‘Moses Wrote of Me’

Many of you know that the former US Senator from Nebraska and then-president of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse, was diagnosed recently with pancreatic cancer and is not expected to live but a few more months. He did an hour-long interview with Ross Douthat that was posted on YouTube on April 9.

Douthat asked him, “Are you angry at God ever?”

Ben Sasse said, “No.”

“Not at all?” Douthat responded.

Mr. Sasse went on, “No. I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like. But I know the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing. I’m filled with dross. This suffering is not salvific, but it is sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it. . . . I now in the midst of this disease know much more my finitude than I let myself believe in the past. . . . I can’t keep the planets in orbit. I can’t even grow skin on my face.”

Then Douthat asked him how to help an unbeliever:

“For the listener or viewer who . . . doesn’t believe in God and finds your cosmic optimism admirable, but maybe he thinks that you’re deluding yourself on the brink of actual finitude, what would you say to that person?”

This is the part of Ben Sasse’s response that I’m most interested in. Think of someone saying to Jesus (Sasse is not Jesus — that’s not the point), “Jesus, here you are surrounded by scribes and Pharisees who have read the books of Moses and the prophets all their lives, and who hear you talking about existing before Abraham [John 8:58] and death and resurrection and eternal life. And they can’t believe you. They think you are deluded. What would you say to them to help them see and believe the truth?”

Here’s how Ben Sasse said he would respond to the person who thinks Ben is deluded:

“Let’s read the book of Romans together. . . . Paul says in chapter 1 there are lots of intellectual arguments you can make against God, but you have to start with a fundamental question about what do you do with this moral issue of our own conscience. And does the individual in your hypothetical really start with the claim that things are right in your soul? Because I can’t relate to that. Things are not right in my soul. My soul thinks Ben should be God, and I want that to die. Cancer sucks. But I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.”

Now, what does that have to do with the overarching theme of this conference, “Christ in All of Scripture”? And particularly with the topic assigned to me, “‘Moses Wrote of Me’: The Messianic Hope of the Law”?

“If you could see and embrace the message of Moses, you would know Jesus. You would believe him.”

The connection is in this: Just as Ben Sasse was asked to speak into the unbelief of a person who can’t see the beauty and worth and greatness of the reality that is holding up Ben’s faith, so Jesus in John 5 is speaking into the unbelief of the Jewish leaders who cannot see the beauty and worth and greatness of the reality that has been in front of them in the books of Moses all their lives and now stands bodily in front of them in the person of Jesus. They didn’t see it in the books, and they didn’t see it in the person. Why? What would Jesus say? Is it similar to what Ben Sasse said?

Blind to Moses

Let’s read John 5:36–47. And as we read, I’m going to point out five tragic descriptions that Jesus gives of the Jewish leaders’ spiritual condition that prevents them from seeing him in Moses and in the flesh.

The testimony that I have is greater than that of John [the Baptist]. For the works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. (John 5:36–37)

First description:

His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you [that would be God’s word in the books of Moses — and Jesus!], for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. (John 5:37–38)

You think you’re full of the word of God from the books of Moses. You’re not. If you were, you’d know me.

Second description:

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5:39–40)

Literally: “You do not want to come to me.” I am not the kind of Messiah you want. And the message of Moses was not the message you wanted.

Third description:

I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. (John 5:41–42)

You don’t love God. That was the main teaching of Moses: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Deuteronomy 6:5). You don’t love him. The God you claim to see in Moses is not God.

Fourth description:

I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? (John 5:43–44)

That’s a rhetorical question. It expects us to give the obvious answer. What is it? “You can’t. As long as you think that the Messiah Moses hopes for supports your love affair with the praise of man, you will never know Moses, and you will never know me.” Ben Sasse said to the unbeliever, “Come, join me in learning that the book of Romans and my cancer are mercifully intended by God to put a dagger through self-idolatry — our craving for the glory of man.” Until that happens, what Moses meant and who Jesus is, you will never see.

Fifth description:

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me [The reason you don’t know me is that you don’t know Moses. If you embraced the message of Moses, you would embrace my message.]; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John 5:45–47)

Before we try to put those five descriptions of the spiritual condition of the Jewish leaders together to see what the basic problem is that keeps them from knowing Jesus and knowing Moses, focus for a moment with me on the implication of verses 46 and 47. Verse 46: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me.” He doesn’t mention a specific prophecy or prediction that Moses made. He simply speaks generally about believing Moses and believing Jesus.

