The Story of Moses & The Israelites Foreshadowing Christ & The Church

While reading through the bible – the New Testament first for many of us, then circling back around to get a sense of the Old Testament, in order to better understand the gospels and epistles – one of the most uncanny elements to pick up on, is the many events and understandings we’re presented in the New Testament, that had been depicted alternatively, and were implicitly represented in the circumstances of the Old Testament. Our lives having started again once living in Christ, and our taking part in the church we find to be right for us, is an experience we never do fully understand, however we have a concrete example of lives lived within God’s promise, and a congregation and kingdom, that we can better internalize our lives following Christ with. We are sojourning in a wilderness that is not ours, journeying toward a land promised to us, trusting that we’re being led to a greater inheritance by faith in the One who redeemed us. The parallel that can be demonstrated between the journey of Christ’s church to life in the Spirit and the New Heavens & the New Earth that we will join Him in after the Judgement, and the House of Israel’s Exodus journey through the remnant of their enslavement still present in them and from the wilderness to the Canaanite land promised to Abraham, is one I believe to be a deliberate foreshadowing and a purposeful lens onto the function of the congregation we join together to become and our spiritual condition as we journey with Christ.

I think that a generally unacknowledged dynamic, is how nuanced of a thing it is to have a personal understanding of who Jesus Christ is and was. We can deliver high-level theological talking-points and depict the set of characteristics we attribute to Him, but there is still a substantial disconnect between our speaking about and grasping who He is. His character and His stature as a man, are, I believe, best displayed in stories within the Gospel narrative, such as the 40 day fast & resistance of temptation, His extended response to the woman brought to be stoned by the Pharisees, and His washing of the disciples’ feet to demonstrate servitude as a leader before putting His robe back on and telling them they are correct to call Him Lord. I believe however, that the best way of reaching the layered understanding of His attributes, is to study and evaluate the collection of Old Testament figures who are presented as predecessors to Him, in the different capacities He was anointed for. Three relatively significant examples are David, Joshua, and Moses – in those three figures’ capacities as king, commander, and congregational leader, respectively. David serves as a depiction of the ideal king of Israel, aside from his murder of Uriah to cover his affair with Bathsheba, and the census taken toward the end of his reign. These events aside, David was a righteous king, and a man “after God’s own heart”; the characteristics of his attributable as incremental representations that can be used as reference points for Christ’s are his unwavering faithfulness in God, his courage in the face of life-threatening adversaries, and the love he had for his friends & the people under his protection. Now Joshua, whose name in Hebrew is the actual given name of Jesus, served as the traditional depiction of an Israelite military hero. He commanded Israel’s armies in what was physical warfare, in the peoples’ conquest of Canaan; however the battles waged for the land inhabited by a corrupt population serves as a proper foreshadowing of the spiritual warfare introduced in the gospels, as Jesus sends out the disciples to speak His word in the neighboring cities. Now Moses was the leader of the Israelite congregation, as they overcame the adversary who’d enslaved them, adopted a covenant with God after He’d redeemed them, and organized the delegation of leadership within their body of people – I believe the Exodus journey, and Moses’ leadership of the Israelite people depicts an almost-complete representation of the purpose & the trials of the church, and of the duties performed by Christ as its leader.

