Moses & Elijah

Moses and Elijah are two of the best-known figures in the Old Testament. So why do we read about them appearing with Christ in the New Testament?

We'll find out next on Renewing Your Mind. The Transfiguration. It's one of the most fascinating moments in the Bible. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with Him up the mountain and shows them His glory when suddenly Moses and Elijah appear.

Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul explains the significance of this dramatic encounter. As we continue now with our study of those people who came face to face with Jesus during His earthly ministry, we notice that for the most part the characters we've examined are people who appear in the New Testament with one notable exception. I sort of pulled a little trick on you when I took you back to the Old Testament and looked at the appearance of Jesus as the Captain of the Lord of Hosts to Joshua, seeing that as a Christophany, an Old Testament manifestation of the pre-incarnate Christ. Well, I'm going to throw another curve today, and that is we're going to look at Jesus coming face to face with some other characters from the Old Testament, but we're going to double the fun instead of going back to the Old Testament to see this encounter of Jesus with these Old Testament characters. We're going to see His encountering them in the New Testament, not in a Christophany pre-incarnation sense, but in His incarnate sense. Jesus comes face to face with two figures from the Old Testament, and those persons are Moses and Elijah. Now before we look at this text, let's just consider the significance that it is these two men who meet Jesus face to face in the New Testament. There is significance in their appearance because Moses as the mediator of the Old Covenant is most famous for and noted for the giving of what? The giving of the law.

Whenever we see portraits of Moses or sculpture, we usually see him holding the tablets of stone. He's the lawgiver of the Old Testament. And the role of Elijah in the Old Testament is to stand at the front of a long line of men who are called of God and endowed charismatically with the gift and the calling of that of a prophet. And the Scriptures so frequently say in summarizing all of the testimony of the Old Testament the reference will be to what? To the law and to the prophets.

The law and the prophets, John tells us, ruled until John. And so with the appearance of Moses and Elijah in the New Testament, we see the appearance, the confluence, the coming together of the Old Testament law and of the prophets of the Old Testament with the Messiah who was to come, whose coming is foreshadowed and promised both in the law and in the prophets. What a fantastic moment in human history this is where this intersection takes place in time and space, where the law and the prophets come face to face with the Messiah. And of course, I'm talking about that aspect in Jesus' life that is called the transfiguration. The transfiguration is recorded in more than one gospel, and today I'm going to read first of all the record of it that is found in the gospel according to Saint Mark. Mark has his treatment of the transfiguration in chapter 9 beginning at verse 1.

We read this, And he said to them, Assuredly I say to you that there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God present with power. Now after six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John and led them up on a high mountain apart from themselves, and he was transfigured before them. The first thing we have to note is where this takes place in the life of Jesus. Jesus had carried on a public ministry for quite some time, and he had ridden the waves of popularity where he ascended like a meteor to tremendous fame and popularity in the land.

But there was an increasing, growing hostility emerging at this time, and near the end of his ministry, in a sense, Jesus and his disciples went on a retreat. They went far to the north, to Galilee, and there while they were at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus gathered his inner circle, Peter, James, and John, around himself and sort of took the pulse of what was going on. And it was there that he asked the question, Who do men say that I am?

And he got the response, Some say that you're a prophet, and so on, and he said, Well, who do you think that I am? And it was on that occasion that Peter gave the great confession, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. You know the story how that then Jesus blessed Peter and said, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah, and thou shalt be called Petros the Rock, and upon this rock will I build my church, and so on. But then in the next episode that takes place, Jesus explains to his disciples that it's time to leave this place of retreat and journey back to Jerusalem where Jesus tells his disciples that when he gets back to Jerusalem he is going to be betrayed and be delivered up to the authorities and that he's going to suffer and die. And when he says that, this same Simon Peter who had just moments before said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, now says, No, no, no, no. God forbid that you should go to Jerusalem.

We're not going to stand for that, and so on. And Jesus who just so recently had said, Thou art Petros the Rock, now he says, Get thee behind me, Satan, and has to rebuke Peter for his poor confession at this point. So when Mark tells us after six days, he's setting this in the historical narrative where six days after Jesus had informed his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem to die, and they set out on that journey, probably the most frightened, disappointed group of men in all of human history trudging along, following after Jesus as he sets his face like a flint towards Jerusalem as they are trying to bear up under this horrible news that he has given to them that he is about to die. How like it is of God in the midst of that kind of moment to burst through the veil of humiliation and give his people a taste of glory. The record of the transfiguration frankly is one of my favorite passages in all of the New Testament. A few years ago I wrote a book called The Glory of Christ, and that book focused on those moments in Jesus' earthly ministry when as it were his divine nature peeked around the veil that was concealed in terms of his deity. Normally Jesus traveled incognito, willingly embracing his role as the suffering servant in the midst of humiliation, hiding his glory from the naked vision of mortal men.

