John 5:46

This statement is among the boldest in all of Scripture: 'He wrote of me.' Moses did not see Jesus in a vision. The five books of Moses do not name Jesus. And yet Jesus claims that Moses wrote of him. What does this mean? It means that the entire architecture of the Mosaic covenant, the sacrificial system with its continual atonement, the priesthood with its mediation between God and people, the image of the prophet like Moses who would come, the promised seed of Abraham, the tabernacle as a dwelling place of God among the people, all of this points forward. It means that when Moses tells the story of Adam and Eve and their fall, when he describes the flood and the covenant with Noah, when he gives the law and describes the system of offerings and atonement, he is writing a story that finds its meaning in Jesus. Not because Moses had perfect clarity about the future, but because God gave him the words, and those words contain a structure of meaning that points to the one who would come.

To believe Moses is to recognize this pattern. It is to say: I see in the Law a foreshadowing of grace. I see in the priesthood a pattern of mediation. I see in the sacrifices a description of substitutionary atonement. I see in the promised prophet a glimpse of the one sent by the Father. This is not eisegesis or reading something into the text that is not there. It is recognizing the genuine architecture of meaning that God built into the Scripture. And Jesus claims that if the Pharisees had truly believed Moses, had heard what Moses' words actually contained, they would already be believing him. Their refusal to believe him is, in a real sense, a failure to believe Moses.