Moses

This past week we held our 8th annual pre-teen camp. It went very well. We had a, I thought, our best program yet in the eight years that we've done it. Debbie and I were teaching Bible class with the kids, which is what we usually do, at least my part of it, with helping her to put that together. This year we had, we read three stories to the kids to keep in line with the theme of the camp this year, which was, you can do it. In other words, you can make a difference. You can accomplish these things. We used three biblical characters out of some children's storybooks, biblical storybooks, that many of us are familiar with.

We did one on Josiah, King Josiah. We did one on King David. We did one on Moses and a sister Miriam, and read those. And then we had various things for them to do to try to emphasize the message of three young people who made a difference, who can do it, and you can make a difference as well. So they all worked together, I think, to fit the overall camp theme. And since my job was to read these, at least on the first date, every group that came through, I once again got reacquainted with these stories. And the one on Moses and Miriam was—they were all three good. And Moses and Miriam kind of hit home to me because of some other research and study that I've been doing in recent weeks on the subject of Moses, and to be able to answer some questions that had been put to me about Moses and his writings and the basic books of the law of the first five books of the Bible. And reading those stories this week kind of brought that back to me. And I thought that this might be a good time, at least certainly for the kids here who were at our camp—and we had, I think, nine of you here, of the young people—and we can all kind of learn some things. And I thought I'd go a little bit deeper into this than you normally would in a pre-teen Bible class, to bring you some thoughts and some study that I've been doing on this subject of Moses, to help us kind of ourselves as a group of adults understand something about Moses, his life, what he did, his role in the Bible, and particularly his role in writing a large section of the Bible, and his stature in the whole story of God's plan of salvation.

It's a very interesting story. It's one that never gets old. That's why every year they play the Ten Commandments movie on television. And we, you know, you can take the story of Moses and you could almost sit down with just about anybody, anywhere, and they would know some aspect of that story of Moses because it has been carried through every generation.

And of course, we have Charlton Heston and his dramatic portrayal in the Cecil B. DeMille epic of the Ten Commandments that is a classic of American cinematography. And so we have that, and yet it sometimes becomes a bit of a caricature or we lose a little bit of sight of some of the realities of really the man and what God did with him and his role and the importance of it. I was thinking about that a few weeks ago when I was doing some of the research and writing some things. And it struck me that I had learned some, I was beginning to see Moses in a whole different perspective than I had before. And I realized sometimes I think I have to clear my mind of the Charlton Heston image of Moses. As good as it was in certain parts of that movie, other parts of it were a little bit, shall we say, corny in his role. However, I don't know what was going on with the producer-director at that time and Charlton Heston's day on the set, but certain sections of it don't ring too well while certain ones do. But none of them, and as good as it may have been, none of it holds a candle, quite frankly, to the reality of who he was and what he did.

And his role and the importance for us to understand so much of certainly the law of God, the Word of God, and the truth of God's Word. I think that the last part is as much of anything as just the role that he has in verifying and understanding what God did with him to produce and to deliver to us the beginnings of the written Word of God in the pages that we have here from Genesis through Deuteronomy. The first five books of the Bible, called by the Jews the Torah, that form or the Pentateuch, and to use another term, but those basic first five books have always been ascribed to the authorship of Moses, and they've also been severely challenged by critics of the Bible and of God, at least in modern times and modern generations as well. Let's turn back, if you will, to Exodus and look at, again, just a few things here. Chapter 2 is where we were this week as I was reading the story. I think we all remember that the Israelites had been in Egypt. They had grown large. They had evolved into kind of a workforce that was on the – they were slaves to Pharaoh within Egypt, and there came a critical moment where, in the story, Pharaoh arose who did not remember Joseph and the reason for the Israelites being there, and they had grown to become quite a large people that, demographically, they were overtaking the Egyptians, and so he instituted a purge to kill the firstborn. If you want to kind of begin to weed out or thin out a population or a segment of group – you know, a particular grouping of people, racially, ethnically, or whatever, start killing the firstborn.

You know, and if you're a despot with total authority, which the Pharaoh was, it's an edict that can be enforced, and it was. And Moses was a firstborn, and so his mother took certain steps. In chapter 2, beginning to read in verse 1, it says, A man of the house of Levi went and took his wife a daughter of Levi. So the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him for three months, because of the edict from Pharaoh. But when she could no longer hide him, and after a few months, those things became quite more difficult to do.

