Power Through Fire Baptism

POWER THROUGH FIRE BAPTISM

Dr. D. K. Olukoya

I want to encourage you to read this chapter prayerfully especially if you are not satisfied with your present spiritual life and would want improvement. Exodus 3: 1-6: “Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro, his father in law, the priest of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb. And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses (God’s double call. In the book of Samuel, when God called Samuel it was, Samuel Samuel, a double call). And He said, “Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place where on thou standest is holy ground. Moreover He said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.”

We find one of the most important events in Scripture in the foregoing. The Bible has been divided into what Bible students call dispensations, which means different periods of time. This particular time signaled the beginning of what we call the dispensation of the law. It tells us about one man called Moses. People say a lot of things about the bush that refused to be consumed, because in the desert you find a lot of dry leaves, dry trees, cobwebs, bird nests and all kinds of things that are inflammable. These things were in that bush while the fire was on, yet it was not consumed. They were good materials for fire yet the fire rejected the bush and its contents as its own fuel supply. The fuel that supplied the energy of the fire was not from that bush, the fire sustained itself. So, it was not an ordinary fire. The focus of the fire was on Moses. Moses saw it, turned aside and there he received his call. And the Bible tells us that of all the prophets, there was none like Moses who spoke to God face to face. He was a very important man of God. If you read his history you will find out that even the devil tried to kill him at a young age just as the devil tried to kill Jesus at a young age. Sometimes at MFM, when we say, “Pray against the spirit of Herod,” many people don’t understand what we mean. The spirit of Herod is the spirit that kills good things in infancy. Herod was the man who killed all babies below two years old because he wanted to kill Jesus. The devil tried to kill Moses by the side of the water where they put him but God prevented that. The devil tries to kill many people because he knows what God would do with their lives.

Moses went to the best university in the world because Egypt was the best centre of knowledge in the world at that time. He was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He lived in the palace of the king.

The incident we are describing now happened at Mount Horeb. Horeb means a waste or a wilderness. All men of God must pass through the wilderness. Moses passed through his own wilderness. Elijah did as well. John the Baptist and even Jesus our Lord passed through their own wilderness. Jesus was there for 40 days and 40 nights. All holy men of God and anybody at all who wants to be useful to God must get to that place in his life, the place where fire is burning the bush and the bush is not consumed. Moses died at the age of 120 years. He spent his first 40 years in Egypt. It ended in disaster because he ended up as a murderer. Why? Because he tried to use his own power, he tried to use the arm of flesh which we know would always fail. He ended up as a murderer. He ran away from Egypt at the age of 40 to a place called Midian and there he did the kind of job that Egyptians hate so much; the dirty job of a shepherd which a graduate should not do. He did not know that God was teaching him the principle of shepherding,for a time was coming when he would lead three million people in the wilderness, just like Peter was first taught how to catch fish and then he learnt how to catch men.