Prophecy in Exodus

“God replied to Moses: I am who I am. Then he added: This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” (3:14)

Reading

God calls Moses from a bush that burns without being consumed and reveals his name, a name that is both a gift and a mystery. The Catechism reads it as God saying who he is and promising to be with his people, the God who is faithful and who alone truly IS (CCC 205–207, 211, 213). He is also the God of promise: “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (3:6), now coming to keep what he swore in Genesis 15:13–14.

Fulfilled

Jesus takes the name on his own lips: “before Abraham came to be, I AM” (John 8:58; compare 8:24, 28). Revelation opens with greetings “from him who is and who was and who is to come,” and the Lord God says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega” (Revelation 1:4, 8): the name of the bush, unfolded across all time.

See also

The Fathers saw in the bush that burns but is not consumed a figure of the Virgin who bore God without losing her virginity; St. Gregory of Nyssa develops it in his Life of Moses.

“Your lamb must be a year-old male and without blemish.” (12:5) “Seeing the blood, I will pass over you.” (12:13)

Reading

Each household sacrifices a lamb, marks its doorposts with the blood and eats the meat in haste, ready to leave. Death passes over the houses marked by the blood. Of the lamb, “You shall not break any of its bones” (12:46).

Fulfilled

“For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). St. John sets the crucifixion on the “preparation day for Passover” (John 19:14), notes the sprig of hyssop (19:29; compare Exodus 12:22) and sees the legs of Jesus left unbroken so that the scripture might be fulfilled: “Not a bone of it will be broken” (John 19:36). The Catechism calls Jesus the Paschal Lamb, “the symbol of Israel's redemption at the first Passover” (CCC 608). In Revelation he stands at the center of heaven, “a Lamb that seemed to have been slain” (Revelation 5:6).

Unfolding

The Passover was to be “a day of remembrance” (12:14). Jesus celebrated the Last Supper within the Passover and gave it its definitive meaning; his own passing over to the Father, “the new Passover,” is celebrated in the Eucharist (CCC 1340; Matthew 26:2).

“The LORD will fight for you; you have only to keep still.” (14:14)

Reading

Trapped between the army and the sea, Israel is told not to fear. The waters are split, “so that the Israelites entered into the midst of the sea on dry land” (14:22), and the people come out on the far shore free. “They believed in the LORD and in Moses his servant” (14:31).

Fulfilled

St. Paul writes that our ancestors “all passed through the sea, and all of them were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Corinthians 10:1–2). The Church sees above all in the crossing of the Red Sea, the liberation of Israel from slavery, a figure of the liberation Baptism brings (CCC 1221), and sings of it at the Easter Vigil before the baptismal water is blessed. Paul adds that these things were written “as a warning to us, upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:11): the baptized can still look back toward Egypt.

“I am going to rain down bread from heaven for you.” (16:4)

Reading

In the desert God feeds his people each day with manna, “like coriander seed, white” (16:31), for forty years. A jar of it is kept “before the LORD” for future generations (16:33), and Hebrews later places it in the ark (Hebrews 9:4). The Catechism notes that the manna always reminded Israel that it lives by the bread of the Word of God (CCC 1334).

Fulfilled

Jesus answers the crowd who recall the manna: “it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven” (John 6:32). “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever” (6:51). The fathers ate manna and died (6:49); the Eucharist is the bread of eternal life.

Future

To the faithful of Pergamum the risen Christ promises: “To the victor I shall give some of the hidden manna” (Revelation 2:17), the food of the world to come, hidden now and given at the end.

“Strike the rock, and the water will flow from it for the people to drink.” (17:6)

Reading

The thirsty people quarrel with Moses and test God, asking, “Is the LORD in our midst or not?” (17:7). God answers their doubt with water from the rock.

Fulfilled

St. Paul writes that “they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was the Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). From the pierced side of Christ on the Cross flow blood and water (John 19:34), which the Fathers read as the sacraments of the Church, and Jesus promises rivers of living water to all who believe (John 7:37–39). Revelation ends with the river of life-giving water flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb (Revelation 22:1).

