Lesson 38
What is a Prophet – 18:15-22
We’ll conclude the section on the government officials in the nation Israel. We’ve been working with a section that stretches from Deut. 16-21. This section in Deuteronomy is distinguished by one over-riding theme; the theme is national righteousness by God’s standards. Therefore it logically divides into two categories, chapters 16-18; chapters 19-21. Chapters 16-18 deal with the government officials. And here you have the men such as the priests, such as the judges, such as the kings, and tonight the prophets. These are the officers; these are the men, the jobs that are available in the government of Israel and as we study these you will see how each job has been carefully defined and described in God’s Word. And then we have a second section devoted to government policy and here we’re going to deal with such things as court procedures, such things as the guardians and the controls in the balance of power, etc. within the nation, applying these point by point to our own situation today.
Tonight we finish this first half, this section, chapters 16-18 that deal with government offices, and in particular you remember at the beginning of this chapter we said that in verses 1-8 you have the priest mentioned and the outline of the priest is short, simply because the priests by this time had already gone on for many, many years and it was clear to most of the people what the priests were to do. We summarized the priest’s office by saying four things; we said that the priesthood office means first that it is hereditary; it is not something that a person gets a special calling from God to do. In other words, the point here is that the priest was authorized to be a priest by his physical birth. That should carry some connotation to you when you realize that the New Testament says every believer in Jesus Christ is a priest. Why? Because the new birth is what qualifies you as a priest. And this means, this doctrine of the universal priesthood of the believer, the cornerstone of the Reformation, means that you have the right to come to God on your own, without the intercession of a pastor, without the any intercession of any so-called priest, without the intercession of any religious leader, you have direct access to God.
Then the chapter broke at verse 8-9 and we found that the priest’s job was limited which introduces us to a problem. The priest’s role basically was a teacher of the Word of God; we found his office was based upon heredity, we found that the role was limited, and specifically the second thing we said about the priest was their job was to teach the Word that had already been revealed, but they themselves were not channels of new revelation. The priest taught what had already been given, an in particular the Old Testament in the Hebrew is in three parts: it’s called the Law, the Prophets and the wisdom books or the Writings. And that is the three-fold division of the Old Testament canon. The Law is the first five books, all written by Moses and they were all finished by 1400 BC. So since these books were finished at that time this was the basic and the heart of the Law, this was the heart of a nation.
You might diagram the Old Testament Bible this way. At the center circle you have the Law and then you have the prophets developing this and then on the outside you have the Writings. Now if you understand this it’ll help you understand your Old Testament. Your Old Testament is not ordered the right way. It is ordered after the Greek Septuagint but it is not ordered the way it originally was in the Old Testament canon and if it was, it would make a lot more sense to a lot more people. What happened was the people who translated the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek rearranged the Old Testament books historically, in other words, as they were written, instead of arranging them topically. But if they had remained in this three-fold division I think a lot more people would understand the Old Testament.
The first division, the Law, would be just like you have in your Bible, Genesis thru Deuteronomy, the first five books, no change; this is one unit, the Law, the center of the Old Testament. Now the prophets begin with the book of Joshua; Joshua is in the prophets, not because Joshua was a prophet, but because the book was written by a prophet. So you have Joshua all the way on up through such things as Judges, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings, all those so-called historical books are not what the Old Testament is majoring in, those books were written by prophets and they were written by prophets as giving the divine viewpoint of history. They’re not just history books. This is why it’s so tragic, people think the Old Testament is a bunch of stories of some fool running around shooting arrows at somebody and this is all you get in Sunday School material, David killed the giant and a few other stories, sounds like some sort of folklore somewhere. But if you see this, those history books weren’t written as history books, they were written to point out and teach doctrine and only those historical events that underscored a certain doctrinal point were included in them. Therefore the book of Joshua is considered to be one of the prophets and this includes such things as Judges, I & II Samuel, Kings, books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and all your Minor Prophets.
Then the third section of the Old Testament, the Writings, includes those books… we seem to have an odd variety and a lot of scholars have wondered, what is it that unifies all of the things collected under the Writings. We have such things as Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Ruth, such things as I & II Chronicles, such things as Ezra, Nehemiah and all these other things and you wonder, what is it that unifies these. Well apparently the thing that unifies these is the Hebrew word chokmah or wisdom. These are all tied in with the concept of wisdom. Wisdom was the third great part. First you have the Law, then you had Prophets and then you had wisdom.
