Hearing the book of Deuteronomy today, The book of Deuteronomy,
just so you know, this was furnished to me, so there's at
least one person that wants y'all to be quiet for a moment.
I'm glad this worked because my next event was to bring my 38.
Welcome to the service. It's good to see you in the
Lord's house this morning. We come to the very last of our
series that we've been involved with in the spring and summer of
this year, and that is looking at the life of Moses.
We've moved from the life of Moses, from the little baby in
the bulrushes all the way through to our sermon today,
which is the legacy of Moses. So here now the word of the Lord
from Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 32.
That very day the Lord spoke to Moses.
Go up this mountain of Aberine Mountain Nebo, which is in the
land of Moab, opposite Jericho, and view the land of Canaan,
which I'm given to the people of Israel for a possession, and die
on the mountain which you go up, and be gathered to your people
as Aaron, your brother, died at Mount horns, gathered to his
people, Because you broke faith with me in the midst of the
people of Israel, at the waters of Meribakadesh, in the
wildernesses Zen, and because you did not treat me as holy in
the midst of the people of Israel.
For you shall see the land before you, but you shall not go
there into the land which I'm giving to the people of Israel.
Then the account of ACT Moses actually doing this is found a
couple of chapters over in chapter 34.
Then Moses went up from the plains of Lohab to Mountain Nebo
to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho.
And the Lord showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan
naturally the land of Efraim Manassa, all the land of Jude as
far as the Western sea, the Negev, and the plain that is the
valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, as follows the war.
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 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. Now Moses was 120 years old when
he died. His eye was undemned, and his
vigor unabated, And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the
plains of Moab for 30 days. Then the days of weeping and
mourning for Moses were ended, and Joshua the son of none, was
full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses has 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 wonders that the Lord sent him to do in
the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all the servants into 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, the word of the Lord.
You may be seated. This is the legacy of Moses.
Moses life falls into conveniently 40 year periods.
First 40 years he was in Egypt, trained and reared in the
Egyptian culture. Then you know the story.
He went into the wilderness and there in the wilderness of
Midian he was for 40 years there the Lord was training him the
ways of the wilderness. And then God called him at the
burning Bush to go back to Egypt and to lead God's people out of
Egyptian bondage through 40 years of wandering in the
wilderness. And then we come to this moment
here. It's interesting that the
scripture says in the reading there that very day the Lord
spoke to Moses. Go up to this mountain, mountain
Nebo, and die on the mountain. What an interesting thing.
Moses was blessing the people. He was.
He just got through preaching. One of the longest sermons
you'll read anywhere, and that is basically the book of of
Deuteronomy, is a is a an address to the people on the
plains of Moab, which is the desert southeast of the Canaan
and the land. And there's no more pleasure for
a preacher than to be able to preach like that for 30
something chapters. It's a good day for Moses.
Blessing the people Canaan land was just insight.
He wasn't reduced in any of his capacity.
His eye was not dim, His strength was not gone.
He was still healthy. And the Lord said on this very
day, go up to the mountain and die.
I'll let you know. That's the way the Lord's timing
works. We never know the moment when
the Lord will say to us it's time to come home.
You just look at the graveyard, You'll see dates of death and
dates of birth, and you calculate ages, and you'll see
everything from infancy to people over 100 years old.
You don't know the time when the Lord will call you home, but the
Lord does. The Lord knows when it's time
because He's given you a work to do, a life to live.
He has blessed you with life and he has a time.
It is appointed unto man once to die.
It's an appointment. And Moses had it.
What's interesting to me is some of the negative things that are
said here. And yet, you know, talk about
God calling Moses home at this particular time, God saying to
Moses, you can see the promised land.
He brought him up to a mountain and then it to a peak on the
mountain that he could see literally pretty much across the
whole topography. He could see all the way across
to the Mediterranean, he could see the land, and he spells out
all the different parts of the land.
The northern part of the land would be inhabited by Dan.
The southern part of the land would be down in the in the
deserts, in the in the South and in the land of Judah that would
be there in the middle in the Hill Country.
