The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Moses was sent to the Israelites by God to deliver them. Jesus was sent by God to deliver us from the world. Looking back on the biblical accounts of their lives, the question almost immediately suggests itself: could these two deliverers be any more alike?
The similarities begin to jump off the page the minute you begin to read the passages concerning the infancy of both Jesus and of Moses. As soon as Moses was born, his life was in danger. The Egyptian king, the pharaoh, feared the increasingly large population of the Jewish people, and that they could become a threat to Egypt itself. So he ordered that every firstborn son be drowned in the river Nile.
But God had plans for Moses. So working through Moses’s mother, the Lord preserved his life. In a remarkable turn of events, Moses ended up being raised by Pharaoh’s own daughter in the palace of the Pharaoh.
Fast forward centuries later to the time of Jesus’s birth: already in His infancy, His life too was in danger. When King Herod learned that some believed that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem, he feared that any such newborn king would become a threat to him. So he ordered that all male children in Bethlehem two years and younger be killed. The tragic event is remembered on December 28th, and we call it the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
God, of course, had a profoundly important plan for Jesus, and thus provided for His rescue, His deliverance from the evil. So in His love and providence, He worked through His mother Mary and father Joseph to preserve Jesus’s life, to save the infant Jesus. They took Him to Egypt, and there He stayed until He was safe.
The parallels between the experiences of Moses and Jesus’s infancy are so predominant that both of them practically speak as one. The most impossible thing was now possible, because of the work of God in providing a deliverer for both Egypt and Israel in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
God’s fingerprints also stand out in another feature shared by Moses and Jesus. Both were surprising choices for the missions that God gave each one of them. Few people would have seemed a less likely liberator of Israel than Moses. He was raised in Pharaoh’s house. He was a murderer — he killed a taskmaster. He had to flee Egypt because he was now a murderer and condemned as such. He was absent for 40 years from Egypt, working in his father-in-law’s fields, shepherding flocks. It’s no wonder when God from the burning bush called Moses to return to Egypt, to Pharaoh, to bring Israel out from their slavery, Moses was anxious that the Israelites would not receive him.
As for Jesus: people had certain expectations at the time about who the Messiah would be, what kind of Messiah He would be. Probably somebody from a prominent Jewish family. Surely someone widely known and respected amongst the people. Certainly someone with strong support from the religious leaders. Someone who would lead Israel to battle and to freedom from the Roman oppression. Jesus, though, was raised in a carpenter’s household, hailing from the lowly town of Nazareth, unknown to the religious leaders and religious elites, and completely uninterested in obtaining their seal of approval. On top of that, the circumstances of Jesus’s birth were always rumored to be rather scandalous: a virgin birth. Seriously — to say that Jesus was a seemingly unlikely Messiah would be an understatement.
But God’s choices of both Moses and Jesus flew in the face of Israel’s expectations in almost every imaginable way. But God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, and God’s ways are not our ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His thoughts higher than our thoughts, and His ways higher than our ways. That is, after all, the same God who later in the Old Testament chose a young shepherd boy named David to be king of His people, and later in the New Testament would choose the leading persecutor of Christians, Saul, to become apostle to the nations. It shows just how unpredictable our Lord is in His selection of servants. Only this God would choose someone like Moses to lead Israel to freedom. Only this kind of God would send someone like Jesus to redeem mankind.
That brings us to another point of similarity between Moses and Jesus. As unlikely as they seemed fit for their missions, both proved to be faithful. Moses faithfully went to Pharaoh and spoke the words that God gave him, supported by signs and wonders God worked through him. And Jesus faithfully taught, preached, and reached out to the lowly and the outcast, supported by the testimony of His merciful miracles.
Moses and Jesus were both repeatedly rejected as they brought God’s word to a prideful people with hard hearts. But both were steadfast in their service and faithfully persisted unto the end. In Jesus’s case, the end was death on the cross.