Verse 47 sounds the same: “If you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” Again, there’s no reference to a specific promise or prediction or type or event or law. There’s simply the general statement: Moses’s writings and Jesus’s words. So, there are two pairs. Verse 46: believing Moses and believing Jesus. Verse 47: Moses’s writings and Jesus’s words.

So, my conclusion is this: When Jesus says at the end of verse 46, “For he [Moses] wrote of me,” he was not thinking of a specific prophecy like Deuteronomy 18:15 (“The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me [Moses]”). Instead, he was thinking of the entire message of Moses and the entire message of Jesus. If you could see and embrace the reality that the five books of Moses are trying to communicate . . .

• the vision of God and his supremacy and freedom and grace and glory
  
• the vision of man in his fallenness and bondage to sin and need for salvation
  
• the vision of redemption to bring these futile, repetitive sacrifices to an end and cover sin once for all and make the human heart new
  
• the vision of the God-pleasing life of humility and lowliness and righteousness and mercy
  

. . . if you could see and embrace the message of Moses, you would know me. You would believe me. You would see in my words, my actions, my person the same reality, only fulfilled. “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).

Veil of Self-Exaltation

So, the statement, “He wrote of me” (John 5:46), I take to mean, “If you rightly understand the message of the Pentateuch as a whole and embrace it — believe it — as the truth of God, you will recognize Jesus Christ as the embodiment of that truth and that way and that life.” Of course, the Pentateuch is strewn with specific foreshadowing of the coming Redeemer:

• the serpent-crushing seed (Genesis 3:15),
  
• the offspring of Abraham blessing all nations (Genesis 22:18),
  
• the Passover and the blood sacrifices (Exodus 12:11; 1 Corinthians 5:7),
  
• the manna and the water-gushing rock in the wilderness (Exodus 16:31; John 6:49–51; Exodus 17:6; 1 Corinthians 10:4),
  
• the tabernacle patterned in heaven (Exodus 25:9; John 1:14),
  
• the high priest and propitiating altar (Exodus 30:10),
  
• and the prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15), to name a few.
  

But here in John 5, it isn’t one of those that’s in focus. What is? To see the answer, let’s put together the five descriptions of the spiritual condition of the Jewish leaders that we saw in John 5:36–47.

Verse 38: You don’t have God’s word in you. When you read Moses, you are missing God’s meaning.

Verse 40: This is not an intellectual problem; it’s a desire problem. You do not want to come to me. You don’t want the true meaning of Moses, so you don’t want me. I embody Moses.

Verse 42: You don’t have the love of God in you. And loving God is the aim of Moses. What do you love?

Verse 44: You love the glory that comes from man, not the glory that comes from God. So, you can’t believe on me, because my very existence as a self-denying, God-glorifying, suffering Messiah contradicts your aspirations. You want a Messiah who comes in his own name, not for the glory of his Father (John 12:28), because that would fit what you want to be — self-exalting. Loving greetings in the marketplaces (Mark 12:38), being called rabbi (Matthew 23:7), practicing your righteousness to be seen by others (Matthew 6:1–5), craving the first places at the banquets (Luke 14:7–11), making long prayers in public (Mark 12:40). You want a Messiah who fits with what you love: the glory of man, the idolization of yourself.

Verses 46–47: You don’t believe Moses.

Now, putting it all together, what’s the deepest problem keeping them from seeing Christ in the writings of Moses? Answer: They don’t love God, and they love the praise of man — two sides of the same coin. The glory of God is not satisfying to their souls, and they crave the glory of man. Therefore, they do not believe Moses, and they don’t have his inspired words abiding in them. The Pentateuch is a closed book. “A veil lies over their hearts” (2 Corinthians 3:15). Their minds are hardened (2 Corinthians 3:14; Romans 11:7, 25). This is not a Jewish problem. This is a human problem. This is our problem. What kind of veil is this? What kind of hardness? It is the veil of self-exaltation. Self-glorification. Self-rule. Self-determination. Or, as Ben Sasse called it, self-idolatry. In his case he said, “I’m pretty grateful that cancer is a stake against my delusional self-idolatry.” Because if our self-idolatry can die, the veil will be lifted, and we will see what Moses was trying to communicate, and we will see the beauty of Christ.