She took an arc of bull rushes for him, daubed it with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river's bank. And his sister stood afar off. Now, this is Mary. This is the sister of Moses. And, you know, you can dramatize the story around this quite a bit, but she stood afar off to know what would be done to him. So the mother took him, laid him in the little boat that was waterproofed, hid him among the reeds at the edge of the river, and his sister stood far enough away to keep an observation but to not be noticed or associated with him. And as the story goes on in verse 5, the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maidens walked along the riverside.

And when she saw the ark among the reeds, she sent her maid to get it. And when she opened it, she saw the child. And behold, the baby wept. So she had compassion on him and said, this is one of the Hebrews' children. How she recognized that, you know, perhaps it was because of what he was wrapped in, perhaps there were some other ways that she knew that. But his sister said to Pharaoh's daughter, verse 7, shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women that she may nurse the child for you? And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, go, in other words, do this, provide that. So the maiden went and called the child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed him.

So we begin to move rapidly through the story. And then in verse 10, the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter. And he became her son. So she called his son Moses, saying, because I drew him out of the water. And so he's to the point in the story where then he is raised as a daughter, as a son or child of the daughter of Pharaoh. And so he's a part of the royal household. And this is how he is raised. So this is where the story kind of begins to transition into his adulthood, because in verse 11, it came to pass in those days when he was grown that he went out to his brethren and looked at their burdens.

And he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brethren. Now we're not going to go through the whole story of Moses' life here at this point in time, but I did want to let's just stop for a moment and understand a few things about this. Obviously, Moses had the advantage of being brought up in the royal household in Egypt at a very unique nation at a unique time.

The Egyptian world and the Egyptian culture at this time was probably at its zenith in terms of its historical development. The Egyptian history is one that just continues to fascinate the modern world. If you've ever been to Egypt, you see that their whole modern culture, it seems, is built around their past, because the pyramids and the sinks and the aspect of Egyptian, ancient Egyptian culture so dominates that nation to this day that they are very heavily dependent upon it, and it fuels their tourism industry, which is a very, very large segment of their whole gross domestic product.

And their modern history doesn't hold a candle to what took place in this time. You can still see the pyramids. The ancient Egyptian culture is one of the oldest in the world. What's important to realize is how old it was when Moses was growing up, he grew up in the shadow of the pyramids. The pyramids were old and ancient in Moses' day. They had been there for hundreds of years, if not a thousand or more years.

So they were old. We think a building that's 80 years old in America today is old. And a hundred years old, it's an antique. A hundred and fifty years old is on the National Historic Register. That's nothing compared to Egypt and other ancient cultures, and Egypt in particular. But it was old at the time, the pyramids were old during the time of Moses. And he grew up as a part of a culture that was power, wealth, knowledge, and if you will, culture was centered at the top in the Pharaoh and those that served him and his family and his life.

That the Egyptians were able to enslave the Israelites speaks to the type of world that it was. You don't have to read too far and too detailed into Egyptian history to understand how much all this was centered at the top. Take, for instance, the matter of writing was the ability to write and therefore to acquire and pass on knowledge was not something that the general population knew.

That was an art, if you will, a mysterious art that was kept to the ruling class and was centered there. And not everyone had that knowledge of who they were and where they came from. They were very, very dependent upon the priest, the religious class, and the ruling class with Pharaoh at the top.

This was the fortuitous family situation into which Moses was adopted. And he grew up in that court. When we were there in Egypt, six years ago, we were there as part of our tour. We went to the feast in Jordan and made an extended tour to Egypt. And we went down to the area of Thebes, Luxor, where the magnificent ruins of the Temple of Karnak are and the tombs of the kings and all. And you can go through them.

It's quite an elaborate area. It's even more interesting than the pyramids, because of what took place there at Thebes, which is up the Nile River from Cairo. It was at Thebes, it was really at the governmental cultural center of this period of time of Moses as he was growing up there in Egypt.

And I remember when we were going through some of the ruins of one of the temples there. The guide made a statement and he was certainly catering to us as a Christian group and trying to point out things that were connected with the story and all of the Bible.