“You will be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” (19:6)

Reading

At Sinai God reminds Israel “how I bore you up on eagles' wings and brought you to myself” (19:4), and promises that if they keep his covenant they will be his “treasured possession among all peoples” (19:5). Israel as a whole is to stand before God for the world. The Catechism begins its teaching on Holy Orders here: the chosen people was constituted by God as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (CCC 1539).

Fulfilled

St. Peter gives the same titles to the baptized: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own” (1 Peter 2:9). Revelation praises Christ, “who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father” (Revelation 1:6; compare 5:10), words the Catechism applies to the whole Church (CCC 1546).

Unfolding

The priestly people is still being gathered from every nation, offering “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). The eagles' wings return in Revelation, where the woman is given “the two wings of the great eagle” to fly to her place in the desert, far from the serpent (Revelation 12:14).

“This is the blood of the covenant which the LORD has made with you according to all these words.” (24:8)

Reading

The people promise, “All that the LORD has said, we will hear and do” (24:7). Moses splashes the blood of the sacrifice on the altar and on the people, sealing the covenant. Then the elders go up the mountain: “They saw God, and they ate and drank” (24:11), a covenant meal in God's presence.

Fulfilled

At the Last Supper Jesus takes the cup and repeats Moses' words in a new key: “this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). The Letter to the Hebrews quotes the Sinai rite and shows that Christ entered the sanctuary “not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood” (Hebrews 9:12, 18–22). What the elders tasted on Sinai, seeing God and eating in his presence, the Church receives in the Eucharist and awaits in the wedding feast of the Lamb (Revelation 19:9).

“They are to make a sanctuary for me, that I may dwell in their midst.” (25:8)

Reading

Nearly half of Exodus is about a tent. Moses is to build it exactly “according to the pattern shown you on the mountain” (25:40), and when it is finished, “the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the LORD filled the tabernacle” (40:34). The God who freed his people now travels with them.

Fulfilled

Hebrews says the tabernacle was “a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary” (Hebrews 8:5) and that Christ passed “through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands” (9:11). St. John writes that the Word “made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory” (John 1:14); the Greek verb means that he pitched his tent. Jesus' own body is the true temple (John 2:21). See The Temple of His Body.

Future

Revelation sees “the temple that is the heavenly tent of testimony” opened (Revelation 15:5) and, at the end, hears the promise of the tabernacle fulfilled for all: “Behold, God's dwelling is with the human race” (21:3). In the new Jerusalem there is no temple, “for its temple is the Lord God almighty and the Lamb” (21:22).

“There I will meet you and there, from above the cover, between the two cherubim on the ark of the covenant, I will tell you all that I command you regarding the Israelites.” (25:22)

Reading

The ark, a chest of acacia wood covered with gold, holds the tablets of the covenant; Hebrews adds the jar of manna and Aaron's staff (Hebrews 9:4). Above its golden cover, between the cherubim, is the place where God meets his people.

Fulfilled

When God's temple in heaven is opened, “the ark of his covenant could be seen in the temple” (Revelation 11:19), with lightning and thunder as at Sinai. At once “a great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12:1).

A Marian reading

This is a reading of the Fathers and the liturgy, not something Exodus itself states. As the cloud “settled down upon” the tent and the glory filled it (40:35), the power of the Most High will “overshadow” Mary (Luke 1:35). Elizabeth's “how does this happen to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (1:43) echoes David's question before the ark (2 Samuel 6:9), and as the ark stayed three months in the hill country (2 Samuel 6:11), Mary stays with Elizabeth “about three months” (Luke 1:56). The Catechism calls Mary “the daughter of Zion in person, the ark of the covenant, the place where the glory of the Lord dwells” (CCC 2676), and the Litany of Loreto invokes her as Ark of the Covenant.

Why mystery

What became of the historical ark is unknown. 2 Maccabees 2:4–8 tells that Jeremiah hid it until God gathers his people again. Revelation answers not with a location but with a vision, and the Church has never encouraged a search.