Father in heaven, You have brought us here not by accident, not a single one of us here by accident. We’re here and we’re dressed up, we’re singing, we trust glad to be here. So we would be remiss if we did not ask for Your help. We are not interested in mere religious exercise. There’s no great celebration in heaven for simply being here this morning. We want to hear from You. So give me just the right words to say and help me to say them in the right way and give to all of Your people here ears to listen, to really hear, not just a word from a man but Your Word to each one of us. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Our text this morning comes from the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book in the Bible, in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy, the very last chapter. Deuteronomy chapter 34. The title, as you see in your bulletin, “The Death of Moses and the Resurrection of Christ.” I promise we will get to the resurrection of Christ but we are starting by looking from this chapter at the death of Moses. We will see how they are connected.
Deuteronomy chapter 34. This is how the end of this book concludes. We believe that Moses wrote these first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Though here where it records his death we understand that some later editor putting this together, the finishing touches, filled in some of these blanks about Moses’ death, but still inspired by the Holy Spirit, concluding this book and also concluding the Torah, this first five books of the Bible.
We read beginning at verse 1.
“Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the Lord showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the western sea, the Negeb, and the Plain, that is, the Valley of Jericho the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar. And the Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.” So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord, and He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor; but no one knows the place of his burial to this day. Moses was 120 years old when he died. His eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated. And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days. Then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended.”
“And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him. So the people of Israel obeyed him and did as the Lord had commanded Moses. And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel.”
Think for a moment in your head, who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met? The most famous person. You don’t have to really know them, just even seeing them pass by in the airport counts for this exercise. The most famous person you’ve ever met. I don’t have any jaw-dropping stories, just a few normal run-ins with famous people. In 1996 I was a college student. It was the summer. I was on a plane flying back home to Grand Rapids where I was from and realized as I got off the plane and there were lights and cameras and reporters and I did not think it was for me, that Floyd Mayweather was on the same plane. He’s from Grand Rapids. He had just won an Olympic medal. He wasn’t very well-known but Floyd Mayweather would go on to be one of the richest, most famous boxers in the history of the sport, finishing his career with a perfect 50-0. I can only imagine he’s recounting somewhere when he was on the plane with Kevin DeYoung.
About a decade ago I was in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates preaching at a large Christian church there. It’s a Muslim country but more than other than countries in that region there is some religious freedom. In fact, in order to support all of the Westerners and western money in that country, the sheiks, the leaders in the country, will give land for Christian churches and they’re quite happy to have Christians there. They don’t like when their own people convert, that’s a no-no, but to have other people from outside the country there.
So I was preaching at this large church and a member of this church, so a Christian, was in charge of the sheik’s camels. Now there’s a number of sheiks, this was the son, but they’re all important and all wealthy. So the pastor arranged for us, he said would you like to meet the sheik. I said I guess so. The only thing I knew about sheiks growing up was that wrestler, the Iron Sheik, and I figured this was quite different, and the pastor told me and the man who watched his camels, said we’ll go to one of his many palaces, we’ll go to one of his palaces there in the desert. They said just so you know, he likes to read about Christianity. I actually saw a study Bible there. He’s a Muslim, but he said he likes to talk about theology and he actually likes it when Christians are over because he likes to argue with Christians.
So we went in the back and he had a whole entourage of men there and there was a few of us there sitting and what was he doing? He was shooting a gun. He was shooting skeet. He was quite a sportsman and so the pastor, I think, had met him before and said this is a pastor from the United States. He’s here to preach about Jesus for a conference. And the sheik said to me, with a gun in his hand, “So you like Jesus? You should become a Muslim.” I just said, you know, in a sentence or two, I believed in Jesus. I don’t know of any great evangelistic fruit, but it gave me a story to tell this morning.
I’ve met some famous sports figures here and there. Sat in front of Magic Johnson at a Michigan State basketball game and did one of those selfies. I was pretending to take a picture of myself but was really, wanted to show that to my friends. Nothing earth-shattering. It’s not like I’ve met Taylor Swift.
