The Promise Land Unseen

Moses is dead. Israel has mourned him for thirty days. Joshua will lead the people into the land Moses was allowed to see but never enter.

We know where the burial took place in a general sense. A valley in Moab, opposite Bethpeor. But the grave itself is another matter. Deuteronomy says nobody knew where it was.

And then, near the other end of your Bible, there’s a sentence about his body that raises a question the burial account never answers.

Michael the archangel disputed with the devil about it.

That’s an extraordinary thing to put in a single sentence and then move on. What was there to dispute? Moses was dead. His work leading Israel was finished. What interest did the devil have in his remains?

And why was Michael involved?

Tonight we’re opening the account of Moses’ death, following that strange sentence in Jude, and going to another mountain where Moses appears beside Jesus Christ.

The grave

Start with the end of Deuteronomy.

Moses goes up Mount Nebo. The Lord shows him the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses can see it. He won’t cross over into it.

There’s a reason for that, and the Bible doesn’t hide it. Back in Numbers twenty, God told Moses to speak to the rock. Moses struck it twice. The water came out, but God told Moses and Aaron that they would not bring the congregation into the land because they had not believed Him and sanctified Him before the people.

So here is Moses, at the end of his life, looking at a place he will not lead them into.

Let me read Deuteronomy thirty-four, verses five through seven:

So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD.

And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.

The Lord buries His servant. That’s how I read that passage. The account doesn’t hand the burial over to Joshua or describe Israel gathering around the grave. It gives us that simple statement, and then tells us the location of the sepulchre was unknown.

This is Moses. People knew his voice. They had brought their disputes to him, complained to him, watched him lead them. Now they mourn him for thirty days, but the text gives them no grave to visit.

Was the grave concealed to prevent worship? Was there some further purpose for the body? Why tell us the burial place was unknown unless that detail mattered?

Those are fair questions. But Deuteronomy doesn’t explain the reason. It tells us he died, tells us he was buried, and leaves the grave unidentified.

Keep that in mind as we turn to Jude. Because this is where a burial becomes something considerably stranger.

The dispute

Jude is a very short letter. You can read straight through it in a few minutes. But it refers to events that could occupy you for a long time.

Here’s verse nine:

Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.

That’s the whole account Jude gives us of the dispute.

Michael. The devil. The body of Moses. And those words: “The Lord rebuke thee.”

Notice what Jude actually calls it. A dispute. We’re not given a description of Michael standing over an open grave with a weapon. We aren’t told the time of day, or even where this happened. Put thunder and a battle in the sky behind it, and you’ve started making a film. The sentence itself is strange enough.

There really was a contention about this man’s body. Jude treats it as an event, not a parable he has invented to make a point.

But the point he’s making isn’t primarily about burial customs. Read the verses around it. He’s warning about people who despise authority and speak evil of things they don’t understand. Then he gives us Michael, an archangel, refusing to bring a railing accusation against the devil.

Michael appeals to the Lord’s authority.

That gets lost if all we want is the supernatural fight. We can spend an hour trying to reconstruct the confrontation and miss the very thing Jude tells us about how Michael conducted himself.

Think about the contrast. People who barely understand what they’re talking about will say anything. Michael knows whom he’s confronting, and he doesn’t behave that way.

There is no shortage of people offering instructions for dealing with the unseen world. Some of them talk as though knowing a name or shouting the right sentence puts them in charge of it. Jude gives us a rather different picture.

Now, does Michael’s restraint mean he was frightened? Jude doesn’t say that. Does it mean Satan had a legally valid claim? The verse doesn’t say that either. It tells us what Michael would not do, and what he said instead.

But that still leaves the question hanging. Why the body of Moses?

There are two explanations I want to examine.

A body people might worship

The first explanation is that Moses’ remains could have become an object of worship.

That isn’t a ridiculous concern. We have an example of Israel doing something like it with an object Moses actually made.

In Numbers twenty-one, God instructed Moses to make a serpent of brass and put it on a pole. A person bitten by a serpent could look upon it and live.

Move forward to the reign of Hezekiah, and listen to what Second Kings eighteen, verse four, says:

He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.

They had kept it. And somewhere along the way, people started burning incense to it.

An object connected to a genuine act of God became something they were treating as an idol. Hezekiah broke it up.

So when somebody suggests that a known grave containing Moses’ body could have become a shrine, there is a biblical reason to take that possibility seriously. If people could do that with the brass serpent, what might they do with the remains of Moses himself?

You can follow the reasoning. A pilgrimage. A relic. People beginning to treat proximity to the dead man’s bones as proximity to God.

But we need to stop one step short of calling that Satan’s established plan. Jude doesn’t tell us he intended to display the body or make an idol of it. That’s an explanation we bring to the event, informed by things we know people have done.

It may account for the dispute. It may account for the hidden grave. We aren’t told that it does.

The other explanation takes us into the subject of guilt, and the Bible’s description of Satan as an accuser.

The accusation

Moses had a history.

Before the Exodus, before he stood before Pharaoh, he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Exodus two says Moses looked around, killed the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand. When word got out and Pharaoh sought to kill him, Moses fled.

Later came the failure at the rock, and the judgment that kept him from leading Israel into the promised land.

You don’t have to invent a secret wicked life for Moses. The Bible records real failures alongside his service to God.

And Scripture calls Satan an accuser. Revelation twelve describes him accusing the brethren before God day and night.

