A Prophet Like Moses

An old man stands before a vast crowd. He is a hundred and twenty years old, and he knows he will never cross the river in front of them. He has led them for forty years. And now he tells them: someone else is coming. Someone like me. Listen to him.

The man is Moses. Israel is camped on the plains of Moab, just across the Jordan River from the land God promised them. Moses will not go in with them. So in the book of Deuteronomy, he gives them a series of farewell speeches. He reminds them of everything God has done, and teaches them how to live in the new land. In chapter eighteen, he talks about how God will speak to them once he is gone. The nations around them, he warns, try to learn the future by fortune-telling, reading omens, and talking to the dead. Don't you do that, Moses says. That is not how the Lord speaks to his people.

Then Moses gives them a promise. “The Lord your God will raise up to you a prophet from among you, of your brothers, like me. You shall listen to him.” A prophet from among you. Not a foreign seer, not a spirit, but one of their own people. And like Moses. Think about what that means. Moses was the one who spoke with God face to face. He led the people out of slavery. He brought them God's law. He prayed for them when they failed. A prophet like that would be someone very great indeed.

Moses reminds them why God made this promise. Forty years earlier, at Mount Horeb, also called Sinai, the whole people heard God's voice speaking out of the fire on the mountain. Thunder, smoke, the ground shaking. And they were terrified. They begged Moses: Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I not die. You go near, they said, and tell us what he says. And God said to Moses, “They have well said that which they have spoken.” God was not angry. He understood. People needed someone to stand between them and his blazing holiness, someone who could bring God's words close.

So God makes a promise of his own. “I will raise them up a prophet from among their brothers, like you. I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” And then a serious warning. “It shall happen, that whoever will not listen to my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.” This prophet's words are God's own words. Ignoring him is ignoring God. Generations passed. Many prophets came. But the last lines of Deuteronomy say there had not yet arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. The people kept waiting. Centuries later, crowds would ask John the Baptist, Are you the Prophet? And after Jesus fed five thousand people, they said, This is truly the Prophet who comes into the world. Peter would later stand in the temple and say that Jesus is the one Moses spoke about.

The people who copied the Dead Sea Scrolls were waiting for this prophet too. Among the scrolls found in caves near Qumran is a short document scholars call the Testimonia. It strings together a few Bible passages about the figures they expected God to send, and it opens with words from Deuteronomy, including Moses' promise of a prophet like him from chapter eighteen. A century or more before Jesus, people were watching for him.

A prophet like Moses. You'll find it in Deuteronomy chapter eighteen, verses fifteen to nineteen. God promised to put his words in the mouth of one who would speak them close to us. So here is a question to carry with you. God said of his prophet: listen to him. How can you make room to listen to Jesus this week?