Think of the most famous person you’ve ever met, or even could dare to meet, and I promise you that person will not be as famous in the history of the world as Moses. Or Jesus, for that matter, but we’re coming to Him.
You could have as much money as Elon Musk, as much influence as the President of the United States, be as famous as Messi or Renaldo, be as beloved by everyone as the late Queen of England, and you would still not be Moses. Here we are millennia later, still reading about Moses. And almost everyone, whether they have any religious background, probably have heard something about this person named Moses.
If you and I did just one of the amazing things that Moses did in his life, we would be talking about it for the rest of our lives.
Like that little bit that the comedian Brian Regan has about I walked on the moon, that he says he wishes he had been one of the astronauts to talk on the moon so whenever he’s at a party and somebody starts prattling on about all of their stories, he can just drop in and say, “Well, I walked on the moon.”
If you were Moses, you would have more stories than anyone. Just think about his birth and his infancy. The king tries to kill the Hebrew babies but Moses was hid away by his mother then put in a basket down the Nile, the followed by his sister, then adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, raised in Pharaoh’s household. If that was the only thing that ever happened to Moses, he would have an amazing story to tell the rest of his life.
I got permission from my second son, Jacob, to mention to you that he was born in the hospital parking lot. I won’t regale you with the whole story, it was very, very traumatic for me, and I think for Trisha, too, but everything thankfully turned out well. I was glad it was at least the second; I had seen one of these before and the hospital did, later after some wrangling, removed labor and delivery from the bill. But if you have, saved us thousands of dollars.
If you have a story like that, you have it in your back pocket. You always have something to share with someone, “Well, let me tell you about this birth,” “Let me tell you about when my dopey husband had to deliver this baby,” and it gives you a great story to tell.
Well, this is just one little part, the story of Moses’ birth and his infancy is even better than that, and that’s just the first of a hundred or a thousand amazing things about Moses. I don’t mean to discourage you, but no one in this room, on that side of the pulpit or on this side of the pulpit, will ever do as much, see as much, be responsible for as much in human history, as Moses.
And yet, like each one of us, Moses still died.
Notice all the ways, I hope you have your Bible open there to Deuteronomy 34, notice all the ways this text highlights the greatness of Moses. Let me mention seven.
Number one. His title. See that in verse 5? Elsewhere in the Scripture he’s called the man of God. Here in verse 5 he is called the servant of the Lord. Throughout these books of the Pentateuch, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Moses has been the Lord’s right hand man. Hardly anything of consequence, that is, anything good has happened apart from Moses. He has been the servant of Yahweh. This is a rare title given in the Old Testament but one commonly given to Moses.
Glance your eyes across the page to the book of Joshua. You see chapter 1, verse 1, “After the death of Moses, the servant of the Lord.” Down again at verse 7, “Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to do all the law that Moses, My servant, commanded you.” Then in verse 13, “Remember the word that Moses, the servant of the Lord, commanded you.”
He is given this honorific that almost no one else has. Moses is the servant of the covenant Lord of Israel.
Notice the second thing. His burial. So his title and then his burial, in verse 6. This is easy to miss, but verse 5, the Lord, Moses died in the land of Moab, according to the Word of the Lord, and He, so what’s the nearest antecedent? That is, who’s the person that this pronoun “he” refers to? It is the Lord. According to the word of the Lord, and the Lord buried him in the valley of Moab. Yahweh buried Moses.
We don’t know exactly what this meant, but we see from the following verse that it meant that no one else knew where Moses was. There was a private funeral, only God Himself buried Moses.
Now normally you have a family member. That’s the way it worked in the Old Testament, that’s the way it works all around the world. The family gathers and a family member buries you.
But not Moses. The Lord buried him.
Many of you, if you’ve been around this church for many years, know that the first pastor of this church, Harry Reeder, sadly passed away about a year ago of a car accident, or it may actually have been a heart attack while he was driving, and I had the privilege, a few of you did as well, to go to that funeral there in Alabama and the church was absolutely packed and there were great choirs and hymns and bagpipes. It was a magnificent occasion. Even with all of that magnificence and pomp and circumstance and fittingly so, yet it is not what Moses experienced here.
