Deuteronomy 34:7

AN HUNDRED AND TWENTY YEARS OLD

‘Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died.’

Deuteronomy 34:7

I. The story of the death of Moses is one of the most pathetic in the Bible.—A life that had been spent in the service of others, that had been extended far beyond man’s allotted span, was approaching its end, although, physically, he was as vigorous as ever. Moses had served his generation; he had brought the people to the very borders of the Land of Promise, but he himself was not permitted to see the fulfilment of his hopes. His sin in taking to himself at Meribah the glory due to God was the reason of his exclusion from Canaan, a solemn warning that sin and punishment are inevitably linked together. Like St. Paul, who besought the Lord that his ‘stake in the flesh’ might be removed, Moses prayed for the remission of his punishment. And as St. Paul, though his petition was denied, received the loving answer, ‘My grace is sufficient for thee,’ so Moses, while his prayer remained unanswered, had the comforting assurance that ‘underneath are the Everlasting Arms.’ Jehovah was with him, and he feared no evil. After blessing the people he loved in the triumphant psalm which forms the thirty-third chapter, Moses set out on his solitary journey up the mountain-side. His life had been to a large extent spent in solitude, and in solitude the end was to come. Before he passed away, he was granted a view of the land which the people were soon to possess. The mountain peak on which he stood, now known as Neba, commands a fine view of the country, and in the clear atmosphere of that land it might not require a miracle to enable him to see this. Thus the departing patriarch looked down upon the land promised nearly five hundred years to Abraham, and so soon to be their own possession. Then came the end. Moses gave himself into the hands of God. The man who, like Enoch, had ‘walked with God,’ ‘was not, for God took him.’ It was a beautiful end to a life that had been lived solely and entirely for others. Not after the cruel torture of the cross, as was the case with Jesus, nor at the sword of the executioner, as Paul, but ‘at the kiss of God’ (so the Jewish tradition), his pure spirit stepped over the narrow line that separates the temporal from the eternal, and he entered into the immediate Presence of God, to Whom he had lived in conscious nearness all his days. ‘Where I am, there shall also My servant be.’

‘And He buried him.’ Jesus ‘made His grave with the wicked’; to Moses alone belongs the honour of being buried by the hands of Jehovah Himself.

‘It was the grandest funeral

That ever passed on earth.’

So died the man who had the highest possible title conferred upon him: ‘Moses, the servant of Jehovah,’ and who was one of the greatest heroes in the history of the world.

II. ‘God buries the worker, but carries on His work.’—For thirty days the people mourned in deep sorrow the loss of their leader, though they had so often murmured against him during his lifetime. Before his death, Moses had nominated as his successor, and publicly commended to the people, his servant Joshua, one of the two faithful spies. Joshua knew the country they were about to enter, and he had the best of all qualifications for the work—he was ‘full of the spirit of wisdom.’ He was a leader rather than a law-giver. Under Moses, the nation had been consolidated, the law had been tabulated, and now the people were fitted to march on to their promised possession under the guidance of Joshua. But as a lawgiver Moses had no real successor until, in the fulness of time, Jesus appeared to be the perfect fulfilment of the Divine law.

Illustration

(1) ‘When Daniel O’Connell, on account of his health, was ordered to leave England, he started for Rome, having had for many years a desire to see that city. In the city of Genoa he was seized with paralysis, so was unable to proceed further, and died there, never having looked upon the longed-for sight.’

(2) ‘Moses yields to Joshua, and Joshua finally to another. No man is indispensable to the divine plan. But to every man is assigned his place and allotted his work. None can afford to be indifferent or neglectful. Let each soul then take care so to live that when its time comes to die, what we call “death” may bring the Pisgah vision and conduct to the Canaan celestial.’

(3) ‘To the eye of the superficial beholder the good and faithful servant is often summoned to cease from his labours at a time when his work is still incomplete, and when his services seem to be most required. A Tin-dale devotes the whole energies of his mind and body to the noble end of translating God’s Word into his native tongue; and just as his life-long efforts were about to be crowned with success, a cruel death snatches him away from a yet unfinished work. A Henry Martyn, intent on the accomplishment of a similar task, is permitted to breathe out, in solitude and in suffering, his last earthly aspirations for the dawn of the new heaven and the new earth wherein shall dwell righteousness. A Patteson, endowed in a marvellous manner with the highest qualifications for the same work, is severed from it by a violent death, inflicted by the hands of those to the benefit of whose souls and bodies he had so cheerfully and ungrudgingly devoted his life. But in each and in all of these cases, precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. It matters little for such whether their death-bed be surrounded by living friends and relatives, and their resting-place be the peaceful churchyard of their native parishes, or whether amidst the solitude of the desert they breathe their souls into the hands of their Redeemer, or in the depths of the ocean their bodies await the day when the sea shall give up its dead. Alike, as in the case of Israel’s prophet and leader, their souls are secure in the guardianship of their Lord, and their bodies are the objects of solicitude to Him who is the Resurrection and the Life.’