Bible Commentaries

THE GREAT PROPHET

‘The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.’

Deuteronomy 18:15

The history of Moses is valuable to Christians, not only as giving us a pattern of fidelity towards God, of great firmness and great meekness, but also as affording us a type or figure of our Saviour Christ. Let us consider in what respects Moses resembled Christ.

I. If we survey the general history of the Israelites, we shall find that it is a picture of man’s history as the Gospel displays it to us, and that in it Moses takes the place of Christ.—We are born in a spiritual Egypt, a land of strangers. Satan is a tyrant over us, and it seems useless to rebel. Christ is a second Moses, and greater than he, inasmuch as Christ leads from hell to heaven, as Moses led the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.

II. Christ reveals to us the will of God, as Moses did to the Israelites.—He is our Prophet as well as our Redeemer. Favoured as he was, Moses saw not the true presence of God. Flesh and blood cannot see it. But Christ really saw, and ever saw, the face of God, for He was no creature of God, but the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father. Christ has brought from His Father for all of us the full and perfect way of life.

III. Moses was the great intercessor when the Israelites sinned.—In this he shadows out the true Mediator between God and man, who is ever at the right hand of God making intercession for us. Moses was excluded from the Promised Land, dying in sight, not in enjoyment, of Canaan, while the people went in under Joshua. This was a figure of Him that was to come. Our Saviour Christ died that we might live; He consented to lose the light of God’s countenance that we might gain it. Moses suffered for his own sin; Christ was the spotless Lamb of God. His death is meritorious; it has really gained our pardon.

Illustrations

(1) ‘The characteristics of the prophet are set in strong contrast to those of the diviners and magicians, and lift the order high above all the filth and folly of these others. First, the prophet is “raised up” by God, the individual holder of the office has his “call,” and he does not “prophesy out of his own heart.” The man who takes this office on himself without such a call is ipso facto branded as a false prophet. Then he is “from the midst of thee, of thy brethren,”—springing from the people, not a stranger, like so many of these wandering soothsayers, but with the national life throbbing in his veins, and himself participant of the thoughts and emotions of his brethren. Then he is to be “like unto thee,”—not in all points, but in his receiving direct communications from God, and in his authority as God’s messenger. The crowning characteristic, “I will put my words into his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him,” invests his words with divine authority, calls for obedience to them as the words of God Himself, widens out his sphere far beyond that of merely foretelling, brings in the moral and religious element, which had no place in the oracles of the soothsayer, and opens up the prospect of a continuous progressive revelation throughout the ages (“all that I shall command him”). We mutilate the grand idea of the prophet in Israel if we think of his work as mainly prediction, and we mutilate it no less if we exclude prediction from it. We mutilate it still more fatally if we try to account for it on naturalistic principles, and fail to see in the prophet a man directly conscious of a divine call, or to hear in his words the solemn accents of the voice of God.’

(2) ‘Do we make enough of the prophet-side of our Saviour’s ministry, who is the Moses of His church? Do we listen enough to the words of His mouth? Are we careful enough to perform all that our Father commanded through Him? Do we consult Him enough? That He fulfils the conditions and answers the test of the true prophet is unmistakeable, because what He has said has followed and come to pass, and shall yet do so, till time shall be no more.’

(3) ‘What shall we say of this coming to you and to me, through the Word and Spirit, of this Prophet, who is no mere servant as even great Moses was, but is the Son of God Himself? What can we say but keep repeating, the words: “Unto Him ye shall hearken”? “But to this man will I look, to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My word.” Yes, that is the only listener that is at all worthy of so great a Messenger—he who trembleth at His words, whose whole heart listens in lowly, eager readiness to be and to do whatsoever He bids. It is this keen-set, awed spirit that we need—this holy sense of urgent necessity, a right royal “I must” dominating all the inner man: “I must believe His words, and trust His every promise, simply because He is the speaker! I must obey each dear command of His: it is my very life!” The Gospels read through in this spirit would be a veritable revelation to many of us.’