Prologue or Epilogue?
Deuteronomy 34:1, 4
Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the LORD showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan. … And the LORD said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.”
Every saint’s biography is both an epilogue to battles won as well as a prologue to future battles. Each saint is a chapter in redemption’s voluminous epic: a grand chapter, a necessary chapter, a powerful, inspiring chapter, but not the end of the story. Every great prophet, priest and king, every pastor, missionary, and evangelist, every parent, grandparent, and great grandparent, every believer, whether he dies in childhood or lives to old age, ends his story on the pinnacle of Mount Nebo, drawn there to the summit of finite earthly existence by the Father’s hand, wishing to go just another step further. As Paul wrote in Philippians 3:13, “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,” so God gives Moses a breathtaking, aw-inspiring glimpse of how far he’s come—it’s a long way from Egypt to Nebo after all—along with an even greater glimpse across the terrain of a providential future.
Moses’s path to this summit has been fraught with trial and opposition, hasn’t it? Just getting here, to the edge of the Jordan, through Pharaoh and Amalek and Og, through Golden calf idolatries and commonwealth rebellions and familial betrayals, is an almost unparalleled feat. Somehow, Moses hasn’t sputtered to a halt in his old age. The long, arduous years in the wilderness, of parenting whiney children, of bearing the brunt of divine fury on his shoulders, of drinking the ashen water of his nation’s idolatry on a daily basis, hasn’t derailed him. He doesn’t die on this mountain as a broken down, battered, bitter, faithless, loveless prophet. Oh no! He’s as full of faith and life and hope and vision and yearning as ever.
It’s been a remarkable journey from those sandy banks along the Nile to these rocky outcroppings of Mount Nebo, but this inspired Book hasn’t even told the half of it. Where the biblical biography ends is where his real glory begins.