Moses' Prediction
April 18th 2008 23:11
“Joshua, I’m near the end of my earthly stay,” Moses told his right-hand man. “I am ready, even eager, to go to my eternal home.”
“It does appear that way, Sir,” Joshua agreed. “We have been aware for some time that you, yourself, will not get to enter the Promised land.”
“To a degree, I am in agreement with that statement, Joshua,” Moses cordially chided. “Still, I am sure that I am going to the better Promised Land, not this earthly piece of soil that I have just seen from the mountain top. I truly believe that there is a Promised Land that none of us can even begin to imagine, a spiritual place.”
“No doubt you are correct, Sir,” Joshua agreed with his superior.
“I’m not sure how much more time God will give me here in this earthly life. I’m sure that it is not much longer.”
Moses seriously considered this man, one of only two in the whole of the Israelites who was over the age of forty. God would not allow them to enter the Promised Land until all of the rebellious generation had died off. That took forty years to accomplish. Only two men were exempt from this decision of God’s to not allow any of the rebellious generation to enter the new homeland. Joshua was one of those two men.
“You will be the new leader, Joshua.” Moses spent a lot of time instructing Joshua on his duties and his outlook as the leader of the Israelites.
“Sir, I will instruct the people that as for me and for the people in my household, we will serve the Lord,” Joshua consoled the old leader. “I know it’s not the popular approach for me, but I intend to work hard to follow your leadership and the teachings that you are leaving for us.”
“Actually, those teachings are not from me,” Moses corrected his protégé. “I was always the person who had to express the teachings and commandments that God gave. I wanted my brother, Aaron, to be my spokesman, but that did not happen.”
“Frankly, I think you did a very good job of revealing what God wants us to know, even if you preferred that someone else be the spokesman,” Joshua added.
“I’m a slow speaker, and I think slowly. My brother would have said the words much more quickly and more fluently, I am sure.”
After a pause, Joshua expressed his thoughts about this. “However, you have been our deliverer, yourself. As I recall, you acted alone much of the time. Even Aaron and your sister, Miriam, were not always in agreement with you.”
“That seems to be the lot of leaders, Joshua. Accept it when you are alone in the future, doing that which you believe is God’s will,” advised the older man.
“You and Aaron were not always looking at things from the same angle, I think.” It was Joshua, feeling more free to tell his viewpoint. “I wondered at times why you chose Aaron to be the priest to our nation.”
“That was the best that was available at the time,” Moses confided. “Whenever we can’t do as we would prefer, we need to do the best that we can. I’m sure that Aaron did not always honestly represent God when he was High Priest. His priesthood was far from perfect. There was a much more perfect priest, one who served our father, Abraham.”
“You’re talking about Melchisidec?”
“Yes. He seemed to be a type of the much greater Deliverer Who will come sometime in the future. We don’t know a lot about Melchisidec, do we?” Moses’ eyes were looking beyond the present time and circumstance, remembering the stories that they had been told about the strange Melchisidec. After a few minutes of inward thinking, Moses went on. “We have been told very little information about him. He was called the king of Salem and at the same time, he was a priest, standing between men and God. He served Father Abraham, collected tithes from Abraham, and soon was not seen again. It seems, from our teachings, that he had no father or mother and no children of his own. It is hard to fathom, the part about him being a priest forever, even up to now, I guess. He was referred to as the King of Righteousness and sometimes as the King of Peace. I wish I understood more about him.”
“So do I.”
“Still, I believe that another High Priest is coming, sort of like Melchisidec, but even better,” Moses predicted. “Maybe you will see Him, Joshua. I kept hoping that I would meet Him, but surely that is not to be. Although I have not seen this new priest and deliverer, I feel a strong feeling of attraction for Him, a feeling much like love.”
“Since you have not met the One who is after the order of Melchisidec, you felt you needed to appoint Aaron to serve?” questioned Joshua.
“It seems something like that, yes,” Moses acknowledged.
The old Israelite looked over the lands that his people would soon call home. Clearly, he would have liked to go with them and see the country and oversee the battles that surely would take place.
“Oh, Joshua, be sure that Caleb gets to choose the part of the land before the other people. You and he are the only men of any age who will enter the land,” suggested Moses.
“Surely, yes, of course.”
“Speaking about things in my past which seemed to parallel the new priest and deliverer, I think that men in the future will speak of the first Passover as significant. I think the blood of a lamb, a lamb which died with no broken bones, this blood has significance.” Moses was doing so much deep thinking, wondering how many of his thoughts were related to a coming leader, king, priest and deliverer.
“You are probably correct about that, Moses,” Joshua agreed. “Maybe other things, too, are significant. I wondered about the bronze serpent that you had us raise on a tall pole. That was to heal people who had been bitten by serpents while we traveled.”
“You’re right,” Moses smiled, his eyes showing that he was remembering those days in the distant past. People who were bitten by the serpents were dying. He felt that God wanted him to raise a pole high in the air with a bronze serpent on it. Whenever people looked at the serpent and believed in its healing power, they did not die from the snake bites. “Strange, isn’t it?”