And the Lord showed him the whole panoramic view.
But he said you're not going in. He said this is the land that I
promised Abraham, God, He promised it.
Abraham again to Isaac and Jacob, they're going to inherit
the land. God's going to keep his promise.
And Moses has been an important part in the strategic part of
God bringing these people along. In fact, Moses found the people
of this of Israel down in Egypt, and they were just a
discombobulated clan of people and families.
And through the wilderness he had brought them all the way
through to now. They were an organized,
militarized, healthy young. Everybody there was about age 40
or younger because the older generation had died in the
wilderness. God has now a organized a
religious people, a people who have a sacrificial system of
people that have a governmental system of people that have a
welfare system, people that have an education system.
That's what the book of of Leviticus and Numbers that are
all about. The penalty tells us there in
that story from Nexus to these passage here how God put all
this stuff together. Incredible.
The things that Moses had done, in fact some of these things
that Moses had done, would be kind of what you would think of
as a, as a king would do a supreme organizer of the nation,
putting together a nation and establishing all the things that
have to be established with a nation.
And kind of that's who Moses is in a way.
The legacy of Moses is that he was proto PROTO.
It means first in an order. It means before all.
He was kind of the first one that did the things functionally
that had to be done. He was a de facto king.
He was a de facto priest and he was a prophet.
Prophet is the office that's usually designated to him.
But these were the offices that God was going to expand and
enlarge and continue and make more and more meaningful.
All throughout the rest of the Old Testament history.
God was going to enhance the leadership office that Moses
had, that is of King. Moses had done a lot for the
people already as king. He had saved them, an ancient
king, with someone who rescued his people.
He delivered them in battle. He had redeemed them by the
strong arm of the Lord. He was now their leader.
The staff that God gave him to be the symbol of authority,
where the the rod and the scepter is the symbols of kingly
authority. God had given that to him and he
was the leader of the people. He was the provider for the
people in the ancient world. The king was seen as the last
resort of the one who provides everything the people need.
He had provided food in the manner he had provided.
He had provided the quail, the meat on several occasions.
He had actually been the one that God used to provide the
water in the desert. In fact, it was on one of those
occasions he got in trouble because instead of just speaking
to the rock, he smoked the rock. And he did two things when that
happened. Scriptures tell us otherwise
that if you understand that right, he actually struck smote
Christ because Christ was that rock.
Christ was that fountain of living water.
And in so doing also Moses had failed to sanctify the Lord,
make the Lord holy and he had not kept the the image and the
proper proclamation of God going.
Can you imagine that all that we've been through with Moses,
how that even there he fell short?
I'll make a second application of Moses life.
I don't care how wonderful a Christian you are, even if
you're a Christian leader of some sort, you will fall so
short of the glory of God you will be so deficient in those
gifts and talents that are necessary for serving the Lord
to the optimum. And there's no reason for any
servant of the Lord ever to be proud when you've done all that
you can do. Jesus said you still are an
unworthy servant. So even Moses, even Moses,
needed a savior. Even Moses needs the king and
the Lord. Moses, the Bible says in the New
Testament, was a servant in the House of the Lord.
Only a handful of people were called servants of God.
Abraham was called a servant. David was called a servant of
God. Israel was called a servant of
God, and one OK, even a foreign king was called a servant of the
Lord. The servant of the Lord is a
pretty restricted group of people, and that's who Moses had
been and he had been before the people as a king, not only as a
savior and leader and provider, but also as a lawgiver.
It is the king, the Kingly office that establishes the law.
Now, when I say Moses did this and Moses did that, you've heard
the story. The Lord used Moses to provide
those things. It is the Lord who ultimately
provided that. And if I'll apply this message
again, I'll tell you that's what happens.
Everything comes from the Lord, doesn't matter how it's mediated
to us. Its source is the Lord himself,
in all of his riches in glory, is who what he gives his people,
and he uses mediators. And that's really the primary
office to to describe what Moses did for God's people and for the
Lord is he was a mediator. He was the man in between.
