The Better Prophet

We have our series continuing this morning on the portraits of the Messiah, the Old Testament expectations of the king of Christmas. Two weeks ago, we dealt with Abraham as we looked at the covenant of grace that was established with him, which was signified in that incredible oath that God would not let anything interrupt or interfere with His accomplishment of making a people for Himself and using that people to bless the whole world. And we saw that, obviously, fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We read about that in Galatians. This morning, we're going to be looking at the life, the portrait of Moses, and we're going to be reflecting on how Jesus is seen in the life of Moses.

And we're gonna begin by reading the end of Moses' life. So this morning, we're looking at Deuteronomy 34, the very last chapter of that book, and we read about the death of Moses in this chapter. So let's turn to Deuteronomy 34 and we begin with verse one. Then Moses went up from the Plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the lands of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb and the plain, that is the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar.

And the Lord said to him, "This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. I will give it to your offspring. I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there." So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And He, the Lord, buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth Peor, but no one knows the place of his burial to this day.

Moses was 120 years old when he died. His eye was undimmed and his vigour unabated. And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the Plains of Moab thirty days. Then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended. And Joshua, the son of Nun, was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him.

So the people of Israel obeyed him and did as the Lord had commanded Moses. And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. None like him for all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of Israel. This is the word of the Lord. We know the story of Moses, don't we?

You don't even have to be a Christian, really, to know of the man who was this great prophet, this great leader of the people of Israel. Born in Egypt, Moses was raised by the daughter of Pharaoh, who had taken pity on an abandoned Hebrew baby. As an adult, after an impulsive murder, Moses flees east, where he begins a life as a shepherd and stumbles onto the forgotten God, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He finds this God in the form of a burning bush. Moses reluctantly agrees to return to Egypt to demand the Israelites' release from their slavery.

Moses manages to lead Israel out in response to God's powerful saving power. Each event in the journey from Egypt to Mount Sinai, where God gives His law to the Israelites, propels Moses further into the roles of prophet, priest, and king, prophet, priest, and ruler of Israel. Moses' most heroic virtue, according to the Bible, is his steadfast obedience to God. It might be said that there was a passive quality that permeated each of the great miracles that Moses was involved with. Ten plagues struck Egypt.

How? Simply by Moses appearing in Pharaoh's court and requesting the release of the Israelites. Moses parts the waters of the Red Sea merely by stretching out his arms and holding his staff above the waters. Later, the beleaguered Israelites defeat a mighty army when Moses simply holds up his raised hands over the battlefield. And even then, he can't do that for very long and he needs two people to hold up those arms.

Moses himself, however, is far from a passive or reticent personality. Moses is an emotional man. Yet his greatness lies not in any self-assertion, but in simple obedience to God. And yet, Moses is such a compelling figure for us to hear about, to reflect on because Moses possesses real human faults. Moses is impulsive.

Moses is passionate. Moses, at times, doubts. For example, we see this passionate impulsiveness when he descends from Mount Sinai, and Moses knows ahead of time because God has warned him that the people will be found worshipping an idol, a golden calf. Upon seeing this scene, Moses angrily breaks the stone tablets inscribed with the law of God. God seems to value this passionate response.

That guttural response is regarded by God as something true and good. In response to that, Moses prays with a sense of urgency, unafraid to ask God to refrain from divine retribution. In fact, being so willing as to take the blame for his people's actions on himself. His earnest attention and his mediatorial urgency to the foolishness of Israel and to God's demands earns Moses the opportunity to go up the Mountain of Sinai again, and this time, to see the face of God. Yet his passion becomes his undoing.

God commands Moses, at one point, to produce from the rock some water to sustain the people in the wilderness. Irritated with another case of the people's complaining, Moses famously hits the rock instead of speaking simply to the rock. And we are told that this act of negligence, this act of disobedience is what causes God to say to Moses, "You will not enter into the promised land." And that is what leads us to this final chapter in Deuteronomy, this final scene of Moses. So in today's passage, we see the end of this great life.

And there are three reflections I wanna share this morning. Firstly, we see the humility of a heart gripped by the gospel. The man who had led a fledgling nation of slaves through deserts, mountain ranges, and a big blue sea, the man who commanded armies, established trade with kings, sat as a supreme court in legal matters, and mediated the word of God as a pastor and a preacher, the man Moses is a colossus among biblical leaders. And yet, despite all of these things, the Bible holds out eminently as the sign of his greatness: his humility. Numbers 12 verse 3 states, "Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth."

