To Encourage You

Numbers 12:1-9 “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses . . . And they said, ‘Has the Lord indeed spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?’ And the Lord heard it . . .And He said, ‘Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses. He is faithful in all my house. With him I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the Lord. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?’ And the anger of the Lord was kindled against them, and he departed.”

God gave us His Word through men, men with natural limitations, imperfect people, people who were no greater than you and me in a sense.  In many cases they weren’t the wisest people, in and of themselves. They weren’t necessarily the most courageous. They weren’t always the most eloquent. Take Moses, for example. In the verses above we have the account of Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother, speaking out against him. After all, if it wasn’t for Miriam having hidden Moses in a basket in the bulrushes, he would likely have died at the hand of Pharaoh. To her, Moses was just a little brother. Then there was Aaron.  When God sent Moses to Pharaoh, Moses objected.  He said he didn’t speak well. So God sent Aaron as the spokesman.  He would take what Moses told him and speak to the people.  Besides that, Aaron was the high priest.  So, in the thinking of Miriam and Aaron, they could speak on behalf of God just as well as Moses could. The problem was, that was their own idea, and not God’s. 

God had ordained that it was Moses through whom He would infallibly speak.  It was through Moses, and not through Miriam or Aaron, that God would give the world His Law.  He would speak through Moses to describe the story of the patriarchs and, before the patriarchs, the story of the creation of the heavens and the earth. It was this Word that would be preserved through the centuries. It was this word that if anyone would speak against it, they would meet with the wrath of God, just as did Aaron and Miriam. 

And so we have the first five books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Law or the Pentateuch.  And with these books we have the same warning from God against anyone who would determine to speak against it.  Others may have their own ideas. Others may think those ideas are just as good as anything Moses said, but God never spoke to other people in the way He did to Moses.  And that’s the way it is with any other writing in the Word of God.  We can ignore it, rise up against it, reject it, and speak against it as nothing more than the word of men, but to do so is to speak against the Word of the Living God and whenever one does so they do so to their own peril.

Many cults have given us their own version of what they tell us is God’s Word. There are others who scoff at the Word of God, including the words given to us from God by way of Moses, but the Bible tells us this about such scoffers: “they are like chaff that the wind drives away (Psalm 1:4).” 

So, are your ears tuned to the words of Moses?  What do you think about how he told us God made the world?  What about Noah’s flood? Do you believe what Moses told us about that?  And what about the Savior that Moses spoke of?  We should note that after His resurrection, it was Jesus Who met the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself (Luke 24:27).”  And then we are told in the account of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16, that the only way anyone will ever escape the torments of hell is to believe what God has told us through “Moses and the prophets.” In other words, it was those like Moses who were ordained by God to give us His message of eternal life.  How carefully, then, we should listen. May God give us ears to hear the words spoken by God through those like Moses, the prophets, and in the New Testament, the apostles, for faith comes by hearing the words these men wrote down for us, and such faith is the only way to eternal life.