Spiritual Gifts and Love
Romans 12:6-9
Open your Bibles to
Romans, chapter 12. We're going to begin in verse 4. Tonight we're going to be wrapping
up on spiritual gifts and also looking primarily at a little more in-depth
study of the gift of prophecy. We always have to be aware of some of the spasms
that are going on in the contemporary environment. Sometimes some of you get a
little bored with some of those digressions because it's not in your realm. But
there are a lot of folks in this congregation physically and also who listen
online who are dealing with family members who are involved in lots of strange
things. Some of these family members have been squared away in the past but now
some of them are confused and are raising questions. You never quite realize
how many things people have questions about.
Some of you may even
come from backgrounds where some of these things weren't very clear so it's
important to clarify what the Word of God teaches on these things. To just pick
up the context a little bit starting in Romans 12:3 Paul begins to develop what
he means in the first two verses, first of all what he means about presenting
our bodies as a living sacrifice. In terms of what we're studying in Matthew
that means to be a genuine disciple or learner or student of Jesus who is
pursuing spiritual maturity through the study of God's Word. In contrast to
presenting ourselves as a living sacrifice we're not to be conformed to the
world. We're not to be pressed into the zeitgeist of the culture around us.
We're not to think like the people around us. We're to think and act
differently. Thinking should always precede action. We're not to be conformed
to the world but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that
our lives demonstrate that God's will is perfect and sufficient and complete.
Then Paul develops
ideas in Romans 12:3-8 related to the body of Christ and the fact that we have
all been given spiritual gifts and over the last several lessons I have gone
through a basic introduction and summary of what the New Testament teaches on
spiritual gifts. Romans 12:4-5 talks about the fact that the body of Christ is
an organism. It is made up of every believer in Christ from the first day of
the Church on the day of Pentecost in A.D. 33 until it is completed when Jesus Christ returns at the
Rapture. All are members of the body of Christ and all the members don't have
the same function. Each person is, as the Psalmist says, wonderfully made and
God has gifted us uniquely.
I talked about this a
little last week and we need to exploit the gifts that God has given us because
each person has a role in the team. I believe that in the microcosm of the
local church all of the gifts are going to be present if you have a group of
more than a couple of dozen believers. Whether all gifts are present or not
everyone needs to function in all of these areas, and it's important to do that,
but not through the sort of contemporary approach to taking various spiritual
gift tests to try to identify your spiritual gift but just to seek to serve the
body of Christ in whatever way it needs, in whatever way you can serve it, but
primarily focusing on spiritual growth and pursuing spiritual maturity.
And as we grow and as
we pursue opportunities to serve in the local body then we will eventually
maximize our efforts in the arena of wherever we're most effective which will
turn out to be where we are gifted. So there's a unity in the body but there
are differences in terms of how we are gifted and how we function within the
body. In Romans 12:5 Paul says, "We, being many, are one body in Christ,
and individually members of one another." Now that last phrase just runs
counter to American thinking. American thinking and American exceptionalism is
built on the concept of rugged individualism. In rugged individualism we don't
always make good team players but that runs counter to what the Bible says
here.
We're members of one
another. That means there's an inter-dependency within the body of Christ.
We're not Lone Rangers. We don't go out and operate on our own and we can't do
that. Every ministry is dependent upon a vast number of people who usually work
in the background in various volunteer capacities taking care of all the
different functions that must be taken care of or a ministry can't just operate
or go forward. I have recently been reading the third book in the trilogy
called "The Liberation Trilogy" by Rick Atkinson who has written this
trilogy on the war in Europe. It's exceptionally well written. It's just great
fun to read it. He has great vocabulary and I've had to look up a word or two
on about every two or three pages. It's not like I have a small vocabulary
either so he's quite challenging in some areas.
He differs in his
approach in talking about the war in that rather than focusing on the
personalities where it's sort of a biographical account dealing with the
different generals or dealing with the overall strategy of the war and the
tactics on the battlefield, he deals a lot with the everyday nuts and bolts of
every operation. He spends a lot of time talking about all the things that
needed to be accomplished logistically just to engage in a battle. It has
really impressed me. We could have probably made it into Berlin six months
earlier but we didn't have gas or oil or food or all kinds of things, like
bullets, grenades, and grenade launchers that needed to be pushed up to the
front. The role of transportation and the role of all the quartermaster units
and everything else just blows my mind how much was involved logistically in
bringing about the end of the war. I was given the third volume for Christmas
so I started off just before D-Day but I think I know the rest of the story so
I can do that.