Wisdom, the word “wisdom” does not mean what you are thinking of when I just used the word. What you’re thinking undoubtedly of is some great philosophical insight or something and you call that wisdom. But you have to understand that wisdom, when it was originally used in the Old Testament, the Hebrew word is chokmah, now wisdom is a technical skill. For example, how would you explain the use of the word wisdom in this context? So and so is a tailor that sews in cloth and she is a wise person. Now that just strikes you as wrong in the English but in the Hebrew that’s perfectly good Hebrew because wisdom means technical skill. And so anyone who had a technical skill was called as having chokmah, or wisdom. For example, a carpenter that built the tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant was said to have chokmah or technical skill in this area. And then the word came to mean skill in living or those people that have skill and insight into how to live. By the way, this is the concept of education, not the idea that you can multiply
2 x 2 and get 4, etc. the concept of education in God’s Word is that you know how to live. Of course, we don’t teach that any more, with one exception.
So we have technical skills, skill in living, and then these sections of Scripture known as the Writings came to be preserved out of all this wisdom, so this was the literary preservation of wisdom or the products of wisdom. So the Psalms have been preserved as a demonstration of wisdom, as a demonstration of musical skill, as a demonstration of how the Holy Spirit worked through the artisans of the days of Israel, and produced these great lyrics that you find in the book of Psalms.
I don’t know why hymn writers fiddle around trying to make up their own lyrics; there are thousands of songs in the Word of God, thousands of them. There’s one in Exodus 15 where God is triumphing over Pharaoh and if you could read the translation of this you would be shocked. They are singing praises to God because God smashed Pharaoh and they [can’t understand word] praise and they take this as a tremendous sign of grace because God has taken Pharaoh, “the horse and the rider He has thrown into the sea,” and we rejoice. It sounds [can’t understand word] but this is the way the Old Testament think. They don’t think of a Mickey Mouse God, their God is a God that works in history and they don’t play games and they don’t play with religious words like people do in the last third of the 20th century. They were very pragmatic, they wanted a God that works in history, right now here, and if He doesn’t, forget it. So this is their concept.
And you have Psalms as an expression of wisdom. Proverbs are an expression of wisdom. Song of Songs, the love song of the Bible is an expression of sex and love, a skill in how to live. And by the way, there was the sex education of the Bible, the Song of Solomon. Ecclesiastes, this is a book that has to do with what would happen if you started out as an unbeliever or you start out as a carnal Christian, what have you got left, it shows you negative wisdom. Then Ruth and I & II Chronicles and these things all show wisdom in various aspects. So this then is part of the Old Testament and this explains also the offices that we’re studying now, for the priests were the ones that dealt with the Law; the prophets are the ones that obviously dealt with the prophets, and they were the ones that wrote the prophecies, they were the ones that taught it. If you want to know what the prophets did in Israel, look at the prophetic books; if you want to know what the priests did, look at the Law. And these, a lot of these were made by the elders, or the elders of the nation such as Daniel. Daniel is not included in the prophets in the Old Testament Hebrew canon because Daniel was not a prophet; Daniel was a wise man in his day but he was never considered a prophet to the nation Israel. He was a man that had visions and so on but still he is not included in the prophecies of the Old Testament; he’s included in the Writings. So we have then this three-fold division of the Hebrew canon telling you the roles that these people played.
Last time we got down to verse 9-10 and said that the priests, therefore, would have a problem; since the priest was dealing with the Law and since the Law was finished in 1400 BC, it means that the Law was a [can’t understand word] and complete thing that could not be applied to the changing conditions of history when the sin nature was involved. Therefore there was a need for guidance, and therefore there was a need to bring the Law up to date and also to amplify the violations of the Law. When the nation got off the track it was the role of the prophet to bring them back to the Law. Don’t buy this jazz that you will get in college religious courses that the prophets were revolutionaries; they were not revolutionaries. The prophets were reactionaries; they carried the nation constantly back to the Law. They weren’t revolutionaries in any sense of the word, they carried the nation right back to the Law.
So the prophets were given to Israel to provide guidance, which their tendency… it was the tendency in the nation to get this guidance illegitimately. We saw this in verse 10-11, we found that God warned them, this is how you might to get guidance, and there’s a list in verse 10, “There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire,” and here we have one means of divination, in other words they’d take some young child and they’d build this big fire and they’d have the kid run through it and if he came out a charred mess that would indicate one way of God’s will, and if he came out all right and just needed a few band aids somewhere then that would be another indication of God’s will. It’s a rather gruesome way of obtaining divine guidance. The second means of obtaining divine guidance is given in the second phrase, “or he that uses divination” and he that uses divination is the one who will try to divine the future by chance. We said the perfect illustration of this in the ancient world was one who would take a quiver of arrows and throw the quiver down and as the arrows would spill out each arrow would be marked a certain way and they’d say it’d be like flipping a coin in our culture. This is divination by chance and God says never mind that. Also, Christians who get up in the morning and it’s usually so early they can’t focus and they say I want guidance today and I want a two minute devotional, so I’m just going to open my Bible and put my finger down on any verse and that’s what God’s will is for me today, using the Bible as a Ouija board. And this nonsense blasphemy to the Lord, it violates the whole principle of divine guidance and makes Christianity a laugh in the minds of the unbeliever and if I was an unbeliever I’d laugh at it too.
