Moses Wrote of Me!

John 5:45-47.

Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust.

For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me: for he wrote of Me.

But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?

What a rebuke Jesus delivers with these words! These were men who boasted of their own righteousness because they practiced every letter of the law.  It is important to understand here that Moses’ words had been interpreted, defined,  and redefined over the centuries as the priests and Levites debated every nuance and created their own version of the Law that God had given them through Moses.

Jesus told them that Moses could accuse them  before God, because Moses had written of Jesus.  Here are just a few examples of what He meant:

i. The Lord your God will raise up for you a Prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren. Him you shall hear. (Deuteronomy 18:15)

ii. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live.” So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived. (Numbers 21:8-9)

iii. Jesus was typified in the rock that gave Israel water in the wilderness (Numbers 20:8-12 and 1 Corinthians 10:4).

iv. The ministry of Jesus was shown in almost every aspect of the seven different kinds of offering that God commanded Israel to bring (Leviticus 1-7).

v. Jesus and His ministry were shown in the Tabernacle and its service. One place where the New Testament makes this connection is with the word propitiation in Romans 3:25, which speaks of the mercy seat on the Ark of the Covenant.

vi. The law of the bondservant speaks of Jesus (Exodus 21:5-6 and Psalm 40:6-8).

It was not only in the Law that the Old Testament spoke of Jesus.  He is in  the Psalms, in Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah—the list is endless.  But the Jews were not looking for Jesus. They were looking for a Messiah to conquer Rome and put the Jews in their proper place of power.  They looked at Him, but did not see.  They listened to Him, but did not hear.

Jesus put his case very clearly. “If you don’t believe Moses, how can  you believe in Me?”

And so He ends this important discourse to the Jewish religious leaders.