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The God who sees—Exodus 3:7

In Genesis 16:13, Hagar called the Lord, “the God who sees.” The same God continued to see, watching over his people.

Verbs of seeing and hearing are common in the Bible, but the emphatic exchange of sight in Exodus 2:24—3:7 might be significant:

  • God hears and sees his people’s suffering (2:24-25)
  • Moses turns to see God’s glory in the thorny bush (3:2-3)
  • God sees Moses turn aside (3:4)
  • Moses fears to behold God (3:6)
  • God notes that he has seen and heard his people’s need (3:7)

God seeing and hearing his people’s need (3:7, 9) frames God’s promise of what he will do, bringing them to a good land (3:8).

Because the Lord knows his people’s sufferings, he has come down to deliver them from their oppressors (3:8). Israelite hearers were familiar with the Lord “coming down” to see and therefore overthrow human arrogance (Gen 11:5). Those who heard the exodus stories repeatedly also knew of the glory when God would come down on Sinai (Exod 19:20). God “coming down” was therefore no small matter—at least to those who believed that this God, who seemed to have done little against the mighty Egyptian empire so far, was really stronger than the might of that empire and its apparently powerful gods. Oppressing other people made in God’s image is always a bad idea, but it’s especially a bad idea when those people are in a covenant relationship with the God who watches over them.

(For other posts on Exodus, see http://www.craigkeener.org/category/old-testament/exodus/.)

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Is God or an angel speaking in Exodus 3:2-6?

The angel of the LORD appears to Jacob in a dream (Gen 31:11), calls to Abraham from heaven (22:11, 15), and appears directly to Hagar (16:7-11; though calling to her from heaven in 21:17). Here he appears to Moses in a flaming bush (Exod 3:2), yet Moses apparently sees only the bush burning, not an angel, until God speaks to him from the bush (3:3-4).

This is not the last occasion on which the angel of the Lord will act. The angel of God acts to protect Israel, moving the cloud to obstruct the pursuing army, in 14:19. In some passages, the angel speaks as if God, as apparently here (3:2-4; cf. Gen 16:10; 21:17-18; 22:11-12, 15-17; 31:11-13; Judg 2:1), whether as God’s agent (cf. Gen 22:16?) or because God’s name was in him (Exod 23:20-21). Some who saw the Lord’s angel also feared that they had seen God (Judg 6:22; 13:21-22; cf. Gen 32:30).

In any case, there should not be too much surprise at this point that the one speaking to Moses is the God of his ancestors (Exod 3:6) whose stories occupy much of our current Book of Genesis. Yet Moses hides his face lest he gaze on the LORD (3:6); he knows that no one can see God’s face (besides references above, see Exod 33:20). Moses’s fear here is quite different from his eagerness to see God’s glory in Exod 33:18, a request that the Lord grants albeit without showing Moses his face (33:20, 23; despite the idiom in Exod 33:11; Deut 34:10).

(For other posts on Exodus, see http://www.craigkeener.org/category/old-testament/exodus/.)