Who buried Moses? The Lord. You read in verse 6, He buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows the place of his burial to this day. Why? Well, likely, so that no cult could grow up around him. If everyone knew where Moses was buried, maybe it would become a shrine, it would become a high place. People would want to do pilgrimages there. Only the Lord Himself knows the exact location where Moses was buried. Such a great man he was.
His title, his burial. Third, look at verse 7. His strength.
He was 120 years old when he died. That’s a long, long life. Joseph was 110 and that was considered by the Egyptians to be the perfect age. You could hardly imagine living any more than that, but Moses lives to be 120. Moses himself would write in Psalm 90, that famous psalm, that the normal span of human life would be 3 score years and 10, or 70, or if by reason of strength, 80, and that’s still, though we live a little bit longer with modern medicine, that’s still basically true. To live into your 80s is a good long life. And he lived to be 120.
But not just that. It wasn’t that he had 40 years of a sad existence. His eyes were undimmed. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’ve been nearsighted since the third grade. When I was in second grade I started to get bad grades on my report card because they thought I couldn’t read. It turned out I didn’t have good eyes. Just, parents, you know, check your children’s eyes. My eyes just got worse and worse and thankfully they’ve not gotten too much worse in the last couple of decades, but I don’t wear these glasses for a fashion statement. I don’t wear them so I can just look like the Yukon coach, though I’ve been told that several times. I wear them because I can’t see without them.
Now, as many of you have already experienced, as I’m in my mid-40s, now I need giant, huge Bibles to read things. If I didn’t have these glasses for being nearsighted, I’d need glasses for reading things, but now I can always just lift these up and see things really close, sort of cheating and glad I didn’t get the laser surgery.
Moses had his eyesight up to the very end. Then it gives this curious phrase that his vigor was unabated. We don’t know exactly what this means. I ran into three different theories among the commentators. One, no wrinkles. Two, his teeth hadn’t fallen out. And three, he still had sexual potency. Not going to comment on any of those. But his vigor. He was a strong man. He possessed all his faculties.
Now we can read earlier in chapter 31 he couldn’t do everything he once did. He wasn’t like Bilbo with the ring and he hadn’t aged a day. He was an old man. But he was able to lead Israel right up to the end. God had given him strength to be a leader of these millions of people into the ripe old age of 120.
His title, his burial, his strength. Number four. Look at his legacy.
We see in verses 8 and 9 the people of Israel wept for Moses 30 days. That was the typical allotted period for a great man in Israel. You would weep for an entire month.
He also had the privilege of turning things over to his successor, Joshua. Verse 9. He lived long enough to see the next generation and the generation after that, to have laid hands. He was his literal hand-picked, hand-anointed successor, to transfer his power and authority.
If you can build something in your life, build an institution, be a part of an organization, a church, a school, a family. Do something that enables a group of people to outlast you and then you know that you’re turning it over to capable hands. That’s quite a legacy and Moses had that legacy.
Number five. Look at his office.
Verse 10 – there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses.
So whenever this book is coming to its final completion, this author looks back and says up to this point in the history of Israel, there was never a prophet like Moses.
The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides called Moses the greatest of the prophets. We don’t often think of him as a prophet; we think of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and some of those books to come. But he was a prophet. He was the Lord’s mouthpiece and through him the Lord gave the law and established the old covenant.
Then look at the second half of verse 10. We notice his intimacy with the Lord: There has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses whom the Lord knew face-to-face.
When God descended on Mount Sinai, many of us have a view of God that is very puny, very chummy, as if we could just be buddy-buddy with God. That’s not the way they experienced God. When Moses came and he was on the mountain and the Lord descended to speak to the people, and there was great pyrotechnics of earthquake and thunder and rumblings and lightning, the very same scene that we see so many times in the book of Revelation as we’ve been going through it over these past months, you recall that the people there said, “Moses, you speak to us. It’s too much that the Lord directly would speak to us.” And Moses says they didn’t even see His face. Of course, the Lord can’t be seen. This is a euphemism speaking of the intimacy with which Moses knew the Lord. The people were in dread fear to even hear the very voice of God.
