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: Moses did not have to stop. The bush was not blocking his path. He chose to turn aside, and the text makes clear that the encounter with God waited on that decision. Brian Hunter has returned to this story more than once, and each time the same detail anchors everything: God placed one of the clearest moments of divine revelation inside something that most people would have walked past or backed away from. The burning bush was not a comfortable, convenient sign. It was a thorn bush, a word that appears in only one other place in the Old Testament, and it showed up in the middle of forty years of ordinary shepherd work for a man carrying a murder charge.
Brian teaches that this pattern is not incidental. God has a habit, as Brian says, of placing clarity right in the midst of great pain. The complexity, the disruption, the inconvenience is not a barrier to encountering God. It is frequently the location of the encounter. Brian says, "We all want the burning bush. But few of us would like to skip the pain part." That tension is honest and the teaching does not try to resolve it cheaply. Not every hard thing is sent by God, and Brian has been clear that conflating divine encounter with suffering caused by sickness or abuse would be a serious mistake. The question the teaching asks is narrower: when something disrupts your routine and your instinct is to avoid it, are you willing to turn aside and look?
And Brian is also careful to say that the encounter is never forced. In the Mark 6 story of Jesus walking on water, Jesus intended to pass the disciples by. He was not pressing himself on them. Just as Moses had to choose to turn aside toward the bush, the disciples had to move toward what frightened them before they encountered Jesus in it. Brian says, "We all want the burning bush, but very few of us are willing to see the burning bush in the midst of what we think of as a disruption." The invitation Tribe returns to again and again is that same willingness to stop, notice, and step closer to the thing you would rather avoid.
Taught from Exodus 3:1-6 · Deuteronomy 33:13-16 · Mark 6:45-52 · Song of Solomon 5:2 · Exodus 3:3
“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.