But there was a section of one of the rooms, it's now open air, but it's a part of the temple area, and he stopped us and he pointed off to the side and he said that this area was kind of one of the areas of learning and teaching in an academy type setting within Egypt. And he said it would have been there, he said, that Moses learned what he did and was taught the ways of the Egyptians.

And of course, that late at night after you're tired and hot for a group like us, that perks up the attention to help us understand something. And you kind of note that and went on and I had no means to debate him. I assumed that he was correct with what he knew. He was an expert Egyptologist, the guy that was guiding us. But if you hold your place here in Exodus and turn back to Acts chapter 7, there is a statement made by Stephen when he was on trial before the Jews here.

Acts chapter 7, beginning in verse 17, When the time of the promise drew near, this is Stephen's major speech here before the Pharisees, which God had sworn to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt, till another king arose who did not know Joseph. This man dealt treacherously with our people and oppressed our forefathers, making them expose their babies so that they might not live.

At this time, Moses was born and was well pleasing to God and was brought up in his father's house for three months. But when he was set out, Pharaoh's daughter took him away and brought him up as her own son. In verse 22, Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds. And when he was 40, it came to his heart to visit his brethren, the children of Israel, which is where we left off in the account back in Exodus. But verse 22 should catch our attention, because in one verse it does really give us several volumes of the story of Moses during his time being raised as a daughter, as a child of Pharaoh's daughter. He was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds. Now, the wisdom of the Egyptians was quite strong.

And it was a huge mistake for their time, and far more than we probably think.

I think so much has been lost through the ages in terms of our knowledge and understanding of what they did know. The fact that they did build the Pyramids is still something that people cannot figure out how to do it. They saw it. It could not be replicated today, they say.

We couldn't build something. We don't know how they did it, but they did it. And they stood there It is a very, very interesting question. It is a very interesting question. It is about the Christian Church and wisdom, and their culture was quite advanced, far more than many other cultures that came on.

There's a, in the commentary, the new international commentary on this section of Acts written by F.F. Bruce, he does make some interesting Stephen, here in Acts 7, 22, expresses himself with more moderation than other commentators have who represent Moses as the father of all science and culture and as the founder of Egyptian civilization. Those are certain Jewish commentators that have extrapolated Moses' role and based it on a lot, but there's a footnote to this.

Certain of these commentators have made the statements. They've said that the Egyptians owed all their civilization to Moses, and he's identified with various characters there. According to one Jewish commentator, they say that Moses was proficient in arithmetic, geometry, poetry, music, philosophy, astrology, and all branches of learning.

Personally, I don't doubt that. I don't know that he gave them all of that, but I think that he was conversant in what they had of all of these disciplines, if you look at what Acts 7.22 says. And I have no reason to doubt that he did, that he had expert knowledge of all branches of Egyptian learning. Josephus, who the great Jewish historian of the first century, describes Moses as unique in wisdom, stature, and beauty.

So with all of that, and what you could dig out about it, what Stephen does say about Moses is perhaps an understatement, but he just glosses over it here and doesn't tell us everything. Now, why is this important? Why is this important to you and I? It's important because God didn't call an illiterate slouch to lead Israel out of Egyptian slavery and to found the nation through them and through whom to give the law and through whom to write the first five books of the Bible that give us a foundation for everything that goes to that point on.

We don't serve that kind of God. That is why it is important to understand this because the field of Bible criticism that goes back to, and really in our modern time had much of its origins among the Germans, German theologians of the 1800s, and still is with us to this day in many of their legacy and the idea of criticizing the text of the Bible as just a work of men uninspired, not truly the word of God, and therefore not a book on which to base your life and your conviction in faith that it is from God.

When they start the whole discipline of what is called Bible criticism, it is to Moses and his writings that they go first because it is almost as if that is the trunk of the tree. And if that can be chopped down, then the whole book falls. The idea of the virgin birth and Christ being the Son of God falls with it.

You don't even have to attack all of that because you've attacked the foundation of the whole book and the Bible. And it is a discipline and a study that has been going on for, well, hundreds, if not thousands of years during the writing of the Bible, but in our modern time has taken on some very unique twists and turns and is still very much a part of the academic disciplines of biblical studies, the study of theology, and looking at the Bible and how this is done.

And so it is important to think about and to understand certain of what we are told internally within the Bible and what we can glean from the histories about these individuals, and particularly Moses, and particularly what he wrote. Because either it is true, and he did exist, and he did write, or the Bible, as we look at it and know it, is not something that we should base our life on.