Yet we read Exodus 33:11 – Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face-to-face as a man speaks to his friend.
This is how it was throughout Moses’ ministry. From the very first, when he’s tending his father-in-law’s flocks and the Lord appears to him in the burning bush that is not consumed and Moses says, “Who are you?” and He says, “I am.” All the times that Moses would go alone on the mountain to speak and hear from the Lord when the elders would be farther down and the people would be at the base of the mountain. This is Moses’ unique privilege.
If you would have asked Moses the question I asked you at the beginning of the sermon, he wouldn’t have thought of politicians or movie stars or heads of state. If you would have asked Moses, “Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?” Moses alone could have said, “The Lord of heaven and earth. And I didn’t just meet Him, I knew Him. I talked to Him face-to-face. In fact, I was His friend,” Moses could say.
Finally, we see Moses’ mighty power in verses 11 and 12. We read of his signs and wonders before Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The staff that was turned into a serpent, and then that serpent ate up the Egyptian magicians and their serpents. Then the plagues that came upon Egypt, of blood, frogs, gnats, flies, livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of the firstborn, that avalanche of ten plagues.
I have a little kid’s book, an ABC board book, that goes through the story of the Bible A through Z and I recount the plagues in there. About the biggest criticism I’ve ever got from any book that I’ve written was from that little book that for “G” I used the word “gnats.” I’ve had so many mothers write me and say, “Why’d you use a silent G?” Well, I was telling the story of the ten plagues and gnats fit in there.
Moses was the instrument of the Lord’s judgment and deliverance. Not only the signs and wonders before Pharaoh and the Egyptians, but then we read verse 12, “the great deeds of terror done in the sight of all Israel.” He parted the Red Sea and then the water swallowed up the Egyptians. He was the instrument of manna from heaven and quail on the ground and water from the rock. Thunder and lightning and smoke and fire on Mount Sinai. The people of Israel knew if only they could hold up Moses’ hands the Israelites would have victory over the Lord’s enemies.
Such were the mighty deeds that he had done.
This language here, signs and wonders and mighty power, this is the language typically used of the Lord Himself, that the Lord is the One who did these things. But now, as the instrument, as the Lord’s servant, we read here that Moses in a way did them.
One commentator calls this “one last extravagant tribute.” Just when you thought the obituary could not get any longer, could not be any more impressive, Moses was known to all, he was known to his own people, he was known before the nation that he helped establish, he was known among the enemies of God’s people, known throughout all the world that had heard of his exploits.
No one here will ever accomplish a tiny fraction of all that Moses accomplished. Can you imagine living the life that Moses lived? Yes, it was full of hardship and suffering for sure, we’re not making light of that, but if you just think about making your life count, because you want your life to count, you could hardly find a more prominent example in the whole history of the world of someone’s life who counted than Moses. An amazing dramatic life. He was married, he had children, he was a redeemer, he was a leader of a nation, a prophet. He wrote part of the Bible, for crying out loud. He established a national covenant. He received the 10 commandments. He lived to a ripe old age and was in good health all the way to the end. What more could anyone ever want?
Well. It turns out that there’s always more that we can want. For all that Moses did, and all that he was, notice the literary theological and thematic center of this chapter. It’s right there in verse 5 – so Moses, the servant of the Lord, died.
For all that he did, he could not live forever. Not only that, look at the rest of verse 5. He died in the land of Moab. That’s not his home. Moses never made it to the Promised Land. He was brought to the top of Pisgah, verse 1, to Mount Nebo, to this high point that he could look out at the Promised Land. We read in verse 4 that this land God had swore to Abraham, Isaac, and to Jacob. This was one of the great hopes for God’s people ever since He plucked Abraham, who was an idolater, out of Ur of the Chaldees and made these fabulous promises to him. God’s people now, for 400+ years, have been anticipating, waiting, for God to deliver on this land of promise.
