Here's the setting.  A desert.  Hot.  Surrounded by sheep that stink.  And like I said yesterday:  He was 80 years old when he saw the burning bush and approached it out of curiosity.  He was a nobody, expecting nothing from life.  He had no future.  No hope of anything better.  Nowhere to go.

In the middle of despair, loneliness, and depression, just when we think we are past our prime, sometimes God has to remind us that we aren't dead yet!  He can still use us.  From the moment Moses was placed in a basket in the bulrushes, God had a purpose for him.  It just took eighty years to get him ready for the job God had for him to do.

The first thing God did when He spoke from the burning bush was to explain the problem.  He told Moses that His people had been praying for years for Him to deliver them out of bondage, suffering, misery and oppression.  He then told Moses that the time had come to do that, and explained the plan.  Ending with these words:  "...therefore, I am going to send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt."

"Whoa!!!  We just met."  That's surely what Moses felt--because Moses began to reason with this Voice.  Began to explain why this was never going to happen.  To explain that God had mistakenly appeared to the wrong man.  The conversation went something like this:
Moses: "Who do you think I am anyway?  What makes you think I would be able to go to Pharaoh and tell him that I've come to take all of his slaves out of Egypt.  This is not a good plan."
God:  "I am going to be with you.  You are going to come back here and serve me on this mountain, here at Horab, after you have brought all my people out of Egypt."
Moses:  "Me??  What am I possibly going to say to them to get them to listen?  You think that if I tell them that the God of their fathers has sent me that they are going to listen?  I don't think so.  They are going to ask me what the name of this God is.  Then what am I going to tell them!!"
God:  "Say to them:  I AM THAT I AM.  I AM has sent you to them.  Tell them I have heard their prayers. and am going to answer them.  Listen to me Moses, they will listen to you.  Pharaoh won't, but I'll take care of that problem."
Moses:  "This is insane.  They won't believe me.  I can't even talk very well.  I'm not eloquent, I speak slow and my tongue gets tangled up.  I'm not the man you are looking for."  (Continued...)