one by whom God would
continually cause to serve his elect scattered through the earth
among the Jews and the Gentiles. So that all the peoples of the
earth, all the nations of the world, as all the events of providence
are ordained of God even in the midst of the curse to serve the
good of God's people. This land many is the land of
a cursed people, and Moses is found there. For among these
cursed people, Moses was pleased to take his wife, and there he
tends sheep as a shepherd. Now those facts are not insignificant. They're not recorded just to
give us some scanty details of Moses' life. The Spirit of God
did not give us these things just so that we would understand
what a great, great tragedy had happened when Moses fled from
Egypt and wound up in Midian. These things are intended And
they are written by inspiration to show us some instructive things
as Moses is set before us in the Word of God as a type, a
representative, a picture, a forerunner of the Lord Jesus Christ, our
Redeemer. Now, there are several things
that come to mind. Surely they come to your mind
just having heard that. The Son of God came into this
world, the place of God's curse. among a cursed people, a people
under God's curse because of sin, in a world cursed because
of Adam's transgression. And he came here to get for himself
a bride from among the damned. He chose a ruined, cursed, despised
people for himself. And like Moses, our dear Savior,
assumed the role of a shepherd. understand how that is represented
in the Word of God. If you want to look at it later
in Genesis 46, Moses is keeping sheep. And when the Israelites
first came into the land of Egypt, Joshua said to his brethren,
to his father's house, I'll go up and show Pharaoh and say unto
him, my brethren in my father's house, which are in the land
of Canaan, are coming to me. And he describes them as shepherds. He says, I'll tell them you keep
sheep, because everybody hates shepherds. Shepherds despise people. When I was a boy, before all
the Westerns got to be politically correct, whenever there was a
struggle, an underdog, a despised group of people, never did I
recall any Western movie portraying those people as cattlemen. The
cattlemen were all in power. The cattlemen owned all the land.
The cattlemen ran things. The cattlemen were respected.
But the sheepherders, the stinking sheepherders, the dirty sheepherders,
were always portrayed as a despicable group. I don't know where that
came from, but I know that in the book of God, Shepherds are
represented as a despised people doing a useless thing for a useless
animal. That's our Savior. He said, I
am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd giveth His
life for the sheep. He said, I came here as a shepherd
carry my lambs in my bosom and gather them with my arms. I am
the good shepherd. Other sheep I have which are
not of this fold, them also I must bring, and there shall be one
fold and one shepherd. The sheep, they hear the shepherd's
voice, and the shepherd gives the sheep eternal life, and they
shall never perish. Look at verse 2. 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. Now, the
Lord willing, I'll come back to that another time and talk
to you about it a little bit more. For now, let me just declare
once more that the angel of the Lord presenting himself to Moses
here is not some created angel. The angel of the Lord is our
Lord Jesus Christ himself. Now, again, this is not a matter
of speculation. I'm not just guessing about it.
If you look at verse 4, you'll notice that this one who appears
to Moses in the flame, he speaks to Moses out of the bush. He
is called the Lord. The word is Jehovah. He is called
God, Elohim. So the angel of the Lord speaking
to Moses, the one that Moses saw, the one of whom Moses later
speaks when he speaks of the goodwill of him that dwelt in
the bush, is himself, Jesus Christ, who comes to make himself known
in one of his pre-incarnate manifestations of himself by those things declaring
that for which he would come into the world in due time. The
Hebrew word that's translated bush. is only used here and one
other time in all the Old Testament. It's only used here and in Deuteronomy
33 verse 16 where Moses recalls what happens here and speaks
of what he heard here and declares it to be the revelation of the
goodwill of him that dwelt in the bush. The word dwelt. I was surprised when I saw this. Sometimes I like to just look
up words. You'd never guess what this word
dwelt is. It's essentially the same word
as the word that is translated Shekinah. In a word, that which
Moses saw in the bush was the Shekinah glory of God. He saw
Jesus Christ, who is the glory of God. He saw Christ in His
glory, just as Isaiah did in the year that King Uzziah died,
just as Paul did on the Damascus Road. Now when we speak of Isaiah
and Moses and Paul and others seeing Christ in His glory, Daniel,
many others set forth in the Scriptures who saw Christ in
His glory. You remember our Lord Jesus said,
Isaiah saw my glory and spoke of me. What's he talking about? Oh, he saw what a great, great
person he was. He saw that he's powerful and
great and good and all that. That won't get it. That won't
get it. Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on the throne. His train fills
the temple. Fills the house with smoke of
an accepted sacrifice. And the post of the doors shake
at his presence. And Isaiah sees him sitting on
the throne, but he describes the throne perfectly for us.
