The Prophet Foretold By Moses

Moses told the children of Israel, “The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken” (Deuteronomy 18:15).  Peter suggested that this prophet spoken of by Moses was the Savior when he spoke to the “men of Israel” shortly after Christ’s death (see Acts 3:12-23).  Nephi made it even clearer.  After quoting the verse in Deuteronomy he said, “And now I, Nephi, declare unto you, that this prophet of whom Moses spake was the Holy One of Israel” (1 Nephi 22:21).  I once read a pamphlet from another faith which highlighted the differences between Jesus and Moses, and it suggested that the prophet Moses spoke of was someone else.  Of course there are many differences between Moses and the Savior—all similes and metaphors break down at some point—but they do have many similarities that confirm the validity of the comparison.  Here are some of them:

• Both Christ and Moses were in danger of being killed as babies.  Moses was born at a time when Pharoah had commanded, “Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river,” but through a series of miracles his life was saved (Exodus 1:22).  Shortly after the birth of Jesus, Herod “slew all the children that were in Bethlemen,” and the life of the young Jesus was saved because of an angel’s direction to Joseph.
• Both Christ and Moses came out of Egypt into the promised land.  Christ was very young when he spent time in Egypt and Moses obviously spent more of his life there, but both of them came up “out of Egypt” into the land of Palestine (Matt. 2:15).
• Both spent time in the wilderness.  Moses wandered 40 years in the wilderness, while the Savior spent 40 days in the Judean desert.
• Moses and the Savior both gave the law of God to the people.  Moses gave the Law of Moses as delivered to him by Jehovah, and the Savior superseded that with the new gospel law.  The resurrected Lord declared to the Nephites, speaking of the law given to Moses, “The law in me is fulfilled” (3 Nephi 15:5).
• Both the Savior and Moses were judges of the people.  Moses “sat to judge the people” for so much of his time that Jethro had to instruct him on how to delegate some of that responsibility so as not to wear himself out (Exodus 18:13).  Christ judged people during his mortal ministry in order to forgive the sins of some as well as condemn the wickedness of the unrepentant and hypocrites.  Beyond his mortal life, He stands as the “Eternal Judge of both quick and dead” (Moroni 10:34).
• Both performed incredible miracles.  Moses showed the 10 miracles of destruction to Pharoah, but he also was the conduit to provide the manna from heaven and the water from the rock as the Israelites traveled in the wilderness.  Jesus similarly performed countless miracles for the Jews, including miracles involving bread like Moses.  Perhaps the best known miracle of Moses was parting the Red Sea.  Jesus likewise performed miracles involving controlling water.  He walked on water and calmed the storms, and this led his disciples to exclaim, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:41)
• Perhaps most importantly, both Moses and the Savior saved their people from bondage.  Moses brought the children of Israel out of physical bondage to the Egyptians, and the Savior saved us all from the bondage of physical and spiritual death.     

Christ was perfect; Moses was not.  But both were called of God the Father to perform a great work for the salvation of the human family.  We revere Moses largely because he was a type of the Savior who was to come, and we stand with Nephi in declaring the Jesus was in fact that great Prophet spoken of 4000 years ago by Moses: “Unto him ye shall hearken.”