And you and I may as well just walk out the door here today and never come back together as the Church of God because what we base our belief, faith, and practice upon is merely the work of men at a later period. As they look at the writings of Moses, they tear apart particularly the book of Deuteronomy as a work of somebody among the Israelites five, six, seven hundred years later than this time as they were trying to piece together their history into some type of a national story.

Just as you and I have Philadelphia, Boston, 1776, and all of those events and characters, we have our national story. Some later Israelite teacher scribe or whatever started pulling together myths and ideas and put it all together, but it was not written by Moses at that time, and in fact he probably never even existed. And if he did, he couldn't even write.

These are some of the ideas that have been elevated to high academic standing through the years, and quite frankly most of them have been debunked and shown to be quite false by the various other disciplines and schools of history, theology, archaeology, biblical studies, in the battle that goes back and forth over the Bible and the word of God in our time.

It's quite an interesting story and study. I mean, as I've been digging into it in recent weeks to answers and questions that have been put to me to answer about the Bible, it's taken me back to studies that I've long since kind of moved on off of when I was at Ambassador College and put me back into, you know, just looking at the whole discipline and the whole story. It's quite an interesting story in itself, and it approached, I think, wisely, properly, led by God's Spirit, once faith doesn't have to be questioned or shattered because of this. Rather, if you look at what we are told and look at some of a lot of some very good and honest research and criticisms and buttressing of the story, what they have put together, there is a, there is, you know, faith is absolved.

There is no reason to throw it all out. There's no reason to doubt that what the Bible and the books proclaim themselves to be. Indeed, they are. They are the works of Moses in these particular cases and all the other ones beyond that because that is exactly how it works. If you go back to the book of Deuteronomy, we'll just, you know, there are, Deuteronomy kind of falls into the role of taking a lot of the brunt of criticism, and I've been able to, I found a number of books, most of them free because they're old enough that Google has scanned them all in and digitized them and you can get it free and or find them in a, on the Amazon used book site for about a dollar or two dollars. You pay more for shipping than you do for the actual book itself and you find that really a lot of very good quality research that has been done over the last 50, 60 years is available in that form to help to put the story together and approach the subject in such a way. Deuteronomy has come into, they received more than its share of the story because of its place within the the canon of scripture, that being the last book that Moses wrote and the fact that some of the things and statements that are made within Deuteronomy cause one to look at with a critical eye and say, how could he write that if he was already dead? Or how could he write about himself in such a way if it was not done? For instance, if you look back at the very end of Deuteronomy, when Moses' life at the very end of the the wonderings, remember that Deuteronomy covers a period of time in the last months of the 40 years of the Exodus and the wonderings of Israel. It was a recap of the law and their story with things added in the very in the last chapters, including the death of Moses and a great deal of information. It is, again, just to read it in itself in a good translation, is an eye-opening book in this way. But chapter 34 begins with Moses going up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, which is across from Jericho. And God showed him all the land of Gilead as far as Dan. Remember, Moses had already been told by God that he would not be taking Israel into the Promised Land because he struck the rock at one point twice, lost his anger with the Israelites. God said, you're not going in. Someone else will take them in. And so this is at the point now where under Joshua the baton has been passed of leadership and Moses has basically recounted everything, reviewed everything for them, written it, put it together. And God is showing him the land that the people are going to possess, all the land of Gilead as far as Dan, and the land of Nathalai and Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the western sea, the south and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees as far as Zorod. The Lord said to him, this is the land of which I swore to give Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, I will give it to your descendants. I have caused you to see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over. Now this particular point, or whether it is or not, you can go in Jordan, you can go to the top of the mountain, and the Catholic Church has built a little shrine there and spot, and it's a popular tourist attraction in Jordan, and you can look out over the land, and at least you can get a view, whether it's the view that he had or the spot, that's another question, but you could well imagine what he was looking at if you go there today and stand on top of Mount Nebo.

And if you get a, happen to get a very clear day, indeed you can see everything that is mentioned here in these verses as to, it is quite a sight, and it's quite an emotional spot to visit and to see and to think about the story of Moses as he was looking out, would have been looking out from upon that scene at least, and recognizing he couldn't go with Israel into the Promised Land.

