Moses: In the Footsteps of the Reluctant Prophet

by Adam Hamilton

He is the single most important figure in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). His presence is felt throughout the Christian New Testament. The epic account of his life, together with the deliverance of the Israelite slaves from bondage in Egypt, is the defining story of the Jewish people. The Jewish festivals of Sukkot (Tabernacles), Shavuot (Weeks), and Passover, as well as the holy days of Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), are rooted in Moses’ story and the Law attributed to him, as is the weekly observance of the Sabbath among Jews. For Christians, Moses’ life serves as the backdrop for much that is found in the Gospels, including the story of Jesus’ flight to Egypt, the Sermon on the Mount, many of Jesus’ sayings in the Gospel of John, the activities of Jesus around Jerusalem, the Last Supper, and the Crucifixion. In the Gospel account of Christ’s transfiguration, Moses actually appears to Jesus and speaks to him. Moses is mentioned by name more than seventy times in the New Testament, and his life, story, and commands are alluded to in nearly every New Testament book.

Throughout history, his story has continued to speak to each successive generation. American slaves composed songs about Moses as they yearned for freedom. Moses is enshrined in the architecture of the U.S. Supreme Court—inside on the south frieze as one of the great lawgivers of history and outside on the eastern pediment. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his final sermon delivered the night before his death, drew upon the story of Moses ascending Mount Nebo. King proclaimed that he had “been to the mountaintop,” where, like Moses, he claimed to have seen the Promised Land.1 Moses’ story has been captured in art, music, literature, and film.

The account of Moses and the Exodus was originally passed down from generation to generation orally since most Israelites at that time could not read or write. Instead they told stories—stories intended to entertain, to shape the identity of a people, and to teach them about God and God’s will for humankind. We often read these stories with a certain seriousness, but for centuries they were told around campfires after supper or to children before they were put to bed. The stories contain heroes and villains, suspense and intrigue, and no small amount of humor. Among the many things I appreciate about Moses’ story is what an unlikely hero he was. He was a Hebrew adopted into Pharaoh’s family. He was a murderer and fugitive from the law. He was an elderly sheepherder from the desert whom God called to deliver the Israelites. He appears to have had some kind of speech impediment, yet became Israel’s greatest prophet. And, as we will see in every chapter of this book, he was imperfect, afra...

It has been said that the Holy Land is the fifth Gospel; those who visit there never read the Gospels the same way again. I’d suggest that the land of Egypt, including the Sinai, functions as a sixth book of the Pentateuch; visiting the archaeological sites and traversing its geography can lead to a fresh and insightful reading of Moses and the story of the Exodus.

Some mistakenly assume that these pyramids were built by the Israelite slaves whom Moses would lead to freedom, but the pyramids were already ancient when Israel was born. They had been standing for at least a thousand years by the time Moses came on the scene.

So, if the Israelites were not involved in the building of these structures, why would we begin our journey—and this book—with the pyramids? One reason is simply that you should never visit Egypt without seeing the pyramids. More importantly, though, we begin with the pyramids because they help us understand the pharaohs and the role they played in Egyptian society. The larger-than-life, semidivine status of the pharaohs, captured in the building of the pyramids, helps us understand the villains or antagonists in Moses’ story. Sometime around 3000 B.C., when the kings or pharaohs first unified Upper and Lower Egypt, a city was built on the west bank of the Nile about thirteen miles south of modern Cairo. This city, located on the boundary of Upper and Lower Egypt, would serve as the new capital of the unified kingdom. We know the city as Memphis. Just north of this ancient capital, and stretching north for miles along the plateau that separates the desert from the Nile, the city’s necropolis—its burial ground—was built. It was there, around 2560 B.C., that a king named Khufu built an enormous burial chamber for himself, a monument to his greatness, in the shape of a pyramid. For almost four millennia this pyramid remained the tallest man-made structure on earth, at 481 feet. It is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still standing. The pyramid of Khufu, known as the Great Pyramid of Giza, along with the pyramid of his son Khafre and its adjacent sphinx a...

Memphis was the capital of Egypt in the period known by scholars as the Old Kingdom. For most of the New Kingdom, the time in which Moses was born, it wasn’t Memphis but Thebes that served as the home of the royal family. Thebes was located about 300 miles south of Memphis, a distance that today takes about an hour by plane.