Moses presents us with a picture of humanity mixed with deep humility and genuine godliness. But Moses is great for us to look at and to reflect on because in him, we see the mixture of flawed human nature, but also tremendous potential. The thing is about Moses that I love is Moses never believed his own press reports. He never got lost in his own track record because he knew that it wasn't his track record. He stayed humble.

And I can't help but think that this humility came from a gospel perspective, a perspective that we will do very well to remember. Moses was a man keenly aware of his own inability. And we see that famously in the early parts of Exodus, where he was very honest about his ability to speak publicly. But he also resisted the call to rule, to be a king, to be a nation builder. He was keen to get others involved, famously, leading seventy elders to oversee the nation of Israel as well.

He knew his past mistakes. He recognised the death of an Egyptian at his hands, his unwillingness to circumcise his own children, his direct disobedience at Meribah to God's commands regarding the water from the rock. Remember, Moses wrote these words down of himself. This was his own account of Exodus. And despite his brokenness and sin, God remained faithful to Moses, and this is what Moses knew.

Exodus 33 verse 11 beautifully sums this up. It says, "The Lord would speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks with his friend." Like old friends, Moses and God spoke as they co-led Israel. As you work through the story of Exodus, you see a God who rescues. He rescues a group desperately in need of rescuing.

He calls this group Israel, His treasured possession. But He also, in the story of Exodus, rescues one particular man from self-destruction, and that is Moses. And this is the first point: this is the God of the gospel. This is the good news that we receive when we put our faith in Jesus Christ, that we, like Moses, are more loved and treasured than we dared to think is possible, even whilst we realise at one point that we are more flawed and broken than we ever dared to imagine to be true. Charles Swindle writes that the story of Moses reveals to us that God is able to take your life with your heartache, all your pain, all of your regret, all of the missed opportunities, and to use all of that for His glory.

And I believe that this tremendous amount of grace that Moses experienced gave him an incredible perspective. A perspective that only comes from understanding who you are in the gospel. That at one terrible moment, you realise that you were a desperately lost sinner, awaiting the judgment of a holy and righteous God, yet forgiven and accepted simply by God's grace. Why was Moses so humble? Was it because he was raised to be a humble person?

No. He was raised in the palaces of a king. Was it because he didn't have any gifts? No. He was a leader.

Why was Moses humble? Because he knew who God was and he knew who he was in light of God. When Moses comes to the end of his time on earth in chapter 34 of Deuteronomy, we see the extent of this humility. God says in chapter 32, two chapters earlier, "Moses, it's time. I'm gonna take you up the mountain and you are gonna die."

That's as simple as God says to Moses. It's time. Moses, we're told, goes and he climbs that mountain after having said his goodbyes to the people. And we find him climbing that mountain without an ounce of self-pity. Moses knows that it's time and he's okay with that.

For us as Christians, there's an aspect to living that requires a whole lot of trust. But this is also the case when it comes to dying. Whether you are young or whether you are old, we trust that God knows best when and how we will pass away. This is actually fundamentally why Christians stand opposed to euthanasia or abortion because God knows and God tells and God leads sovereignly. God is in control over life and therefore, there is no need to be anxious about how that life ends.

Because this is the hope, even in those final moments, God is with us. He is present right to the end. God was with Moses in his living, and yes, in his dying. If you look at this chapter in these verses, you find that Moses is the only one in the Bible that God buried personally. Verse six says, "And He, God, buried him in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth Peor."

What we see is that Moses, in his humility, has a heart consecrated to God. A heart handed over in submission to His Lord and His Saviour. And Moses, up until the end, lived under the direction and the leading of God every single day, every single hour. Hearing and knowing the word of God and applying it and living it out personally. For me, as a pastor, as a leader, it challenges me again and again to return to the word of God myself.

To not simply speak the truth and leave it out there, but to live it myself. I am challenged to reflect often on the will of God, to consecrate my life to God as a living sacrifice to Him. Knowing who God is leads to humility. The Bible says that pride is the beginning of sin. And if pride is the beginning of sin, then I wanna tell you that humility is the beginning of righteousness.

So that's the first point we see: a heart humbled in view of the gospel. The second thing is we see a God who loves us personally. In verse seven, it says that Moses was 120 years old when he died, and yet his eyes were not weak. His vigour was not diminished. In other words, Moses had the opportunity to step into the promised land.

He could have probably lived another forty years in the promised land. In a moment of weakness and anger, he had broken God's word. He had dragged the holiness of God through the mud. The same God whose words he wrote down, the words of Leviticus 19 that we read this morning: "I am the Lord. Be holy as I am holy."

