John 5:46

THE TESTIMONY OF MOSES

‘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?’

John 5:46

We might almost so express the converse, ‘Had ye believed Me ye would have believed Moses,’ for our Blessed Lord quotes Moses, I think, thirty-two or thirty-three times. You see, in those days, it was the Jews who did not believe Christ; they did believe Moses. Now we have those who do believe Christ, and do not believe Moses. But, as true believers, of course, we believe Moses and believe Christ too. Moses is the beginning, Christ the end of our revelation. And on this I wish to say a few words this evening, as our Collect is about the Bible.

I. From the beginning.—Had ye believed Moses ye would have believed that our religion is the oldest and the newest. You know that Napoleon refused Christianity on the ground that it was not the oldest religion. He said that the religion of the East—Confucianism, for instance—was older than Christianity. He dated Christianity only from Pentecost, or from our Lord’s time. But for our religion we go back to the very beginning, we believe Moses, and turning over the Bible to the first chapter, we read, ‘In the beginning.’ We cannot date behind that. There is no date which lies behind the beginning; it is the very first. If you date Calvary, take care what date you give to it; it has no date. It was pre-ordained before the beginning of the world. Our religion lies back in the beginning with God, and the last word of the Bible is ‘Jesus.’—‘Come, Lord Jesus.’ And Jesus is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The Lord Jesus belongs to the past, present, and the hereafter.

II. Development in religion.—Had ye believed Moses you would believe in the right theory of development in religious matters, for our holy religion is not a stone, immovable, cold, but it is as the plant full of life, expansion, possibilities, future. The Lord said that the Kingdom of Heaven was like a grain of mustard seed, ‘which, indeed, is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown it is the greatest among herbs.’ And, again, we are told that our religion is within us—grows out of the tender plant within the soul, and, by the Holy Ghost, is spread abroad. ‘The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, Which is given unto us.’ There is no knowing how the love of God may expand within the soul and develop. The Lord pointed out this truth when He talked with the disciples on the way to Emmaus. He spake to them things concerning Himself, but He began at the beginning; He began at Moses, and went all down till He came to Himself, and showed from Moses and the Prophets how the things that had happened to Him must be. He threw light right over the Old Testament, and showed them the true revelation.

III. The doctrine of Atonement.—Had ye believed Moses ye would have known the true doctrine of the Atonement, the saintly doctrine of Christianity, for had ye believed Moses ye would have read of the hyssop, dipped in the blood, striking the lintel and the two side posts of the house; sprinkling the horns of the altar of the sanctuary. You would have read that everything must be sprinkled with blood to be acceptable. That is the testimony from without. You wonder that you meet blood so often in the Old Testament. Look out the word blood in the Concordance, and see how often it occurs in the Old Testament. You thought Leviticus was a useless book; you have hardly read it. It is the testimony from without. Then comes the testimony from within to meet it—how that if the hands be washed with water, the heart must be washed with blood. And then, when the cry comes out of the heart, and the sigh out of the soul, and the tear from the eye, you can pronounce the word in a way that you understand—‘The Atone-ment.’ And you are led to the blood of Christ, and you say: ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Quite white in the blood of the Lamb. The blood of Christ has spoken to you better things than the blood of Abel. In the Old Testament you come to blood, the blood of vengeance, which is the blood of Abel, and that has led you on to the blood not of vengeance, but of redemption from the heart of God. Oh, if only you had believed Moses you would have been right!

IV. The unity of the Bible.—And then let me say this—if you had believed Moses you would never have cut your Bibles in two. Oh, how cruel it is to mutilate God’s Word! How cruel to cut in two the Bible! They have begun by cutting off the Old Testament, and now they want to cut off the New with the sharp knife of criticism. But do not you be persuaded into the first step to cruelly cut off the Old. ‘Had ye believed Moses ye would have believed Me.’ The two go together. It is cruel to separate them. ‘And he said unto them, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.’ And One did rise from the dead; but how can you believe it? One died for our sins, and rose again for our justification; and they that do not believe Moses do not believe that One rose from the dead. How true it all comes!

V. The inspiration of the Scriptures.—Last of all, let us who hold the true faith about the revelation of God be quite certain all Scripture is given by the inspiration of God—by God the Holy Ghost. You read the Bible by the power of the Spirit. The Lord Jesus Christ came in the flesh, but you and I know Him no longer after the flesh; we know Him by the Spirit; we know Him in the Sacraments and in His Word; we know Him now no longer in the flesh. The Bible tells us: ‘It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing.’ We do not know God’s Word after the letter. The literalist will ever perish by the letter that killeth, and these critics are all on the letter. It is plain, ‘Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me.’ There is the sober truth.

—Rev. A. H. Stanton.

