The child of God is much advantaged to come to grips with the life lived by his Savior. I would suggest that the insights to be listed here are essential to a proper understanding of that most wonderful of all lives, and thus that the believer is well advised to consciously and deliberately include these realities in his conception of that life.
#4 – The purpose of Jesus’ many miracles was to prove true His astoundingly difficult claims concerning Himself (cf. John 3:2; Ac 2:22). Thus, miracles were the most frequent during the period of Jesus’ ministry when His intent was to present Himself to Israel as her Messiah (i.e., the first 2½ years). During the first half of the final year of His ministry (i.e., during that time when He was seeking solitude with His disciples in order to reveal to them the unsettling and startling fact that He was going to die and rise again), Jesus was reluctant to do miracles and anxious to escape the local notoriety which always accompanied the doing of miracles. On the other hand, when it once again became strategically important to do so, Jesus again worked many miracles. The greatest of the miracles wrought by Jesus, and thus the miracle with the most dramatic and important vindicating force, was His own bodily resurrection from the grave on the third day after His death and burial (Rom 1:4).
(Insight #5 will be posted soon!)
Do you think his miracles demonstrated that he was the ultimate fulfillment of Deut 18:15 in light of Deut 34:10-12 and John 6:14?
If so, then there is one part of Deut 34:12 that is still lacking. I wonder if the “great deeds of terror” of Moses will one day find their match in the Day of the Lord.
Todd,
Thanks a million for the note. It prompted me to spend some time on the issue of “like [Moses]” in 18:15 & 18, and there will be a post here in a few days. The short answer: your terminology is, in my mind, precisely accurate: Jesus was the ultimate fulfillment, but I don’t believe He is the sole or even the primary fulfillment. The promise given by Yahweh in that passage has to do with the fact that Moses is about to die, leaving the neonate covenant nation without God’s voice in their midst, and beside that Moses has just interdicted any traffic with the pagan soothsayers of the land of Canaan. The issue is: how is Israel going to hear from God? If Jesus is the sole referent in the promise of “a prophet like Moses,” then the concern at hand is left entirely unaddressed. And yet, in ways both exegetically and theologically defensible, Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment – indeed, “all the prophets, from Samuel and those who follow, as many as have spoken, have also foretold” the Messiah. Which is to say that the Living Word must be recognized as the apogee of both the prophetic office and the prophetic message.
In that regard, I very much appreciate the insight with reference to the “great deeds of terror” in Deut 34:12. I had never thought about that, but the connection is compelling and instructive.
I concur about the scope of Moses’ prophecy.
I don’t if I’m being fair to the text of Deut 34:10 if I extrapolate upon it all the way to the time of Jesus. If that writing preceded the other prophets, it may have only held true until those other prophets appeared.
However, John 6:14 sure makes me stop and think. As much as Moses’ prophecy applied to all the intervening prophets, apparently the Jews were still waiting for “the” Prophet — and by their instant recognition of his miracle as a sign that he was the one for whom they were waiting, it makes me wonder if Deut 34:10-12 might indeed describe a level of intimacy with the Father and a level of power that no other prophet but Jesus could match (and exceed).
Sorry for the typo! That’s, “I don’t know if I’m being fair to the text . . .”