“So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that 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.”-Exodus 3:8
At the burning bush God wastes no time in introducing Himself to Moses and making his intentions clear.
Right away, He lets Moses know that He is the God of his fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This is very important because God is connecting His appearance all the way back to that one foundational covenant He made with Abraham.
Whenever I begin my prayers to the Almighty, I sometimes start off by saying “To the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” because out of all the false gods and spirits that are resident in the world, I want to make sure that my prayer reaches the very same God with whom Abraham entered into a covenant as well as the One who is speaking to Moses here.
As believers, I think this is something very important we need to remind ourselves.
The God we worship is rooted in the historical covenant God made with Abraham and that He will now make with Moses.
Literally, we are grafted into this faith and become one with believing Israel.
There are a couple of expressions here reflective of how the ancient Hebrew mind viewed God as well as just being Hebrew idioms that are not to be taken literally.
When God says, “I have come down” to rescue Israel from Egypt, it doesn’t mean that He just physically moved from one location to another.
This is a Hebrew idiom that refers to the action of proactively intervening in a given event.
In this case, God is going to intervene to free Israel from the clutches of Egyptian servitude.
Second, we come to a phrase that we will hear quite often.
God says that he will bring Israel to a “land flowing with milk and honey”.
Again, this is just one idiom out of the many that we will encounter in the Scriptures and it is NOT to be taken literally.
Milk and honey were NOT staple products in the Land of Canaan.
This expression is used to indicate great fruitfulness, abundance and fertility.
The biggest spiritual takeaway I feel God placing on my heart while I type these words is that we should never assume that just because God seems silent or doesn’t seem present in our lives does NOT mean He has forgotten the promises He has made to us or no longer has any interest in what is happening in our lives.
I am well aware that long and uninterrupted periods of divine silence can sometimes be quite nerve-wracking, especially when tragedy or hard times befall us.
It is during times like this that we become especially susceptible to discouragement and this may lead to a loss of faith that may in turn lead to sin.
So please take this post as a reminder that heavenly silence is one of the key ingredients the Lord uses to prepare us for the plans He has for us.
No doubt Moses had many long and dreary days when he probably wondered “what the hell has happened to my life?“
However, here God makes it clear to Moses that He has never been asleep on the job.
And that things are about to get action-packed furious.
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