Fear is a powerful emotion, and irrational fear can lead us to do irrational and sometimes horrible things. It doesn’t take long to think of examples around the world in which fear of minority populations has led nations to oppress, dehumanize, and at times kill those viewed as strangers in their midst. The word we use for this fear is xenophobia. Taken from the Greek, it means “fear of strangers.” I think of the ideal of America captured in Emma Lazarus’s famous lines, engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Yet in our history there has always been a tension between living up to this lofty vision and our fear of the other. When the Irish came to America in large numbers in the mid-1800s because of a famine in their home country, fear gave birth to a new political group at first called the American Party and later the Know-Nothing Party. This group was certain the Irish were sent by the Pope to take over America, and they sought to ensure that Catholics would not hold office in America. Later the Chinese came to America fleeing persecution in their own country. The United States happily received them, and at first even recruited them, as a source of cheap labor to build the railroads. But later, as the number of Chinese grew, they evoked fear and were sp...

God often works most profoundly in the disappointment and heartache of our lives.

We began our first day in Luxor visiting Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple, beautifully preserved and restored just south of the Valley of the Kings. Hatshepsut, a woman, ruled as the pharaoh for approximately twenty years, from 1478 to 1458 B.C. If an early date is assumed for the Exodus, then she would have been the pharaoh ruling just prior to those events. We then toured the Valley of the Kings. Beginning in the 1500s B.C., Egypt’s kings began to build elaborate underground burial chambers. Each pharaoh would commission a tomb shortly after ascending the throne. The tombs, like the earlier pyramids, would have walls with careful instructions for the journey to the afterlife, the judgment, and the king’s deification. Rooms in the burial chambers would be filled with items deemed necessary for a successful afterlife, including food, drink, furniture, and chariots. Most of the sixty-three tombs and hundreds of chambers in the tombs had been sacked by grave robbers over the millennia, but in 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter and his team discovered a tomb that was largely intact: the tomb of King Tutankhamun, known to us as King Tut. This boy king ruled just nine years, from 1332 to 1323 B.C. If a late date is assumed for the Exodus, then Tutankhamun was the pharaoh when Moses was in his late teens and into his twenties. King Tutankhamun was nine years old when he began to rule and only eighteen when he died. Many of the treasures that were found in the tomb are now in ...

Elijah the prophet, facing hardship as Jezebel tried to kill him, actually fled to the same wilderness where Moses had settled and there waited to hear from God.

God is not finished with us because we’re in the wilderness; in fact, God is often most profoundly at work in us during the wilderness seasons of our lives.

Where we see satire most dramatically is in the ninth plague, when the sun was blotted out. Remember that Ramesses’ and Moses’ names had a common root: Moses meant “son of,” which without a prefix meant Son of No One; while Ramesses’ name meant Son of Ra (Ra being the sun god). In this battle between the eighty-year-old stuttering Son of No One and the powerful Son of Ra the sun god, Moses’ God, Yahweh, defeated Pharaoh’s sun god, causing utter darkness.

In one of the essays on Exodus in his excellent book, Covenant & Conversation, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks captures the message of that modern-day plague in these words: “When money rules, we remember the price of things and forget the value of things.”4

One interesting term used when Pharaoh is said to have hardened his own heart is the Hebrew word kabed, meaning to make heavy. I was struck by the connection between the heaviness of Pharaoh’s heart and his own beliefs concerning what would happen to him at his death. Those beliefs were part of every pharaoh’s education.

The Book of the Dead, Spell 125, depicted the famous “weighing of the heart.” In this account, the dead pharaoh was taken to Osiris by the jackal-headed god Anubis. Before the pharaoh and Osiris stood a scale, with an ostrich feather on one side of the scale representing the goddess Maat, the embodiment of truth and justice, and with the pharaoh’s heart on the other side of the scale. The weighing of the heart ultimately showed whether the pharaoh was just or unjust. If the heart was too heavy, a terrifying beast called Ammit stood by to devour it and put a final end to the pharaoh’s hopes of passing into the afterlife.