“What are you referring to, Sir?”
“It’s strange how God told us to not make any brazen images, no pictures to try to represent God or even earthly things. Still, He told me to have the serpent cast of bronze for people to see.”
“Are you ready to depart now, Sir?” asked Joshua. “It will soon be getting dark and will be hard to find our ways back to camp.”
“In a while, not yet. Let me think a while longer and admire your new homeland.”
Some more thinking, more looking in the distance across the lands. They could see so much from this peak, rivers, meadowlands, rocks, rolling lands, even the walls of cities which may have to be conquered by Joshua and the men he would be leading.
“Can I trust you to be truthful with me, Joshua, even if I ask questions which make you uncomfortable?”
“I will try, Sir,” Joshua replied. His facial expression showed that he hoped to not become uncomfortable.
“Am I impulsive? Do I do things that I later regret?” Moses asked.
Trying to think defensively, Joshua took a while to respond. “You worked miracles, Sir. Remember when we were fighting and you had your hands in the air? As long as your hands were up, we were winning.”
“Yes, I got very tired that day,” Moses remembered. “Then, Hur helped me by holding my hands up for me. My strength was quite gone. He helped us to win when I could not do enough for myself.”
“Remember when you struck a rock with your rod and water came out? We were so thirsty at that time,” Joshua expressed.
“That is one of the reasons why I asked you if I am impulsive.” Moses looked at Joshua intently. Joshua lowered his eyes. “Sure, I struck the rock and provided water when it was really needed. Think it through, however. That even is why I am standing on this mountain now, looking at the land that I cannot live in. I hit it too hard, too often. It displeased God. He then told me that I cannot enter the Promised Land; I can only look at it from the outside.”
“You are a man, a human, Sir,” said the man who would soon lead the Israelites into the land beyond this mountain. “Humans are frail; they make mistakes. We are all nothing more than dust, dust that God chooses to use.” After Moses did not answer, Joshua added, “You and your magic stick did great things for our people, in God’s name. Recall how that rod caused the great Red Sea to open a path for us and how that same rod caused the Red Sea to come down upon the Egyptians who were chasing us, drowning great numbers of them.”
“What a day that was!” Moses smiled strongly as he recalled that event.
“Your rod became a snake, remember?”
“Yes, that rod did so much. But it was God, not the stick, that worked the miracles,” Moses recalled. “It was not all good things, at least not good for the people of Egypt.”
“True, but it was because they had hardened their hearts against God.”
“I kept telling the Pharaoh that bad things would come unless he would give us the rights that humans should have,” Moses said. “The plagues of frogs and the grasshoppers, the dust storms that caused skin problems, the water all turning to blood. Of course, the final plague was the slaying of the firstborn child in every Egyptian family. How it hurts me to remember the wails and cries of the people. Because of the pride and corruption in Pharaoh’s court, all of the Egyptian people had to suffer.”
Some time lapsed before Moses could go on. Clearly, it did not please him that the Egyptians had suffered so much.
“In the eyes of some people, I was an Egyptian myself, Joshua,” Moses sadly admitted. “Somehow, God placed me into the Pharaoh’s own family, being considered a grandson. That probably did place me into the line of people who could conceivably become a pharaoh, myself.”
“Because of being adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter when she found you floating on the river in a basket?”
“Yes, I was raised pretty much as an Egyptian,” Moses said. “Still, my own mother nursed me since the Pharaoh’s daughter was dry. She hired my own mother to provide milk for me for a year or so. It was then that I learned some of the Israelite language although the Egyptian language seems more like my own language, even to now.”
“Your life has been a blessing to me, Moses,” encouraged Joshua. “I hope that God will be as close to me as He has been to you.”
“It’s true that I have been blessed above other men,” admitted the departing leader. “For example, I doubt that many men have ever seen God in the flesh. Adam and Eve saw Him, at least until they sinned by unbelief and rebellion. Even I have not seen His face, only his back side, and that was astonishingly bright.”
“Yes, I know about that. We had to cover your face for a while until the brightness began to fade,” laughed Joshua.
“I told you a few minutes ago that I believe that there is a Prophet, a Deliverer, a much better High Priest coming. He is the One that I love and the One Whom I want to see. Remember what I wrote in Deuteronomy 18:18. I predicted that He is coming. I don’t really know when, but He is coming. How my heart wants to see Him.”
Noticing that darkness was settling in the East, Joshua began to stress the need to return to the camp.
“I’ll tell you what, Joshua,” Moses suggested. “You go on back to camp. Prepare your helpers and make plans to enter the Promised Land. Leave me here to look over the land for some time. If God permits, I will find my way back to camp. If I don’t come, just allow the thirty days of mourning and consider that God has taken me to my own Promised Land, the land of the Great One who will come later, bigger and more powerful and more important than I am.”
With some heaviness in his heart, Joshua did as Moses suggested. Moses was never seen again. They understood that he was spending quality time with the God Whom he had served for many years and the God would take care of any details concerning his death.
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