And as prophet and representative of this holy God, Moses must bear the punishment. We do know, however, from the book of Deuteronomy that Moses asked God three times to change that ruling over his life. Moses really wanted to see the promised land. He asked three times for God not to go through with His decision. But after three appeals, Moses accepts his fate.

God is righteous. God's judgment is fair. But here's the great encouragement: God doesn't stay angry with Moses. In fact, the relationship has been reconciled immediately. After the incident at Meribah and the rock, another thirty-nine years would go by of Moses leading the people, of Moses speaking on God's behalf, of Moses being able to see and communicate with God personally. The relationship doesn't end, yet God's decision remains unchanged.

What we see from this is the beautiful character of the God we serve. When it was time for Israel to move into the promised land, when Moses had spent those thirty-nine years safely bringing them to the destination at the edge of the promised land, God tells Moses to climb up to Mount Nebo. And there, God shows Moses the view of the promised land. Verse one says, "God showed him all the land," and it gives us a description from Gilead in the East, right up to Dan in the North, which is now near Lebanon, to Ephraim and Manasseh in the East and towards the Mediterranean Sea, and down all the way to Judah and Simeon. God shows all the land to Moses, we are told.

A few years ago, twelve years in fact, I was able to go to Israel and I climbed Mount Nebo. It's down the south. It's in modern-day Jordan now. But from Mount Nebo, you have a view of the ancient city of Jericho, which exists today. From this mountain, and it was a tough climb to get up there, you see a lot, but I can tell you, you don't see all the land.

You can't see all the way up to Dan, up to the northern parts of Israel. So what was happening when Moses climbed that mountain and was able to see all the land? I believe God gave Moses supernatural sight. Moses was given a bird's eye view of the promised land to see the lushness in comparison to the wilderness desert, to see the land flowing with milk and with honey. It was God granting an old friend his final wish.

It was as though God was saying, "There it is, Moses. This is what your work for me has produced." God personally grants Moses a moment the privilege of seeing his work finished. For me, that is just such a personal and special insight into the Father heart of God. Although God moves to orchestrate history, although God raises up and pulls down leaders, He gives victory to nations and He gives loss to others.

Although God can take a bunch of slaves and forge them into a nation, this God never forsakes the individual whom He loves. The one that He has set His heart upon. We see God granting an old man peace. Now Moses could pass away, satisfied that his work was complete, that the people he had grown to love would be okay. Friends, the God we worship is not a God that simply deals with us as a church, with us as a nation.

Although He is so big, He never forsakes His child. He cannot. It's not in His nature to forget. Isaiah 49 verse 15, God says, "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast? Can a mother have no compassion on the child that she has born? Even if she was to forget?

I will never forget you. I have engraved you on the palm of my hand." God grants Moses peace before he passes away and the Israelites, when they realise that Moses was dead, mourn for him for thirty days before they're ready to pack up and cross the Jordan. We see a God who loves us personally. And then, thirdly and finally, even in the death of Moses, we find an obituary that leads us to Jesus.

Deuteronomy ends in these verses, verses 10 to 12, and it reads, "There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him, for all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel." What this is saying is that Moses is one of a kind. So we can relate to the flaws, we can relate to the weakness, but we can't relate to his calling. We are not Moses. Moses was a prophet, a priest and a king.

There will only ever be one Moses. That is what this passage is telling us. And yet, these words are haunting. These words are written with the presumption that people will be tempted to make comparisons to those who will follow. It's written so that the people living in the time of Elijah will go, "Surely Elijah was a great prophet."

But Deuteronomy 34 says there's none greater than Moses. Surely, Ezekiel, in the time of the exile, he was a great prophet. There was no prophet greater than Moses. And yet Moses himself knows something more than everyone else. As the greatest prophet, he has the deepest prophetic insight to know that someone greater must come after him.

In one of the oldest prophecies of the Messiah in the Bible, Moses says to Israel in Deuteronomy 18 verse 15, "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him." When we reach the New Testament, there are some people who start making the connections. They claim that this prophet has arrived. Specifically, in the gospel account of John, after Jesus had fed 5,000 people, a miracle of astounding power.

John 6 verse 14 records this. After the people saw this miraculous sign that Jesus did, they began to say, "Surely, this is the prophet who is to come into the world." The people remember the ultimate prophet of God, a greater prophet, one better than Moses who was to come. Now, if you read the gospel accounts of Jesus, and I would say, particularly, Matthew, but also the gospel of John, these two writers hold up Jesus next to Moses a lot. Listen to these amazing points of similarity that are made in their accounts.