We know from the battle of Kadesh, in which Ramesses II fought against the Hittites, that Egypt had several thousand chariots in addition to the six hundred elite chariots. The chariots were lighter and more advanced than those of other nations. One modern engineer described them as the Formula One racers of their time. Two horses would draw the chariot, which was piloted by one warrior while another, using Egypt’s advanced composite bows, fired at their enemies from a distance. As the charioteers drew closer, swords and spears were used.

A rabbi friend describing the Passover Seder noted, “This is our defining story. If you are a Jew, you’ve got to get this. It defines who we are as a people. We were slaves. God saw our suffering. God delivered us and made us his own. This is our story.”

Following God’s dramatic victory over the Egyptian army at the Reed Sea, the Israelites sang, worshiped, and feasted as they celebrated their newfound freedom. Then they followed Moses as he began the journey back to Mount Sinai where he had first encountered God. They would take three months to make the 190-mile journey, and once there they would remain camped at Sinai for the next eleven months. During those eleven months Moses would repeatedly climb Mount Sinai, and God would descend upon the mountaintop to meet him, often in dramatic fashion with smoke, thunder, and lightning. At these meetings God and Moses conversed “face-to-face, like two people talking to each other” (Exodus 33:11). Moses would then bring down from the mountain God’s commands for the people, including the ordering of their religious and civil life. Mount Sinai is the setting for Exodus 19–40, all of Leviticus, and Numbers 1–10. In these passages Mount Sinai is referred to in various ways, including Mount Horeb (though in a handful of places this name seems to refer to a separate mountain) and often simply “the mountain of God” (NRSV).

A large valley at the base of Mount Sinai is called the Plain of el-Raha, “the Plain of Rest.” Here the Israelites were said to have camped for nearly a year. Again, the events described in Exodus 19–40, all of Leviticus, and Numbers 1–10 are set here. Walking across the plain, and later looking down at the plain from above, it was easy to picture thousands of Israelite tents pitched here. It was here, according to tradition, that Moses forty years earlier had met Zipporah, his wife. And it was here, just months before leading the Israelites to this place, that Moses while grazing his father-in-law’s flock had heard the voice of God speak to him from the burning bush.

Christians will be interested to note that the terms of this special relationship are echoed in 1 Peter 2:9-10, which appropriates God’s words in Exodus to describe the missional identity of Jesus’ followers: You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who are God’s own possession. You have become this people so that you may speak of the wonderful acts of the one who called you out of darkness into his amazing light. Once you weren’t a people, but now you are God’s people. Once you hadn’t received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Of the 613 commandments said to have been given by God to Moses, only these ten were etched in stone by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18). The stone tablets, representing the foundation of biblical ethics and the summation of the Law, were placed inside the Ark of the Covenant.

Jonathan Sacks, formerly Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, writes, “When the Greeks and the Romans first encountered Jews, they could not understand Shabbat. They knew the concept of a holy day—every religion has such days. What they had never before encountered was a day made holy by rest, a day of being rather than doing.”3

After presenting the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, Moses went back up the mountain and was given a set of case laws and expansions of the Ten Commandments. These are found in Exodus 20:20–23:33. Together with the Ten Commandments, they constitute the covenant God made with Israel and Israel with God. In Exodus 24, Moses built an altar at the base of the mountain, where the people made sacrifices to God. He took half the blood from the sacrifices and sprinkled it on the altar, then took the other half and sprinkled it on the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD now makes with you on the basis of all these words” (Exodus 24:8). Christians recognize these words, as Jesus alluded to them on the night of the Last Supper. Jesus said as he took the wine, “This is my blood of the covenant” (Matthew 26:28). He himself would be the sacrifice, the ensign, and the means of a new covenant between God and all humanity.

Following Moses’ dramatic words and act at the altar, God told Moses to bring Aaron, his two sons, and Israel’s seventy elders, and to meet him on the mountain for a covenant meal: Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel went up, and they saw Israel’s God. Under God’s feet there was what looked like a floor of lapis-lazuli tiles, dazzlingly pure like the sky. God didn’t harm the Israelite leaders, though they looked at God, and they ate and drank. (Exodus 24:9-11) God made a covenant with Israel, a covenant that included—as was ancient practice—the slaughter of an animal, the sprinkling of blood, and the sharing of a meal. This covenant ceremony and meal in Exodus 24 seem to be the backdrop for Jesus’ words at the Last Supper and the Christian pattern of remembering and marking this covenant with bread and wine, a communing not only with fellow believers but with God. Each time believers share in this meal, they receive and renew Christ’s covenant with them and they with him.