But on rare occasions the glory would break through, and it was a delightful experience for me to write a whole book just focusing on those moments where the glory broke through. And there's no moment more glorious I think during the earthly ministry of Jesus than this one that is called the transfiguration. Again we look at the text of Mark chapter 9. After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John, his inner core, and led them up on a high mountain apart by themselves, and he was transfigured before them. Now that word transfigure is not a word that is commonplace in our vocabulary. In fact the Greek word would probably be more communicable to us than the English word because the Greek word is the word from which we get the English word metamorphosis. And the word metamorphosis I think is more familiar to us than the word transfigure.

You never hear the word transfigure except when you're singing the battle hymn of the Republic, you know, with the glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me, and even then we have no idea what it means that we are transfigured. But let's look at a metamorphosis. A metamorphosis is something that takes place when the caterpillar becomes the butterfly. Ovid, the Roman poet, wrote a whole book by the title Metamorphosis, and metamorphosis has to do with a change of form.

Morphology is the science of forms. And so the Greek word here in this text has to do with a sudden, dramatic, visible transformation, transformation that is a going across or a changing of the forms of Jesus himself. And before their very eyes, suddenly Jesus' form changes. His figure changes. Into what? His clothes became shining, exceedingly white like snow, such as no launderer on earth can whiten them.

Wow. The first appearance here is of a transformation in Jesus' physical appearance in his clothes and in his face. We are told that now suddenly the refulgent glory of God begins to shine. Whenever Scripture speaks of the glory of God, it speaks of that glory in terms of a shining. And it speaks of it in terms of a dazzling, blazing light that is so bright it would hurt the eyes to look at it directly.

And here, as the author of the New Testament seeks to somehow find in his finite arsenal of vocabulary words a way to describe this ineffable experience of glory, he says that the whiteness of the garments of Jesus became whiter than any fuller or whiter than any launderer can make. I remember when I was a child, I grew up, they didn't have television. We had radio, and when we would be home sick in the summertime, we'd have to listen to the soap operas all afternoon. And they were called soap operas because the sponsors of these programs were soap manufacturing companies. And I would listen to the jingles of the commercials, D-U-Z, D-U-Z, put those in your washing machine, see your clothes come out so great.

D-U-Z does everything. Rinse so white, rinse so blue. And you would hear all of these programs day after day after day with these ads. Well, the one that intrigued me as a child was this one soap called Tide. Tide's in dirt, T-I-D-E, Tide.

See, that was the way we'd sing that little commercial. But it seemed like every year Tide would come out with a new, improved version. And they always advertised new and improved Tide. And I started to wonder about that after a while. I said, now if this is eight years in a row that we're getting new and approved Tide, I wonder what that product was like eight years ago.

It must have been terrible. And then one of them, I don't know if it was Tide or whoever, finally came up with the slogan that they made their clothes come out whiter than white. And I thought, now this is the nadir of Madison Avenue, distortion of the sanctity of truth, because surely there is nothing whiter than white.

White without any hint of color, white without the slightest hue of gray, white without the most minute mar or imperfection, a white that is absolutely pure. Oh, if you want to catch a vision of that, read Herman Melville's classic chapter in Moby Dick on the whiteness of the whale, which was his symbolic description of the character of God Himself. But before the very eyes of the disciples, suddenly they see His clothes lose their drabness.

The gray, the black, the soil disappears, and there is a whiteness that is so pure, that is so dazzling, that is so bright that it begins to shine like the sun in its strength. And now this light is flowing out of Jesus. Now remember, in the Old Testament when Moses went to the mountain to meet with God, and when he spoke with God at Sinai, he asked for the big one. He said, you know God, it was great to see the exodus and the burning bush and all those things, but let me see what every human eye has burned to see.

Let me see your face. And God said, no Moses, no man can see my face and live. But I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll carve out a little niche, a little hollow place in the rock, and I'll place you securely in that cleft in the rock, and I will pass by and I will allow you a momentary glimpse of my backward parts, literally in the Hebrew, the hindquarters of Yahweh, but my face shall not be seen. And the Scriptures tell us that the glory of God passed by that cleft in the rock, and Moses had a momentary instantaneous glance at the refraction of God's glory. And when he came down from the mountain, his face was shining with such intensity that it frightened the people. Moses' face, Moses' face was shining, and the shining that was coming from Moses' face was the result of the reflection of God's glory from a sidewards glance at his backward part. Now I want you to understand that the light that the disciples see in Christ is not a reflection. It is a light that is coming from inside of him, bursting through the shell of his body and of his garments as the glory of his deity now explodes on the sea. And when they see this, what's their reaction?

It's the same reaction all of us would have. They were terrified. And we read in verse 4, And Elijah appeared to them with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter said to Jesus, Rabbi, it's good for us to be here. Let's make three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah, because he did not know what to say, for they were greatly afraid.