Moses and Loving God

Two questions remain that I want to ask. The first is this: Do the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) drive a stake through the heart of human self-idolatry? That’s what Jesus implies when he says, “There are two reasons you don’t believe in me: One, you’re in love with your own self-idolatry. Two, you don’t believe Moses.” Implication: Moses drives a stake through the heart of self-idolatry. Is that true? How does he do that? Yes. It is. I’ll show you four ways that Moses drives a stake through the heart of our self-idolatry.

Human Sinfulness

First, Moses drives a stake through the heart of self-idolatry by teaching the universality of human sinfulness and the hopelessness of self-salvation.

We know that whatever the law [Moses] says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Romans 3:19–20)

One of the great purposes of the law is to teach that law-keeping as a way of getting right with God is hopeless. As Galatians 3:22 puts it, “Scripture [including the law] imprisoned everything under sin.” Or as Romans 11:32 puts it, “God has consigned all to disobedience.” That’s the starting point for the death of self-idolatry. Left to ourselves before the holiness of God, we are hopeless. “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Moses wrote that.

New Heart

Second, Moses drives a stake through the heart of self-idolatry by teaching that the only way out of this hopeless condition is a new heart which God himself alone can give. God asks in Deuteronomy 5:29 [literal translation], “Who will give, and it will be in their heart to fear me and to keep all my commandments?” In other words: Who is going to give this rebellious people a heart to fear and obey me? God answers in Deuteronomy 29:4, “To this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” They must have a new heart, and only God can give it. And he will, in the far-off new covenant which Moses promises in Deuteronomy 30:6: “The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.”

“If you welcome the mortal stake that slays your self-idolatry, Jesus will be beautiful to you.”

So, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3), and Nicodemus, baffled, said, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” (John 3:9–10). In other words, Moses taught you this. You need a new heart, a new birth. Jeremiah said it; Ezekiel said it. But you can’t see it, because the new birth is another nail in the coffin of your autonomous self-idolatry. Left to yourself, you are hopeless. You have to be born again, and only God can do it. Moses drove that nail.

Unconditional Election

Third, Moses drives a stake through the heart of self-idolatry by teaching unconditional election — that only those will be born again whom God chooses without regard to any human distinctive, including Jewishness. Paul sees this in the story of how God chose the children of promise among the patriarchs.

Romans 9:8: “It is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.” Then he illustrates: God chose Isaac, not Ishmael, and brought him into existence through a human impossibility — Sarah was barren and Abraham was too old. Then he chose Jacob, not Esau: “Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad — in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls — she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger’” (Romans 9:11–12). Then Paul underlines God’s sovereign freedom in election in Romans 9:15 (quoting Exodus 33:19): “[God] says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’” This is the end of all human boasting, the death of self-idolatry.

Justification by Faith Alone

Finally, fourth, Moses drives a stake through the heart of self-idolatry by teaching justification by faith alone apart from works of the law. In Romans 4, Paul builds his whole argument for justification by faith alone on Moses, quoting Genesis 15:6: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3).

We must be righteous in order to be accepted by God. We can attempt to establish our own righteousness through law-keeping, and prop up our self-glorification, or we can admit our desperation and look away from ourselves to the righteousness of God, the totally free gift of imputed righteousness in Christ. Here’s how Paul put it in Romans 10:3–4 [literal translation]: “Being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, [Israel] did not submit to God’s righteousness. For the goal of the law [think of it! The goal of all the books of Moses] is Christ for righteousness to everyone who believes.” The final nail is driven into the coffin of our self-idolatry. We are utterly dependent on the righteousness of another, not our own.

Beauty of Christ in Moses

Shut up to the deadness of sin, desperately in need of a new birth, utterly dependent on God’s free choice (not our own) to make it happen, and now forever relying on the righteousness of another. What has become of our boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By the law of Moses, the law that teaches the bondage of sin and new birth and unconditional election and justification by faith.

So, my final question is this: What about you? Do you see the all-satisfying glory of Christ in the books of Moses? If you insist that apart from grace you are not dead in sin, and that the new birth is nonsense (like it was for Nicodemus), and that your self-idolizing will (not God’s gracious election) will decide your future, and that you can establish your own righteousness, then Moses will be a closed book for you, and there will be no Christ in it.

But if you join Ben Sasse and millions of others and welcome the mortal stake that slays your self-idolatry, the Bible will be a new book for you, and Jesus will be beautiful.