The third thing, “an observer of the times,” this is one who divines by trance, he gets into a trance to speak in tongues, or he can give like the Oracle of Delphi in history, you have people today, the crystal ball gazers, etc. Jeanne Dixon and a few other people like this, these people would be eliminated by capital punishment in the nation Israel. “Or an enchanter, or a witch,” now an enchanter is one who divines by signs, such things as palm reading, astrology, tea leaf readers and all the rest of the garbage that goes on. These would be included in the phrase “an enchanter.” So these things were specifically rejected from the nation. We find “the witch,” or “the charmer,” these are people who use herbs and drugs or what we call [can’t understand word] or voodoo magic. Some of you think that’s a big laugh, you talk to some of the missionaries if you don’t think there is such a thing as voodoo magic and they will tell you some horrifying things that will make your hair stand up. These people on the mission field are able to gain power and control over whole groups of people because they actually are able to cast spells that result in real sickness, real physical sickness. So evidently they have a demonic dimension to them and God didn’t want Israel to be involved.
Finally, the last category in verse 11, “a consulter with familiar spirits,” (comma) “or a necromancer.” The word “wizard” shouldn’t be there. So you have “a consulter with familiar spirits or a necromancer” and these are people who say they speak with the dead. I mentioned Bishop Pike supposedly speaking to his son over Canadian television, etc. and he had this séance. Now the consulter and the necromancer we proved last time are phonies, although they themselves may not be aware of the fact, they may genuinely believe they are talking with the dead, the Bible proves it from 1 Sam. 28 compared with Isaiah 29 that these people are phonies; they do not speak with the dead, in fact, they do speak with someone and that someone is not a dead person but someone is a real live, believe it or not, demon.
So these are the false ways of obtaining guidance, and the tendency would be for the priest, look, the Law was written back in 1400 BC and we need God’s word today, where are we going to get it. So these people would sway over to spiritism just like people are all over the place today; spiritism, it’s the biggest thing, it’s bigger than the cults. It’s coming in by the truckloads. You can go into any newsstand today and you will find book after book on astrology, palm reading and all the rest of it. Why? Because people have lost guidance from the Word of God and therefore they’re going to seek in all these illegitimate ways.
Now what is God’s provision? God never says don’t without providing a provision. Verse 15, this is a principle of God’s Word, He never says don’t do this thing without giving you a most tremendous alternative. This is why I never buy the story that people have that Christianity is a bunch of don’ts, don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t do this and don’t do that. Christianity offers you so many things that you can do, I don’t see how you have time to think about the things that you don’t do. Christianity provides a fantastic life for every individual, regardless of your place in life. Christianity tells you that the moment that you have trusted Jesus Christ God has given you at least one spiritual gift; this means you have an equal place with the King with everyone else, it means that you don’t have to be bullied by some pastor, you don’t have to be bullied by a missionary, if you’re not out evangelizing the world you’re not in fulltime service and all the rest of the junk that you hear from Christian pulpits. This is blasphemy, the Word of God says that if you are a believer, you have a gift, you are in fulltime service, all you have to do is find out God’s will for your life.
Therefore the Word of God gives us an alternative as it gave to Israel. And verse 15 this is what God gave them, if He said I don’t want you to play around with a Ouija board, if He said I don’t want you to play around the mediums, I don’t want you to get involved in spiritism, they could say all right God, how are we going to get our guidance. Here is how they are going to get their guidance, verse 15, “The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.” The word “prophet” here is nabiim and the liberals today are making a big thing out of this, a cult, the cult of Nabiism, and they will make something out of everything, but the word nabi is the word which means called, and it is not an office such as the priesthood, it is individuals who are called by God out of various vocations into a ministry of communicating God’s Word. That is the prophet’s job in the Old Testament.
