Moses: Servant of the Lord and God's Instrument

After 34, I want to begin reading at verse 5. All the way through the book of Deuteronomy, the story has been about the things that God has done and how God has presented to him, his people, the story of his redeeming power and how much he keeps his promises to the people to whom he's made promises. So we see all the way through this story from the Exodus all the way to this event, how God has worked through the people and what he's done to the people who belong to him. It's been a story of God, not a story of Moses. Because in all these events, God is the central figure in what's taking place and it's not Moses. God is the one who made all of the plans and God is the one who got involved in every situation that they were in. He tells us about this human side of how God has worked and what he's done. In this chapter, it starts out, I want to start reading at verse 5. And Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in Moab as the Lord had said. He buried him in Moab in the valley opposite of Beth Peor. But to this day, no one knows where his grave is. Moses was 120 years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak, nor his strength gone. The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab 30 days until the time of weeping and mourning was over. In this passage, Moses is referred to as the servant of the Lord. This is a phrase reserved for very few people in the Bible. Moses has the most of these references, there are over 15 references to Moses as a servant of the Lord. Now get this, he's talking about Moses as a servant of the Lord. Moses was obedient to what God asked him to do and say. It's awfully easy for us to look at Moses and see in the hand of Moses the power of God and see Moses as the figure. What the Bible makes clear that we understand is that Moses was a servant of God. He wasn't a substitute for God, nor was he God. All the great things that took place in Moses' life were the result of what God had done. It was God who chose Moses. No one thought Moses was a great speaker. When God came to him and said, I have a job for you. I want you to go to Pharaoh and I want you to tell him these things. Moses himself said, I can't do that, I'm not a speaker. And he was right, he got his brother to do the job for him. God took his brother and told his brother what to say to Pharaoh. And it was a while then before Moses himself became a speaker. But he wasn't as hard as he thought it was going to be. Because it wouldn't matter very much what you knew if you had someone right there with you to be able to tell you what to say. Wayne could explain to us nuclear energy. All he would need is a man who knew everything about it, standing right beside him, saying, Wayne, here's the word you say. And he'd say it. Here's the next word. And he would say it. If someone would come to Wayne and tell Wayne every single word to say, he could explain to us anything that the person talking to him would tell him to explain. He might not understand one single word of it. But the words that would be given to him, if it was a nuclear energy engineer, would be exactly the right words. Moses did not think this stuff up. Every time that he did or said anything, it was a direct result of the fact that God said, Moses, here's what I want you to do. We lose confidence in God. How many people have you heard who would say things like, I couldn't teach a class. Or I couldn't tell somebody about Christ. Well, you're probably right. But if God asked you to teach a class and told you every word you were supposed to say, he could make it possible for you to do that. One of the remarkable things about the Bible is that most of the people we see as great heroes of Scripture were oftentimes people who were not personally qualified to be able to do what they were doing. God looks all around the world to find people who are not qualified to do his work. And then he tells them what to do. And they begin to do it. And it's powerfully effective. Because he tells them what to say. We don't have any long speeches by Moses. In this book of Deuteronomy, there's a song that he writes, God will ask him to write. But we know what God does. He just gives him the words he's supposed to write. Moses mostly stood up and said exactly what God told him to say. What God wants to do is to demonstrate through human beings his intelligence, his wisdom, his direction, and his care. And what he wants people to do are say the words that would make those things evident and clear. So when God calls people, he often calls people who in the world's eyes are not qualified to be able to do the job. There was not one of Jesus' disciples who had in his life before they came to be his disciples who were eloquent preachers or even Bible teachers. And yet they became the agents through which the gospel was spread around the world. You take someone that God says, you come and follow me. And then he says, this is your job. And they go and do that job. And they're effective at it. God does not expect us to have the ability or skill to do the work to which he calls us. Because it is spiritual work. What he wants is a human body with a mind and with a voice who will listen to him and do and say what he wants them to do and say. That's all it is. We have to be careful that we get the words God wants us to say as we say them. Because those are powerful words. The very words of God. If you don't have them, they become your words. We don't know very much about Moses' personal life. We know he had a wife. We don't know how many children he had. We don't know very much about him. Because the story is not about him. Even though Moses is a considerable figure