Put those things together, and you can understand the interpretation: perhaps the dispute involved an accusation against Moses. Perhaps Satan was appealing to his sins in contesting what should happen to his body.

Moses’ failures are recorded. Satan’s work as an accuser is recorded. The specific charge made in the dispute over Moses’ body is not recorded.

I can’t quote a speech Jude never gives us. And I can’t turn the fact that Moses died into proof that the devil owned him. An accusation and a rightful claim aren’t automatically the same thing.

But there is another passage worth opening here, because the words Michael uses appear in it too.

Zechariah chapter three. Joshua the high priest is standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan is there to resist him. This is the high priest Joshua, not the Joshua who succeeded Moses.

Listen to verses two through four:

And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?

Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and stood before the angel.

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.

There’s the rebuke. And there are the filthy garments.

The passage doesn’t resolve the scene by telling us Joshua’s garments were clean all along. They’re removed. His iniquity is dealt with. He’s clothed again.

That gives the accusation reading of Jude a meaningful connection to consider. It doesn’t supply the missing transcript of Michael’s dispute. But it does show us the Lord rebuking Satan in a scene where a man’s uncleanness is real and God provides the remedy.

That’s why this part of the subject matters beyond curiosity about angels.

If somebody brings up something you actually did, you can’t always answer by saying it’s a lie. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the event happened exactly as they say it did.

The question then is whether the accusation tells the whole truth about your standing before God.

We’ll come back to that. First, we need to find Moses again.

The other mountain

Matthew seventeen.

Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. His appearance changes before them. His face shines as the sun, and His clothing becomes white as the light.

Then verse three:

And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him.

Moses.

The man whose death we read about in Deuteronomy. The man whose burial place wasn’t known. He’s there, talking with Jesus.

Elijah is there too. And they didn’t leave this world in the same way. Second Kings records Elijah going up into heaven by a whirlwind. Moses died and was buried. Yet the Gospel places both men beside Christ.

If you’ve followed the mystery this far, you can feel the temptation to fill in everything between the burial and this appearance. God preserved the body. Michael recovered it. Moses was raised at a particular moment. Here is the complete sequence.

But those steps aren’t supplied by these passages. We can see Moses at the beginning and at this later appearance without knowing everything that happened between them.

There is also a correction I need to make to the original article. I wrote that this was not a vision. Jesus Himself uses that word in Matthew seventeen, verse nine:

And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead.

So I shouldn’t have ruled out the word Jesus used. Calling it a vision doesn’t require us to dismiss it as something imaginary. Matthew says Moses and Elijah appeared. Luke says they appeared in glory. But this passage doesn’t give us a medical account of Moses’ body or tell us how his appearance was accomplished.

We know who was there. And Luke tells us something else that I think is more important than all the details we’re tempted to invent.

He tells us what they were talking about.

Luke nine, verses thirty and thirty-one:

And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias:

Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.

His decease. His death, which He should accomplish at Jerusalem.

Take a moment with that. We’ve been following the death of Moses. We reach the mountain where he appears in glory, and the subject of the conversation is the approaching death of Jesus.

Moses isn’t giving the disciples directions to his grave. The account doesn’t stop for him to explain the dispute in Jude. He and Elijah are talking with Christ about what Christ is going to accomplish.

That’s where the event directs our attention.

Peter proposes making three tabernacles. While he’s still speaking, a bright cloud overshadows them, and a voice speaks out of it. Matthew records the whole declaration:

While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.

The disciples fall on their faces. Jesus touches them and tells them not to be afraid. When they look up, they see Jesus only.

For all the questions Moses’ appearance raises, the instruction they’re given is unmistakable. Listen to the Son.

What the accusation leaves out

Let’s put down what we can actually carry out of this investigation.

Moses died, and the Lord buried him. Jude records a dispute between Michael and the devil about his body. The Gospels show Moses appearing with Elijah beside Jesus, and Luke tells us they discussed the death Jesus would accomplish at Jerusalem.

The reason for the dispute remains unexplained. I think the accusation connection is worth taking seriously. The idolatry explanation has a real biblical precedent behind it too. But neither allows me to announce that I’ve recovered every detail of the event.

And I don’t need those missing details to tell you what Scripture says about accusation and Christ.

We’re talking about the ground of your standing before God. This isn’t a way to avoid responsibility to somebody you’ve hurt. If you need to confess something or put it right, do that.

Listen to Romans eight, verses thirty-three and thirty-four:

Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth.

Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.

There’s the answer Paul gives. Christ died. He rose again. He makes intercession.

If you belong to Him, your confidence isn’t that nobody can find a real failure in your life. They can. You probably don’t need much help remembering one.

Your confidence is in what Christ has done, and in the God who justifies.

But the person who can describe your sin doesn’t thereby acquire the authority to pronounce your final condemnation.

Revelation twelve gives us the blood of the Lamb as the means by which the brethren overcome the accuser. The passage doesn’t pretend their lives were easy. It says they loved not their lives unto the death. Overcoming the accuser didn’t mean escaping death.

So the strange account we started with opens onto something that isn’t remote at all. Guilt. Death. The question of who has the authority to condemn, and what Christ’s death and resurrection have accomplished.

I understand wanting to know what happened to the body. I want to know too. That’s why that sentence in Jude catches my attention every time.

But notice where the Gospel takes us when Moses appears. To Jesus, and a conversation about Jerusalem.

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