Moses: A Prophet Like Unto Me

The Bush That Was Not Consumed

Moses was born under a death sentence. Pharaoh had commanded that every Hebrew son be cast into the river (Exodus 1:22). His mother hid him for three months, then laid him in an ark of bulrushes at the river's brink. Pharaoh's own daughter found him and raised him as her son. She named him Moses, Because I drew him out of the water (Exodus 2:2–10).

He grew up learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22). But when he was grown, he chose his own people. He refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God (Hebrews 11:24–25).

He tried to deliver them in his own way and his own time. He killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, and the next day a Hebrew threw it back in his face: Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? When Pharaoh sought to slay him, Moses fled to Midian (Exodus 2:11–15). Stephen explains what went wrong: he supposed his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would deliver them: but they understood not (Acts 7:25).

Forty years passed (Acts 7:30). The prince of Egypt became a shepherd on the backside of the desert. Then, at Horeb, the mountain of God, he saw a bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. He turned aside, and God called him by name.

“And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me: and I have also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them. Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.”EXODUS 3:7–10 · KJV

God had seen, heard, and come down to deliver, and He would do it by sending Moses. At eighty Moses stood before Pharaoh (Exodus 7:7). Through him God brought Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders, gave the Passover, opened the Red Sea, fed the people with manna, brought water from the rock, and spoke His law at Sinai. Moses led Israel forty years in the wilderness and died on Mount Nebo, within sight of a land he could not enter (Deuteronomy 34:1–5).