Here was God up here, transcendent, ineffable in his
name beyond knowing in so many ways no one had ever seen God,
and God raised up Moses to be that person.
In the middle the Bible says that he saw God face to face and
another case said Jesus said nobody can see my face.
John said nobody can see the Lord and live.
So it's a it's a a way of expressing that he had that
first hand auditory vision of God.
The Lord made himself known unmistakably and spoke to Moses
in the words. Moses got things first hand.
We looked a few weeks ago where it says behold, I have put my
words in thy mouth. And so Moses was the go between.
He was the mediator between God and man, and in this mediatorial
work he occupied in a de facto manner these three classic
biblical offices. We've mentioned King.
Let's mention a little bit of what he did by way of profit,
which we've already mentioned. He was the spokesman for God.
What are the things the prophets of Israel would be doing for God
is they would speak for God? How many times in the Old
Testament, especially in the writing prophets, do we hear the
term? Thus saith the Lord.
Well, it's the Lord speaking through the mouth of the prophet
and that's what Moses had done. Moses not only occupied the
office of a prophet and did the things that a prophet did, but
it is Moses that spelled out for us independent Duke itself, the
way we can tell and discern a false prophet from a true
prophet. And Moses laid out those
particular criteria points that we would know how to discern.
And it was mainly A prophet's prophecies come to pass.
They are fulfilled the true prophet.
There's a sense in which you kind of know after the fact, but
most importantly, it was Moses that that wrote down the things
of God. The prophets were literate.
In fact, if you read the writing prophets of the Old Testament,
the Hebrew scriptures, if you read Isaiah and Jeremiah and
Jose and Amos and Joel and all the rest of them, you'll find
they're highly literary. In fact, it's written in a
poetical form most of their books.
It's not just prose. It's poetry.
It's highly, highly literate. And the prophets were the ones
that had been trained in the words of God and the letters of
God, and they're the ones that wrote the things.
In fact, the prophets wrote the the scriptures.
Samuel wrote a lot of it. Moses himself wrote these first
five books that we have. Joshua probably wrote some of
it. Samuel wrote Judges and and
First Samuel. And so you could go through, and
God does it all the way down to Jeremiah, one of the last
prophets of the Kingdom. Jeremiah was spending his time
with the books, with the scroll. He even had a fulltime
Emmanuelsis, the secretary Baruch, who spent his time
working with Jeremiah to keep the words of the Lord in
scripturating. Writing down that which God had
said orally is always been important to God.
That's why we have the New Testament.
The events of the New Testament took place without anybody
writing down a word. But then the Lord made sure that
everything that was important for us to know about those
events, that is the life in the ministry of Christ, the early
apostles and all of that came to us by specific individuals that
were called to write it down in Scripturation.
That is something that is written down that you can see
and understand and heed and live out in your life is a biblical
concept. Yeah, I've got a couple of
minutes. I'm going to take a detour.
That's what's made America great.
We in our heritage, principally in America going back to the
Magna Carta and some some precedent in the English
speaking world. We have what is known as in
scripturated word, that is, people are willing to obey a
document. They have the words of the 10
commandments, the words of the Lord, the words of the apostles,
the words of the Gospels, the structures.
God has trained A godly people to live according to a written
word. An ungodly people will not live
according to a written word. And when this country was
founded as a country, we had what was called a constitution.
And the only thing that enforces that constitution is the
willingness of a godly people to submit themselves and subject
themselves to a document. Not to a king yielding a sword,
not to a great army, not to threats, but to a document which
is enforceable only by the sworn oath in the conscience of the
subjects. And when a people become so
ungodly that they cannot submit themselves first to the word of
God, you'll never find them submitting themselves to the
words of man in a constitution. And some people have observed
the unconstitutionality of so many things that goes on in our
life and in our culture and in our government today.
How it is not according to those in scripturated words of the
Founding Fathers. When you read the Federalists,
you go through their Federalist 15.
And you know I'll try to find what what what all these guys
meant when they said what they meant.
What are the amendments mean First Amendment.