“The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet” like unto me, this is a prophecy and a prophecy always has two types of fulfillment. It has what we call a near fulfillment and a far fulfillment, some people call it a far fulfillment I would call it a complete fulfillment. But you can have many, many near fulfillments. I don’t like the designation “near fulfillment” and far fulfillment, I’d rather have a partial fulfillment and a complete fulfillment because you can have many, many partial fulfillments of a prophecy, but only one complete fulfillment of a prophecy. Now partial fulfillments of verse 15 are every prophet that ever lived in Israel, so beginning with Moses you have a series of men who would rise up or be called by God in crucial hours of the nation’s history to reveal to the nation the Word of God for that hour. This is a fundamental law of Bible prophecy. Bible prophecy always has a contemporary expression. It is always have a series of these prophets and they all go down, starting with Moses, and guess who’s the last one on the list? Jesus Christ. Moses to Jesus is the list of the official prophets in the nation Israel. These are men spontaneously called for.
What do these men do? They do many things, the most important thing and the only thing that I’m going to touch tonight is that they kept the Scriptures. They were the custodians of God’s Word. Those of you who have the New Scofield Bible if you look on page 492 you will have a list of all the literature that we don’t have. We know a lot of books existed in the Old Testament times that we do not have, records etc. and on page 492 of the New Scofield Bible is a list of these. [New Scofield: “The O.T. points to a very extensive literature among the Hebrew people which has not been preserved. Among the uninspired books are the two mentioned here: The book of Nathan the Prophet (also 2 Chron. 9:29 and The Book of Gad the Seer. Among others are: The Book of Jasher (Josh. 10:13; 2 Sam. 1:18); The Book of the Acts of Solomon (I Ki. 11:41); The Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and The Visions of Iddo the Seer (2 Chron. 9:29; cp. 12:15; 13:22) The Book of Shemaiah the Prophets (2 Chron. 12:15; Isaiah’s The Acts of Uzziah 92 Chr. 26:22); and The Sayings of the Seers (2 Chr. 33:19). Some of the facts recorded in these now lost books appear, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, in the historical records of the O.T. The discoveries at and near Qumran included portions of over 200 non-canonical books.]
For example, if you’ll turn in 1 Chron. 29:29 I’ll show you an example of how these prophets worked. This gives you the tip off as to how the Bible came to be, who wrote the Bible. Well it tells you right here who wrote the Bible, you don’t have to resort to al this JEDP business that you get in your college religion class, which is a figment of 19th century imagination. “Now the acts of David, the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel, the seer, and in the book of Nathan, the prophet, and in the book of Gad, the seer.” These three men were prophets. They were men who were alive in their own generation, they wrote things down and their record became the base for inspired Scripture. That is how most of the prophetic literature was written. It was put together from the notebooks of the prophets.
Therefore in 1 Chronicles 29:29 you see one is Samuel; who did Samuel keep notes on? He kept notes on some of the judges; he kept notes on David; he kept notes on Saul; so where we get our stories in the Bible about David and Saul? Through Samuel, so you’re getting a prophetic view of history from this man. Then you come to the next one on the list and that’s Nathan. Who did Nathan look at? He’s looking at David again and he’s also looking at Solomon. Where do we get our stories about David and Solomon? We get them through Nathan. And Gad the Seer, he’s a man that comes on later. This is how we got the records; the prophets gave them to us. So you can be thankful to God for providing prophets to the nation Israel.
Back to Deut. 18, how else is the prophet in verse 15 related to Moses. He’s shown that in one way every prophet of the nation fulfilled Deut. 18:15, but in a unique sense there is only one man who fulfills Deut. 18:15 and that is the Lord Jesus Christ because Jesus Christ is a prophet unlike all other prophets and He had a perfect revelation of God, an absolutely perfect revelation of God and we’ll see a little bit of that later on. But this is what John means when he says “no man has seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, He is the One who has revealed the Father.” And Jesus saw God as no other man has seen Him and therefore Jesus is the supreme prophet of prophets, and therefore Jesus Christ is the complete fulfillment of verse 15, even though every other prophet in the Old Testament partially fulfilled it.
“…unto him ye shall hearken,” and this would be done, verse 16, “According to all that thou desire of the LORD thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying,” now what happened there? Turn to Deut. 5:23 and you’ll see what happened in the day of the assembly that set off the prophetic order. Why was it necessary to have prophets in the first place? In Deut. 5 we have the account of the Ten Commandments or better, more accurately put, the ten phrases and here God spoke audibly to about three million people. This was the rare time in history when God spoke so that if you were standing there you could her Him speak directly. He did that several other times in history. He spoke one time on the Mount of Transfiguration when He said “This is My Beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased.” If you had been standing there you would have heard Him speak. He spoke again on the Damascus Road to Paul and in Acts Paul even tells you what language God used to speak to Him in, it’s Hebrew. And God spoke to Paul in the Hebrew language on the Damascus Road. So there are times in history when God speaks audibly and this is one of them in verse 23 but let’s look at verse 22.
