in.
The Symbolism of the Burning Bush.
" Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt." We must, like Moses, turn aside to discern the symbols which lie beneath the vision. The symbolism of the Burning Bush has been variously explained.
1. Some regard it as typical of the incarnation and the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow. The thorny bush represents the humiliation and degradation of the Son of God when He came into our world and assumed the like- ness of sinful flesh ; the flame that enveloped it is an emblem of the intensity of suffering which He endured in our room and
*■ Mn. Penn-Lewis, Face to Fau, 89. * H. Macmillao.
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stead from men and devils, and from the Father Himself ; while the faot that the bush was unconsumed shadows forth His triumph over all His sufferings — over death and the grave. In visionary form we have here pictured to us the altar, the victim, and the sacrifice of the great atonement.
2. But the Burning Bush has also been taken to represent the condition of the Church. It was exactly suited to the circum- stances of the children of Israel at the time. It was the true likeness of their sufferings in the furnace of affliction in Egypt. The thorny bush was a fit emblem of their character and position. As the plant was stunted and depressed by the ungenial character of its situation, creeping over the barren rock, scorched by the sun, and seldom visited by the kindly dew and rain and breeze, its stems producing thorns instead of graceful leaf and blossom- laden branches ; so the Hebrew slaves, in their dreary bondage, were morally and intellectually dwarfed, and developed, under the influence of these unfavourable circumstances, the baser and more abject aspects of their nature. The thorn in the wilderness recalls the primeval curse upon man ; and we have in the suffer- ings of Israel a repetition of the sufferings of our first parents after their expulsion from Paradise. The same cause which pro- duced the one produced the other. The thorns of Adam's lot were the very same as those that stung the Hebrews in Egypt. And, by God's appearance in the thorn bush, we have the great fact of redemption shadowed forth, that God Himself has gone with us into the wilderness to be the sharer of our doom while redeeming us from it. It is a striking thought that in the very thorn of man's curse appeared the shining Angel of the Covenant to bless him ; that out of the very wood of the thorn bush, which was the symbol of man's degradation, was constructed the tabernacle which was the symbol of his exaltation through the incarnation of the Son of God.
Thou art burning on, thou ancient tree,
With unabated flame; The fires of earth have beat on thee,
And thou art still the same: Thou art not lessened in degree,
Nor tarnished in thy name.
EXODUS III. 2 269
Thou hast two sides of thy life on earth;
One has in dust its share, — It blends with scenes of pain and dearth,
It touches eommon care : The other seeks a higher birth,
And branches arms of prayer.
Oh, Church of the Uving Lord of all,
Like Him to thee is given A common life with those that fall,
And an upper life in heaven; A being with the weak and small,
And a path where stars are driven.
Thy starlight's glow shall put out the fires
That check thine earthly way ; The burning of thy pure desires
Shall burn thy dross away, And in the love thy Christ inspires
Thou shalt endure for aye.^
3. Another aspect in which we may conaridar the parable of the Burning Bush is in the light it casts upon the nature of God. That light has been broadening and brightening from the time of Moses down even to our own age. Consider how God reveals Himself here, as the fire which burns, but does not consume.
(1) In the world of matter. — To the careless eye it seems that the fire of decay is for ever burning up and destroying the material things we see around us; but science teaches us that this is quite false, and that there is no such thing as destruction possible in God's universe. You may grind a stone to the finest powder and dissipate it to all the winds of heaven, but it is not in your power to annihilate the finest atom of it ; it is conceiv- ably possible to gather together all the infinitesimal fragments, when the weight would be found to be exactly what it was before its cohesion was interfered with. You may take solid iron and heat it till it becomes first soft as wax, then fluid like water, and next is changed into vapour; but by so doing you only alter its condition; you cannot destroy the least particle of it. The pool of water, when the sun has dried it all away, is not non-existent, it is only expanded into mist : it becomes part
1 G. Matheson, Sacred Songs, 138.
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of the cloud which anon will descend again upon the earth in the shape of rain. The tree which after standing for centuries slowly dies and crumbles beneath the withering finger of decay, though it disappears from the visible universe, is not really destroyed ; in the shape of carbon and silica and of various gases every particle of it is as certainly in the universe as ever it was, and will be worked up anew into flower and pebble and hving thing. And so it is with all that is to be found in God's creation. In his popular lecture on the burning of a candle, Faraday shows that when the candle has burnt to its socket and apparently been annihilated altogether, every particle of its constituent elements can be gathered together again and weighed and measured. ^ When Goethe makes Nature sing —