in the Bible, it's not about him. It's about what God said through Moses and what God did through Moses. Moses could have gone up to any body of water, wherever it was, held up his hands, and it wouldn't have parted. The Red Sea didn't part because Moses held up his hands. It parted because God said, if you'll hold up your hands, I will part this sea. I will take care of you. And Moses simply did what he was told. The water was not responding to the hands of Moses. It was responding to the power of God. And God said to the water, be separated. It did exactly what he told it to do. We don't have confidence in the power of God. That's why we complain so much about our inadequacies. That's why so many people refuse to take the responsibility to be obedient in witness, to be obedient in ministry, to be obedient in prayer, to be obedient in the task that God has for us. I like to say I can't do this because of my obvious human limitations. There's not any place in the Bible where the obvious human limitations of people limited what God wanted to do through them. The reason we don't see these miraculous things take place is sometimes we're not open to listen to God enough to Him to hear Him say, this is a job I want you to do. That's probably the biggest one. And when we do hear Him, we refuse to do what he tells us because we look not at the power of God, but at ourselves. Moses was able to do many powerful and wonderful things. God empowered him. God guided him. He was able to do things that he had never, ever done before. The one great failure Moses had was one time God said, this is what I want you to do. And Moses took the credit for what God asked him to do. The story is important for us to understand. If Wayne is standing before us and he's explaining nuclear fission to us. And we know Wayne for a long time. And we all would say, he has no idea what nuclear fission is. And the person standing behind him is telling him all these words to say. And when he finished, Wayne said, this is my words to you. And I want you to understand exactly how smart I am. We would be really surprised for him to take credit for something that someone else gave him. This is the story of the scriptures. God is to be glorified in Moses' life. So when God calls and talks about Moses, he doesn't talk about him as a great prophet, even though he was a prophet. He talks about him as a servant of the Lord. There is nothing greater in the kingdom of God than to have this phrase attached to your name. A servant of the Lord. Because a servant listens to instructions, does what he's told to do. A servant is submissive always to his master and boss. And that's what a follower of Christ really is like. So the whole story of Deuteronomy is wrapped up in this one single phrase. Moses, the servant of the Lord. He died in Moab. You know, he never got to go into the land of promise because he failed one time to give credit to God and took credit for himself as to what God had told him to do. God wanted the water to come out of the rock. So he honored what Moses did. But even though Moses took credit for being able to do it, God said, I'm not going to rob the people of the blessing they were to get from the water. But you, Moses, will pay for taking credit for what I do. And whenever God asks us to pray for someone, and we do pray for them, and they thank us, remember to say, I only prayed for you because God told me to. I only did for you what I did today because God asked me to do it. And whenever you do tell people something about what God has done, and they're amazed at your ability to say this and your courage to say it, you have to remind yourself and them, the Lord directed me to do this. What God wants are people who are servants of his prepared to do whatever he asks. And he tells us here that there's a tragic consequence if we fail to give God credit for what he's told us to do and told us to say. So Moses died, never entering the land of promise, because the one time in his life when he took credit for what God did, he buried him in Moab. We don't know who he is. Some people think it's Joshua. Some people think it's God himself who buried him. He buried him in Moab, the valley opposite the Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is. Now, you know, famous people have fans. I read the other day about Elvis Presley's home in Memphis, and some story about how many people went there every year, how many people come to visit Graceland because Elvis lived there at one time. Can you imagine if we could find the place where Moses was buried? There'd be buildings built there. There'd be tourists that would come there, people who would stand by the grave of Moses. And think by standing there they could in some way receive the blessing of Moses. God knew that Moses was not the center of attention. He was. And so he buried Moses in a place no one would ever find it. The humble lifestyle of Moses and submission to God required that he be buried anonymously so no one would know. Because Moses was not the center of attention. It was God. We do take too much effort at people who God has blessed, either be able to be speakers or preachers or teachers or whatever it is, to honor and lift them up so that they become what one man said about some preacher, he's more famous than Jesus. And whenever we do that, we go contrary to what the Bible describes as a servant of the Lord. Moses was not in the forefront. Never was. And God didn't allow him to be. Because God never intended for Moses to cover up for him to take his place. So God made sure that he was buried there 120 years old when he died. He didn't die because he was weak and unable. His eyes were still strong. They were not weak. Nor