Claim. John the Baptist stood structurally in the position Moses had occupied at the national scope, called to lay the worldwide foundation of faith on the parallel four-hundred-year preparation period, and to relate as dual parent/child figure to Jesus in the same way Moses related to the Israelites.
Elaboration. dp-3-the-providence-of-restoration-under-the-leadership-of-jesus §3.1.1 makes the parallel explicit. The Israelites had suffered “four hundred years in Egypt without a prophet” before Moses arrived to lead them out; the Jewish people similarly suffered “four hundred years under the oppression of the gentile nations of Persia, Greece, Egypt, Syria and Rome without a prophet” — the inter-testamental silent period — before john-the-baptist arrived. Both began their missions on a four-hundred-year Satan-separation foundation. Both prepared the way for the Messiah at successively expanded scopes (national vs. worldwide).
Moses’s life in Pharaoh’s palace under his mother’s tutelage prepared him to love Israel; JtB’s ascetic wilderness life of locusts and wild honey, with the miraculous birth-circumstances (Zechariah’s silence broken at the naming), similarly built Israel’s recognition that here was a divinely-sent prophet. The text records that the priests and Levites wondered whether JtB was the Messiah (John 1:19-25). His successful forty-day-period analogue separation from Satan laid the foundation of faith.
Structurally, JtB stood in moses’s dual position: parent in laying the foundation of faith, child in securing Abel-position for fulfilling the indemnity condition to remove fallen nature. The Jewish people, in Cain-position, were to follow JtB. Had they done so — without JtB needing to leave Egypt (i.e., remaining within the Roman Empire to convert it) — they would have completed the foundation of substance and received the Messiah immediately. The structural-equivalence to Moses is what makes JtB’s later faithlessness structurally homologous to Israelite distrust of Moses.