And so this is what he wrote. Now to get back to a point here, verse 5 says, Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him, God, buried him in a valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-Pior. But no one knows his grave to this day. He was 120 when he died. Now one of the critics would say, and it has been said for many, many years by critics, you know, this shows that Moses didn't write this because how can he write, how can a person write about his own death?

Okay, good question. How do you write about your own death? And there are other places throughout Deuteronomy where you could, you would, the same criticism has been made. We're not going to take the time to go through all of those here this morning. But it is a, it's an interesting statement. And again, if you just took it from a critic, and you could say, well, I hadn't thought of that. That may be true. Well, then maybe he didn't write the book. But there are, there is plenty of internal evidence to show that Moses did write these words. If you look in just a few pages back in chapter 31 of Deuteronomy and verse 9, we'll just take this one statement.

It says, Moses wrote this law and delivered it to the priests, the books, the sons of Levi who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord and all the elders of Israel. Now, this can stand for so many other references throughout the first five books, or particularly Leviticus and parts of Numbers and especially Deuteronomy, where we are told many times Moses wrote what God said to put down, and he wrote it down. So this is one verse that stands for many, many others. It is true that Moses is not mentioned at all in the book of Genesis, which sometimes is brought up as biocritic. Well, how can he, he didn't even, he's not mentioned in Genesis, and probably one of the most logical answers to that is it doesn't cover a period of time that includes his life.

There would be no reason for Moses to even put his name into the book of Genesis because it ends prior to him being born. His story doesn't begin until the first chapter of Exodus. So it, to, you know, to criticize that is not necessarily valid. But there are many sections that show that the book of the law was written by Moses. He wrote it down, delivered it to the priests. I would just, you know, Joshua 1 and verse 8 is another section that, another verse that mentions that.

And throughout, other places throughout the Old Testament, Moses' authorship of the, of these, of the law and these books are mentioned internally as proofs. And I think that, again, an honest examination of the books for what they are, that is a valid proof that is buttressed by a great deal of other scriptures.

But the authorship of the first five books of the Bible is always attributed personally to Moses throughout the Old Testament scriptures. It's never doubted or put to anyone else. That's, again, why it is attacked by modern critics who say that you, that it was written seven, eight hundred years later at another time in Israel's history to begin to put together their national story, but could not have been done there. Historians, archaeologists of the Bible do know for a fact that writing was well known at this particular time.

The, that throughout the Middle East there's ample evidence that has been found to know that the people were not illiterate. Writing was a part of culture that was well known. If Moses, indeed, as the scriptures say, was raised with all the wisdom of the Egyptians, writing would have been something that he would have known how to do. For him to have sat down and to write what God told him to write is not beyond the realm of believability from the internal evidence of the scriptures here. So that objection can be completely thrown out as, and it has been, by honest, honest scholars.

This section in chapter 31 can begin to help us understand something about the question that is raised at the end of the book about Moses' own death. How can a person write about their own death after, you know, before the fact in that case? Well, it is a good question. Go back to Deuteronomy 31 verse 9, and let's understand something in general. Moses wrote this, and he delivered it to the priests.

Now what Moses wrote and delivered to the priests to be kept after his life was something that was to be read every seven years, verse 10 tells us. Moses commanded him, saying, at the end of every seven years, the appointed time in the year released at the Feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel comes together, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Now, they are told to gather the people, the men and women, and the strangers that they may hear, that they may learn to fear the Lord your God, and carefully observe all the words of this law. So there was to be an oral reading. That doesn't mean that there was not a written scroll, instead of writings, of what had transpired, but they all didn't have kindles and nooks and iPads to read it on. But there was, as part of the elaborate system, the priests were to read this every year at the Feast of Tabernacles, and probably referring at least specifically to the book of Deuteronomy, the rest of their story from Exodus and Genesis, whether in oral or written form, was a part of their tradition and their story as well, which they know. Keep in mind, as you go through the Old Testament, the singular event that defined the history of Israel was the Exodus and the establishment of them as a people. That continually comes up through the Kings and the Chronicles. They're referred back to the Exodus, when God brought you out of Egypt, out of slavery.

That was the starting point, that was kind of their hinge point of their whole existence that was always brought forth. That's where everything began, which again makes Moses this towering figure in the Bible within Israelite life, and should be within hours that cannot be just dismissed as an illiterate scribe or a pseudo scribe or someone who just, you know, let a few people out, and the story got magnified with each generation until it became this huge national epic.

