Moses

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Today, we're probably in the main character in all of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, kind of the center character. When you think of a prophet, when I grew up as a child, I always thought when somebody said the name prophet, what was the prophet that you thought of? Jeremiah. Jeremiah, okay, well that's different. That makes sense. What, Elijah? I always thought Isaiah, you know, because of all the different prophecies about the birth of Christ and stuff. But they're all derivatives of the guy today, Moses. He's the prophet. That it even says at the end of Deuteronomy, it'll say, no one has since that day risen like Moses. They're still waiting for another Moses. Well, he does come. His name is Jesus. But there is no one that has risen in all of Israel up to that day that is like Moses to take his place. And yet Moses prophesied himself about someone in the future. Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight. Why the bush does not burn up. When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, Moses, Moses. And Moses said, here I am. Do not come any closer. God said, take off your sandals for the place where you are standing is holy ground. Then he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. At this Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I've heard them crying out because of their slave drivers. And I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of the land into a good and spacious land. A land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of Israel has reached me and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? And God said, I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain. Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, say to the Israelites, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever. The name you shall call me from generation to generation. You probably, some of you cannot help but think of the scenes from the Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille when you see this, and Charlton Heston standing before this burning bush. Others maybe think of the Prince of Egypt, the Disney animated flick. DreamWorks. Oh, it's DreamWorks. It's not Disney. Oops. Yeah, you might be thinking of those things. The problem with Cecil B. DeMille, by the way, is not him personally. I don't know him or what, but Moses does look like a very heroic figure in that book. Here, he's trying to get out of actually doing what God wants him to do if you read more of the text. You know, most people, and this is where we're going today, we're going to look at two different points today, but most people today believe in the existence of God still in our day and age, in our culture. I'd say 85 to 90% will say, I believe there is a God who exists, but that's about as far as it goes. They're not quite sure who that God is, what that God is like, or how he's supposed to be. And for what we can tell, Moses also believed that God exists, that there might have been multiple gods for him at the time that he was called by God and then started to believe in this God. But before the burning bush appears, he doesn't seem to know who this God is. In fact, you notice in this text, he doesn't know his name. It's like, well, if I'm going, how am I supposed to refer to you? So here is the first time Moses meets God, or better to say, God meets Moses. That's the story of the Bible, by the way, and Abraham Heschel in his book called The Prophets puts it correctly. He says, all of human history as seen by the Bible is a history of God in search of man. Israel's faith is not the fruit of a quest for...