Burning Bush: Who Spoke to Moses from the Flame?

Question 2111.

The burning bush is one of the most famous scenes in the whole Bible, yet ask who actually spoke to Moses from it and you will get a surprising variety of answers. Was it an angel? Was it God the Father? Was it, as I am persuaded, the pre-incarnate Son of God? The text of Exodus 3 gives us more help than people expect, and following its clues leads to a conclusion that should warm every Christian heart.

Let us set the scene first, because the setting is half the sermon. Moses is eighty years old. The prince of Egypt has spent forty years keeping sheep on the back side of the desert, his ambitions long since buried in the sand. It is an ordinary working day at Horeb. And then a bush catches fire and does not burn up.

Who Appeared in the Burning Bush?

Read the passage carefully and notice who is named. “And the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush” (Exodus 3:2). So the figure in the burning bush is the Angel of the LORD, that mysterious Messenger who threads his way through the Old Testament. But two verses later the narrator changes the name without changing the person: “When the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!'” (3:4). The Angel of the LORD appears; the LORD sees; God calls – one speaker, three designations, no seams.

The voice from the burning bush then removes all doubt about its own identity:

“Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

Exodus 3:5-6 (ESV)

No created angel makes ground holy by standing on it, and no created angel says “I am the God of Abraham”. Moses certainly drew the right conclusion: he “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (3:6). Whoever was in the burning bush, Scripture insists it was God Himself.

The Voice Gives His Name

The conversation that follows contains the most famous self-introduction in history. Moses asks what name he should report to Israel, and God answers, “I AM WHO I AM… Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you'” (Exodus 3:14). The Hebrew is ehyeh asher ehyeh, and from the same root comes the covenant name YHWH, the LORD – the name I have explored in What is the name YHWH? and in The divine name I AM and its meaning. The One in the burning bush is the self-existent God, who depends on nothing, derives from nothing, and simply, eternally, is.

Jesus treated the passage as bedrock. Arguing with the Sadducees about resurrection, He appealed to “the passage about the bush”, where God says, “I am the God of Abraham” – present tense, long after Abraham’s death – and concluded, “He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Mark 12:26-27). For Jesus, the exact wording of the burning bush account carried doctrinal weight. That alone should make us read it slowly.

Stephen, in his speech before the Sanhedrin, retells the burning bush scene the same way: “an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush”, and yet what Moses heard there was “the voice of the Lord” saying “I am the God of your fathers” (Acts 7:30-32). The first Christian martyr, moments from seeing the glory of God himself, saw no contradiction in the passage: the figure in the burning bush was both the Messenger and the LORD, both the One sent and the God who speaks. The earliest church read Exodus 3 exactly as we are reading it.

Why I Believe the Speaker Was the Son

So the figure in the burning bush is both “the angel of the LORD” and “God”. How can he be both? The answer I find most faithful to the whole of Scripture is that this is the pre-incarnate Son. The Angel of the LORD across the Old Testament speaks as God, receives worship and bears the divine name, while remaining personally distinct from the LORD who sends him – the full case is set out in Is the Angel of the LORD the pre-incarnate Christ? And the New Testament tells us which divine person does the revealing: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). The Father is the unseen sender; the Son is the One who appears.

There is a delicious detail in John 8 that clinches it for me. When Jesus declared, “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), He was not choosing His words carelessly. He reached back to the burning bush and took the name spoken there as His own – and His hearers understood perfectly, which is why they reached for stones. The earliest Christian writers, Justin Martyr among them in the second century, read Exodus 3 the same way: the One in the bush was the Word, the Son, before His flesh. When Moses stood on holy ground, I believe he was standing before the Lord Jesus.

Why a Burning Bush That Did Not Burn?

God never chooses His visual aids at random. Fire, throughout Scripture, marks His holy presence – Sinai ablaze, the pillar of fire, the tongues of flame at Pentecost. But why a bush? The Hebrew word, seneh, denotes a thornbush, common scrub, about the humblest plant the desert offers. Here is the wonder: the holy fire dwelt in the lowly bush and the bush was not consumed. The God whose presence is a consuming fire condescended to inhabit something fragile without destroying it.

Israel in the furnace of Egypt could hardly miss the picture: afflicted, ablaze with suffering, yet not consumed, because God was with them. Moses himself would later bless Joseph’s tribes in the name of “him who dwells in the bush” (Deuteronomy 33:16) – of all the titles he could have chosen, the old man reached for that one. And dare I say the burning bush points further forward still: to the day when the fullness of deity would dwell in frail human nature, and the bush of Mary’s son would carry the fire of God without being consumed by it. The pattern of the bush is the pattern of grace from beginning to end.

A Call from the Flame

Do not miss what the voice from the burning bush actually said once the introductions were over. “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry… I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7-8). Seen, heard, known, come down – four verbs that tell you everything about the heart of God. And then the fifth verb, the uncomfortable one: “Come, I will send you” (3:10). The God who comes down to deliver delights to deliver through people, and frequently through people who, like Moses, have spent decades convinced their chance has passed.

Moses’ objections – who am I? what shall I say? they will not believe me? I am not eloquent? – take up the rest of the chapter and most of the next, and God answers every one, not by flattering Moses but by promising Himself: “But I will be with you” (3:12). The sufficiency was never going to be in the messenger. It never is.

So, now what?

First, take off your shoes, figuratively speaking. The God of the burning bush has not become more casual in the intervening millennia. We come to Him boldly through Jesus, yes – but boldly is not the same as breezily. A God who makes desert gravel holy by His presence deserves better than the distracted scraps of our attention. When did you last approach Him with anything like Moses’ trembling?

Second, take heart from the timing. Eighty years old, forty of them in obscurity, and the call comes on a working day in the middle of nowhere. If you have quietly concluded that God has finished with you – too old, too failed, too far from the action – the burning bush stands in Scripture as a permanent rebuke to that conclusion. The fire lights when God is ready, not when we feel ready.

And third, remember who was in the flame. The same Lord Jesus who saw, heard, knew and came down for Israel has seen, heard, known and come down for you – all the way down, to a cross. The question He asked from the burning bush He still asks from His Word: whom shall I send? What would happen if, this time, you answered?