No, that doesn't square either with what we see and what we have here.

That Moses was told to deliver this to the priests, and the priests then were the recipients and the caretakers of a set of writings written by this monumental figure in their history.

It's not something that you can just kind of gloss over.

The priest that Moses handed this to was handed something very important.

If, what could be a modern parallel to this? I guess if somehow you and I had been walking around the streets of Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, like the Hancock's were just a few weeks ago, and Thomas Jefferson walked up to us, or fast forward to 1785-86 when they wrote the Constitution, and someone of the stature of James Madison, the father of the American Constitution, walked up to you and I with this bundle of books all bound together and said, this is the Declaration. This is the Constitution. Keep it. Preserve it. Hold fast to it.

And all those signatures from John Hancock all the way down were right there. And it was given into your hands. How would you treat it? How valuable would it be to us? Well, this is what the book of the law was when it was given by Moses to Eliezer first, and then when Eliezer got old, and the next high priest, he handed it off to him, and so on, down through the generations.

What Moses wrote was held in such high regard by the Israelites to even think that people added stuff into it. Or people, you know, cut and pasted and did a number on the book of the law.

It doesn't fit with history, the Bible history, culture. It doesn't square.

They would not have added anything other than perhaps a few what are called glosses, just what we read where Moses died and he, God, hid his body. And a few other places that you can look at in the book of Deuteronomy and say, well, maybe this was kind of edited just slightly at a later point to, as the priest told the story, and as it became codified then in their history.

That's not beyond the realm of imagination, but that doesn't take away from the authorship of the books by the man to whom God gave it. It is beyond, you know, it's a stretch to go down that road to think that it came up later on. There are many other reasons that buttress that.

But you begin to see some of the ideas that come about as a result of this, the challenge whether or not Moses was the author of these books. Hold that thought there. If we jump into the New Testament, there's internal evidence, and keep in mind we're jumping ahead over 1200 years, 12 to 1300 years when we come into the time of Christ and the apostles. And so we're talking about the New Testament scriptures and scrolls and parchments and all that became then the New Testament. And we're beginning to see, you know, something 1200 years later, but also a little bit closer to our time, of which we have some pretty strong textual evidence that these gospels, these epistles are indeed accurate. What are the statements that we find?

Well, let's look in John chapter 5. I end recording Christ's words.

John chapter 5 and verse 46.

Let's look at something he said, and he said this about Moses.

For if you believed Moses, as he's saying to the Jews of his time, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. He, Moses, wrote about me, Christ said.

But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?

You go no further than these two verses alone and you see the problem that you and I can get into if we begin to start to doubt any book, the authorship of the Old Testament, then we've got to question the New Testament. And when you start to question and criticize, it's like that one strand that if you pull it, the whole tapestry comes apart.

Did Christ mean what he said? If you believed Moses, you would believe me.

For he wrote of me. And you have to go back to Deuteronomy 18 and verse 15 to the prophecy that Moses gave of one greater than he that would be given. See, and this is another interesting part of the story. Moses and Christ kind of are joined at the hip in the story of the Bible.

In one sense, Moses was the first Christ. He was the lawgiver. Christ came and he said, not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill the law. But Moses specifically said, there will be one come greater than me, a prophet that you will look to. Deuteronomy 18 and 15. And that's what Christ is referring to here in John 5. And so, again, the stature that Moses has in the story of the Bible and of Israel and this whole epic is quite large. For anyone to have tried to edit Moses, it would have been unthinkable back in Israel's time. It would have been unthinkable.

I mean, he was the one that was on the mountaintop when it was burning.

I guess I don't know who would be a comparable modern figure that you would never...

He goes, you know, we'll edit anybody today. Nothing is so much sacred. You can't believe anything within the digital age as being completely accurate. Pictures, words, because things can be cut and paste. Photoshop can do wonders to a picture. And we think nothing of that today. But to have edited Moses, to add it to it, to rearrange the story would have been unthinkable. Christ is challenging the Jews in his day that they didn't believe him.

And he said, but you would believe Moses? And he told him, he prophesied of me.