Peter didn't know what was going on. All of a sudden there's this transfiguration. All of a sudden there's this dazzling whiteness and this brightness of the strength of Christ's glory. And then to add astonishment upon astonishment, suddenly who appears but Moses and Elijah. And the disciples are watching as Moses and Elijah ignore them and are involved in deep, earnest conversation with Christ. The Bible doesn't tell us everything that is spoken between them, but you know what was being said. Moses and Elijah come to the Messiah, and they say, go to Jerusalem.

It is your destiny, and we have borne witness to you, and we stand with you, and God in heaven has sent us to come to confirm that to you. The law and the prophets are standing there discussing the mission of Christ with him. And as the Scriptures say, the disciples are very much afraid.

And now to make matters worse, what happens? A cloud came and overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud saying, this is my beloved Son, hear him. Suddenly when they had looked around, they saw no one anymore, but only Jesus with themselves. What kind of a cloud was this? What kind of a cloud do we always associate with the presence of God but the Shekinah glory? And this cloud of glory comes now and encompasses Christ and encompasses Elijah and encompasses Moses.

Perhaps it had come to transport Elijah and Moses back to heaven just as Elijah once had been translated and had gone on the chariots of fire into the heavenly places. And just as the Shekinah glory cloud came again to escort Christ in his ascension into glory and the promise that Jesus made that at the last day when he would return to this world, he would return with the clouds of glory. So the Shekinah cloud that indicates the visible presence of God himself and his exalted majesty now overshadows it. If the vision of Christ's transformation wasn't enough and the appearance of Moses and Elijah wasn't enough, now here comes the cloud. And that's not the end yet. And as the cloud envelops them, they hear audibly the voice of God from heaven.

Think of it. Only three times in all of the New Testament is it spoken of God that he spoke audibly from heaven. And on every occasion when God spoke, the message was substantially the same. Remember at the baptism, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. And now while the disciples are cowering on the ground and hiding their faces and in absolute terror with this phenomenon that's taking place, they hear the voice of God. And what does God say?

This is my beloved Son. Hear him. Listen to him. They didn't want to hear him. They didn't want to listen to him. They didn't like what he was telling them that he was going to Jerusalem to die. And to reinforce Jesus' teaching to these men came the testimony of Moses, the testimony of Elijah, and finally the audible word of God himself.

This is my Son. Hear him. Have you ever had a mountaintop experience where you didn't want to leave it? It was such a spiritual high. You just wanted to tarry, enjoy it, revel in it. Peter had that experience on the Mount of Transfiguration.

He says this is time for a celebration. Let's make a booth, and we're going to make a house, a little house for Elijah, a little house for Moses, a little house for Jesus, and we're all going to stay up here and have a bless-me party for the rest of our days. Isn't it sad that in that moment of transfiguration where the glory of Christ burst through and God's voice itself is heard from on high, that the disciples themselves were still thinking strictly in terms of glory and not in terms of suffering. They still had not come to peace with the mission of Christ. They forgot where they were headed, and they were reluctant to go to Jerusalem. They wanted to stay on the mountain. They didn't want to be involved in ministry.

They didn't have to work out the concerns of the church or the ministry of redemption or a ministry of compassion. They wanted religion for what it would do for them so that they could bask in spiritual joy and delight on this mountain without any intrusion of duty. But the purpose of the mountaintop experience for them is the same as the mountaintop experiences for us, to send us out of the church and into the world to be participants in the death and in the humiliation of Christ. There Jesus stood in all His glory, accompanied by Moses the lawgiver and Elijah the prophet. Their appearance shows us how all of Scripture points to Jesus and finds its fulfillment in Him.

You're listening to Renewing Your Mind and another lesson from Dr. R.C. Sproul's series Face to Face with Jesus. This is a 12-part video series, and in it we learn some profound lessons about our Savior, including His righteous character and His compassion for sinners. This is a resource that is perfectly suited for group study at church or in your home.

The length of Dr. Sproul's lessons leave plenty of time for discussion. We'd like to send it to you for your gift of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343, or you can go online to make your request at renewingyourmind.org. Our goal here at Ligonier Ministries is to come alongside the church to provide helpful resources to laypeople and those in full-time ministry. Toward that end, we want to let you know about the Institute for Expository Preaching.

It features Ligonier teaching fellow, Dr. Stephen Lawson. Dr. Lawson is passionate about this style of preaching, which explores passages or entire books of the Bible verse by verse, helping the listener understand the meaning and application of the text. If you're a pastor or a church member and you think your pastor may be interested, we'd love to tell you more about the Institute for Expository Preaching, and you can find out more when you do call us at the number I mentioned earlier.

It's 800-435-4343. Well, most of the face-to-face encounters Jesus had with people were with His followers or with those who would come to know and love Him, with one notable exception, Pontius Pilate. There are several times in the New Testament where Jesus gives a summary of the purpose of His life and of His ministry, but here He focuses on something else. When Pilate says, Who are you? What are you about? Jesus said, For this reason have I come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Our Savior's face-to-face encounter with Pontius Pilate. It's an important moment in redemptive history, and it will be our focus tomorrow on Renewing Your Mind. Please join us. .