Moses didn’t get there. The Lord said, “I want you to go up to the mountain and you can look out.”
Some of you, you can go, and we have even mountains here in North Carolina with some of these names, you can go to the top of Mount Mitchell or you can go somewhere up near Boone and you can look out. You can see for a long ways.
So Moses looks out and starts at the north Gilead as far as Dan, then around to Naphtali, the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, to the south and the land of Judah, to the western sea, that is the Mediterranean, and then into the south, to the Negeb, the Plain, and the Valley of Jericho. He looks all the way around the circle of the compass that he might see the land with his own eyes.
I just wonder if it was the Lord’s blessing but it was also a bittersweet providence that the Lord had given him unabated eyesight to the very end. On the one hand, it was a gift that he could see the land. On the other hand, it must have been bittersweet. God has given me this perfect eyesight, this 20/20 vision to the very end so that before I die I can look out with my perfectly good eyes and see the land that will never be mine. I will see the place where we were all heading. I’ll see the place that I’ve been leading our people, and I won’t get there.
I’m now firmly in the category of middle age. It’s true. How did that happen? Just sneaks up on you. It’s true. You think in a new way about what you’ve done and what you haven’t done. You kind of crest, I don’t know, over 45. You start to realize you won’t live forever. You realize even in a life as blessed as mine has been you won’t see every dream come true. There are many things you would like to do that will go undone. You realize in the second half of your life especially, in the first half of your life it’s all open, everything there in front of you and you can just grab it and it’s all there. You’re just going to get it. The second half of your life, you all know this, you start to realize that any one thing you say yes to, there’s one or two or ten other things that you’re saying no to. Because you can’t do every, you can’t go everyplace you want to go. You can’t have every job you want to have. You can’t read everything or write everything or meet everyone. You can’t have every experience. You can’t serve in every way you wanted to. You realize that the human life is bound up in great constraints and limitations.
And even as we look with gratitude on all that the Lord does with us and to us and through us, you still can’t help but have some sense of pang to understand all that won’t happen.
Here’s Moses, the ultimate measure of faithfulness to the Lord in the Old Testament. No one did more than Moses. No one was more powerful than Moses. There’s a verse that says no one was more humble than Moses. No one was more consequential in Old Testament redemptive history than Moses.
And in a way this is a glorious ending to the Pentateuch, a great, fitting tribute and obituary to Israel’s great national leader, yet at the same time it’s a rather frightening ending. Here they are, Israel’s deliverer, law-giver, leader, prophet, the one that set them free from Egypt, the one that led them through the Red Sea, the one that interceded on their behalf that they wouldn’t be destroyed after the golden calf, this Moses is not going to be there to lead them all the way into the land. It’s really a joyous and frightening conclusion. They’re just on the cusp but they’re not there. And they won’t have Moses to lead them in because with all the greatness of Moses he never made it to Canaan.
You see, Moses was not enough. Not enough for himself to make it to the Promised Land, it was the Lord’s judgment upon his life that he would not enter Canaan.
Moses was not enough. If he wasn’t enough for himself, he certainly wasn’t enough for the ultimate deliverance of God’s people.
So even here at the cusp of Jericho and entering the Promised Land, God’s people surely as they close the page on this Pentateuch, should have thought to themselves, “I guess we need another prophet. I guess we need a better prophet than this Moses.”
Deuteronomy 18:15, Moses had already said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers. It is to Him you shall listen.” They had already heard from Moses’ own lips there’s going to come another prophet, I can’t get you everywhere you need to go. We need someone who will not only speak the truth, Moses did that; show us the way of life, Moses did that; we need someone who is the Way and the Truth and the Life.
We need, as the New Testament book of Hebrews teaches us, we need someone who’s more than a servant. We need a Son. Hebrews 3 – “Therefore, holy brothers, you who share in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, who was faithful to him who appointed him, just as Moses also was faithful in all God’s house. For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses—as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are His house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.”
