The Next Moses

Right in the middle of Deuteronomy, God promised Israel another mediator “like Moses”. Well, technically, he did it roughly forty years earlier, but Deuteronomy is where we find the details.

Exodus 20 tells the original story of this awesome encounter and its consequences, and Moses repeated it to a new generation of Israelites in Deuteronomy 5. God graciously accommodated a terrified people at Sinai (Horeb), unwilling to continue experiencing the Almighty’s presence directly, when he spoke to them from heaven out of the midst of the fire and gave them the first ‘ten words’ out of many commands.

The people then begged Moses to receive God’s message to them on behalf of the entire nation.

Do Not Let God Speak to Us

Surprisingly, God agreed with Israel that they were not able to stand before him and hear his word from him directly. He even complimented them on their eagerness to receive his word despite their professed inadequacy to withstand the awesome spectacle they were witnessing. So he made this promise to provide for their national weakness of spirit, and Moses later shared this with the nation:

“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers — it is to him you shall listen — just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the Lord said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.’ ”

Moses was not unique in every aspect of his prophetic ministry, but in no prophet before or since was the combination of qualities he possessed precisely duplicated.

‘Like’ Moses

First, there is the nature of Moses’ relationship with God. He did not see dreams or visions, but God spoke to him “face to face”. Second, Moses was a brother Israelite. Balaam too had God’s words put in his mouth, but he was a foreigner. Third, Moses did spectacular signs, “great deeds of terror”. Many later prophets did no signs at all. Fourth, Moses did not do what he did in a corner; he did it in plain sight of not just the entire nation of Israel, but other nations as well. Fifth, failure to listen to Moses resulted in the culling of the nation. An entire generation died in the wilderness because the people would not obey their prophet, who gave them the words of God’s own mouth. To be “like Moses” was a pretty special package.

Prophets came and went at various points in Israel’s history and even before, but nobody possessed the combination of qualities Moses did. Like Balaam, Abraham was a prophet, but he was not an Israelite. The unnamed prophet of Judges 6 was an Israelite, but he did no signs. He simply brought a message. Samuel called forth thunder and rain, but it’s never said that he spoke to God face to face. Elijah and Elisha did great signs and wonders, but neither were in a position to do them before entire nations as Moses did. Many later prophets faithfully brought messages and engaged in symbolic acts as God told them, but few were miraculous or spectacular. Great numbers of dead resulted from the rejection of Elijah’s word, or Isaiah’s, or Jeremiah’s, but nobody could compete with Moses in separating wheat from weeds.

An Authoritative Word

Moses’ word came with unique authority and was confirmed by heaven in the very strongest and least equivocal terms. The “next Moses” would come with this sort of authority. “Whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.” No rebel in all Israel would escape the consequences of rejecting this prophet’s utterances or failing to obey his commands. This is exceptional. Some questionable characters survived sieges to become exiles in Babylon and Assyria, having children and living to a ripe old age.

When searching for the “next Moses” as prophets appeared one by one down through the centuries, devout Jews took this last clause very seriously.

So then, as of the time the last writer/editor of Deuteronomy signed off on his duties, no prophet entirely comparable to Moses had arisen in Israel. The people of God were still looking for their “next Moses”.

Jesus Fits the Bill

It will not be a surprise to most of our readers to turn to the New Testament and discover the apostles quoting this passage and applying it to the Lord Jesus. Nobody else fit the bill.

• Speaking to God face to face? Check. Jesus did not just receive God’s word, he WAS God’s word made flesh.
• An Israelite? He was “made like his brothers in every respect”, and we have two genealogies in the gospels to prove it. The Pharisees doubted he was the king of the Jews, but nobody could say he was not technically qualified.
• Spectacular signs? The gospel writers lose count.
• Were this prophet’s miracles seen by the entire nation? Certainly. He did them in Galilee, Nain, Bethsaida, Capernaum, Gennesaret and, yes, Jerusalem, of course. He did them on both sides of the Jordan and outside the national boundaries entirely. In fact, if you compare this map of the original tribal allotments with this map showing where Jesus performed his miracles, there’s a good argument to be made that Jesus performed at least one miracle in every historic tribal territory with the possible exception of Reuben. Reuben’s allotted territory was no longer Israelite in the first century, so there would have been no point.
• Did the rejection of his word result in the culling of the nation? This is the power of the apostolic testimony. When Peter testified to the crowds in Solomon’s portico, this is his punch line: “And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.” Likewise, when Stephen quotes from Deuteronomy, making Jesus the promised “next Moses”, he indicts the entire generation who crucified him, resulting in his own murder by stoning. And of course we have AD70 to stand as proof that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the “next Moses”. All that he prophesied concerning Jerusalem sadly came true.

The Interesting Part

The book of Deuteronomy ends with this significant statement as its final paragraph:

“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.”

Despite being a book of history, Christ is unambiguously singled out as Deuteronomy’s main point.

The age of Deuteronomy is a matter of scholarly dispute. Literalists point to five different times the book identifies Moses as its author, as if this settles the matter at approximately 1400 BC. For most of the book’s contents, surely it does. Liberal scholars and sceptics make its completion date much, much later, as recent as fifth century BC. We can say with certainty that, in its original Hebrew, the Jews accepted Deuteronomy as sacred canon sometime prior to the translation of the Septuagint (Greek) Old Testament in the third century BC. Beyond that, we cannot say much.

Here’s why. We only have to read this final paragraph of the book to see that the definitive version of the sacred book was completed after Moses was dead by somebody else entirely. It probably wasn’t Joshua, because Joshua’s own life is summed up in the verse just before this, that characteristically “the people of Israel obeyed him”. Moreover, what would be the point of writing, “There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses” if only a decade or two had passed since Moses died? There would be nothing whatsoever impressive or remarkable in that statement. It would serve no purpose at all. The author of that last paragraph seems to be relying on the fact that sufficient time has passed since Moses left the scene to make the lack of a suitable successor a notable thing, one worth drawing to the reader’s attention.

Finding the Next Moses

That’s not a knock on the literalists. I absolutely believe Moses wrote the bulk of this book down exactly as the relevant passages in Deuteronomy indicate. I just don’t think the timing of Deuteronomy’s completion is a matter of concern. There is nothing remarkable about the final version of a book being wrapped up for canonization by an unknown editor or commentator some years — even many years — later. Samuel, Kings and Chronicles were all compiled that way. They had to be, as they covered generations of history, and the documents from which much of that history was taken are listed within them. The doctrine of inspiration is not affected by this one whit, as we have Christ himself both using and endorsing the entire Old Testament package as accepted by the Jews in the first century, in multiple translations and paraphrases as well.

What is remarkable is that no prophet could be found in Israel between Moses and the Lord Jesus to meet the standards of the “next Moses”. Israel was still looking for him, and the explosion of the first century church only weeks after his crucifixion and resurrection demonstrates that in Christ, they found the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people.