Wholly Moses Quotes

ITS ANNIHILATING HOLINESS: In the Hebrew Scriptures, in the desert, under the merciless sun, the Israelites witness repeated outbreaks of Yahweh, Who “is a consuming fire,” an untamable force, a burning pestilence, a plague of serpents. And so is He revealed not just as the Holy Other but as Wholly Other, possessed of a cosmically singular sui generis nature that cannot and will not abide contradiction. In the words of Luther himself, if you sin “then He will devour thee up, for God is a fire that consumeth, devoureth, rageth; verily He is your undoing, as fire consumeth a house and maketh it dust and ashes.” As Otto wrote with such frightening clarity of apprehension, there is something baffling in the way His wrath is kindled and manifested, for it is “like a hidden force of nature, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near. It is incalculable and arbitrary.” To see His luminance shining from the face of Moses is a horror. To see His face is to die.

I find it curious that the Bible allowed so many authors in a collection so important to setting the trajectory of a people. In my Protestant tradition, we acknowledge sixty-six books of the Bible. Within those sixty-six writings, who would dare to venture counting the number of fingerprints on those pages? In the collection known as the Psalms alone, a whole gang of psalmists are identified as contributors. That’s to say nothing of letters like Hebrews, where no author is identified. And let’s not get started on books where biblical scholars aren’t so convinced that the author named in the book actually owned the hand moving the quill. I won’t lie to you: I feel like God chose an awfully sloppy process if the goal was for us to receive each and every single word as though it were spoken by the mouth of the same God. God could’ve given it all to Moses on Sinai that first time and provided a little more uniformity to all of this. But that is not what happened. Instead, we are left with a collection of various writings: wisdom literature, poems, songs, letters, teachings, sermons—and even some stories that seem a lot like what we’d now consider folktales. We even have some writings put in there twice. Either God is a sloppy editor, or the voice of the people was preserved in the text on purpose. If God is a sloppy editor, then the Bible is of marginal value. If the voice of the people is preserved in this text, then the Bible is an invitation to seek God in our history, present, and future.

The Amalekites were not ignorant of God’s character or of his sovereignty, but instead of fearing before him, they had set themselves to defy his power. The wonders wrought by Moses before the Egyptians were made a subject of mockery by the people of Amalek, and the fears of surrounding nations were ridiculed. They had taken oath by their gods that they would destroy the hebrews, so that not one should escape, and they boasted that Israel’s God would be powerless to resist them. They had not been injured or threatened by the Israelites. Their assault was wholly unprovoked. It was to manifest their hatred and defiance of God that they sought to destroy his people. The Amalekites had long been high-handed sinners, and their crimes had cried to God for vengeance, yet his mercy had still called them to repentance; but when the men of Amalek fell upon the wearied and defenseless ranks of Israel, they sealed their nation’s doom. The care of God is over the weakest of his children. No act of cruelty or oppression toward them is unmarked by heaven. Over all who love and fear him, his hand extends as a shield; let men beware that they smite not that hand; for it wields the sword of justice.

Trust God Roll your works upon the Lord [commit and trust them wholly to Him; He will cause your thoughts to become agreeable to His will, and] so shall your plans be established and succeed. PROVERBS 16:3 AMP Many people make resolutions at the beginning of a new year . . . only to break them before the month is complete. Others set goals, then lay out detailed plans to accomplish them. In fact, January sees a plethora of self-help courses, webinars, blog posts, and other venues that emphasize how goals and/or resolutions will lead to success if we can manage not to break them or throw out the goals. There’s nothing wrong with these things, except too many times we forget to include God in our plans. In the first chapter of Joshua we read of God’s charge to Joshua after Moses was dead. It was time to lead the children of Israel into the Promised Land. God tells Joshua the secret to success: “Be sure to obey all the teachings my servant Moses gave you. If you follow them exactly, you will be successful in everything you do. Always remember what is written in the Book of the Teachings. Study it day and night to be sure to obey everything that is written there. If you do this, you will be wise and successful in everything” (Joshua 1:7–8 NCV). Solomon writes that we are to roll all our plans and goals onto the Lord. If they are in accordance with God’s plan, then He will establish our plans and help us make them reality. Father, I commit my plans to You today.

This history of Moses, as general of the Egyptians against the Ethiopians, is wholly omitted in our Bibles; but is thus by Irenaeus, from Josephus, and that soon after his own age: — "Josephus says, that when Moses was nourished in the palace, he was appointed general of the army against the Ethiopians, and conquered them, when he married that king's daughter; because, out of her affection for him, she delivered the city up to him." See the Fragments of Irenaeus, ap. edit. Grab. p. 472. Nor perhaps did St. Stephen refer to any thing else when he said of Moses, before he was sent by God to the Israelites, that he was not only learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, but was also mighty in words and in deeds, Acts 7:22.

In England, the kenosis theory was first broached by Bishop Gore in 1889, to explain why our Lord was ignorant of what the nineteenth-century higher critics thought they knew about the errors of the Old Testament. Gore’s thesis was that in becoming man the Son had given up his divine knowledge of matters of fact, though retaining full divine infallibility on moral issues. In the realm of historical fact, he was limited to current Jewish ideas, which he accepted without question, not knowing that they were not all correct. Hence his treatment of the Old Testament as verbally inspired and wholly true, and his ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses and Psalm 110 to David—views which Gore thought untenable. Many have followed Gore at this point, seeking justification for rejecting Christ’s estimate of the Old Testament.

Neither in Greek nor in Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of 'labour' or the concept of labour 'as a general social function.' The nature and conditions of labour in antiquity precluded the emergence of such general ideas, as of the idea of a working class. 'Men never rest from toil and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night,' said Hesiod (Works and Days 176-8). That is a descriptive statement, a statement of fact, not of ideology; so is the conclusion, that it is therefore better to toil than to perish, and better still to turn to the labour of slaves if one can. But the world was not one of toil and sorrow for everybody, and there lay a difficulty. The expulsion from Eden had the saving feature that it embraced all mankind, and hence, though it linked work with sin and punishment, it did not degrade labour as such. A fate which is everyone's may be tragic, it cannot be shameful. Sin can be washed away, not natural moral inferiority. Aristotle's theory of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics was an extreme position, but those who did not accept it merely turned the doctrine round: men who engaged in the mean employments or in the slavish conditions of employment were made inferior by their work. Either way there was no consolation. All this, it will be objected, is based on the views of the upper classes and their spokesmen among the intellectuals, not on the views of those who worked but were voiceless. But they were not wholly so. They expressed themselves in their cults, for example, and it is to be noted that though Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan), the craftsman among the gods, was in a sense a patron of the crafts, and especially of the metallurgists, he was an inferior deity in heaven and he received little formal worship and few temples on earth. The most 'popular' classical cults were the ecstatic ones, particularly that of Dionysus/Bacchus, the god of intoxication (in more senses than one). Through Dionysus one did not celebrate toil, one obtained release from it. Those who worked also expressed their views in their demands for land, already noticed, and in their failure to ally themselves with the slaves on those relatively rare occasions when the latter revolted.