If you want the end of your life to not be the end of your earthly life, then you need someone better than Moses. For all that he accomplished, a servant will not do. You need a Son. That’s why Hebrews says, “We are His house.” That is, we are the body, the building, the thing that Christ Himself is building if, notice the if, we hold fast our confidence and our boasting and our hope.
Friends, is the Gospel your confidence? That is the Gospel that Jesus announced when He said “Repent and believe,” faith and repentance, that Gospel. Is that your confidence? Do you have confidence in the nice clothes you can put on for Easter? Confidence in the meal you’re going to eat? The time with family and friends? Confidence in what you’ve accomplished? Hebrews says we’re only this house that Jesus is building if the Gospel is our confidence, if the cross is our boasting, and if the resurrection is our hope.
You see, we need someone, not only who died, but who couldn’t stay dead. As Peter said at Pentecost, “This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men, God raised Him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for Him to be held by it.”
Don’t you just love that verse? It was not possible for Jesus to stay dead.
The wages of sin is death so the only way for death to be overcome is for the entire dead of sin to be paid for, and that’s what Christ accomplished. The perfect Son of God who fulfilled in His life and death all the prescriptions of the law and sustained in His body and soul all the penalties of the law so that on that Easter morning it was impossible that He could stay dead.
You know when you read in the Gospel accounts and there’s that strange business about the grave clothes are folded up and you think, well, what was Jesus doing? He’s a bit of a neatnik? He just wants to make, did He dust the place before He left as well? And vacuum out and sweep things? Surely if my kids were around He told them to put their shoes away. Why? It’s Jesus’ way of saying, “I don’t need these anymore.”
See, this was not a mere resuscitation. There were other people, Lazarus, most notably, who had been brought back from the dead, but it was a resuscitation. They would have to die again. They still had to pay the penalty for their sins, though God had given them a miraculous new lease on life. No, that’s not what we have here with Jesus. He wasn’t just brought back from the brink or had some out of body experience and then saw a light and then came back. The grave clothes, He doesn’t need them anymore because death has no claim on Christ because He paid perfectly for all of the wages of sin.
So it is for each one of us if we trust, if we turn from our sins and we turn to Christ, that death, though you and I will die, will have no claim on us. It will be impossible that we would stay dead.
Now you can turn, if you still get a newspaper, or you can look on any number of apps or media sites on your phone and they will give you all sorts of headlines today, just like they do every day. There will be something about what Biden did and there will be something about what Trump said, maybe something about the Final Four, or a new movie to come out, or some fashion, or what happened on a television show last night. But the headline should read today and every day, “He has risen just as He said.” It is the one indisputable fact of human history that has changed all of human history, His resurrection, and bound up with that His incarnation, His suffering, His death, and then His ascension, His session, His exaltation, and His coming again. All of that completed work of Christ.
Do you have eyes to see it? To believe it?
The land that Moses saw on the top of Mount Nebo, it was a good land, a rich land, a beautiful land, as the Old Testament puts it, flowing with milk and honey. But he had to look upon that land with the eyes of faith because he wouldn’t get there in this life.
No matter what you accomplish in life, no matter how famous you might become, no matter all the famous people you meet, no matter how good and kind and decent you strive to be in your home and with your neighbors and at your workplace, you will come, I will come, to the end of life. You and I will die. I read a survey on that one time and it’s still 100%, will die.
Not only that, but like Moses, we will die in Moab. We will die outside the land of Canaan. That Promised Land will be the land that we can cross over only in the journey from death to newness of life. So it means, friends, we need someone, not Moses, we need a Son, we need a prophet, priest, and king. We need someone who has gone ahead to prepare a place for us on the other side of the Jordan, who’s already made it and will live forever and can beckon to us and can grab us by the hand and say, “Come to where I live in the beautiful land.”
“Let not your hearts be troubled,” Jesus said. “Believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house there are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to Myself, that where I am, you may also be.”
Let’s pray. Gracious heavenly Father, so work in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that we might turn from sin and turn to You, our only hope and our only comfort in life and in death, that where You are we may also be. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.