was his strength gone. And the idea of his strength sometimes has to do with vigor. Physical vigor. The kind of vigor that a normal person would have in their life. Moses did not simply get weaker and weaker and weaker until he died. But he died in good health. That's what the Bible is talking about. A sudden death perhaps. So that that moment when he died, God buried him. The Israelites grieved over Moses. He went up to the mountain to die. They knew that. There appears to be nobody else with him. But there was a kind of a custom. Whenever the leader of Israel, any leader of Israel would die, they would spend 30 days in mourning. A time in which people would express their sorrow of the person, their recognition of the person. And they would spend time recognizing this person. So the people of Israel grieved for 30 days. And then their grieving was over. And they started into the land of promise. The next verse in verse 9 says, Now Joshua, son of Nun, was filled with the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him. So the Israelites listened to him and did what the Lord had commanded Moses. Moses, before he died, came and laid his hands, what we call kind of an ordination or passing on of the spirit on Joshua. So that the people would understand that whatever it was that Moses had, now was being passed on to Joshua. This was an important idea. That God was not dead. And when Moses was gone, God's work was not finished. A new person was there in the place. We do attach too much importance to individuals. So that when we have a Sunday school teacher who feels God wants them to change and they quit and somebody else starts, people, they like the other one better. Or preachers leave the church, new preacher comes, they like the old one, they don't like the new one. What God does when he calls us, is in each person that he calls, he places his spirit. So that whatever leader there is, if they're God called people, they have the spirit of God in them. It doesn't matter who the speaker is. They are merely repeating the words of God. So we shouldn't be distressed because there's a change in leadership or a change in teachers or a change in preachers. For if it's really in God's work, God is there, just a new face is now speaking the same message of God. And if we get turned off because we're attached to a personality, then we fail to listen to what God really is doing. Moses is off the scene. Joshua is now filled with the spirit. And in the book of Joshua, in the first chapter, we're told that Moses passed this on. And Joshua is never called a servant of God till the end of the book of Joshua. Faithful in all of his life. And then at the end of the book of Joshua, Joshua is two times referenced as a servant of God. You can't say that a person is a servant of God before they begin. For it's a lifelong act of themselves to show that they are obedient to God that marks them as that servant. So Joshua now becomes the leader of the nation of Israel because he's the person through whom God has chosen to both act and speak. A new leader has come, and yet there is no new leader. For the old leader was God, and the new leader is God. No change. It might be that the tone of voice by which the person speaks is different. Or maybe their style of speaking is different. But if it's really like God wants it to be, those words will be the words of God. And so the people of Israel, 30 days they recognized Moses, and then it was over. Moses, the servant of God, was in the past. Joshua, the servant of God, was in the present. God's transition was simply to change one voice for another voice. But always they were both people his voice. This is God's secret throughout the Bible. God is never attached to one person so that when that person is gone he's ineffective anymore. He always is willing to provide leadership if he has someone who's willing to do it. The book of Deuteronomy ends with these last paragraphs. Since then, no prophet has risen equal in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. What was different about Moses was he had the ability to go in the tent of meeting. And he was able to sit down and have conversations with God like you have a conversation with somebody who is a human being. This was the unique thing for Moses and God. They talked together like ordinary people would talk together. The word of God came to Moses in clear and plain to him as it is when you and I converse with each other. This was the distinction that Moses had. So the Bible ends this book by saying there was no other prophet like Moses. Now Moses was a prophet because he delivered the message of God to the people. That's what a prophet does. A prophet doesn't necessarily predict the future. Even though sometimes they do tell things that are going to take place in the future. But they tell things that are going to take place in the future because God tells them if the people of Israel don't stop this here's what I'm going to do. Now we know we have the Old Testament and the New Testament. If you look at some of the instructions in the New Testament and the Old Testament then you know something about what God is going to do. If someone rebels against God and turns away from God you know what's going to happen to them. Disaster is going to come in this life and when they die they'll spend eternity without God. And so if you've met someone and they say I don't believe in God and I'm not interested in following him I don't have any interest in doing the things the Bible says you can prophesy brother you're going to hell and you'll be right. You prophesy that not because you can tell the future because you know what God is going to do because he's told you what he's going