“In the third month from the very day the Israelites left the land of Egypt, they came to the Sinai Wilderness. They traveled from Rephidim, came to the Sinai Wilderness, and camped in the wilderness. Israel camped there in front of the mountain.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Here we come at last to a new leg of our journey through Exodus. Everything we have so far encountered has been leading here. No, we are not yet to the Promised Land (and we won’t actually get there on this journey; as far as distance from Egypt goes, this is as far as we’ll get), but we are at the next place where God will reveal Himself to the people in a significant way. More importantly than that, God finally lets the people in on what He is planning with them, on why He did all of this in the first place. We will walk through all of this in the days and weeks ahead of us, but here at the start we encounter something important that I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss. God reveals His character here in a way that mattered to Israel, but which matters even more to us. Let me tell you why.

I want you to think back with me for just a minute to when this whole adventure started. The story itself starts way back with the oppression of Israel by Egypt and the birth of Moses. But the first eighty years of his life are just prelude. This particular adventure started when Moses was minding his own business, following his sheep through the wilderness of Mount Horeb. When a couple of sheep wandered away from the flock and he went to go after them, suddenly, he saw a bush that was on fire, but wasn’t actually burning. (As a side note, we should probably call it the “fiery bush” instead of the “burning bush” given the fact that it wasn’t burning, but I doubt the name change will take.)

When Moses goes over to investigate this thing he had never seen before, God spoke to him from out of the bush. And because people then apparently had a category for talking bushes, Moses didn’t completely lose his mind, but stayed and listened to what God had to say. As it turns out, God had some pretty important things to say. He was calling Moses to go back to Egypt and lead his people Israel from out of their bondage as slaves to Pharaoh.

Well, this was a task beyond which Moses was capable of conceiving at all, let alone how he was possibly going to manage such a thing. Besides, doing this kind of work was something done by people who were famous or powerful or at least righteous. But Moses had a past. Now, after 40 years living in obscurity, he was a nobody doing nothing of any significance. Sure, it may have mattered to him and his family, but that was about it. God would be better choosing someone who was really up to the task, someone who was worthy of such an honor as this from the outset. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and that I should bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Moses asked.

God’s response in the moment is interesting. There were a lot of things He could have said as the first thing He said in response to Moses’ objection. What He chooses is this: “I will certainly be with you, and this will be the sign to you that I am the one who sent you: when you bring the people out of Egypt, you will all worship God at this mountain.”

The whole, “I will certainly be with you” part was nice and encouraging, but as far as signs go, this one seemed pretty weird. Couldn’t He go ahead and do something miraculous and obvious? But no, God said they were going to worship Him at the mountain where this whole exchange was taking place. When that happened, then Moses would know for sure that He was behind this whole thing. Now, God would eventually give in and give Moses some more miraculous signs that he could take to the people in order to convince them, but this was the first and most important sign.

Well, what did we just read at the beginning of this post? “In the third month from the very day the Israelites left the land of Egypt, they came to the Sinai Wilderness.” Guess where the Sinai Wilderness was. Well, as a matter of archaeological specificity, we’re not totally sure, but the mountain they camped in front of was called Mount Horeb. In other words, the promise God gave to Moses as a sign that He was really the one behind this whole journey was now fulfilled. In other words, God kept His promise.

I don’t know how much this mattered to Israel. We don’t have any evidence of Moses’ sharing this promised sign with them. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t, but we don’t know. The text never tells us. It could be that Moses kept this sign to himself, and its fulfillment here is what finally gave him the confidence that God was with him 100%. From the standpoint of revealing God’s character, though, this promise fulfillment means a great deal to us. What this promise fulfillment reveals is that we serve a God who keeps His promises.

God makes a lot of promises that are recorded in the Scriptures. And some of them – many even – we see fulfilled later on in the text. What we are reading about here as we get started on Exodus 19 is not a one-off event. It’s not like God kept this one, but then we don’t really see any evidence of His being a promise-fulfilling God after this. He does it here, and He goes on to do it again and again and again over the course of the next 1500 years or so of recorded history covered by the various texts spanning from Exodus through Revelation. (He fulfills promises in Genesis too, of course, but we’re in Exodus so I started from there.)

But while there are a lot of promises God makes and then we see Him fulfill in the context of the text of the Scriptures, there are a bunch we don’t see fulfilled. The reason for this is not that these are the exceptions to His promise-fulfilling character, but rather that we are still waiting on their fulfillment. Two thousand years is a long time to wait for a promise to be fulfilled, but God’s clearly established character of being a promise-fulfilling God gives us the hopeful confidence that He will yet fulfill these.

That’s very good news, because a whole bunch of these yet-to-be-fulfilled promises are pretty powerful. They include things like our forgiveness from sin and the restoration of creation and eternal life in God’s kingdom. They include His promises to be with us always, to one day bring us to be with Him in person again, and to make all things new so that all the pain and anguish and frustration of life in a broken world will be wiped away and replaced with unending joy and righteousness. There are promises that if we will seek Him out in prayer from the midst of our anxieties, He will replace our fears with a peace that passes all understanding. Like I said, these are pretty powerful promises. They are pretty powerful promises that we can live our lives with confidence in their eventual fulfillment in our favor because we are serving a promise-fulfilling God.

Spend some time this coming weekend reviewing the yet-to-be-fulfilled promises of God in the Scriptures. Read about the things God has planned for you in Christ. Study all of this and be refreshed and encouraged in your spirit to keep following Him with faithfulness and courage. He’s promised to have your back. You can count on the fact that He will.