Friday, October 16, 2015
John 5:46 "For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me."
WITNESS: MOSES
The final witness that Jesus points to is Moses. It's quite likely that the testimony of Moses had the greatest impact on the Jewish heart and mind. Moses was beloved and well respected by the Jews. If he supported something, they were sure to support it also. Many of the Jews who rejected Jesus did so because He was proving and showing that He was greater than Moses, especially when it came to the handling of God's law.
Jesus was the fulfiller of the law that God first introduced through Moses. John touched on this earlier in his Gospel with this statement, "The law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). It's not that Moses knew nothing of the gospel or that Jesus disregarded the law. The point of this distinction is what God revealed through both. Moses was the one through whom God revealed it. Jesus was the Mediator of the new covenant of forgiveness, the greatest expression of God's grace. Law and gospel abound in both Moses and Jesus, but are emphasized differently.
Jesus used Moses and what he wrote by inspiration as an example because it all pointed to Jesus. The Jews had left the correct path and fallen into thinking that they themselves could fulfill the requirements of the law. But there is no hope or success in such an endeavor. Only through Jesus is Moses' ministry complete.
There are many today who follow the same thinking that those Jews did, even if they don't look to Moses as a source of truth. It's human nature to think that we must save ourselves, or at least take part in the work. But even Moses, the giver of the written law, looked to Jesus and testified that He was the Savior and Messiah. May we rest our hearts only on Jesus and so help others do the same.
