Fuel-less Fire

Read this chapter in a book I was reading the other day and thought that it was a very good insight, here is the chapter:

The story of Moses and the burning bush is mother's knee story-telling material in most Christian homes. Popular interpretation puts the emphasis on the marvel of a bush unconsumed in the midst of enveloping fire. And why not, for isn't this a contradiction of fixed natural law? A desert bush with its leaves and twigs, cobwebs and bird's nets, is combustible, a natural fuel supply for the desert Bedouin. Yet the fire rejects the bush as its fuel resource and blazes on unfading and completely self-sustained. The miracle is not so much in the bush as in the fire; yet the bush somehow has attracted our attention and closed our minds to anything more. God was not primarily trying to show Moses the bush, but the glory that can ignore, yea reject, the fuel potential of the bush and yet burn on. God is introducing not the burning bush but the fuel-less fire.

Before attempting further interpretation of this unfed fire, we must examine the context. God's revelation to Moses is not given apart from the context of his experiences. The focus is on a disillusioned man. Moses was a man in whose heart a fire of zeal to accomplish God's great mission had burned fiercely forty years earlier. Now he is a man of lost vision, faded passion, and waning purpose. His inner fires have burnt to ashes. It had been his hope to right the injustices being meted out to his people by the Egyptians. But, for all his impressive natural abilities and high degree of training, he had impressed neither friend or foe. Confronted with exposure, he had fled to the wilderness, his mission unaccomplished. Certainly a self-sustained fire could never be applied as symbol of the man himself.

Moses knew from his own experience that he would never again be able to trust his own emotions to supply motive power for spiritual work. It is at this point he is confronted by the God of the fire and hears him declare: "I am... the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. I have seen the affliction of my people... and I have heard their groaning and am come down to deliver them." God is showing Moses that the fire of his covenant faithfulness, of his compassionate concern was not the feeble, fickle flame that Moses may have imagined because of God's long delay in delivering his people. HIS fire had burned on, regarding and needing not human passion to feed it.

In 1965 the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, a fellowship stemming out of China Inland Mission, celebrated its centenary... Hudson Taylor built the structure of the China Inland Mission on God's faithfulness. He claimed: "There is a God! He has spoken in His word. He means all He has said, and will do all He has promised." One ground for this confidence was the text, "Have faith in God," which he interpreted rightly to read, "Hold God's faithfulness." He had confidence neither in his own faith in God, nor yet in the accumulated faith of hundreds or a thousand workers to sustain the work. A thousand people could have faith in some bridge and be proved wrong because the object of their faith was unable to fulfill their expectations. There had to adequate assurance that God would accept responsibility for the involvement of literal obedience to his command. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness," he has promised, "and all these things shall be added unto you." The decades of CIM's witness surely demonstrate continuing fire of God's faithfulness.