What does Tribe teach about burning bush?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At Tribe, the teaching on the burning bush starts with a simple observation about Moses: he was an eighty-year-old fugitive doing ordinary, unglamorous work when the bush caught his eye, and he had a choice about what to do with it. The bush was not blocking his path. He turned aside toward it, and the encounter with God waited on that decision. Brian Hunter has returned to this story more than once because he believes it tells us something true about how God operates. The bush is rarely where we expect it. It shows up inside the routine, the inconvenience, the pain, the disruption, and most of us walk past it because we are looking for something that does not feel like any of those things.
Brian has pressed on the Hebrew word for bush itself, pointing out that the word used in Exodus 3 describes a spiny, thorn-covered shrub, not ordinary shrubbery. That same word appears in only one other place in the Old Testament, a blessing in Deuteronomy 33 that speaks of "the favor of him who lived in the bush." That detail matters because it places God's clearest self-revelation inside something sharp and painful, not inside something comfortable. Brian says, "God often places clarity right in the midst of great pain," and the burning bush is where the Bible first makes that pattern visible. He has also been honest about the gap between what we want and what we are actually willing to accept: "We all want the burning bush. But few of us would like to skip the pain part."
The consistent invitation across these messages is to slow down enough to notice what God may be doing inside whatever is difficult or inconvenient right now, and then to move toward it rather than away from it. Moses turned aside. The disciples in Mark 6 had to do the same thing. In both cases the encounter was already present, but it was hidden inside something the person might reasonably have avoided. Brian does not treat every hard thing as God's design, and he has said plainly that conflating divine encounter with suffering caused by sickness or abuse would be a serious mistake. The question, as he frames it, is not whether God caused the hard thing but whether, in the middle of it, there is an opening worth stepping into.
Taught from Exodus 3:1-6 · Deuteronomy 33:13-16 · Exodus 3:1-12 · Mark 6:45-52 · Song of Solomon 5:2
“What if there is a miracle waiting for you from the Lord lurking just behind the veil of your disbelief?”
From Resisting the Rut
The passage taught · Exodus 3:1-12
1 Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God’s mountain, to Horeb.
2 Yahweh’s angel appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the middle of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
3 Moses said, “I will go now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.”
4 When Yahweh saw that he came over to see, God called to him out of the middle of the bush, and said, “Moses! Moses!” He said, “Here I am.”
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- August 26, 2024 Resisting the Rut Brian Hunter uses Moses at the burning bush and Jesus walking on water to show how God meets us in disruption, not routine, if we turn aside to look.
- March 11, 2024 The Burning Bush: Clarity in Complexity Brian Hunter explores how God places clarity inside pain, using Moses at the burning bush and the crown of thorns to show what to look for in hard times.
- March 10, 2024 The Burning Bush A Wyoming pastor explores Moses and the burning bush, connecting ancient thorns to the crown of Christ, and asking what clarity God hides inside our pain.
- October 16, 2023 Encounter in the Inconvenience A Wyoming congregation shares stories of how God meets people in life's most inconvenient moments, drawing on Moses, Job, and one another's testimonies.