But you throw Moses out, you throw Christ out. That's how slippery a slope it gets when you start down the road of Bible criticism and looking at whether or not it indeed is inspired and the Word of God. John 7, verse 19, there's another reference is made. I know this is all internal proof, internal evidence, and that has to be buttressed by a lot of other things, but nor do you throw it out either because of being internally. John 7, 19, he said, did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill me?

And then in Romans chapter 10, just to look at another writer of the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, Romans chapter 10, makes a reference to Moses. In verse 5, Romans 10, verse 5, Paul writes, for Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, the man who does these things shall live by them. He's quoting from Leviticus 18, verse 5 there.

So again, I use this just to show that the Apostle Paul and Christ referenced Moses in the New Testament as having written the law. Paul was obviously a trained Pharisee at the highest, one of the highest schools of Pharisaical studies in his time out of Gamaliel, and he's echoing what is the received knowledge and belief of that time of Moses being the author of the book of the law and it being a valid reference that goes back there. To go back, there's one other story that we should note here, and all of this today is just kind of a fleeting low flyover of the whole subject, but let's look at one episode that again comes up as a criticism and just again to help us understand how to approach some of these things. Turn back to Numbers 12. Numbers 12. This is an episode from Moses with his siblings, Miriam. Again, we're back to her story. And Aaron, so kids, those of you that were camp you can do this week, this is Miriam, a little girl that helped to kind of preserve her little brother there in the boat, but now they're adults. They're all over 80 years of age at this point in the story.

And Miriam and Aaron are with Moses in the journeys through the wilderness, and one of their episodes of Dissension comes out here. Let's look at it. Chapter 12 of Numbers in verse 1. Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Ethiopian woman whom he had married, for he had married an Ethiopian woman. That's another part of the story of his pre-called life, where Moses was a general in the Egyptian army and he led an expedition into Ethiopia, and part of the spoils was a marriage into the royal family of the Ethiopians. But that's another part of the story. We're not told it from the Bible. You get that from Josephus' history.

I'm sure there's a large part of the truth there. Anyway, this is part of the criticism that came up.

So they said, in verse 2, How is the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses?

Has he not spoken through us also? And the Lord heard it.

All right, there's a challenge. Now this is a family squabble, if you will. This is Miriam, who protected her brother when he was a baby. You can well imagine, you could write a whole book around this one as to how she grew up and watched Moses and what he became, first among the Egyptians, then as the deliverer of the Israelites from slavery, and now, you know, closely working with him. She knew him as well better than anybody. She had been right there to guard over him and to watch him all these years. And of course, now Moses has quite an exalted position and quite a responsibility. Things change the dynamics among people. And where there may have once been a relationship where Moses was dependent upon her, now she was dependent upon him.

Friction comes up. Jealousy, envy, all of these human elements begin to work, along with Aaron, and they challenge them, as only family members can challenge one another. That's part of the interesting story here. But that's not so much what we focus on. Verse 3, Now the man Moses was very humble, more than all men who were on the face of the earth.

Wow! Did Moses write that?

How can you be humble and proclaim yourself to be the most humble man on the face of the earth?

Therefore comes another point of criticism by the critics. He didn't write that, and if he didn't write that, then he didn't write this. And this other section, you go right down the line. Did he write it? Or was this added by somebody later on? This is where you can find all types of commentaries that will make suppositions on what happened. What's this about? Did he write it? Did he not?

And as I've researched it in just not an exhaustive research, but looking at what I have readily available to me in my own personal library and what's on the internet, I see a variety of opinions among the experts to explain this particular phrase, all as part of the matter of biblical criticism and whether there was a Mosaic authorship of this part of the Bible.

And again, if you can pull that one loose brick out, then the whole wall falls down according to the theory and the way it goes. Did he write it? Did he not? Again, I could bring in four different commentaries, learned, educated, smarter men than me. And they would all they would contradict one another. And they would have their different point of view.

One commentary says that the word shouldn't be translated humble, that it should be miserable.

That Moses was the most miserable man on the face of the earth. Now this is the expositor's Bible commentary take on it. I don't necessarily buy that particular point of view, that that's what it was. If I take the point of view that Moses wrote it, I can begin to, I think, get a little deeper into an understanding of the concept of meekness, exactly what he was.

Now you can construct a whole biography of Moses and say, you know, he really wasn't the very meek man as certain other episodes of his life. He displayed anger. He displayed frustration.

