Moses — Face to Face With God

From Pharaoh’s palace to the promised land — the pattern of divine deliverance

The Calling He Tried to Refuse

Moses spent his first forty years as royalty and his next forty years as a fugitive shepherd in the Sinai wilderness. He had killed an Egyptian to protect a Hebrew slave and fled before Pharaoh's justice. By the time God appeared to him, Moses was eighty years old, an old man living in obscurity, with no apparent future as anything other than a keeper of his father-in-law's flock.

Into this silence, God spoke from a burning bush. The bush burned but was not consumed. Moses turned aside to look. God called his name from the middle of the fire. The moment is one of the most theologically charged in all of scripture — the God who tells Moses that he has seen the affliction of his people and has come down to deliver them.

Moses's first response was characteristic of every true prophet in scripture: he listed his inadequacies. He was not eloquent. Who was he to go before Pharaoh? Why would the people believe him? He asked God five separate times to send someone else.

God's answer was the same answer he always gives: I will be with thee. The question of adequacy is not the prophet's problem to solve. The question of obedience is. Moses was adequate because God would accompany him. Every sign and wonder that followed was God's power, not Moses's. Moses was the vessel. The fire was divine.

Moses 1 — What God Showed Him First

The Pearl of Great Price provides what the Bible omits: the vision God gave Moses before the Exodus began. In Moses 1, God showed Moses the whole of creation — worlds without number, more than Moses could comprehend. Then God told him something extraordinary:

Moses 1:6

“And I have a work for thee, Moses, my son; and thou art in the similitude of mine Only Begotten; and mine Only Begotten is and shall be the Savior, for he is full of grace and truth; but there is no God beside me, and all things are present with me, for I know them all.”

Before Moses was sent anywhere, God established his identity. Moses was a son of God, made in the similitude of the Only Begotten. He was not merely a servant sent on an errand. He was a child of God, given a work, with his true identity declared before the work began.

This pattern matters enormously. Satan immediately appeared to Moses after the vision ended and demanded worship, calling him only “son of man.” Moses, fortified by what God had just told him, rebuked Satan and called on God. The temptation to forget who you are is the enemy's primary strategy. God tells you who you are before the battle begins precisely so you cannot be talked out of it.

The Burning Bush

At the burning bush, God revealed his name: “I AM THAT I AM.” In Hebrew, the Name — YHWH — is the first-person form of the verb “to be.” God is the self-existent one, the one whose existence depends on nothing outside himself. “I AM” is the ground of all being.

This name becomes the key to understanding Jesus's “I AM” statements in John's Gospel. When Jesus says “before Abraham was, I AM,” the audience picks up stones — because they understand exactly what he is claiming. He is claiming identity with the God of the burning bush. He is claiming to be the YHWH who spoke to Moses.

The burning bush is not just a dramatic setting. It is God establishing his own nature before sending his prophet into battle. The God who sends Moses to Pharaoh is the self-existent, eternal God who has been the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob before Pharaoh's ancestors built their first pyramid. The power differential is absolute.

The Plagues — God Versus Pharaoh’s Gods

The ten plagues were not random demonstrations of power. Each plague was a targeted refutation of a specific Egyptian deity. The Nile turned to blood — Hapi, the god of the Nile, was exposed as powerless. Darkness covered the land for three days — Ra, the sun god, the supreme deity of Egypt, was shown to be nothing. The death of the firstborn struck at Osiris and the myth of Egyptian sovereignty over life and death.

This was a theological contest as much as a political negotiation. The God of Israel, the I AM of the burning bush, was systematically dismantling the entire Egyptian religious system by defeating its gods one by one on their own territory. Moses was not simply asking for the release of slaves. He was demonstrating that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was sovereign over every force the Egyptians had worshiped, and that Pharaoh — himself considered divine in Egyptian theology — was answerable to a higher authority.

The Passover and the Red Sea

The Passover is the central event of the Old Testament. A lamb without blemish, killed, its blood placed on the doorposts. The destroying angel passed over every house marked with blood. Every house without it suffered the death of the firstborn. This was not merely a historical event — it was the foundational type of the Atonement. The lamb whose blood saves is the lamb of God, whose blood saves all who are marked by it.