No question about what he saw. He said, I saw the Lord high
and lifted up. He's on his throne. And he saw
the sheriff, the cherubim looking at the throne. Facing down at the throne. You remember where that's first
revealed? Back in Exodus, when God told Moses to build the mercy
seat, build the ark, make the ark, put the mercy seat on top
of it, and He said, Form with that mercy seat these angelic
beings looking down on the mercy seat continually with their eyes
fixed on the blood of atonement which is offered for the people
representing Christ our Lord who is, what you just read a
little bit ago, the propitiation, the word mercy seat. Isaiah saw
Christ in his glory seated on his throne in exactly the same
way John did in Revelation chapter 4 when he sees one rising up
out of the midst of the throne as a lamb that had been slain.
So the glory of God which Isaiah saw, the glory of God which Moses
saw when he saw this bush, the Shekinah glory that he beheld,
the Shekinah glory that is revealed, by which God is revealed to men,
is Jesus Christ in the glory that is his as a result of finished
redemption. The glory that's his in the saving
of his people. He saved us to the praise of
the glory of His grace. The glory of God shines forth
in the face of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Before Moses could
be sent to deliver Israel, before any man is able to preach the
gospel, I'm not talking about able to give a little religious
lecture. Any man who has good sense can
do that. But before any man is able to preach the gospel, he
must be made to behold the ineffable glory of God in the face of Jesus
Christ, the crucified Redeemer. Here is God's glory. Here is
God's glory. In Jesus Christ, He found a way. in his holy character to exercise
complete grace towards sinners who fully deserve his wrath.
That's the glory of God. The glory of God is the mystery
of godliness, the wonder of redemption. Until a man sees what Moses saw
that day in the mountain of God, he has nothing to preach. And
everything he has to say, insofar as religious or spiritual matters
are concerned, is less than irrelevant. He who is God's messenger, the
angel of the Lord, is God's message. Jesus Christ and him crucified. Now, when Paul wrote to the Corinthians
and said, I determine not to do anything among you, Save Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. He was not saying to the Corinthians,
now I'm going to just preach the gospel to you folks. Other
folks who are stronger and more mature and more spiritual than
you are, then I can talk to them about prophecy and church order
and the place of the United States and the place of the Arabs and
the place of the Jews in the timetable of God. Enough said
about that. He said, I determined not to
know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
Let me give you an exact statement paralleling that. And he's saying
exactly the same thing. In Ephesians chapter 20, he said,
I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. It's the same thing. There, Chris,
all the counsel of God is his son. He is not a word from God. He is the word of God about whom
this word always speaks. All right, now let's look at
the bush. Look at verse 2 again. And the angel of the Lord appeared
unto him in a flame, a fire, out of the midst of a bush. And
he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush
was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn
aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not consumed."