When reviewing the Exodus story & the establishment of Israel as a nation, it becomes apparent that the Israelite people’s journey as stewards of God’s promise fits exhaustively onto the circumstance of the church’s inauguration. If we start at the point of the Israelite congregation’s escape from Egypt, we have the people's redemption from a corrupt worldly ruler, Pharaoh, to whom the Israelite people had been enslaved to, and who had been overcome as the people were freed from their bondage, before perishing at God’s hand. It is not until Death, which Christ had overcome in His sacrificial crucifixion, and the world’s ruler who holds its power are conquered that Christ had been given earthly authority and commissioned His disciples to venture into the nations and gather the rest of God’s Elect, and join them to His congregation to follow Him as well. Upon deliverance from the bondage they’d been trapped in, God who’d saved the people established with them a suzerainty covenant at Sinai, which followed along the structuring of a traditional Eastern covenant, made between a king and a subordinate ruler or a people he’d established rule over. Now the covenant established by Christ, of life given in Him, by His grace, through faith in Him, following His atoning sacrifice, served to satisfy the wrath designated for each of us individually that we accumulate as we commit acts against God and the goodness He created the world for, in our corruption, as well as releases us from the bondage of the flesh we’re born into, and the wickedness that manifests in each of us through it; and our partaking of this covenant was made possible at Christ’s deliverance, and establishment of His rule over us, and prevailing against Death who’d reigned from Adam until Moses, and the sin that’d manifested in those who’d been under the law. Finally, the Israelite journey to their promised land was a tumultuous intergenerational effort; throughout which the people longed for & gave in to the activities that satisfied them as slaves, were sent out to battle for ownership of territories with corrupted inhabitants, for the sake of establishing adherence to God’s will in the land, and the people within the congregation actively rebelled against God’s authority and asserted themselves as justified challengers to God’s will. Our lives after entering into Christ’s salvation and joining His congregation are all-but defined by the consistent contention we experience inside ourselves, as the flesh we’d been accustomed to satisfying wrestles with the Spirit born in us, that we have a constant need to reorient ourselves toward our leader, Jesus, in order to walk in. We engage in legitimate battle, every time we venture out into the world or the communities we engage with outside of the church, where by our words and our adherence to the love that Christ demonstrated for & commanded to us, are challenged and frequently overtaken by the selfishness, idolatrous worship of “gold”, and lust for dominance, that we contend with in almost every worldly setting we enter. The dynamics present that reflect the parallel assignment & circumstance between the congregation of Israel and the church of Christ are observable in review of the text, however it is the implications of this preceding story that must be discerned & uncovered before we can apply them to our own journeys.

The congregation of the House of Israel was an initially 630,550 count collection of members, numbered by the able men who could serve as contributors in that time period’s primary activity by which a nation sustained itself, war. The first conclusion for today’s church that can be derived from Israel’s congregation, is the duty held by all members active in our congregation, of engaging in the spiritual warfare that’s at hand all around us. These are contentions not of swords & death but of Spirit & words; and in the professional, neighborhood, and family communities we actively engage in it is a responsibility of ours to stand firm in & carry out His word. Early into the start of Israel’s progression toward their promised land, right after as well as before being made into a covenant people, Moses delegated the authority he had: first that of upholding God’s commands as arbiter between the people, in the form of chiefs who served as judges; and then of shouldering the weight of leading a troublesome people, as elders were appointed as extensions of Moses’ responsibility. It is a well-understood notion that strong leaders throughout a church’s membership are very important in upholding the adherence to God’s purposes as the church goes about its functioning; however I believe it’s observable that the activity of arbitration in misunderstandings between members, by those charged as leaders in a congregation, is a generally neglected practice – formally and informally. We are led in our churches by our pastors, who serve as priests of God’s word and ministers of God’s people, and a large function that many pastors take on is as a personal resource and a source of advice & council for their church’s members as they are sought out for that. Each of us following Christ and engaging in His church carry with us an emotional & spiritual burden, from our unresolved activities & corrupted habits left over from our former lives as rebels. The designation of elders is a common feature of any church body’s leadership team, however the capacity of that appointment as a minister to God’s people within it, and an expectation of taking on some of the burden placed on pastors & those speaking His word, in decisions made toward active, personal engagement with the spiritual & emotional circumstances of its members, is a rarely-seen activity that would bring about a tangible degree more fulfillment & even joy in church communities overall. 

