Moses Discardable

Moses in the New Testament: Why Moses Still Matters

The New Testament has too often been filtered through later assumptions, detached from its Jewish authors, and explained in ways those authors didn’t intend.

One person that has been detached from most teachings that I have ever heard or read is Moses! When is the last time you heard anything in a teaching that has followed the thread of Moses’s influence, authority and importance from the Gospels to the book of Revelation.

When the New Testament describes a woman reaching out to touch the hem of Yeshua’s garment Matthew 9:20, it specifically refers to the fringes commanded by God to Moses in Numbers 15 to remind Israel of the commandments. To see Yeshua without his fringes is to see a man disconnected from the God-given authority of Moses, a revision that the original text never makes. This is not coercing an interpretation into a Jewish context. Yeshua's garment fringes were in compliance with God’s instructions given to Moses. 

Moses in the New Testament confirms the writers’ attitude toward him. See how Yeshua, Acts, Paul, Hebrews, and Revelation keep returning to Moses. The New Testament keeps returning to Moses, again, and again. Not as background scenery. Not as a sentimental ancestor. As authority. That is strange behavior if Moses was supposed to fade quietly and no longer hold a place in the lives of believers in Yeshua. 

Moses received the Torah from God

Moses matters in the New Testament because he mattered in Israel’s covenant life. Scripture presents him as the one who went up the mountain and spent forty days and forty nights with God, receiving covenant instruction for Israel. That is why later arguments keep returning to him. When Torah speaks through Moses, the New Testament treats it as revealed instruction, not as antique opinion.

That is why Yeshua says that if people believed Moses, they would believe him, because Moses wrote about him. Yeshua is referencing the Torah. This is not replacement language. It is continuity. The problem is not too much Moses. Instead, the importance of Moses and his writings in the Torah are being confirmed. 

Yeshua Confirms Moses’ Authority

Matthew 23 makes the point even sharper. Yeshua says the scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’s seat, and he tells the people to do what they say. That line is easy to glide past, but it is one of the clearest signs that Moses’s teaching authority was still recognized. Torah was being taught in a real synagogue world, and Yeshua openly acknowledged that authority. Not exactly a Moses retirement party.

Even in the most supernatural moments of the New Testament, Moses remains the indispensable witness. During the Transfiguration, Matthew 17, Yeshua does not appear in his glory alone. He is flanked by Moses and Elijah. If Moses’s authority was truly meant to fade, he would not be a hand-picked guest for Yeshua’s most private and divine moment. On that mountain, Moses isn’t a ghost of a dead era, he is the living representative of the covenant people, appearing to show that the son is not replacing the lawgiver but standing in perfect alignment with him. This isn’t a hand-off. It is a summit of the highest authorities in Israel’s history.

Moses as the Guide for Daily Life

When Yeshua heals a man with a skin disease, he tells him to go to the priest and do what Moses commanded. When divorce is discussed, the argument returns to what Moses permitted. When resurrection is debated, Yeshua proves it from Moses at the burning bush. These are not random proof texts tossed like confetti. These are living Torah discussions. Moses is still being used as the present authority for practice, doctrine, and interpretation.

The same point appears in Yeshua’s warning about lawlessness. When he says, “Get away from me, you workers of lawlessness,” he is not speaking into a vacuum or inventing a new moral standard on the spot. In the Jewish world of the New Testament, the law in view is the Torah given by God through Moses. That is the revealed covenant instruction already standing in the room. So, lawlessness is not merely vague bad behavior or generic rebellion. It is a disregard for the instructions God gave to his people through Moses as recorded in the Torah. 

Acts Shows That Moses Still Matters

Then comes Acts 15, which many readers skim too quickly. The council decides to give new non-Jewish believers only a few initial instructions, since the Torah is read in synagogues every Sabbath, they would hear God’s instructions given through Moses. That means the newcomers were entering a learning environment where Torah instructions were heard every week. 

Acts 21 is even more pointed. Quite a while after Yeshua’s resurrection and sacrifice, Paul arrives in Jerusalem and hears that people are saying he teaches Jews among the nations to forsake Moses. The response is not, “Yes, of course, Moses is finished now.” Instead, the elders tell Paul to take four men to the Temple and to be purified with them, which would include an offering.  In plain English, “forsaking Moses” is treated as a serious charge, not as the new normal.

The Prophet Like Moses

Moses was so central to Israel’s covenant life that one of the ways scripture emphasizes Yeshua’s importance is by calling attention to the promise that God would raise up a prophet like Moses. Acts 3 picks up that promise directly from Deuteronomy 18. That comparison only works because Moses already stands as a towering servant through whom God gave instructions to Israel. The New Testament does not magnify Yeshua by making Moses small. It magnifies Yeshua by saying, in effect, think of Moses, and now pay attention. Moses still echoes at the end. The thread does not stop with the Gospels or Acts. Hebrews still speaks of Moses with honor, and at the far end of the New Testament, in Revelation, God gives harps to those defeating the beast, and they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb. Moses is not only present near the beginning of the story. He is still echoing in this final vision of worship and victory. For someone supposedly replaced, Moses has a very busy schedule.

Why Moses Still Matters

A lot of readers approach the New Testament as though Moses exited in chapter one and left no forwarding address. The text itself refuses to cooperate. He keeps showing up in synagogue authority, in legal debates, in healing instructions, in resurrection arguments, in Acts, in the promise of the prophet like Moses, and even in the Song of Moses at the end.

The New Testament does not present Moses as a discarded relic. It presents him as central to teaching, interpretation, doctrine, and covenant life. The debates are not about whether Moses matters. They assume he does. The real question is how his words are understood and lived. Maybe we should not be surprised that he is still one of the few people whose thread runs from the Gospels to Acts to the Epistles to Revelations. For those of you who have been grafted into Israel are you expecting the same blessings because you are grafted in?  Perhaps you also need to be listening, heeding and doing the instructions that God gave to Moses for Israel.  

Matthew 5 - For Yeshua said that he did not come to abolish the instructions, referred to as law or Torah, that God gave to Moses for Israel. Yeshua said whoever disobeys the least of these instructions from God to Moses for Israel and teaches others to disobey them will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever obeys the least of these instructions from God to Moses for Israel and whoever teaches others to obey them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

The Jewish writers of the New Testament clearly showed that Moses, and the instructions God gave through him, remained vital for God’s true children to obey both before and after Yeshua’s resurrection.