“These words the LORD spoke unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice; and he added no more.” Now that word “add no more” means He stopped, [can’t understand word] and that was the end of it. God from this point on would speak to the nation only through a mediator. So you have God, you have a mediator and you have the people. This mediator is called a prophet. So on verse 23, “And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness (for the mountain did burn with fire), that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders. [24] And ye said, Behold, the LORD our God has shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God doth talk with man, and he lives. [25] Now, therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us,” and the point here is that this is such an awesome spectacle in view of their own sinfulness that they can’t bear to be in the presence of God.
Now we don’t know all that is involved here, but I do know one thing, that in every major prophetic vision of God in the Bible, no matter what book it is, all the way down to the book of Revelation, every time God reveals His glory, even to these sainted men, they fall down because they stand His glory and you usually have a few angels with a resuscitation apparatus and they stay around and the resuscitate this person. They may have to give them artificial respiration or something and get them going again, but it’s something you’ll always see when these great visions occur in the Bible. So there’s something about the glory of God that we, in our natural bodies, cannot take. Therefore the prophetic role has been set off here in Deuteronomy.
If we turn back to Deut. 18 we an understand this phrase, verse 16, “According to all that you desire of the LORD thy God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, neither let me see this great fire any more, that I die not.” The point was that they couldn’t stand this, they said Oh God, we have to have a mediator, somebody to go into Your presence, come back to us and tell us what You said. That is the role of the prophet. This is the classical definition of a prophet, a mediator. But notice something, the prophet never changes the words. We’ll see this is a very dramatic way in a few verses.
Verse 17, “And the LORD said unto me, They have well spoken that which they have spoken. [18] I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren,” notice this, all prophets in the Bible are Jews; no Gentile prophets and you will never have a Gentile prophet and all this bologna about prophets living today, certain sects like to claim they have living prophets, don’t believe them. No prophet exists today except the Jews that existed in the Old Testament on up to the time of Christ and those immediately commissioned by Christ in the first century church, Eph. 2:20. So this prophet will be “from among their brethren,” not Gentiles, they will be Jews, “like unto thee, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him.” Now what does this mean? This means that you can’t get any more out of God coming directly to you and talking to you than you can out of the Bible. Do you realize that? You couldn’t get any more out of personally seeing Jesus Christ and having Him sit down and talk to you than you are getting right now from your Bible because the Bible gives you the words that He would say to you. This is what is the fantastic claim about the Bible.
And this is why the Bible says that if you disrespect the Word of God and you don’t care about it, and you never pay any attention about it and you go on experiences, oh, I don’t like doctrine, I just love the Lord, and all the rest of this garbage… how can you love someone that you don’t know, tell me. You can’t, the only way you can love is that you respond to somebody else who’s initiating to you. That’s the only possible way you can love, and therefore you can’t love someone that you know nothing about. And the only way you can love Jesus or love the Lord is to know about Him and the only place you can know about Him is in the Word of God. Therefore the Word of God is the most important thing to you and don’t you ever buy this stuff that you pick up in Christian devotional literature, Christian magazines and all the rest of the stuff because the editors that write this stuff don’t know any more than you do about it. They are people that haven’t studied the original languages, they are people who are not theologians and they just like to… well, let’s face it, they have a market, they’ve got to print something that people are going to buy, so they put out these sweet little articles about oh, we love all this experience and we have this thing and that thing and all the rest of it, but we hate doctrine. So this is how we get this attitude among believers today, oh we won’t bother with the Bible, etc. Don’t ever buy this; this book tells you the words of the Bible are God’s Words and if you don’t like those, you’re not going to like God; it’s as simple as that.
Verse 19, “And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto My words, which he shall speak in My name, I will require of it him.” What is the emphasis again? What are the words that the prophet is talking? They are the words that God has given him, not the thoughts, the words, the words that God has given him he will speak to you and you’d better listen, that’s what he’s saying. When these prophets in the Old Testament spoke and people didn’t listen and they pooh-poohed, they said oh ho-ho, Isaiah and his Bible classes. Do you know where those people wound up? They wound up on a captivity mission when Nebuchadnezzar came in and he took Jerusalem and those people that were laughing at Isaiah and Jeremiah and saying ha-ha ha-ha, look at all the hundreds of believers down at the Bible class of Jeremiah, and they all laughed him, just like a lot of people around here. Of course they’re the people that if something happened and this country goes down they’re going to be the cry babies, they’re going to be the people that always come to the pastor. Do you know who comes to the pastor for counseling? People that never pay attention to the Word of God when it’s taught. That’s always the case.
