Acts 7:23-43

²³“ One day when Moses was about forty years old, he decided that he would go and see his fellow Israelis. So he went to the place where they worked.

²⁴He saw an Egyptian beating one of the Israels. So he went over to help MTY the Israeli man who was being hurt/beat {whom the Egyptian was hurting/beating}, and he ◄got revenge on/paid back► the Israeli man by killing the Egyptian who was hurting/beating him.

²⁵Moses was thinking that his fellow Israelis would understand that God had sent him to free them from being slaves. But they did not understand that.

²⁶The next day, Moses saw two Israeli men fighting each other. He tried to make them stop fighting by saying to them, ‘Men, you two are fellow Israelis! So ◄stop hurting each other!/why are you hurting each other?► RHQ’

²⁷But the man who was injuring the other man pushed Moses away and said to him, ‘◄No one appointed you (sg) to rule and judge us (exc)!/Do you (sg) think someone appointed you (sg) to rule and judge us (exc)?► RHQ

²⁸Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’

²⁹When Moses heard that, he thought to himself, ‘Obviously, people know what I have done, and someone will kill me.’ He was afraid, so he fled from Egypt to Midian land. He lived there for some years. He got married, and he and his wife had two sons.”

³⁰“ One day forty years later, the Lord God appeared as an angel to Moses. He appeared in a bush that was burning in the desert near Sinai Mountain.

³¹When Moses saw that, he was greatly surprised, because the bush was not burning up. As he went over to look more closely, he heard the Lord God say to him,

³²‘I am the God whom your ancestors worshipped. I am the God that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob worship.’ Moses was so afraid that he began to shake. He was afraid to look at the bush any longer.

³³Then the Lord God said to him, ‘Take your sandals off to show that you(sg) revere me. Because I am here, the place where you are standing is holy/sacred.

³⁴I have surely seen how the people of Egypt are continually causing my people to suffer. I have heard my people when they groan because those people continually oppress them. So I have come down to rescue them from Egypt. Now get ready, because I am going to send you back to Egypt to do that.’ ”

³⁵“This Moses is the one who had tried to help our Israeli people, but whom they rejected by saying, ‘No one RHQ appointed you to rule and judge us!’ Moses is the one whom God himself sent to rule them and to free them from being slaves. He is the one whom an angel in the bush commanded to do that.

³⁶Moses is the one who led our ancestors out from Egypt. He did many kinds of miracles in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and during the forty years that the Israelite people lived in the desert.

³⁷This Moses is the one who said to the Israelite people, ‘God will appoint a prophet for you from among your own people. He will speak words from God, just like I speak his words to you.’

³⁸This man Moses was our people's leader when they gathered together in the desert. It is Moses to whom God sent the angel on Mount Sinai to give him our laws, and he was the one who told our other ancestors what the angel had said. He was the one who received from God words that tell us how to live eternally, and Moses passed them on to us.”

³⁹“ However, our ancestors did not want to obey Moses. Instead, while he was still on the mountain, they rejected him as their leader and decided that they wanted to return to Egypt.

⁴⁰So they told his older brother Aaron, ‘Make idols for us who will be our gods to lead us back to Egypt! As for that fellow Moses who led us out of Egypt we (exc) do not know what has happened to him!’

⁴¹So, they made out of gold an image that looked like a calf. Then they sacrificed animals and offered other things to honor that idol, and they sang and danced to honor the idol that they themselves had made.

⁴²So God rejected them. He abandoned them to worship the sun, moon and stars in the sky. This agrees with the words that one of the prophets wrote that God said, You Israelite people MTY, when you repeatedly killed animals and offered them as sacrifices during those forty years that you were in the desert, ◄you most certainly were not offering them to me!/what makes you think that you were offering them to me?► RHQ

⁴³On the contrary, you carried with you from place to place the tent that contained the idol representing the god Molech that you worshipped. You also carried with you the image of the star called Rephan. Those were idols that you had made, and you worshipped them instead of me. So I will cause you to be taken away { people to take you} from your own country. You will be taken { They will take you} far from your homes to regions even farther than Babylon.”