Paul says explicitly: “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). The Passover is not an ancient ritual that Christianity replaced — it is an ancient prophecy that Christianity fulfilled. Moses administered the type. Christ accomplished the reality.

At the Red Sea, with Pharaoh's army behind them and water ahead, Israel had no path forward. Moses raised his staff. The waters parted. They walked through on dry ground. The Egyptian army followed and was destroyed. Paul interprets this in 1 Corinthians 10 as baptism — passing through water, the old life of bondage cut off behind you, entering a new life of covenant on the other side. The Red Sea is not just history. It is the pattern of every baptism.

Sinai — Face to Face

At Sinai, Moses ascended into the fire and cloud. He received the law. He was with God forty days and forty nights without food or water. He came down with a face that shone — so radiant from the presence of God that the people of Israel could not look at him without a veil over his face.

Moses 1:31

“And behold, the glory of the Lord was upon Moses, so that Moses stood in the presence of God, and talked with him face to face.”

The LDS understanding of this is literal. Moses saw God. He spoke with him face to face. This is not metaphorical intimacy — it is an account of physical proximity to an embodied, glorified God. Joseph Smith's First Vision connects directly to this tradition: God has always been willing to appear to his prophets. The Restoration did not invent a new kind of experience; it recovered a biblical one.

Forty Years of Wilderness

The forty years in the wilderness were Israel's doing, not God's plan. God had promised to bring them into Canaan. They refused to enter because they feared the inhabitants. That generation died in the wilderness as a consequence of their unbelief. Moses led them for those forty years — leading a people who complained, who built a golden calf while he was on the mountain, who repeatedly preferred Egypt to the promised land.

Moses never lost his charge. He never abandoned the people who abandoned their covenant. He interceded for them repeatedly when God was prepared to destroy them. He stood in the gap between the people and their judgment — the intercessor who bought them time. This is another pattern of Christ, who stands before the Father and intercedes for every one of his children who has defaulted on their covenant.

He Died Without Entering — and That Was Okay

Moses never entered the promised land. He struck the rock at Meribah when he was commanded to speak to it, and for that act of impatience was told he would see Canaan but not enter it. He was allowed to climb Pisgah and see the whole land spread before him, and there he died.

This ending strikes many readers as harsh. It does not strike Moses as such. The record shows no bitterness, no protest, no resentment. He knew what the promised land was — he had spoken with God face to face. He had stood in the divine presence. He had seen things no mortal in his generation had seen. He understood something about the promised land that the people following him did not yet know: the earthly inheritance is a type of the eternal inheritance. He was going to something better.

LDS scripture reveals that Moses was translated — taken without dying in the ordinary sense, preserved to appear on the Mount of Transfiguration with Elijah and Christ, to deliver priesthood keys to Peter, James, and John for the New Testament dispensation. His work continued long after his physical body was laid in an unknown grave in Moab.

And he appeared again on April 3, 1836, in the Kirtland Temple, to restore the keys of the gathering of Israel to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. Moses delivered his keys not once but twice — and the work of gathering that he began with the Exodus has never stopped.

Moses as a Type of Christ

Moses himself prophesied of the one who would follow him:

Deuteronomy 18:15

“The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.”

Peter, in Acts 7, identifies this prophet as Jesus Christ. The parallels are deliberate: both Moses and Jesus spent time in Egypt as infants while a ruler sought to kill them. Both fasted forty days. Both led their people through water into covenant. Both gave law on a mountain. Moses gave the law of Moses; Christ fulfilled it and gave a higher law. Moses redeemed Israel from physical slavery in Egypt. Christ redeems all of God's children from spiritual slavery to sin and death.

Moses pointed to Christ in every major act of his ministry. He was not the final deliverer. He was the herald — the greatest prophet of the Old Testament, speaking by his whole life of the One who was to come.

He stood on Pisgah and saw the promised land. He was not diminished by not entering it. He had seen the Creator of the promised land, face to face. What lay ahead of him was not less than what lay across the Jordan. It was infinitely more.