Matthew begins to say that just as there were four hundred years of silence before God had sent Moses to free Israel from their slavery in Egypt, so there had been four hundred years of silence before God sent Jesus to free Israel from their slavery to sin and death. Four hundred years before Moses, four hundred years before Jesus. We are showing that both Jesus and Moses were utterly humble to the will of God. Both are shown to have rejected the possibility of becoming rulers in their own right. Moses, raised as a son in the royal family, could have enjoyed a lavish lifestyle as a powerful ruler.

Hebrews 11 verse 24 tells us he chose differently. Likewise, we know that Satan offered Jesus to rule over all the kingdoms of the world, Matthew 4, but that Jesus rejected that offer and chose to offer his life instead for his people. Both knew and spoke to God face to face. Both had their faces shine with the glory of heaven at one time. Moses at Mount Sinai, where he saw the glory of God, and Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.

Both gave the people bread from heaven. That is the point in John 6 where the people start saying, "Well, this is maybe the prophet." Remember the story of the manna that falls in Moses' time? Jesus miraculously feeding 5,000 people. That is connected to the same idea.

And just as Moses would lift the bronze serpent on a stake in the wilderness to heal people from their fatal wound from snake bites, John 12 tells us, so Jesus would be lifted on the cross to heal people from their sin. Time and time again, Jesus is held up as the better Moses. But here is the all-defining difference. Jesus is shown to have been the unique deliverer, the greater prophet, speaking the very words of God. How?

Through His resurrection. Moses dies. Moses is buried. In Jesus, we come to know the Son of God, who died as Saviour, but was raised back to life as God. This is what Hebrews 3 gets at when it says, "Consider this, the apostle and the high priest of our confession, who was faithful to Him who appointed Him, just as Moses was also faithful in all God's house.

For Jesus, it says, has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses. As much more glory as the builder of a house has more honour than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. Now Moses was faithful, it says, in all God's house as a servant to testify to the things that were spoken about later, but Christ is faithful over God's house as a Son. In other words, the book of Hebrews speaks of Jesus being a better Moses because whilst Moses was able to lead his people to the promised land, he could never enter it because of his own sin.

Meanwhile, Jesus dies, but not for His sin, for ours. And the fact that it was not His sin, but ours, means that He is raised back to life. Jesus doesn't die forever. He rises from the dead in a physical body. He ascends to heaven and He enters what the book of Hebrews in chapter 4 will tell us is the promised land, the kingdom of God.

His life becomes the billboard of something that all believers will experience because He is the prototype. He is the first fruit. And this is our greatest hope as Christians, that the God who has humbled us by the grip of the gospel, the God who blesses us with His sheer grace, the God who never forsakes the ones, the children that He has put His heart on. This God has rescued us through our very own Exodus, through Jesus Christ, the coming King of Christmas. And this Jesus leads us from our sin, leads us from death into the promised land with us.

We enter into a home that is flowing with milk and honey, a kingdom of peace ruled by the God who can overpower the greatest superpowers, a God who can split a sea in half. A God who can bring water from a rock, who can send bread from the sky, can give healing from snakes, and time and time again, protect His people in such a way that the Bible can write of the Israelites that not even their sandals wore out in the desert. The story of the Exodus shows us a God who is willing to go to extreme lengths to rescue the ones that He loves. And in Jesus and in Him, we see exactly how far He's willing to go. Let's pray.

Father, we thank You for the great example of Moses, that even in his greatness, we see similarities in his weakness with us. Impulsive, impatient, protective, at times, focused on himself. And yet, over the course of many decades, Lord, You worked on him, You corrected him and ultimately, You transformed him by Your grace, so that at the end of his life, he could be called the humblest man on the face of the earth. God, may we grow towards that humility.

May we be so moved, may we remember so often and so clearly the grace, the sheer grace that has saved us from our flawed, weak state. And that has offered us a land flowing with milk and honey, the promised land of the coming kingdom. And Lord, may this hope, may this sure future humble us out of our pride that causes us to lie, causes us to hate our neighbour, to judge partially, to not respect the holiness of the holy God we serve. If pride is the beginning of sin, Lord, help us to see that humility is the beginning of a righteous life. But then, comfort us again and again that our prophet has arrived in Jesus, the one who spoke truly the words of God, the one in whose face we see God Himself.

And help us, Lord, be encouraged to know that He is the builder of this house. He is the builder of His church. A servant was simply a servant of that house, as Moses was simply a servant of that house, so Jesus is the ruler of that house as the Son. Give us, Lord, a great hope that as the Son, He instructs us and He guides us through the Spirit and that He will not let us go. He will not cause us to succumb to our own devices.

Thank You, Lord, for what we may receive today in the knowledge that He is the greater prophet. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.