I Am Come Down to Deliver Them

I asked a woman what she was actually watching for, and she had a very specific answer, and she was slightly embarrassed by how specific it was.

She said she was watching for a phone call, a letter, or somebody being willing to sit down with her.

Three mechanisms. She had been praying for six years and in her mind the answer, if it came, would arrive as one of those three, and she had been checking for them the way a person checks a lock.

I asked her what she would do if it came as none of the three, and she said she had not thought about that, and then she sat there for a while.

Everybody does this. A person praying about something for a long time develops a very short list of shapes the answer is allowed to have, and then spends years scanning for those and only those.

And what God says at the bush, when He finally speaks after four hundred years, is not on anybody's list.

The first thing He says about the answer

Read what He says at the bush, and read the first verb of it before anything else.

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large. (Exodus 3:8, King James Version)

I am come down.

That is the first thing. Before any strategy, before Moses, before a single plague, before anything anybody could call a plan. The answer to four hundred years is announced as a movement of God Himself.

And it is in the first person. He does not say I have arranged something. He does not say I will send a solution. He says I am come down, and everything else in the chapter follows from that sentence.

You have an answer that is described as somebody arriving rather than as something being arranged (Exodus 3:8), and that part belongs to the Holy Spirit, who makes that distinction land on a person who has been scanning for a mechanism.

And when the plan does arrive, look what the sign is

There is a moment a few verses later where Moses asks the obvious question, and the answer God gives is one of the strangest in Scripture.

Moses says who am I, and God says this.

And he said, Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. (Exodus 3:12)

Certainly I will be with thee. That is the answer to who am I, and it is not an answer to the question that was asked. Moses asked about himself and God answered about company.

And then the token He gives is a thing that will only be visible afterward. It is not a sign to act on. It is a promise to recognize later.

You are given company as the answer to a question about your own adequacy, and that is what God said at the bush rather than any reassurance about Moses (Exodus 3:12). That work is the Spirit's, and He is that company in somebody who has been asking the same question about themselves.

And Isaiah looks back at the whole exodus centuries later and describes it in a way that removes any doubt about who was doing it.

In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them. (Isaiah 63:9)

In all their affliction he was afflicted. That is a claim about God being in the trouble rather than observing it, and it is written about the four hundred years.

And the whole point of the New Testament's opening claim is the same one carried further. A name is given that means God with us, and it is given as the announcement rather than as a footnote.

You are dealing with a God whose announced name means He is with us, and Matthew puts that at the front of the whole account (Matthew 1:23), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a name into something a person can actually lean on.

What the list costs

I want to say what the short list of allowed answers actually does to a person, because it is not harmless.

It makes them blind in one direction. A person watching three doors is not watching the other eleven, and the answer that arrives through a door they were not watching frequently goes unrecognized for months.

And it makes the waiting worse. Every day that none of the three happens is registered as a day of nothing, and a person accumulates thousands of those, and the accumulation becomes the evidence they use about God.

And there is a third cost, and it is the heaviest. A list of mechanisms turns the whole matter into a transaction, and a transaction that never completes eventually stops feeling like a relationship at all.

You have been keeping accounts on the wrong ledger, and the answer at the bush was a Person coming down rather than a mechanism being supplied (Isaiah 63:9). The same Spirit is the one who moves a person off a list they did not know they were keeping.

And this belongs here plainly, because this category reaches people in real danger. Where the situation somebody is crying out about is dangerous right now, that is not for an article to answer. Tell a person today: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, somebody who can sit with you, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.