Don't Settle for Crumbs When You're Invited to the Feast
Moses was special.
Out of all of Israel, only he had direct access to God. No one else could walk up the mountain or into the tent and speak to the maker of heaven and earth. He was the only one with God’s ear, the only one who could speak to God and for God.
“With [Moses] I speak mouth to mouth, clearly, and not in riddles, and he beholds the form of the LORD.” (Numbers 12:8)
So, if you needed something from God, you had to go through Moses. He was, in biblical terms, Israel’s mediator. The one who was chosen by God to stand between God’s holiness and an unholy people. Moses was Israel’s sole access point to God.
But not so for us.
Whose mediating now?
Now, in the new covenant, we don’t need a man like Moses to come between us and God.
“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
Israel turned to Moses to speak to God, pray, plead, and teach for them. As recipients of the new covenant, we turn to Jesus for these things.
God’s people no longer look to a man like us, like Moses, but look to the God-man Jesus for access the heavenly banquet of divine communion.
We’re still looking for Moses
Yet despite this reality, despite having Christ, we’re still looking for Moses.
Many of us are looking for a man like one of us to go up the mountain to meet with God. We want someone to do the hard, costly work of praying, of seeking after and communing with God. We want them to do this and to tell us what they’ve gleaned so we don’t have to.
We’d prefer someone else to enter the Lord’s glorious palace so we can stay in our frail, human-crafted huts.
We want to eat the crumbs of another’s encounter with God when we can go up the mountain and feast with him ourselves.
We get spiritual kicks from the crumbs on Instagram stories and Sunday morning sermons. The crumbs sustain us, for a time, but they will never ultimately satisfy. As Augustine famously wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you.”
We weren’t saved to live off of spiritual crumbs. Jesus died to bring us to the feast. He died to bring us into a deeper communion than even Moses knew—the communion shared between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The communion we were made for and the rest our hearts ache for.
If the Holy Spirit is living within us then God is not found far off in another. He is found in the place where he’s made himself at home—in you.
Don’t settle for the crumbs, realize the feast.
Get alone with God.
Sit in silence.
Open Scripture.
Taste and see with your own eyes just how good the LORD is.