Exodus 3: 1-6

Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” And he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.


Moses took a look. He knew that a bush could either burn or it could continue to grow. But here was a bush doing both. Boom! Off the beaten track for Moses.

Moses heard a voice calling him. He knew that either God had called him out of his path with emotional intensity, or He told him not to come near. That made as much sense as a bush that was on fire but not burned up. Boom!


Moses was turned towards God by these contradictions. They did not contradict reality, only what Moses believed about reality.


Atheistic people believe that we are merely atoms. They believe that this (look around you) is all there is. They sometimes lose faith in their position when they discover that this inevitably implies that there are no such things as:

• true absolute morality,

     (genocide isn't always wrong)

• substantial beauty,

     (the Grand Canyon is just rocks)

• genuine value,

     (people don't matter)

• eternal spirituality,

     (dying makes no difference, funerals are pointless)

• real love,

     (it's chemical imbalances in the brain, or self-interest)

• objective goodness,

     (because who cares what you do?)    

• dependable truths about justice and injustice,

     (all truth claims are just power plays)

• reliable hope, 

     (death is the end so nothing you do matters)

• satisfactory meaning,

    (it's all an accident; we're an unhappy juxtaposition of molecules)


The reason for this loss of faith is simple: working out of the premise that there is no God and no reason to believe in the things that we all believe in makes it seem strange that we still feel that life ought to involve morality, beauty, value, spirituality, love, goodness, justice, hope, meaning. I say it's an unsatisfactory premise. It is impossible to explain the human experience without reference to God. Unpalatable and unfashionable though it may be to say that God is real, and that He provides the existential and intellectual integration for human experiences, I am afraid to say that it is true. This means that, like Moses, we need to fear.