Now here's a wonder that all the magicians in Pharaoh's court
could never imitate, a miracle that baffles human wisdom. The
Lord God our Savior performed a miracle to make Himself known
as God our Savior. How does that hymn go? But when
He saved my soul, cleansed and made me whole, it took a miracle
of love and grace. If you believe on the Son of
God, if you see Jesus Christ in His glory, it's because God
performed a miracle before you and in you. He did for you what
no human power in you or out of you could ever perform. Before
we get to the words our Lord spoke to Moses, let's turn aside
and see this great sight. I have no question, being as
how Moses was a man, much like me, do you know what I'd do if
I were out in the middle of the field in the middle of the day,
and all of a sudden I saw a bush burning, a dried bramble bush,
a thorn bush, and I didn't hear any crackling noise, and I didn't
see any charring, and I didn't feel any heat. I believe I'd
be just a little bit curious. Think I would. And I have no
doubt that Moses first turned aside to look at this bush out
of nothing but just curiosity. He wasn't expecting the Lord
to appear. He wasn't expecting the Lord to come down and perform
a miracle in front of him. He's out here in the middle of
the desert, been there 40 years, just tending sheep, and suddenly
he sees something no man's ever heard tell of. A bush engulfed
in flames and yet not burned. Now I read something today, when
I read it I just laughed out loud, called Shelby and I said,
come look at this. Hugh Latimer used to urge people to come hear
the gospel, saying, though thou comest but to sleep, it may be
God will take thee napping. How many like myself? At first, begin to look into
the things of God. At first, begin to attend the
preaching of the gospel just because they're curious. Investigate
a little bit. Investigate a little bit. And
God takes them in their curiosity. To absent yourself from the preaching
of the gospel is to absent yourself from hope. But to hear the Word is to hear
that by which God is pleased to call out His people for His
namesake. Next time you're tempted to find
something to do other than worship God when the saints meet together,
try to remember and think about what Thomas must have missed,
that one service he chose not to attend. the one time he chose
not to meet with God's people. The Lord Jesus was in the bush
and the Lord Jesus is in the gospel. Now I realize that to
many that seems terribly simplistic and trite. In my eyes it is profoundly
mysterious, wondrous. The burning bush appeared to
Moses that he might see the glory of Christ as it is set forth
in the gospel of God's saving grace. And the symbolism is startling. First, the bush burned with fire,
and yet the fire didn't burn the bush. Profound, mysterious,
miraculous? But the mystery of godliness
is indescribably more profound, mysterious, and miraculous. In
the scriptures, fire is always set before us as a symbol of
judgment and wrath. Our God is a consuming fire. Fire was used in the Old Testament
sacrifices to consume the sacrifices implying God's judgment and God's
wrath. Fire burned in the mountains
implying God's fierce judgment upon the enemies of his people.
How can God, who is a consuming fire, burning up all that is
contrary to his nature? How can God, who is a purer eyes
than to behold iniquity, have anything to do with fallen, sinful,
vile, wretched men and women like you and me? How can he do
it? How can he do it? How can sinners like you and
me come to God Almighty and not be consumed? What is it that
makes you terrified of dying? What is it? It is that fact written
on your conscience by the hand of God in creation that you can
never get away from. God Almighty is holy and you're
nothing but sin. And so men are terrified to meet
God. Animals get old, just go off
and die because they have no terror, no conscience, no fear,
no dread. Not men made in God's image.
God stamped on us a God consciousness from which we cannot escape.
And until you find out how it is that God Almighty, without
compromising His holy character, can take you into His arms and
snuggle you up in His love and mercy, without compromising His
character, you will never be prepared and never be able to
leave this world in peace to go out yonder and meet God. It
ain't gonna happen. How can God embrace the sinner? How can God
forgive a transgressor, there's not but one way. If grace comes,
grace must reign through righteousness. Not grace reigning in spite of
righteousness, not grace reigning without righteousness, not grace
reigning at the expense of righteousness, but grace reigns through righteousness
unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. How? Only by the sacrifice
of Jesus Christ who is himself the righteousness of God. Only
by him being made sin for us, and being made a curse for us,
can the blessing that God later speaks of to Moses, right here,
the blessing of the covenant promised to Abraham only, only
by the sacrifice of his own son, can God Almighty pour out the
blessing of His grace upon chosen sinners. The word bush means
a bramble bush, a thorn bush, a vivid reminder of God's curse
upon the earth. And the Son of God, our all-gracious,
all-glorious Substitute and Savior, entered into the place of curse
for us when He assumed our nature. And He took on Himself the cause
of curse when He assumed our sin, and He took to Himself the
curse itself when it was made a curse for us, and died under
the wrath of God to satisfy the justice of God in our womb instead. saw the bush, he saw in the bush
the gospel, the very gospel we believe and preach. Now by virtue
of what he did upon the curse tree, God Almighty sits in human
flesh on the throne of grace, with power over all flesh as
a man who is God, to give eternal life to as many as the Father
has given Him, and He does so on the basis of absolute, impeccable
righteousness, justice, and truth. But what is the gospel of the
bush then? It is the gospel of Christ, the revelation of Him
who is the revelation of the invisible God, the Shekinah glory,
assuring and forever dwelling in, or assuming and forever dwelling
in, humanity. Here is the tender plant, the
root out of dry ground, in whom resides all the fullness of God
in a body. God is here. Moses saw God in
a person. He saw God in that one who appeared
before him as a man, as the angel of the Lord. He saw God in flesh. God come to save. The gospel
of the burning bush is the gospel of an irresistible sacrifice.