Now we have legitimate reasons for people to come for counseling and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t come to the pastor for counseling, but my experience and the experience of the man under whom I studied in Houston has been that 90% of counseling cases are by people who have either (1) not heard the Word, or (2) have heard the Word and not paid any attention to it. And this is why I am so insistent upon believers understanding the Word, because frankly it saves me a lot of time. If people will take this in and use it, you can be spiritually self-sustaining and you don’t have to run around for band-aids every six hours in the Christian life because you have it all in one convenient package between the covers of the Bible. The Word of God can be your means of sustaining you in any crisis of life if you know it.
So therefore he says in verse 19 he’s going to speak these in my name, and I am going to require it of him, and these are the words then that God is going to judge the nation by. Christians are going to be judged on the basis of what they have heard, what they’ve been exposed to and failed to utilize in the Christian life. So every time you study the Word of God that places a greater obligation on you to get with it because otherwise you’re just listening, tuning it in and making it go in one ear and out the other. God is going to hold you responsible and this is what it says here in verse 19.
Verse 20, “But the prophet, who shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded…” which I have not commanded, now here is the false prophet, then “you shalt not be afraid of him” at the end of verse 22. I want you to see that connection, I want you to skip down and watch the connection. “…speak a word in My name, which I have not commanded him to speak,” verse 22, “thou shalt not be afraid of him.” Do you see why? Because God has said on the one hand I want you to be afraid of him; if he’s speaking my words you’d better be afraid of him, but if he’s not speaking my words, don’t give him two minutes attention. You say how do you tell whether a man that gets up on TV, he’s on the radio, he writes a book, he talks to you, how do you know whether that person is really speaking the doctrine of God or not, the Word of God. There are two tests given in Scripture, one is given here and the other in chapter 21.
Verse 21, “And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD has not spoken,” here is test number one. Verse 22, “When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken,” now what do I mean by this? I think I read out of the introduction to Jeanne Dixon’s Gift of Prophecy and I think you will remember this quotation, page 10 of the introduction where this newspaper reporter is writing about Jeanne Dixon and says this, and this is remarkable because it fulfills Deut. 18:22. “Gradually I became sufficiently impressed with the phenomenal accuracy of her predictions to be believed but on occasion she missed,” underline “on occasion she missed.” “Had she always been right, some of her forebodings would have seemed to horrific for comfortable contemplation.” And what is he saying? He’s saying that Jeanne Dixon, no matter how much of a loud mouth she may be or her supporters, she may have 98% accuracy but the 2% disqualifies her.
A prophet in the Word of God must be 100% correct or nothing. This is the only test in God’s Word. If a person predicts something and it doesn’t come to pass, he is a phony and this is why Jeanne Dixon is a phony and this is why every person like her who writes books like her and all the garbage you’ll find in the newsstand are phonies because they do not predict accurately; they do not predict perfectly. A prophet of God has received the omniscient message, a message that stems from the omniscience of God and he can’t be wrong, not even in the details. In the Old Testament it said Messiah would come and He would come on an ass, and Jesus came riding this mule to the east gate of Jerusalem. Such a little detail as that, these prophets were accurate down to the last detail. You can read Daniel 9, here is the prophecy of Daniel’s 69 weeks and to the day Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem, on the very day that that prophecy ended, that Messiah would be cut off 483 years based on the lunar calendar, from the time of the decree of setting up Jerusalem. So you have prophecy, therefore, the first qualification is that it must be 100% accurate or it is phony. That’s the first step.
The second test is given in Deut. 13 and let’s review that second test for a moment. Here you are, you’ve listened to this prophecy; does it come true. Well suppose it does come true. The first test is if it doesn’t, then you know it’s wrong; if the prophecy doesn’t work out then you know the guy is a phony. So suppose the guy predicts something and it comes true, so now the first test doesn’t work because the first test depended on negative results. All right, you get a positive result. But there’s another test and the test is given here in Deut. 13, “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and gives thee a sign or a wonder, [2] And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spoke unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them, [3] Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams;” why? The second test is the doctrine taught by the prophet. If he teaches false doctrine and he prophesies and even if the prophecy comes true, you’re still not to follow him.
