BURNING AND NOT CONSUMED
‘Now that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’
In ‘the bush,’ flaming but not destroyed, were indeed closely knit together, in that incident at the foot of Sinai, three signs.
I. The bush.—There was the fact of the shrub, apparently being destroyed, yet living, and indestructible, and intact.
II. The title.—There were the words which God selected as His very title—‘the God of the living and the dead’—‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’
III. The name.—And there was the grand name by which He named Himself—‘I AM’—‘I AM!’ Independent of all external things, self-containing—self-existent. ‘I AM,’ in My own, and ‘I AM,’ part of My own eternal nature; they draw it from Me, and uphold it in Me.
Now, ‘the burning bush’ was a picture and type of many things illustrative of one fundamental truth.
IV. The Presence in the bush.—You will recollect that—in itself a poor bramble tree—‘the bush’ was actually in flames, but in it was a Presence. That Presence is first called ‘the Angel of the Lord’—no doubt ‘the Angel of the Covenant’—the Lord Jesus Christ, the one great ‘Messenger’ who brought the message of peace and truth to this world. ‘The Angel of the Lord’ called Himself by the very same name by which He named Himself nearly fifteen hundred years before—‘I AM.’
Where He is, annihilation, destruction, death, can never be. There is an essential element of perpetuity. As He is for ever, so is that. If He is in it, it is for ever. Therefore, ‘the bush was not consumed.’
(a) Such as the ‘bush’ was, so at that moment were the Jewish people. They were a poor, crushed race. But they were the covenant people, covenanted to great things. And the Lord God was with them, therefore the result was sure—they could not be consumed. They might be in a ‘furnace of affliction’; but the ‘I AM’ was there.
(b) The same truth has been indicated in the children of Israel ever since. Some persons would say that a people so oppressed would lose their integrity, must perish among the nations. But they live, as distinct as ever—they shine, and shall shine, as God’s witness in the ‘fire,’ and shall ‘not be consumed.’
(c) And as with the Jewish Church, so with our own. Our Church has lived on, from century to century, amid all that is destructible. It has been ever ‘ready to perish’—by its afflictions and its martyrdoms—but it lives, and shall live, the monument of the truth and power of God, because the ‘I AM’ is there—‘God is in the midst of her, therefore she shall not be moved.’
(d) Many is the child of God who could put his seal to the same truth. ‘My trials have burned deep, but I have lived through them. I don’t know one real possession of my soul, not one bud of hope, not one ray, that has ever perished.’ Why? The great ‘I AM’ was with you!
We learn to connect and identify the indestructible with the indwelling of God.
—Rev. James Vaughan.
Illustration
‘There, in the Scriptures, in one short, unfathomable sentence, in the self-revealing words of Jehovah to Moses by the mysterious bush, Christ finds immortality, not for the soul only but for the body too, that is to say, not for a part of humanity only, but for its total. And He finds it in the fact that then and there the voice of Eternal Personal Life and Love proclaimed a link between Itself and man, intimate and endeared: “I am the God of Abraham,” said the Voice, “and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” That amazing relation was, for our Lord Christ, warrant enough for the certainty of the immortality, whole and perfect, of those three personalities. If God, if the God of the Bible—Living, Loving, Holy, Infinite, Alpha and also Omega of existence—can descend into living relationship with Man and be his God, then man must be so made that he is capable of sustaining that relationship—capable in the idea of his nature. Then man is not, because he cannot be, a creature only of the dust. He is born for immortality.’