Illustration

‘All that it was necessary for Christ to ask of the Jews, for the purpose of His own mission, was that they should believe Moses; for if they believed Moses, they would believe in Himself. It deserves further consideration whether the reference of these five books to Moses necessarily involves the inference that he wrote every word of them. But it does certainly seem to involve the assumption that they are substantially the work of Moses; and still more certainly does it involve the assumption or the assertion that they are thoroughly trustworthy. Again and again our Lord refers to the books of Moses in the same spirit. “Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill Me?” “Moses gave unto you circumcision (not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers).” In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham is represented as saying, “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them; and he said, Nay, Father Abraham, but if one went unto them from the dead they would repent. And He said unto them, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though One rose from the dead.” Most important, perhaps, of all is His language to His disciples after His resurrection, when He must at least be regarded as speaking with unclouded knowledge and authority. “O fools,” He exclaims, “and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself”; and again, “These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me. Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures, and said unto them, Thus it is written and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day.” ’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

CHRIST IN THE OLD TESTAMENT

We have often remarked the reverence with which our Lord regarded the Old Testament.

I. Christ refers to the Old Testament on every possible occasion.—When He is tempted in the wilderness; when He is preaching in the synagogue (Luke 4), or on the mountain (Matthew 5:17); when He is teaching in the Temple or arguing with the Sadducees (Mark 12); when He is dying on the Cross (three of the ‘seven sayings’ are taken from the Book of Psalms), or walking on the Emmaus road on the afternoon of the first Easter Day, or standing in the upper chamber that same evening in His risen glory, the words of Holy Scripture (the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms) are on His lips.

II. The Apostles and the Evangelists used the Old Testament in exactly the same way, and with the same reverence as their Master before them. For example, in Acts 28:23 St. Paul persuaded the Jews ‘concerning Jesus, both out of the Law of Moses, and out of the prophets, from morning till evening.’ In the many sermons recorded in the Acts, we find the same line of thought. I will add one more text. In Hebrews 10:15, etc., a quotation is made from Jeremiah 31; but the prophet’s name is omitted, and the words are ascribed, not to Jeremiah, but to ‘the Holy Ghost.’ Our Lord had used the same expression in Matthew 22:43: ‘David in Spirit’—i.e. David writing in the Holy Spirit, in the power of the Holy Spirit. And compare Acts 1:16 and Hebrews 3:5.

III. Our Lord interpreted the Old Testament for us.—He pointed to the Law of Moses, and the Prophets, and the Psalms (the three divisions of the sacred Books in our Lord’s day), and He says, Moses wrote, and prophets wrote, and psalmists wrote of Him. ‘Moses wrote of Me.’ The whole Mosaic institution was more than a blaze of ritual pomp—it was grand picture-lesson of Christ. Take Christ out of the Old Testament and it is like a great organ with no breath in it. It is just this in the hands of the Jew to-day, voiceless, lifeless, because Christ is not the interpreter.

IV. Have you found Christ in the New Testament?—Do you reverence it? Can you say, ‘My heart standeth in awe of Thy word’? Do you believe it? ‘If ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe My words?’

V. ‘My Words.’—And beautifully simple they were! He said He was the Shepherd, and they that believe on Him were the sheep; He said He was the Vine, and they that believe on Him were the branches; He said He was the Light, and they that believe in Him should not abide in darkness; He said He was the Life, and they that believe in Him should never die; He said He was the Master, and they that served Him on earth should be for ever with Him where He is. And these promises of His, which brought tears to so many eyes, have been echoing all down the ages! But He spoke of judgment as well as mercy. He said that those who would not believe in Him should die in their sins, that they should be cast out into outer darkness, that they should go away into everlasting punishment. And these awful threatenings have been echoing down the ages too!

Let us not think we can put these ‘words’ away from us: ‘He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My words, hath One that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day’ (John 12:48).

—Rev. F. Harper.

Illustration

‘The most solemn of all Christ’s attestations to this truth consisted, perhaps, in His own familiar use of it, especially in the great crisis of His life. As in the Temptation He rested His resistance to the tempter on passages in the Book of Deuteronomy, so He went to the Cross itself in obedience to the Scriptures, saying, “How then shall the scriptures he fulfilled, that thus it must be?” and He breathed out His spirit in the language of the Psalms. In an admirable little book by a Lord Chancellor, the late Lord Hatherley, the passages are carefully collected in which our Lord and the other writers of the New Testament refer to the Old; and it is most striking to see how our Lord refers to the whole course of the Old Testament Scriptures with the same undoubted acceptance of their truth. His references and quotations are shown to be taken from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, the Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Jonah, Micah, Zechariah, and Malachi. The whole course of the Old Testament records is thus endorsed by Him and appealed to by Him as authoritative.’