You know, he endured a great deal. Moses, the more you study about Moses and glean this and look at the scriptural point of view, I've come to the conclusion Moses was a genius, or the highest order. There were few people smarter than him in all of history. As I said, he was not a slouch.

He was a genius. And what he did in terms of administering and leading and mastering this group of people and coming out of the Egyptian culture and society is one of the greatest stories of history. You don't have to make up fantasy and fiction to get any better than this. Just understand what the Bible tells us. You've got a whole lifetime of study into this. But Moses was a towering individual, and he was a conflicted individual. But if you look at the, as some commentators will say, who believe that he wrote what he did about himself here, and that it was not added by some later thought, there was something that was added, and you could build a case to explain that, but you could also build a case for what I'm going to explain. And that is, if you look at the rest of the story here, he proves his meekness. And he basically comes in, he says, down in verse 13, Moses cried out to the Lord when Maryam turned out leprous, please heal her, O God, I pray.

Let me summarize quickly what I think is going on here. I think that he wrote it, and it was left in there that they would not have dared tamper with it or add to this in any way.

I think Moses had a pretty clear vision at this point of himself before God and man.

And when he fell on his knees, it was just, it truly is a story and lesson for all of us about what true meekness is. Christ did say, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, in the Sermon on the Mount. Meekness is not a milk toast approach to life that is weak.

It is something that few of us ever come up to. And yet it is worth trying. And it be, there's no better example in the scriptures probably than Numbers 12 and how Moses took this criticism from his own sister and brother, nonetheless, and then fell on his knees before God and prayed for them. I think Moses knew that he, what he was inside before God, that he had tendencies toward arrogance, pride, and that he indeed probably allowed, there were moments when he did take too much to himself and maybe he didn't delegate enough.

And I think in his deepest private thoughts, Moses knew that.

And by him not lowering the boom on Miriam and Aaron and calling in Joshua and Caleb to cut their heads off, or whatever else he could have done at that moment, by not doing that, by falling down on his knees before God, he was saying basically to his brother and sister, kiddos, you're not telling me anything I don't know. I already know what I am.

But he also knew that they had crossed the line.

They crossed the line administratively, governmentally, religiously, familial, just on personal relate. They crossed every conceivable line you could draw in in a relationship that governs more than two people in this type of a structure.

And he knew they'd crossed the line. And God had made it very clear, evident who he was behind, and yet Moses fell on his knees and begged mercy and pardon for them. And then he had the audacity to write it. Not because he was arrogant, but because he wanted that lesson learned among the people and for all generations that would be reading it from that point forward.

That's what I think, buttressed by other experts on the subject who look at this and are not quite so prone to just throw something out because it doesn't seem plausible from our particular modern point of view. So it's a fascinating story, one of many that we could go into just in this whole study or concept of biblical criticism or a more technical term for what I've been going through with you this morning, which is called apologetics. Biblical apologetics. Not that we're not apologizing for God, the Bible, or the truth, but an apology in a sense as it is used in this sense to explain and to defend a point of view, a truth, a position. Moses was a unique individual with a unique story. He started the Bible, if you will. He started to write the Bible that later developed into all the various books and letters and everything that came together that you and I hold on to it. Again, because of his position and what he did, it's understandable that he and his writings and his position probably gets the sharper focus of criticism through the generations as to the truth of the scriptures. But I bring this out to you here this morning for us all to just have a little bit of an appreciation of the man, what he did, but also of the Word of God and to help us to know how to approach the Word of God. Back in 2 Timothy, and I'll conclude with this verse here. This is one I kept going over last month at Camp Catubik when I was teaching the Bible class with the teens at camp. 2 Timothy 3 and verse 16, the scripture that I firmly believe, and I know you do, but one that we dare never forget. 2 Timothy 3, 16. All scripture, Paul wrote, from Genesis to the end of Revelation, all scripture is given by inspiration of God.

Through men, preserved, protected, defended, but given by God's inspiration.

It is not a work of men. It's not a literary book to be criticized in the traditional forms as you would the work of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or anyone else. It is given of the inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped, for every good word. There is ample reason for every one of us at any particular turn in our life to place our faith in what Paul wrote here as he was speaking about the scriptures of God. And when we do, we can be sure that we will be building upon a solid foundation, the rock of God, and God's Word stands true forever.