An almighty, omnipotent sacrifice. The gospel of irresistible blood. The Lord God Almighty here portrays
his wrath in fire, burning and burning and burning and burning
and burning and burning and burning and burning. But the bush is
totally unaffected by the fire. Another picture of our Redeemer,
there was an ark built according to the command of God for the
salvation of his elect just before the flood. And when the flood
came, all the fury of God's wrath that would crush the world to
hell, built an ark. And the ark sailed through all
the fury of God's wrath, not in the least affected by it. The fire burns, the fire of judgment. the fire of justice, the fire
of God's holy fury against his darling son. And while his son
willingly laid down his life for us, the fire never affected him at
all. But didn't he die? Yes, sir.
suffering all the wrath of God, all the terror of judgment, all
that we must suffer forever in hell, He suffered for us to the
full satisfaction of justice. The fire burned in this bush
until the fire was totally exhausted. That's what Christ did for us.
He rose again the third day triumphant over death, hell, and the grave
with life in his hands, having obtained eternal redemption for
us to give eternal life to whom he will. The gospel of the burning
bush is the gospel of the eternal, absolute, unconditional, can
I find more words, security of God's elect in Jesus Christ. Who can fail to recognize the
obvious? Clearly there is some correlation
between this bush and Israel burning in affliction and trial
down in Egypt. Clearly there is a correlation
between Jesus Christ, our representative, and the whole election of grace
in him. Persecutions and trials are the
fire which assail us with ceaseless fury. our inbred corruptions and sins,
the raging lion of hell who seeks whom he may devour, our weakness
and instability, the allurements of the world, the very flesh
in which we dwell would destroy us, except for one thing, We
are one with Him who keeps us, and we cannot be consumed. Our
Lord Jesus Christ dwells in us. He who is the glory of God has
taken up residence in us as His temple, and He defies all things
and all people, everything and everyone who opposes us to do
us harm. You see, the Church, God's elect,
is the chosen home of His unbounded love. Here, His all-protecting might,
His all-preserving care, His full delights, His perfect rest
and repose, here He receives His Church as a gift from the
Father, His Bride. his jewels, his peculiar treasure,
his portion, his delight, the fullness of his body, the completeness
of his mediatorial glory. And he is determined to present
his body, the church, faultless before the presence of the glory
of God, holy and without blame, unreprovable in the sight of
God himself. And he's going to do it. He's
going to do it. You talk as if there's no possibility
of any chosen of God, redeemed by the blood of this great sacrifice,
Jesus Christ, called by God's almighty grace, in Christ Jesus,
living in Him, no possibility of any harm ever coming to them. You heard me exactly right. No
possibility. No possibility. Children of God
think much of the goodwill of him that dwelt in the bush. To imagine that we stand secure
before God Almighty because of something we do or something
we are or something we experience is blasphemous presumption. But to understand that we are
one with Christ. Is that what this book teaches?
David Burge, we are one with him. To say that on one hand
And not to believe that he will keep us in perfect safety forever,
on the other hand, is utterly, utterly inconsistent with any
kind of reason. And it is to dishonor him who
is God our Savior. Look back. Look back. Long before God made the world, He put us in Christ, accepted
us in Christ, blessed us in Christ, chose us as His own and made
us His own, adopted us in Christ. And when we came forth from the
womb speaking lies, all the days of our rebellion and ungodliness
You may have had opportunity to look back and see, hey, but
one thing on this earth kept me from dying and going to hell
right there. He wouldn't let me die. That's
all. That's all. That's all. And all
these days since He called us by His grace, what corruptions
has He held you through? let alone the outward temptation
and trials, the burning thorns of your own vile lust in you. Yet He kept you. He kept you. He kept you. Look forward then. He who has
kept us will keep us to the end. The bush shall never consume
the Redeemer. And until it consumes the Redeemer,
it shall never consume us. And as the glory of God was seen in that bush, Matthew,
in the mountain of God, when Jesus Christ stands in eternal
glory with all His chosen, His ransomed ones, His loved ones.
With every sinner He came into this world to save and presents
them faultless to wandering worlds. The glory of God shall forever
be seen in the bush. Amen.