“I’m a West Texas girl, and if I know anything, I know that you never, ever, pick up a snake by its tail, and when I read that in the Bible, (Exodus 4:4) I knew that it was really God speaking to Moses, and I believed.” These were the words of Ellen, a young woman who spoke to a group in our church in Houston, Texas several years ago and I never forgot them. The audience laughed, but she insisted that this was the moment of her conversion.

Moses’ encounter at the burning bush with God there on mount Horeb, as it is written in Exodus, is the first known contact between God and His people after four hundred years of silence. It is the beginning of a deep and intimate relationship between God and Moses, that embraces the whole of the the people of Israel, and their liberation from slavery. The Exodus meant the freeing of a whole nation of people, not free to self-will, but a particular freedom of relationship with their God who they knew as the God of their ancestors: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When God told Moses how to approach the leaders of the enslaved nation, He told Moses to invoke the patriarchs, for they were even then the names that gave identity to all the people.

Everything God does is entirely new, and in the Exodus this was a struggle at first for Moses, and almost always for the people he was to lead: This, said the Lord, is so that they may believe that the Lord the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has appeared to you.” (Exodus 4:5)

Believing in God through believing in Christ is the message of Christians from the time of Jesus speaking to his disciples: “The work of God is this: to believe in the one He has sent.” (John 6:29) God gave Moses “signs” by which His people could believe that Moses was truly in touch with their ancestral God.

When Jesus gave the Holy Spirit to people, he made it possible for them to believe and enter into a close relationship with his Father God. This Holy Spirit moved Ellen to grasp the truth of Scripture when she read it in the account of Moses’ talk with God, Thousands of years after the events of the Exodus, a young American girl experienced God, not in a burning bush, but in reading the Scripture of Moses and the Lord. He came to her as He comes to us, bridging the gap of time and space and entering our lives, that we may believe .

Love in Him,

Prue