Quotes about Moses

Moses spent forty years thinking he was somebody; forty years learning he was nobody; and forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody.

Moses was a prophet, but the tabernacle needed an artist.

Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.

This tremendous lesson from the life of Moses teaches us that one can be regarded as hugely successful in the ministry and yet be a failure.

Moses has the Ten Commandments, it's true, but I've got much better lines - King David

Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.9 He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know.

Following the lead of Moses, Israel seizes upon this revelation as the clue to its future. Israel celebrates that Yahweh is this peculiar God of covenantal relatedness, even as Israel insists that Yahweh must be the God who is self-announced in this way. Israel "prays back" to Yahweh in an imperative, Yahweh's own words of self-announcement.

Yahweh is not unfettered but is constrained by a hard, relentless commitment made to Israel. The very character of Yahweh, as Yahweh has articulated that identity, gives Moses and Israel a toehold against God and a space from which to speak imperatives that Yahweh must heed.

The creedal disclosure of Exod. 34:6-7 and the initial "pray-back" of Moses in Numbers 14 form a tap root for Israel's recurring prayer to this You who does wonders of costly solidarity.

Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.

How long will this people spurn Me? And how long will they not believe in Me, despite all the signs which I have performed in their midst? I will smite them with pestilence and dispossess them, and I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they" (verses 11—12). That's when Moses pleaded with God not to wipe them out even for His own reputation. And God relented.

Most men are notable for one conspicuous virtue or grace - Moses for meekness, Job for patience, John for love. But, in Jesus you find everything.