That then raises the most important parallel between the two deliverers. Through them, God’s plans were brought to completion. His plans were fulfilled; His promises kept. His people were set free. As we will see in the remaining weeks of Lent, God worked through Moses to lead people out of the bondage of Egypt. And in Christ, God freed us from the chains of sin, death, and the power of the devil. So again, we asked at the beginning: could these two deliverers, Moses and Jesus, be any more alike?
With that, I’d like to move on to highlight one more thing that stands out when we read about Moses’s and Jesus’s lives. As we read in the Bible, it’s almost impossible not to find ourselves asking: could these two deliverers be any more different than alike?
As we’ve seen, Moses and Jesus were chosen by God to set the people free. But their responses were as different as they can be. Moses was resistant to God’s call and reluctantly went to Pharaoh, and even offered excuses not to go — especially highlighting his weakness as a speaker. He was slow of tongue; scholars take that to mean he was struggling with a speech impediment. Jesus, on the other hand, was a willing Redeemer who embraced the mission of saving us, knowing from the very start that the price He would have to pay would be death on the cross.
Another fundamental difference between these two chosen deliverers: Moses himself needed to be delivered. While he was not personally a slave in Egypt, he did need as much saving as anyone else. Someone set him free from the chains of sin and death. He was a sinner — a murderer, as a matter of fact — who needed saving and Christ the Savior. Though He was tempted in every way, Christ remained without sin. So He had no need of a Savior. No need to be rescued from death.
At that point, another vitally important difference: the greater Deliverer, Christ, accomplished a far greater deliverance. When God worked through Moses to set the people free from slavery in Egypt, it was a great and gracious work. But when our Lord Jesus Christ redeemed us — redeemed us from all sin and death and the power of the devil with His own blood — He remains the single most important person in all of human history.
So in a number of noticeable ways, Moses and Jesus are a lot alike. And in some infinitely important ways, they are dramatically different. But both are fundamentally important to the plan of salvation given in the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ. In the faithful deliverer Moses, God was giving His people a partial preview of the Deliverer to come, Jesus Christ. And in Israel’s liberation, God was foreshadowing our redemption. He was giving His people a glimpse of how He would ultimately fulfill the promise of salvation. So He was giving them some important pointers of what to look for in the Savior to come. You could say that in Moses they were essentially being shown a rather underdeveloped and blurry picture of a deliverer. But in the person of Jesus Christ, that blurry picture becomes crystal clear: who the promised Savior is.
The parallels between Moses and Jesus serve a fundamentally valuable lesson: that Moses was the great deliverer, and Jesus was the greatest of the deliverers. But the differences between them are absolutely essential. Moses deserves our appreciation and our respect, but Jesus deserves our reverent worship and praise. Moses can be seen in some ways as a role model: faithful, steadfast, dedicated to the Lord, courageous, a powerful leader. But Jesus is the Lord who came to serve us, whose steadfast love toward us is beyond our understanding, whose dedication to us is immeasurable and is truly undeserved, and who alone is worthy of both our faith and our worship.
Moses is a fellow sinner and saint to whom we can relate and whom we can respect. Jesus is the Savior of Moses, of us, of all sinners. And that is a truly blessed difference. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. But because Moses is both significantly similar to and vastly different from Jesus, the same is true for all of us.
Like us, Jesus is truly human, our brother in the flesh. He is also true God. He remained sinless through it all. But we sin daily. Jesus died. But unlike us, He died not because of His own sin, but because of ours. So like Him, we live forever. But unlike Him, it is not because we’ve merited it, but because of His mercy — not on account of any merit or worthiness in us, but by His good grace and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
He is like us. He is radically unlike us. Both of these are extraordinarily good news, for we need deliverance in Jesus: God, who in the flesh is our perfect Deliverer, who has delivered us from sin, death, and the power of the devil, and delivered us into the heavenly kingdom forever. Your sins are forgiven because you’ve been delivered by Christ. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.