[8:00 a.m.] The Legacy of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:48-52, 34:1-12)

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.

Deuteronomy 32 · chapter mention

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

Acts 15 · chapter mention

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.