to do. When people stand before me and they have not surrendered their life to me he said this is what I'm going to say depart from me I never knew you. So because you know what God has said he's going to do you can speak that word of prophecy when you see people who have ignored and rebelled against God's authority. Not because you can tell the future but because you know what God is going to do. Everyone has family members that if you had something happen and you could predict how they're going to react to it because you know them well enough to know what they're going to do and because you know what they're going to do because you've seen them over and over do these things you can say well I'll tell you what would happen if Butch came home if Butch went to the house and he went in the kitchen and fixed stuff and left stuff everywhere when his wife came home he probably knows what she would say to him because he knows her and he probably has been in a spot where he did something before she didn't like maybe one time. So this would be the second time and he'd already know exactly what was going to happen. Whenever you read the Bible and you see over and over how people have reacted to God in different ways when you see other people around you who react the same way you know what God's going to do because he's the same yesterday, today and forever. Moses' difference was he had somehow a closeness to God so that he could sit down and talk to God like human beings talk to each other. That was a big difference for Moses. So no prophet has been risen in Israel like Moses whom the Lord knew face to face who did all these miraculous signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt. Remember the signs and wonders were things God did and he sent Moses to do them but God did them through Moses. Moses couldn't do any of those things but he simply told Pharaoh this is what God is going to do if you don't do turn these people loose. Because God said this is what I'm going to do if he doesn't turn the people loose. To Pharaoh and all of his Egyptians and all of his officials and to the whole land for no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. God chose Moses as a special person to do something unique for him. Now this may seem like it's a big difference between you and Moses. It may be in the task that God gives each of us. But whatever the task is God gives us it's the same as Moses' tasks. This is what I want you to do and I want you to do it faithfully. And if you do it faithfully I will make it have powerful consequences or results. So if you're to share what Christ has done in your life with someone you've been praying for or if you're to pray for someone that God would touch their life and their mind and change their whole life then that can happen. God responds to his people. And the mighty power of God is available for each of us to accomplish the things that God has asked us to do. Our key ingredient is we have to discover what it is God says here is your job, your responsibility and your task. And when we do it then God places his power in what we've done and it becomes effective and powerful because he has asked us to do it and he empowers what we do so that the results come. Moses is sort of a typical character for us. Obedience to God turns loose the power of God through the life of the person who's obedient. So the key to the power of God is obedience in the mind and hearts of people so that when we do or say what God wants he empowers it in life-changing, world-changing strength to accomplish the mission that he has for us. So Moses kind of becomes a pattern by which we can see how God uses us. What is it God wants for you? What is it you've had in your mind that you ought to do? Someone you ought to pray for? A responsibility you ought to accept in his kingdom? If you never do that you will never experience the power of God. If you know he's asked you to do something and you do it, it will have effect. Isaiah said that the things God does is like planting seeds, like water that goes out. It will always accomplish its purpose and his word will never come back to us empty. So when you say what God wants you to say it will always accomplish its purpose and it will never bounce back to you as if there were nothing there because God gives it power and God transforms the person who hears it. A great thing for someone to say no one has ever shown mighty power or performance in the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all of Israel. But that same sentence could be written about us. No one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that you, put your name there, did in the sight of all the church. Could you bow your heads please for a moment? We're thankful for the example that Moses gives, for all the things he was able to do in obedience to you. They've shown us the unlimited power you have to act and how you can take a person not qualified to do a job and make them outstanding in doing it. Alert us to the fact that when something comes to our mind to pray for someone that we realize this is an opportunity to demonstrate your power in our lives and through us. Whenever we know we're supposed to do something, give us a passion to do it that we might demonstrate your power through our own lives. And we will always give you credit for what results come from what we do. And when we try to do things for you that you've never asked us to do and they come up empty, remind us that it was because you never asked us to do it. For your power will always be available in obedience. We give thanks to Christ for letting us see this in him too. Amen. Okay, I finished that one. We're going to start next Wednesday night.