And then follows the bringing forward of witnesses, John, the Father, the works, the Scriptures, and the climax is reached in the one whose name was ever on their lips—­Moses.  And this is the significant reference to Moses, “He wrote of Me.”  Sift into that phrase a bit.  It cannot mean, he wrote of me in the sacrifices provided for with such minute care.  For Moses clearly had had no such thought.  It might be supposed to mean that unconsciously to himself there was, in his writings about the sacrifices, that which would be seen later to refer to Jesus in His dying.  And there is the resemblance in purity between Moses’ sacrifices and the great Sacrifice.  Yet where there is so much plain meaning lying out on the face of the thing, this obscure meaning may be dropped or checked in as an incidental.  There is a single allusion in Moses’ writing to a prophet coming like himself.

But Moses is ever absorbed in writing about a wondrous One who revealed Himself to him in the burning bush, the pillar of cloud and fire, the little peaked tent off by itself on the outskirts of the camp, and the soft distinct voice.  There was the One with whom He had twice spent forty days in the mount, and whose great glory left its traces in his face.  Ever Moses is writing of this wondrous Jehovah.  Jesus quietly says, “He wrote of Me.”

Another time He said, “I and the Father are one,” provoking another stoning.  Invisibly holding back their hands He said, “The Father is in Me, and I in the Father,” and again they are aroused.  In connection with this word “Father,” it may be noted that the Old Testament has been called the “dispensation of the Father.”  But this seems scarcely accurate.  God speaking, appearing there is spoken of as Father very rarely, and then chiefly in the great promises of the future glory.  The common name for Him is Jehovah.  Jesus practically gives us the name Father for God.  He constantly refers to God as His Father.  It was He who taught us to call God Father.  He never speaks of Jehovah, but of the Father.  His language in this always fits in perfectly, as of course it would, with John’s standpoint, that Jesus is the Jehovah of the Old Testament times.  A little later Jesus says, “Moses gave you not the manna from heaven, but—­my Father giveth (note the change in the time element of the word)—­giv_eth_ you the true bread.”  It is a sort of broken, readjusted sentence, as though He was going to say who it was that gave the manna, and then changes to speaking of the Father and the present.  He does not say who it was that did give that manna.  It is plain enough from John’s standpoint what he understands Jesus to mean as he puts the incident into his story.

Jesus is God Wooing Man.