Go back and read Exodus 18, the entire chapter. I think you’ll find four steps that Jethro the consultant gave Moses: 1.Choose the right people—capable, reverent, and trustworthy. 2.Train the people well. 3.Empower and authorize them in front of the people they will be leading. 4.Make clear what needs approval and what they can decide on their own.

Interestingly, the tent seems to have been patterned after the tent of Pharaoh Ramesses II, which was used in the Battle of Kadesh in Syria as Ramesses was attacking the Hittites, a battle that took place in 1274 B.C. just a few years before the Exodus. Today the tent of Ramesses, a portable palace that was erected when Pharaoh was leading the Egyptians into battle, can be seen in bas reliefs depicting scenes from the battle. The Tent of Meeting may have been patterned after the tent of Pharaoah Ramesses II, where the pharaoh made offerings to the Egyptian god Amun-Ra. Both Pharaoh’s tent and God’s Tent of Meeting had an open-air outer courtyard that was twice as long as it was wide. Each had an inner tent three times longer than it was wide, and the inner tent was divided into two rooms, one larger and one smaller. The smallest of the rooms was, in both cases, a throne room. Pharaoh’s throne was depicted as having two winged creatures on each side, protecting the Pharaoh. In the case of God’s Tent of Meeting, an area called the Most Holy Place, or the Holy of Holies, also had a throne—the Ark of the Covenant—that had two winged cherubim on each end. The connection between king and god in Egypt was clear. For Israel, God was her King. The sanctuary Moses was asked to build was both temple and palace.

Though we spent just a day exploring the landscape, in 1869 English explorer E. H. Palmer spent eleven months there, traversing the Sinai peninsula on foot with a small expedition and local Bedouin guides. He wrote a fascinating book about the Sinai entitled The Desert of the Exodus: Journeys on Foot in the Wilderness of the Forty Years’ Wanderings.5 One of Palmer’s traveling companions was his brother, Captain H. S. Palmer, who wrote of the Sinai, “It is a desert, certainly, in the fullest sense of the word, but a desert of rock, gravel, and boulder, of gaunt peaks, dreary ridges and arid valleys and plateaux, the whole forming a scene of stern desolation which fully merits its description as the ‘great and terrible wilderness.’”6

One of my favorite stories of how leaders will be criticized is about two men named Doane Robinson and Gutzon Borglum, who had the crazy idea of sculpting the busts of four presidents out of a mountainside in South Dakota. People thought it was the worst idea they’d ever heard of. Why would anyone destroy a mountain like that? Why would anyone pick those four presidents? What a ridiculous expenditure of money when there were so many hungry people in the world. Newspapers, conservationists, preachers, and politicians all jumped on the bandwagon of criticism. And just as the project was getting started, the Great Depression struck. Today, though, no one criticizes Mount Rushmore. It is a national monument visited by over two million people annually,10 and the one-million-dollar cost adds over $200 million a year to the local economy.11

By Numbers 13, the Israelites had been free from slavery for two years. They were in the Wilderness of Paran, setting up camp at Kadesh Barnea. This was exciting—they were just a few miles from the Promised Land! After two long and arduous years, they were about to inherit the land that flowed with milk and honey, which Moses had described so many times. At that point God commanded Moses, “Send out men to explore the land of Canaan, which I’m giving to the Israelites. Send one man from each ancestral tribe, each a chief among them” (Numbers 13:2). The scouts spent the next forty days exploring the Promised Land. Here was the scouts’ report when they returned: “We entered the land to which you sent us. It’s actually full of milk and honey, and this is its fruit. There are, however, powerful people who live in the land. The cities have huge fortifications” (13:27-28). Upon hearing this report, the people of Israel became anxious, but Caleb, one of the scouts, spoke up: “We must go up and take possession of it, because we are more than able to do it.” But the men who went up with him said, “We can’t go up against the people because they are stronger than we. . . . All the people we saw in it are huge men. . . . We saw ourselves as grasshoppers, and that’s how we appeared to them.” (Number 13:30-33)