So these are the two tests that the people of the Old Testament gave every prophet. First he had to predict accurately 100% in his own [can’t understand word/s], this is why prophecy always has a near fulfillment; it must have a near fulfillment or the prophet could never verify himself to his own generation. So you have test number one given in Deut. 18, 100% accuracy. Test number two, Deut. 13 it must adhere to Mosaic Bible doctrine. It must be logically compatible with Moses’ teaching; either one of these tests disqualifies a person and under the Old Testament economy he was stoned to death.
So back to Deut. 18 and we’ll finish. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously, this means he has taken it upon himself, he has spoken it out of his own volition and you are not to be afraid of him, you are not to pay him any respect. Now how does this apply? We don’t have living prophets but we have dead prophets today and who are the dead prophets? The prophets that wrote your Bible; that book you hold in front of you is Bible, it’s prophecy. Now if someone comes up to you and does not teach the crucial doctrines, I’m not talking about nitpicking details here, I’m talking about the major doctrines of Scripture, and the person does not teach that, you are not to have any respect and you are to remove yourselves from under the authority of any person. That is a mandate; now it’s not a mandate to come join Lubbock Bible Church. This is not a commercial, but it’s simply a principle of God’s Word that whatever organization you may be in and the person under whom you must adhere and you’re in a position of submission to this person, you don’t go tear the place apart, you get out, because you are not to be afraid of him, you are not to respect him, as it says in the Hebrew. So just forget it. If this person isn’t going to teach Bible doctrine just forget it, stop playing games. So Bible doctrine is the important thing because today this is the expression of the Word of God.
Now I want to summarize the prophet for you so you’ll have a summary of him as well as the priest and the judge. The prophet can be summarized in five points. First of all a prophet is called by God and not by men. In other words, the initiative for the prophet lies with God, not with men and therefore there are going to be periods of silence in history where there is no living prophet. And if you live in a period of silence, such as we do under a closed Canon of Scripture, you can go through all the conjuring ceremonies and have all the experiences you want to and you’re not going to do a thing because God will give a prophet when He is ready.
Now we have periods of silence and because of our time I don’t want to spend time on this except to point to one verse, turn to Psalm 74:9 I’ll show you one case where the Bible authors knew they were living in a gap, in a prophetic gap where there was nobody speaking the Word of God. Other passages are 1 Sam. 3:1, Amos 8:11 and if you have an Apocrypha or a Catholic Bible around look at 1 Maccabees 4:42-46. If you don’t have an Apocrypha around I’ll read the passage.
[1 Sam. 3:1, “And the child Samuel ministered unto the LORD before Eli. And the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision.” Amos 8:11, “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.”]
Psalm 74:9, this is proof, now watch this, this is tremendous because it shows you that the people in the Old Testament could tell the difference between a prophet and a thinker. Today the modern anti-supernatural mentality of our generation would say well, these prophets were just men that had a certain insight, you know, they were the guys that could sit down and analyze the news, so to speak. It’s amazing these news commentators, they tell everybody how to do it, I’d love to elect them to office and see how they’d run the show. This is the connotation of a prophet but that’s not true. Here in Psalm 74 you can tell that the people were aware of the lack of a prophet. Verse 9, “We see not our signs; there is no more any prophet, neither is there among us any that knows how long.” Do you see that? Those people were very, very conscious and could tell you the difference between a prophet that was living in his own day in a generation that was dead, a generation that was living in silence when there was no prophet; they had brilliant men in all generations but brilliant men are not prophets. A prophet is a man who has been called by God to give God’s message.
The other passage that I’d like to read out of 1 Maccabees 4:42-46 is very illuminating. This is not inspired Scripture but it gives you the attitude the people had. 2 Maccabees is written in the second century before Christ and it covers the period of time between the close of the Old Testament and the opening of the New Testament. “He chose brainless priests,” this is the Maccabean brothers, by the way, if you want an exciting history sometime you look at the Maccabean Revolt, it’s a fantastic thing. You had one of the most totalitarian dictatorships known in the world. You had these Greek generals who had divided up Alexander’s kingdom and had taken possession of Palestine. And there was one man and he had some sons, and these sons were students of the Word of God, and they weren’t about to compromise anything. And it was one of the most heroic stories, to my way of thinking, probably almost parallels anything you’ll find in the Word of God. These men were stationed one day and the Greek army walked into town and they said all right, I want to take all these Jews and we want you to sit down here and make a sacrifice to… I forget the Greek king involved, so they all had to do this.
