Later text
Acts 7:31BSB
When Moses saw it, he marveled at the sight. As he approached to look more closely, the voice of the Lord came to him:
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Acts 7:31BSB
When Moses saw it, he marveled at the sight. As he approached to look more closely, the voice of the Lord came to him:
Earlier text
Exodus 3:3-4BSB
So Moses thought, "I must go over and see this marvelous sight. Why is the bush not burning up?" When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called out to him from within the bush, "Moses, Moses!" "Here I am," he answered.
"When Moses saw it, he marveled at the sight. As he approached to look more closely, the voice of the Lord came to him" (Acts 7:31; Exodus 3:3-4). Stephen lingers on the burning bush because of where it stood — in the desert of Midian, holy ground far from Canaan and centuries before any temple. The God whom Stephen's accusers charged him with dishonoring met Moses in a thornbush in the wilderness. The theophany that draws Moses to look becomes the summons that sends him to deliver: divine presence and divine mission are one. Every such localized manifestation of the holy God among his people reaches toward the moment when the presence would take flesh and "tabernacle among us" (John 1:14) — the true and final meeting-place of God and man, whose glory Stephen will behold with open eyes as he dies.