This was the tenth incident of the people complaining against Moses and, by implication, against God. The people even planned to stone Moses and Aaron! (14:10). Their attitude roused God’s anger. After all God had done for them, the people still didn’t trust God! And so God announced to Moses,

As a result of God’s pronouncement, no one twenty years of age and older who had cried out against God and against Moses would be allowed to enter the Promised Land. Only Joshua and Caleb would go, because they had encouraged the people to enter the land and take it. This is the reason the Israelites spent the next thirty-eight years in the desert: they had allowed fear to stop them just miles from the Promised Land.

As Moses stood before the Israelites, he knew this would be the last time he would address them. They would enter the Promised Land without him. It had been eighty years since he had stood by and watched the Israelite slaves being worked to death by their Egyptian masters—eighty years since he had killed the Egyptian slavedriver, left his life as prince in Egypt, and fled to the Sinai. It had been forty years since he had heard the voice of God calling him from a burning bush, compelling him to return to Egypt to lead the Israelites to freedom. Moses stood there remembering his great confrontation with Pharaoh and the plagues and the day the Israelites passed through the Sea of Reeds with Pharaoh’s army in pursuit. Most of the people who stood before him that day had not even been born when God’s glorious presence descended upon Mount Sinai with smoke and lightning. They had never seen the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments that Moses had sealed inside the Ark of the Covenant forty years earlier. This was a new generation of people who hadn’t known what it was to be a slave in Egypt and whose knowledge of their deliverance had come only from the stories their parents or grandparents had told them. The text of Deuteronomy tells us that Moses’ heart was heavy that day, not because his death was imminent but because he feared that the Israelites would enter the land, become prosperous, and forget what God had done for them. He worried that they would slowly drift away fr...

For this reason, Deuteronomy became one of the most loved and frequently read books of the Hebrew Bible. Thirty copies of Deuteronomy were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, making it the second most common book of the Hebrew Bible found there after the Book of Psalms (thirty-six copies of the Psalms were found).4 Likewise, in the Gospels, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy more often than any other text in his Bible except for the Psalms. This preference is clearly seen in the story of Jesus’ temptations, when to each temptation Jesus responds with a verse from Deuteronomy.

If there is one theme that stands above the rest in the farewell discourses of Moses that make up the Book of Deuteronomy, it would be Moses’ concern that the Israelites pass on the faith to their children. Thirty-eight verses in Deuteronomy mention children. Many passages are similar to these: These words that I am commanding you today must always be on your minds. Recite them to your children. Talk about them when you are sitting around your house and when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are getting up. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7)

When your children ask you in time to come, “What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that the LORD our God has commanded you?” then you shall say to your children, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. The LORD displayed before our eyes great and awesome signs and wonders against Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his household. He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land that he promised on oath to our ancestors. Then the LORD commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our lasting good, so as to keep us alive, as is now the case. If we diligently observe this entire commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us, we will be in the right.” (Deuteronomy 6:20-25)

There is an urgency to Moses’ words. He knew that Israel’s faith, the faith he had devoted himself to, would be “never more than one generation away from extinction.”5

Haydn Shaw, in his book Generational IQ, reminds us that young adults have always dropped out of church in their late teens and returned when they start having children. He notes that millennials are waiting much longer to marry and have children than young people did twenty years ago, which means they are also waiting longer to come back to church.

When you eat, get full, build nice houses, and settle down, and when your herds and your flocks are growing large, your silver and gold are multiplying, and everything you have is thriving, don’t become arrogant, forgetting the LORD your God: the one who rescued you from Egypt, from the house of slavery. . . . Don’t think to yourself, My own strength and abilities have produced all this prosperity for me. Remember the LORD your God! He’s the one who gives you the strength to be prosperous. (Deuteronomy 8:12-14, 17-18)

