with prophets of your class,--"I, the Lord, make myself known unto him in a vision, in a dream I speak unto him. Not so my servant Moses; in all My house he is faithful. Mouth to mouth I speak to him, and face to face, and not in dark speeches; and the appearance of the Lord he beholds." Moses, as a prophet, is here contrasted with the whole order of prophets of ordinary gifts. A higher dignity among them is claimed for him on the ground that not some special mission, [Pg 112] but the care of the whole economy of the Old Testament, was entrusted to him; compare Heb. iii. 5. His is a specially close relation to the Lord, a specially high degree of illumination. The collective body of ordinary prophets cannot, therefore, by any possibility be the "prophet" who is _like unto Moses_, as completely equal to the task of the future as Moses was for that of his day. But the greater the work of the future, the more necessary is it that the prophet of the future, in order to be _like unto Moses_, should, in his whole individuality, and in all his gifts, be far superior to him; compare Heb. iii. 6. _Finally_,--The common prophetic order itself refuses the honour of being the prophet like unto Moses. The prophecies of Isaiah, in chapters xlii., xlix., l., and lxi., are based upon our passage, and in all of them the Messiah appears as the prophet κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν. It is to Him that the mission is entrusted of being the restorer of Jacob, and the salvation of the Lord, even unto the end of the world.