Second Amendment. What are these amendments mean?
Because we're trying to understand in Scripture rated
word, and a people that are not skilled at interpreting in
scripture rated word will not understand nor live according to
a constitution at all. If you didn't get anything else
when you learn to read in elementary school, you know that
was God's determinate plan for this country.
When you learn to interpret written word and then live your
life accordingly and match up to written word, you are living in
a godly stream. But if you don't know how to
read, if you don't know how to interpret and understand written
word, then you're just liable to do anything with that old
document. Probably the most important
thing, critically, practically, that you'll do.
Just ignore it and go on and live according to some other
word, some word that comes from some other source, or some
inclination of your own sinful heart.
And when enough people start living like that.
They've broken themselves away from the word of God.
They're not going to in any way shackle themselves to a
political document or a constitution or anything else.
It took a minute longer than I thought.
But does that make sense to anybody?
A constitutional government will not work with an unbiblical
people. So to the extent that you're
ignorant of the Bible, you're incapable of understanding the
concepts and the truths of the founding documents of our
country. I think that's going to ever
happen in America, that we're going to slip a little.
Yeah, I think so. Where was I in the sermon?
Well, I'm talking about. I'm talking about being a
prophet, but the most important thing not only does a does a
prophet speak the word of God, but he writes the word of God.
He helps us discern the difference between true and
false prophets. But there's something that is
above it all and that is that Moses is a not just a proto king
or a proto prophet, but he's also a proto priest.
Now Aaron was the high priest. They were from the House of
Levi. That was the priestly tribe.
Moses had anointed and designated.
The Lord had designated. We saw a couple of weeks ago how
the Lord gave indication that Aaron was his a chosen 1 by the
blossoming of the rod. And so we we we know that Aaron
held that office formally. But it was Moses that set it all
up. It was he that went to the
mountain and found out how to construct the entire Tabernacle
and all of its furnishing, and how the whole sacrificial system
worked, and how the annual calendar worked.
All the feast days and the festivals, and all of that was
structured and put together by the Lord as he gave it to Moses.
And he told Moses to do it exactly the way the God
instructed him to do it on the mountain.
And so he did that. And not only that did was Moses
the one who set up the entire priestly or religious system for
Israel, with all of its atonement rituals and all of its
cleansing rituals and all of its anointing rituals.
But Moses also was the one that had had been to the Lord.
And it heard the Lord speak. But believe me, he also heard
the people speak. We've seen that the last few
weeks, haven't we? We've got Korra talking to us in
rebellion. We've got Miriam and Aaron and
many of the other people. Moses had all kinds of people
that that would back talking. And so he had heard the the
complaining, the murmuring, the grumbling, the in the wilderness
and all that went on. And Moses had become the 1:00.
And we saw this time and again had become the intercessor for
the people. He prayed for the people.
He was the one that would take their plea, take their heart,
and take it before the Lord and plead their cause.
Even when the Lord was ready to do an act that would be very
radical, Moses would plead with the Lord based upon the Lord's
heart, his compassionate all that.
The Lord, of course was compassionate that he would find
a way to to mitigate the circumstances and not destroy
Israel completely at that point and to move along.
Moses interceded for the people. He also was the one that
sanctified the people. That is, that it was the setting
aside, according to the command of God through Moses, that the
holiness code came into being. How that all the people, first
of all the people themselves, were set apart.
That's what the word sanctified means.
It means taken and set apart and then cleaned up and put into
service. That's the that's the whole
range of sanctification. And that's what Moses, through
the command of the Lord, had done to the people.
Apparently there'd been some problems with that because the
Lord said you failed to make me holy before the people.
I sure hate to see preachers get in trouble for what unsanctified
congregations do, but that's what happened here in this, in
this instance. So it it's interesting to see
all the ways in which Moses was a proto king.
He was a proto prophet and he was a proto priest in making
intercession, offering sacrifices, anointing, and doing
all the things that the that in praying interceding all the
things that a priest did. Why do I say he was a proto
means before, but before what? Before Christ?
