Deep study
Exodus to Deuteronomy - the burning bush, the exodus, and the man who stood in the gap
Moses is the towering mediator of the Old Testament - and at every turn he points beyond himself to a greater Deliverer.
Moses' life falls into three forty-year movements: forty years a prince in Pharaoh's house, forty years a shepherd in Midian, and forty years a leader in the wilderness. The middle stretch matters. The man who tried to deliver Israel by his own hand (killing an Egyptian) had to be emptied of self-confidence in the obscurity of the desert before God could use him. God often prepares His servants in hidden places.
At the burning bush (Exodus 3) Moses asks who he should say has sent him. God answers, I AM WHO I AM (ehyeh asher ehyeh), and reveals His covenant name, YHWH. The name speaks of One who simply is - self-existent, dependent on nothing, eternally present. Before Moses is given a task, he is given a vision of God. The ground is holy not because of the place but because of the Presence.
Centuries later Jesus would take that exact name on His lips: before Abraham was, I AM (John 8:58). The Jews picked up stones, because they understood He was claiming to be the God of the bush.
The tenth plague falls on every house, but those marked by the blood of a lamb on their doorposts are passed over (Exodus 12). Israel is not spared because they are better, but because they are under the blood. Redemption comes by substitution: a lamb dies so the firstborn may live. Paul says it plainly - Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7) - and John the Baptist points and says, Behold, the Lamb of God (John 1:29).
After the golden calf, Moses stands between a holy God and a sinful people. He pleads, and even offers himself: blot me out of your book (Exodus 32:32). On the mountain he asks to see God's glory and is shown God's goodness - merciful and gracious, slow to anger (Exodus 34:6). Moses' shining face testifies that to meet with God is to be changed; Paul says we behold that same glory, unveiled, in Christ (2 Corinthians 3:12-18).
The ten plagues are not random disasters but a targeted dismantling of Egypt's gods. The LORD says, on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments (Exodus 12:12): the Nile that Egypt worshipped turns to blood, the sun is blotted out by darkness, and the final blow falls on the firstborn - including Pharaoh's son, himself reckoned divine. Through it all runs a refrain of purpose: that you may know that there is none like the LORD our God (Exodus 8:10). The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is described both ways - Pharaoh hardens his own heart, and God hardens it - a sobering picture of judicial hardening, in which God gives a defiant man over to the very stubbornness he has chosen. The exodus is, at bottom, a contest over who is truly Lord.
At Sinai God gives the Law - but grace comes first. The Ten Commandments open not with a demand but with redemption already accomplished: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 20:2). Israel is not saved by keeping the Law; they are given the Law because they have been saved, to shape a redeemed people for life with a holy God. Then comes the tabernacle, built to an exact pattern shown on the mountain (Hebrews 8:5), so that the God of the burning bush might dwell in the midst of His people. The whole system - altar, blood, priesthood, mercy seat - is a tutor pointing forward, a shadow of the good things to come whose substance belongs to Christ (Hebrews 10:1).
The wilderness is a long story of grumbling met by mercy. When venomous snakes bite the people, God tells Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole; all who look at it live (Numbers 21:8-9) - and Jesus claims this as a picture of His cross: as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up (John 3:14). Paul says the rock that gave them water was Christ, who followed them (1 Corinthians 10:4). Yet the mediator himself stumbles: at Meribah, told to speak to the rock, an angry Moses strikes it twice and seizes a fraction of the glory, and for misrepresenting God's holiness he is barred from the Promised Land (Numbers 20:12). Even the greatest mediator of the old covenant falls short - and so points to the need for a flawless one.
Moses promised a prophet like me whom you shall heed (Deuteronomy 18:15). Hebrews says Moses was faithful as a servant in God's house, but Christ as a Son over it (Hebrews 3:5-6). Jesus is the greater Mediator (1 Timothy 2:5), the true Passover Lamb, and the One who accomplishes a greater exodus - which is exactly the word Luke uses (exodos) for His death at the Transfiguration (Luke 9:31).
The story comes full circle at the end. The redeemed in glory stand beside a sea of glass and sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb (Revelation 15:3) - the two great deliverances joined in one anthem. And the plagues that once fell on Egypt echo through Revelation's judgments, while the blood of the Lamb still marks out the people of God as surely as the doorposts once were marked.