After Israel was freed from their bondage in Egypt they’d been provided sustenance by God’s providence – in the form of the “grain from heaven”, manna; and it’d been soon after the congregation’s departure from Mt. Sinai when the people were pulled by their accommodation to the comforts of their prior lives under slavery, and began complaining, longing for fish, and cucumbers, and melons. The grumbling against & rejection of God’s provision was contagious, and in response to their hunger for their lifestyle of bondage, God fulfilled their craving with a heaping of meat that they satisfied themselves with, and then killed them for it. We, having been freed from our flesh’s dominion over us are just as prone to succumbing to the desires of our base nature. We act on this all of the time, and it usually plays out as a craving for our egos to be satisfied, being that our stomachs are generally fed. This longing for our prior comforts looks like: watering down of the person we identify Jesus as, downplaying our plainly ignoring the magnitude & the validity of His teaching, and our regard of our belief in Him to be a matter of momentary confession & expression of His relationship to the Father, as opposed to unyielding acknowledgement of the stature & commands of the Savior that we are claiming to follow; self-centered, as opposed to word-centered discussion as church communities; empty speech about the experience of a Christian lifestyle or of righteous values, while believing and holding contradictory narratives of our world inside of ourselves; and transposing the self-interested, organizational-position focused ethos of many of our professional environments, onto our engagement with the church. Now as a final occurrence from the Israelite wilderness years to be extrapolated from as representative of our condition as congregants in Christ’s church today, it was after the extensive narrative of the prophet Balaam’s attempt at cursing the Israelite people, and God’s prevention of his intended word, that the people then succumbed to idolatry and began sacrificing to one of the surrounding false gods, Baal. Reflective of this story, this sort of giving in to being fooled by what actually is a large collection of other sources of assurance and providers of justification in the world around us, is very common, and little acknowledged. Whether it be our political identity, “status” as an elite in some realm such as education or profession, people group, financial position, digital entertainment to numb ourselves, notions of social hierarchy and influence, our looks, our role in our church, or even the city we live in, that we cling to for what makes us who we are, in our regard of ourselves individually, or in relation to the people around us – all of that is idolatry, taking up a superficial or ultimately empty source of legitimacy for ourselves, and then sacrificing to it with our time, money, praise, or obedience, while we abandon the identity given us & the example set for us in Christ. This occurrence being tackled in the church, is I believe addressed in Paul’s declaration of us being charged to judge our brothers & sisters in the church, by the standards of Christ’s commands laid out, and to not hold to account our understanding of righteousness when it comes to those outside of our congregation of disciples following Christ.