It is Moses who set out the template, who who gave the broad
contours of the mediatorial work of Christ.
It is Christ who's now going to function in terms of a prophet.
He's going to be that great prophet about whom Moses
prophesied in Deuteronomy 18. Jesus is going to be that
prophet. Jesus is going to say the
people. If you knew Moses, you would
know me, for he wrote of me. It's important that that people
know Moses because in order to know Moses, I mean in order to
know Christ, you have to know Moses.
In fact, in the in the book of Acts, in Acts chapter 15, when
they had what's called the first council of the church, the
Jerusalem Council, one of the things they had going for him
when they made the decision that they made it were getting rather
ready to send it out to all the churches through the various
people that were there, Paul and and and Barnabas and many
others. One of the things that they said
was that Moses was read in the synagogue in every city
throughout that Roman Empire, that known world.
In other words, Moses had gone before through the Jewish
people, as they had been scattered by various Diaspora
dispersions. They had been carried off into
Babylon, they had been scattered into into the world.
They had been been in every major province of the of the
Empire. There were Jewish people, many
of them refugees, and they had synagogues, and in those
synagogues they read Moses. And by reading and understanding
Moses then it was fertile ground, and the groundwork had
been laid and the contours had been put out to where you come
straight in there and preach Christ.
Because Christ was the fulfillment of the law.
Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
What scriptures? The book of Leviticus where it
describes the sin offering and the trespass offering and the
guilt offering and the cool idea of substitution that the the
innocent could die for the guilty.
The whole idea of the shedding of blood, the whole 1 concept
after another that we understand the death of Christ.
We understand because Moses heard the Lord and set up a
sacrificial system that perfectly prophesied, foretold
the meaning of the death of Christ.
So the gospel writers didn't have to write all about
substitution and forgiveness and the life of the flesh being in
the blood. And and when I see the blood I
will pass along that had all been in scripturated in Moses
and Jesus, said he, Moses wrote of me.
It's interesting, they're on the Emmaus Rd. after the
resurrection, when Jesus was walking with the two disciples
along the road to Emmaus and they didn't recognize him.
And what he began to do was he opened the scriptures, and
beginning at Moses and the prophets, he opened their eyes
to understand the Scriptures. And then that evening hit the
same thing with the disciples in in the the room there in
Jerusalem where they had gathered beginning with Moses.
And the prophets enabled them to interpret and to understand the
scriptures. We understand Christ because
Moses had taught us. That's what the word Torah
means. The Torah is the teaching.
He had taught us Christ. And so as I wrap it up here, let
me just let you vision this little brief scenario.
The Lord told Moses to go up on the mountain and die from all
eternity past. That's God's plan with Jesus
Christ. He told Jesus Christ to go up on
the mountain and die. Moses goes to Pisgah, Christ
goes to Calvary. And on Mount Calvary Jesus hung
there between heaven and earth, a mediator between God and man,
and pour bore the sins of his people in his own body, on the
tree that we may live eternally. God took Moses and buried him
there in the valley in Moab. Israel's experience in Moab had
been kind of miserable, by the way, you remember Balam and the
talking donkey and all that stuff that took place there in
Moab not too long before this event.
But he buried him there. Nobody knows where he's buried.
Jesus was buried. But I'm here to report to you
that Jesus did not buy a burial plot.
He knew he wouldn't need it. He didn't even take out a
shortterm lease on one because he knew he wouldn't need it but
for a couple of nights. And so it was perfect that he
was buried in a borrowed tomb, and before it was over the tomb
was empty as an open testimony to a living Christ.
It is not Moses to whom I call you today, to faith and
repentance. Although Moses was wonderful, he
served the Lord in the Lord's house faithfully, the Bible said
in the book of Hebrews twice. But Jesus came and served God
with an eternal sacrifice, and he is a priest that lives
forever. Christ is a prophet that is the
pure truth of God's word, and he is a king, the king of the kings
and the Lord of the Lords. Christ is what Moses was talking
about, the legacy of Moses. It's Christ.
It's Jesus Christ.