And they had a priest and this priest was supposed to lead the people in the worship of God and so the test came and all the people looked around to see what this priest was going to do because he was the leader in the town, he was the Levite that led this town’s worship, etc. Would the priest defy this man and be cut down by the Greek soldiers or would he go ahead and lead the people to worship this person. And so the priest, cowering as a coward would, went down and he worshiped at which time Maccabeus signaled his sons and his sons took a sword out and stabbed the priest in the back, and they took off and they became the Robin Hood’s of their day in the beginning of the Maccabean Revolt, they rode around as, you might say the Indians challenged the U. S. Army out on the plains, and they would hack away at the Greeks, and they would eventually attain freedom and it’s one of the most exciting stories you can read about this man and his sons. Eventually they are all killed if I remember the story correctly, but every one of these Maccabean sons, this is what the Jews celebrate by the Maccabean war, were great heroes; they would not compromise the Word of God and when the totalitarian forces descended upon their nation they fought with arms. And they did not compromise the Word of God. Where you have a large number of Bible-believing Christians intruding armies have a very tough time; this is the tradition of the Word of God, it’s a tradition of the Maccabean Revolt, etc.
This is Maccabeus and it’s at the time when they are setting up their worship, “And he chose brainless priests, devoted to the Law, and they cleansed the sanctuary and removed the defiled stones to an unclean place.” You see, the Greeks had defiled the place. “They deliberated what to do about the altar of burnt offering which had been profaned. They felt best to tear it down, lest it bring a reproach upon them for the Gentiles had defiled it. So they tore down the altar and stored the stones,” now watch what they did, they didn’t have a prophet, so what did thy do? They sat around, what are we going to do, we don’t have anybody to tell us the Word of God, so “they tore down the altar and stored the stones in a convenient place on the Temple hill until there should come a prophet to tell them what to do with them.” So you see, these people knew they were lacking a prophet, they knew this.
Second point summarizing the ministry of the prophet, they began with Moses and they terminated with Jesus. That’s the second thing.
The third thing about the prophetic office is that they had to pass the two tests of Deut. 13 and 18; they had to pass the tests before they could be authenticated to the people.
Fourth, they were called into the presence of God and given and exact message which included words. Let me show you one passage of Scripture, Gen. 32:4 and this will prove to you that they received the word for word message from God. I want you to see the context of this expression, “thus saith the_________ blank,” now usually you say “thus saith the Lord,” the prophet says “thus saith the Lord” and he announces his message, and what does that mean. You can see what it means from Gen. 32:4, this is not God speaking but it’s another use of this same phrase. “And he commanded them, saying, Thus shall ye speak unto my lord, Esau: Thy servant Jacob saith thus, I have sojourned with Laban, and stayed there until now.” In other words, “thus saith Jacob,” and what would they do? They would quote what Jacob told them. Another passage for you doubters, Gen. 45:9, same use of thus saith blank, this formula, this is a formula of an introduction of a quote. While this does not mean a literal quotation mark as in the English, it does mean that the words which follow must accurately, totally and completely convey the thought of the original. “Hast ye, and go up to my father, and say unto him, Thus saith thy son, Joseph: [quote] God hath made me lord of all Egypt; come down unto me, tarry not.” (end quote). That’s a form of introduction and this is the message the prophets always introduced their word by, therefore when they say “Thus saith the Lord” they mean to imply that what they are the words of God.
Point 5, there are no prophets today because of Eph. 2:2 and 1 Cor. 13:8; both those passages teach that prophecy has ceased, it was temporarily active under the Holy Spirit in the first generation of the Church, it is closed today because the Canon is closed.
So now we’ve come to the end of Deut. 18, we have seen the offices of the nation. We’ve seen the judge, we’ve seen the priest, we’ve seen the prophet, we’ve seen somebody called a king who is actually a super-judge and we’ll comment on them later, but these are the offices that must run the nation and they are a reminder to us who live in our country that we have a certain pattern that we can follow in our country to minimize suffering. The Word of God, remember the council in the 17th and 18th chapters, don’t centralize; when you start accumulating power with a group of individuals you are asking for trouble. So we can follow and make certain applications. The first application we can make from what we have learned in Deuteronomy is that civil justice today depends on the righteous standards of the Word of God and nothing else. If you don’t have a base for law and the essence of God, you don’t have a base for law.
The second thing you can say for over centralized government, you are asking for trouble, and the third thing you can say is that as Christians our total and complete allegiance is not to the government, out total and complete allegiance is to Jesus Christ. “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesars but unto God those things that are God’s.” And today we are called upon to be loyal to God, and as much as possible, compatible with the Word of God, loyal to Caesar.