Now the last component of the Israelite journey to their promised land that I’ll reference as available to understand our following Christ to the inheritance promised us by, is Moses’ functioning as Israel’s leader, being a lens onto the activities performed by Christ for us, and a window into how we can orient ourselves as better congregants on His behalf, out of our love for Him, and the tangible ways we can actively walk in His ways and by His example, and contribute to the building up of His kingdom. One of the most descriptive examples of Moses’ responsibility over the Israelite congregation is his activity as an intercessor, depicted at Mt. Sinai when he stood in the way and convinced God against the release of His anger, after they’d begun worshipping a gold constructed metal-work of a Canaanite god, while Moses had been atop the mountain receiving the set of commands God had been laying out to keep the people safe & reconciled to Him. Moses’ activity as an intercessor presented him having bore the spiritual & experiential burden of the peoples’ rebellious acts on their behalf, and saving them from having had poured out on them the response that God righteously designated them. Christ expressed this duty briefly when He spoke and asked the Father to forgive the Jews & the Romans who’d mocked, stripped, & beat Him before the coming of His death while nailed to the cross. Given the Spirit living inside us, and our individual partaking in Christ’s name as He abides in us, we have access to the Father, through Him, and are equipped to intercede on behalf of our brothers & sisters in our church communities who’ve fallen in one way or another, as well as for those outside of His church who don’t know Him, and aren’t intending to come to Him any time soon, yet who are all the while deserving of forgiveness for rebellion. Now the capacity that Moses is and has traditionally been most recognized for, is as the mediator of the covenant between God and the Israelite people. He joined God in “the secret place of thunder” and after 40 days & nights was given by God the covenantal agreement that would serve as the conditions of the relationship between God and the Israelite people He’d redeemed and established rule over. Then, aside from commissioning the construction of the tabernacle that was to hold God’s name among them, Moses read aloud the entirety of the law given them, in front of the plains of Moab before they entered their inheritance. Christ established a new covenant, between the Father and all the people of the nations who receive His salvation, and not before directly challenging Moses’ authority as representing God’s will in the laws he laid out, in dialogue with the Jewish teachers of the law. The first thing we can do in consequence of Christ’s mediation of His new covenant is to actually know the commands and the covenant that He laid out; and after that, as a way of following His example & upholding His will, we can actively, vocally, establish what the truth of Christ’s commands are while in church community discussion, if it is the case, which it may likely often be, that His will is not what’s being suggested & agreed upon. The third that I’ll mention, and I believe least understood attribute of Moses’ leadership of Israel, which we can better understand Christ’s functioning through the lens of, is of a commander in spiritual battle. Moses directed the men of Israel’s military into physical – yet which underlied as spiritual – war, against the kings of Midian and against King Sihon of Heshbon and King Og of Bashan, on command for the sake of vengeance, and in response to the kings’ hardness of heart and inhospitality to God’s people, resulting in their land being taken as a possession, respectively. The idea of this happening and being justifiable seems completely barbaric today. I think it to be the case that during this period of time, ~3500 years ago, the conditions of collective life and the expectations & necessity of warfare were much different than they are now – post, say, the Pax Romana period. Now it’s my belief that the spiritual warfare depicted by Christ & the disciples throughout the gospels exists as a parallel conflict, with ultimately greater stakes; however it exists on the spiritual plain and is fought against the demons & worldly spirits governed by Satan, sent out into the world and which occupy and exist inside the souls of those who’ve succumbed to their influence. This dynamic seems to be what’s presented in the collection of stories depicting Jesus casting out demonic entities, who were aware of Him and He of them; and subsequently, the activity of the disciples when they’d been sent out to the cities of Israel, and of those who’d been Apostles purging demonic influences from afflicted Jewish people, as they ventured around Jerusalem and the nations. As far as this activity goes in our lives today as Christ’s disciples, the extent of my understanding of this scenario that I hold a pretty firm belief in at this point is that much of the time spent in public settings, or around new people outside of the church, or in the aftermath of some corrupted act being decided on by ourselves or someone in our physical midst, yield what can be experienced as a “spiritual disruption” or our being in a setting that feels like a “spiritual wasteland”. I haven’t had a single conversation on this topic, I don’t believe, and I have no clue what other peoples’ experience is with this dynamic, but I’m honestly confident that these “shifts in the atmosphere” are something that happens and can be felt. I read through the bible constantly, and in this context through the psalms specifically, and what I feel inside is completely different after I’ve spent a bit of time doing that. There’s a sort of “melting” inside it feels like, and a dryness or an emptiness beforehand often – and what I’ll do is vocalize through maybe a single book of the 5 psalms books, almost every time I change the  environment I’m in throughout the day, as replenishment. The idea I have is that the words spoken toward God, written originally as expressions of the heart directed toward Him by the different psalmists, have an effect of “regenerating” our souls, and His presence, and in some way constraining the detrimental influences that are experienced as in our midst beforehand. I have no confirmation or credible reference for any of this, but this is one of the things I think through throughout the days. So, to the extent that this spiritual engagement dynamic is present and at hand, I believe that what us, as the congregants of Christ’s church can do in the upholding of His will, is to speak His word – literally to speak it, in moments of solitude, in discussion with our church groups, and as we go about our lives in the world, and that that will play a part in bringing His presence into the communities & places that we operate in.

Now in conclusion, we all, as active and burgeoning members of Christ’s church, have a collective and individual interest in living out our commitments to our Savior, Christ, and in following His example as disciples of His life and teachings. It seems to be a discernably recognizable dynamic, that Moses and the Israelites’ journey from slavery in Egypt to the promised land given them by God, presents a parallel foreshadowing of the church, with Jesus as our leader, journeying from our enslavements to the flesh & corruption that we’re born into toward the development of the Spirit born within us and to the inheritance in God’s kingdom on earth & in heaven, promised to us. As we seek to understand the actual person of Christ and His attributes, He seems to be most properly represented in the multiple Old Testament figures who preceded Him, in different aspects of His calling on earth. In reference to the church of today & Christ’s leadership of it, Moses appears to be the most representative forerunner to Christ’s redemption of God’s Elect, His establishment of a covenant between God and us, and His leadership of the church congregation. The comparisons between the journeys led by the two figures can be made, and the aspects of Jesus that are reflected in Moses’ characteristics can be analyzed, however the most valuable use of this representative foreshadowing dynamic is to use the stories of Moses’ leadership and the Israelites tumultuous journey to their promised land, as a guide for us, to better understand and follow the example of the leader that Jesus is for us, and to learn from the mistakes made by, and the snares that caught, the Israelite people as they struggled to overcome the comforts of their prior enslavement, after their redemption into newfound freedom as God’s people. I believe that if we dig into these stories, learn from the lessons presented, and apply the insights that can be taken away to our lives lived as disciples of Christ, we’ll be well equipped to live out His will, invite in His presence, and to inherit His promise.