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann wrote in his book Spirituality of the Psalms about the seasons of life that Israel seemed to cycle through regularly, seasons that we recognize in our own lives.7 He described these seasons as orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. Orientation is when things are going well—so well, in fact, that over time it’s easy to forget God. In these seasons we experience the words to the old hymn: “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”8 Disorientation is when we wander from God and feel fear, anxiety, and pain. When Israel wandered from God she made poor choices, uninformed by her faith. God’s hand of protection was no longer with her. The nation would find itself in trouble, and enemies would gain the upper hand. In these seasons Israel would cry out to God, asking for help and forgiveness. And God, who is rich in mercy, would rescue Israel, healing, forgiving, and restoring her. These seasons Brueggemann referred to as reorientation. In these moments after receiving forgiveness and restoration we experience ecstatic joy and feelings of gratitude and hope. Over time, however, reorientation gives way to orientation, which can lead to straying and disorientation all over again. In a sense Israel’s story, and our story, can be told in the light of this ever-repeating cycle.

The story of the Exodus had already seen these cycles. The cycles started with disorientation when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. Intense joy and gratitude of reorientation followed when God delivered the Israelites from Pharaoh. These feelings gave way to orientation, and then seasons when the people, forgetting God’s mighty acts of deliverance, began to grumble and complain, leading once more to disorientat...

Much of Deuteronomy recounts portions of the Law, but it includes one verse, one command, that stands above all the rest. Faithful Jews place this verse in a mezuzah and hang it on the doorpost of their home. They recite the verse every morning when they awaken and every night before going to sleep. They hope to have the presence of mind to recite it before taking their final breath: Israel, listen! Our God is the LORD! Only the LORD! Love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your being, and all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

This command is repeated multiple times in Deuteronomy as the essence of what God seeks from his people. Jesus described this as the first and most important commandment, then added Leviticus 19:18, as a corollary to it: “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” These two, Jesus said, summarize all the Law and the Prophets.

So now, O Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you? Only to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of the LORD your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being. Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the LORD your God, the earth with all that is in it, yet the LORD set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today. Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer. For the LORD your God is God of gods and LORD of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the LORD your God; him alone you shall worship; to him you shall hold fast, and by his name you shall swear. He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have seen. Your ancestors went down to Egypt seventy persons; and now the LORD your God has made you as numerous as the stars in heaven. (Deuteronomy 10:12-22 NRSV)

If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the LORD your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul—then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshiping them, for then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly off the good land that the LORD is giving you. You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the LORD swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth. (Deuteronomy 11:13-21 NRSV)

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you. (Deuteronomy 30:19-20 NRSV)

Then Moses hiked up from the Moabite plains to Mount Nebo, the peak of the Pisgah slope, which faces Jericho. The LORD showed him the whole land: the Gilead region as far as Dan’s territory; all the parts belonging to Naphtali along with the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, as well as the entirety of Judah as far as the Mediterranean Sea; also the arid southern plain, and the plain—including the Jericho Valley, Palm City—as far as Zoar. Then the LORD said to Moses: “This is the land that I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I promised: ‘I will give it to your descendants.’” (Deuteronomy 34:1-4)

I’ve heard pastor Bill Hybels say, “The job of a leader is to take people from here to there.”

All of us need a compelling vision of the Promised Land. The task of leaders is to help us see what we cannot see and move us to give ourselves in pursuit of a vision bigger than ourselves. That vision is meant to drive us, shape us, and move us to accept sacrifice and hardship along the way in pursuit of a better “there.” In modern times, one of the most compelling pictures of the Promised Land was the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On the night before he was shot to death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Dr. King preached at the Mason Temple Church of God. He had come to Memphis to stand with sanitation workers in their quest for a living wage. That night King wasn’t feeling well, but he didn’t want to disappoint the crowds who had gathered to hear him. As usual there had been death threats. As he preached he began by recounting what had brought him to Memphis and the journey he had taken during the civil rights movement. He laid out a strategy to effect change. He unpacked the parable of the good Samaritan. The sermon is a masterpiece. I encourage you to read it. As Deuteronomy was for Moses, this sermon in Memphis would be King’s final testimony. You’ll recall that King, as he ended his sermon, preaching with all the fire and conviction he could muster, drew upon the story of Moses ascending Mount Nebo. He told his followers that God had allowed him to go up to the mountain and see the Promised Land. He noted, “I may not get there with you. But I ...

Then Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there in the land of Moab, at the LORD’s command. He was buried in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired and his vigor had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended. (Deuteronomy 34:5-8 NRSV)