Theopedia

Moses

Overview

Moses was the Hebrew lawgiver, prophet, and mediator whom God raised up to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and to give them his law at Sinai. Scripture credits him as author of the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. His place in redemptive history runs well beyond his own lifetime: Reformed theology has long read Moses himself, not only the law he delivered, as a type pointing forward to Christ, the greater mediator, prophet, priest, and king.

Life and Ministry

Moses was a Levite, born in Egypt to Amram and Jochebed (Ex. 2:1-2; 6:20) and the younger brother of Aaron and Miriam (1 Chron. 6:3). His family lived among the Israelites in Goshen, whose rapid growth under slavery had made Pharaoh regard them as a threat (Ex. 1:8-14). Raised in Pharaoh’s household after being drawn from the Nile, Moses fled to Midian as a young man after killing an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave (Ex. 2:11-15).

It was in Midian, while keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, that God called Moses from a burning bush that was not consumed (Ex. 3:1-4). When Moses asked God’s name, God answered, “I AM WHO I AM,” and told him to say to Israel, “I AM has sent me to you” (Ex. 3:14). Bavinck reads this self-naming as God’s declaration of his own absolute, underived, and unchanging existence as the ground of everything else that exists, the very statement to which Moses’ own commission was tied.1 Carter likewise treats Exodus 3:14 as foundational to the church’s classical doctrine of God, God speaking of his own being in the act of sending Moses to deliver his people.2

Moses returned to Egypt, and after the ten plagues and the exodus he led Israel through the wilderness to Sinai, where God gave the law, including the Ten Commandments, and established his covenant with the nation (Ex. 19-24). For forty years Moses governed Israel in the wilderness, mediating repeated crises of rebellion and unbelief. At Meribah, when the people again complained of no water, Moses struck the rock in anger rather than simply speaking to it as God had commanded, and God told him that for this he would not enter the promised land (Num. 20:1-12). Watson later grouped this failure with David’s adultery, Peter’s denial, and Jonah’s anger as proof that Scripture records the sin of its own central figures rather than flattering them: “Moses records his own impatience when he struck the rock, and tells us therefore he could not enter into the land of promise.”3

Moses died on Mount Nebo after viewing the promised land from a distance, at 120 years old, his “eye undimmed” and his “vigor unabated” (Deut. 34:7). God buried him in the land of Moab, and to this day no one knows the location of his grave (Deut. 34:6).

Theological Contribution

Gill treats Moses as a type of Christ under four aspects of the office Christ himself fulfills. As mediator, Moses stood between God and Israel to receive and deliver the law, a role Paul calls the office of a “mediator” (Gal. 3:19), which Christ fulfills as the mediator of a better covenant (Heb. 3:1-6).4 As prophet, Moses spoke God’s words to the people at Sinai (Deut. 5:5) and himself foretold that God would raise up a prophet like him (Deut. 18:15), a promise the New Testament applies to Christ as the one to whom the Father says, “Listen to him” (Matt. 17:5).4 As the one who consecrated Aaron and his sons to the priesthood (Ex. 29:1), Moses’ role anticipates Christ’s own priesthood, exercised, in Gill’s reading, “after the order of Melchizedek” rather than Aaron’s.4 And as Israel’s lawgiver and deliverer, ruling as “king in Jeshurun” (Deut. 33:5), Moses foreshadows Christ’s own kingship, the one of whom Isaiah says “the government shall be upon his shoulder” (Isa. 9:6-7).4

Historical Significance

Moses’ giving of the law at Sinai founded Israel’s national and religious life for the whole of the Old Testament period, and the Pentateuch traditionally ascribed to him remains foundational to both Jewish and Christian Scripture; the question of what, precisely, Moses himself wrote, and what was added or edited afterward, is treated at Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.

Moses’ own recorded life includes a genuine moral failure. His anger at Meribah, and the barring from the promised land that followed it (Num. 20:1-12), stood in later Reformed reading as a deliberate example of Scripture’s honesty about its own central figures rather than a difficulty to be explained away.3 That the lawgiver himself fell short of the law’s own demand for faith and self-control did not diminish his standing as God’s chosen mediator; it illustrated, for Watson’s purposes, that the Bible’s authors had no motive to flatter even the greatest of their own number.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), chap. 8, “Living, Acting God.” ↩

  2. Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). ↩

  3. Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity (1692), 12-20. ↩ ↩2

  4. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, book 4, chap. 3, “Of the Exhibitions of the Covenant of Grace under the Mosaic Dispensation” (1769). ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4