Acts 7:30-36 (NIV)
“After forty years had passed, an angel appeared to Moses in the flames of a burning bush in the desert near Mount Sinai. When he saw this, he was amazed at the sight. As he went over to look more closely, he heard the Lord’s voice: ‘I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look.
“Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off your sandals; the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have indeed seen the oppression of my people in Egypt. I have heard their groaning and have come down to set them free. Now come, I will send you back to Egypt.’
“This is the same Moses whom they had rejected with the words, ‘Who made you ruler and judge?’ He was sent to be their ruler and deliverer by God himself, through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. He led them out of Egypt and did wonders and miraculous signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea and for forty years in the desert.”
It took forty long years from the time Moses fled from Egypt until God was ready to deliver His people through him. God caught his attention with a bush that burned on the slopes of a mountain but was not consumed. And when Moses came over to check it out, God spoke to him and gave him the calling to deliver Israel from their oppressors.
Though Moses was raised as an Egyptian and now lived as a Midianite, God reassured him of who he really was: a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, an heir to the promise given to them, and someone who belonged to God by virtue of ancestry. This was vital for him to both know and communicate, because God would not bring in a deliverer from outside His own people.
Stephen reviewed God’s commissioning of Moses, the direct call to be His chosen deliverer. He also points out the irony that this Moses, who really was the God-sent deliverer, had been outrighted rejected as a deliverer by the Israelites forty years previously.
But now, finally, they would accept him as their leader, and would end up following him all the way through decades of wandering in the wilderness, right up to the edge of the Promised Land. The thing that finally persuaded them was Moses ability to do wonders and miraculous signs in Egypt and for forty years in the desert.
But now the leaders of God’s people had again rejected God’s chosen deliverer, Jesus. And they were even more hardened and resistant than their ancestors had been, because they rejected Jesus despite the wonders and miraculous signs that He had done day after day before their very eyes!
Father, we are often told that cynicism and doubt about You and about things like miracles and the supernatural are a sign of maturity and intellectual sophistication. But history shows that those things are really a sign of depravity, increasing sinfulness and hardness of heart. Lord, we have so many hard-hearted people out there today, many of them in positions of power and authority, and many of them leading people away from the path of life under the rubric of sophistication and intellectualism. But we can only find You, we can only come to You, if we are willing to put aside any pretenses of sophistication and come to You as little children (Mark 10:15). Help me to always enter Your presence like a little child, so that I can fully receive Your love, Your grace and Your guidance. Amen.
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