Encountering God: What the Bible Actually Says About Hearing From Him

Moses is not looking for God. He is at work, keeping his father-in-law’s flock on the back side of the desert, and something in the landscape refuses to behave.

A fire that will not burn out is the attention-getter, and that is all it is. Once Moses turns aside to look, it has done its job and the conversation starts — and what God opens with is not power.

Four verbs, every one of them personal. Seen. Heard. Know. Come down. None of that is the language of a distant deity reviewing a file. God had been paying attention the whole time his people assumed he was not, and the first thing he does with Moses is say so.

Then Moses asks the practical question — who do I say sent me? — and God answers with something stranger and better than a title.

Not a role. Not a résumé. A name, given to a man who was about to walk back into the country he had fled. Moses gets God himself as his credential, which is the only thing that would have been enough.

This is the part that reframes it. If you are waiting for your encounter with God to arrive as a burning bush, you may have had several already and filed them under something else.

Elijah is the case in point. He has just come off the biggest spiritual victory of his life and he is finished — frightened, exhausted, and asking God to let him die. God’s response is not a correction.

God lets him sleep, cooks for him, lets him sleep again, and cooks a second time — because the journey is too great for thee. There is no rebuke anywhere in it. For a man at the end of himself, the encounter was a nap and a hot meal, twice.

Isaiah’s encounter runs the other way — he sees the throne room, and it undoes him.

Seeing God clearly does produce that. But watch what happens next, because the order matters enormously and most of us stop reading at the woe.

Humbled, then healed, then sent — in that order, and with no gap between them. The very mouth Isaiah had just called unclean is the thing God touches and then commissions. He is not left on the floor to think about what he has done.

Put the three encounters together and they move the same three things every time.

• How you see God — personal, not distant. He has already seen, heard, and come down before you said anything.
• How you see yourself — humbled, but loved and healed rather than condemned. The woe is real; it is also not where the story stops.
• How you see your future — sent, not stuck. Every one of these men walked out of the encounter with something to do.

So you can stop auditioning for a burning bush. Some weeks the quiet does produce something dramatic. Far more often it looks like Elijah’s: you are tired, you rest, someone feeds you, and you can go on. That was God. It counted.

There is a practical test in here for the voice you think you are hearing. The Spirit tends to sound like the fruit of the Spirit — patience, kindness, joy, gentleness. Condemnation and shame do not come from him. If the quiet leaves you smaller and more certain you are a disappointment, that is not the God of Exodus 3, who led with seen, heard, known, come down.

So go back tomorrow expecting presence rather than fireworks. Bring the thing you are actually tired of. And pay attention to rest and provision when they arrive, because on the evidence of Scripture that is very often what an encounter looks like.