Quotes about Moses

Sometimes a Christian has such confused thoughts that he can say nothing but, as a child, cries, `O Father', not able to express what he needs, like Moses at the Red Sea. These stirrings of spirit touch the heart of God and melt him into compassion towards us, when they come from the Spirit of adoption, and from a striving to be better.

saw how in the story about Moses and the burning bush, Moses doesn't take his sandals off because suddenly the ground becomes holy. The ground had been holy the whole time. The story is about Moses becoming aware of it.

it's through Moses that God makes four promises to these slaves. I will take you out. I will rescue you. I will redeem you. I will take you to me. There's a reason why these four promises are so significant — they're the promises a Jewish groom makes to a Jewish bride. This is wedding language.

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.