The body of Christ is
like that. Often we look at the key figures, the names, the writers, the
pastors, the big names, but just as you say in the military, behind every
combat unit there are hundreds, if not thousands of people behind every single
soldier on the front line allowing him to do what he's doing. The same thing is
true for every pastor and every church. There are myriads of people who make
that happen and they are unsung. I believe that many of them are going to be
much, much closer to the throne of God when we get to heaven and they're going
to have more reward at the Judgment Seat than the people we usually see on the
frontlines today.
That's part of the
whole operation of the body of Christ. Everyone needs to be encouraged to be a
part of that. We are members of one another. We are interdependent. Romans 12:6
says, "Since
we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, {each of us is to
exercise them accordingly:} if prophecy, according to the proportion of his
faith." It's interesting when you get into looking at the grammar here
that it is a fresh sentence not dependent on the previous sentence so there's a
lot of discussion exactly how this should be understood. I think it probably
should be understood as a causative adverbial participle starting off with the
idea of "since" or "because" we have gifts differing
according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them. That's the general
command in that sentence.
That command governs the next several verses. We are to use
these gifts and the first gift he begins to talk about is prophecy. He's going
to work through a list of several gifts here. It's not as extensive a list as
in some of the other passages and he's going to describe how these gifts should
function. I've broken the 1 Corinthians 12 list into two separate lists because
they are distinct. One is given in 1 Corinthians 12:8-11 early in the passage
and the other is given later in the passage starting in 1 Corinthians 12:28.
Ephesians 4 gives the four foundational gifts for equipping
the saints to do the work of the ministry: apostles, prophets, evangelists, and
pastor-teachers. In Ephesians 4:11-12 the purpose for those gifts is to equip the
saints to do the work of ministry. The word there for ministry is the same word
for which we get our English word "deacon", DIAKONIA. This is the same word
that is translated "service" in Romans 12 as a spiritual gift. So it
is the role of apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers to train
and equip all the saints to function in the realm of ministry. The term DIAKONIA has a broad general sense
just related to service within the body of Christ and that can cover just about
any function within the body of Christ.
Now apostles and prophets are mentioned again in 1
Corinthians 12:28 and the gift of prophecy is mentioned in Romans 12, as well.
That's the first gift that's mentioned. As we've discussed some are temporary
gifts. There are different designations you'll run across in talking about the
temporary gifts. Some refer to them as "sign" gifts, some refer to
them as "miraculous" gifts but the best term is temporary gifts
because some were not revelatory or sign gifts but they are designated as the
Scripture says in 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 as temporary gifts. 1 Corinthians
12:8-11 consists exclusively of temporary gifts.
1 Corinthians 12:28 mentions apostles, prophets, healings,
and tongues which are temporary gifts and then talks about administrations or
in some translations leadership or helps which is the Greek word ANTILEPSIS which means simply to
assist or help someone. In our passage in Romans 12 prophecy is the first one
mentioned, then teaching, leadership in the sense of management, service [similar
to helps but a different word is used] mercy, exhortation, and giving.
Since prophecy is the first one that's mentioned, I want to
talk tonight about this gift. I've talked about it before, that within the
context of the modern charismatic movement, of course, the thinking was that
all of the gifts were permanent. The idea was that if we just acted like the 1st
century Church then everything would be wonderful. You often run into this sort
of utopic idealism among certain Christians that if we were just like the early
Church all would be well. Well, the early Church, pardon me, was a little bit
ignorant. They didn't have a lot of the vocabulary we have. They didn't have
words like "trinity". That wasn't coined until the middle of the 2nd
century. They weren't talking about dispensations the way we do. They were
confused about a lot of things. They weren't even that clear on salvation.
Once you drop off the cliff with the death of the last
apostle, the doctrine of salvation gets incredibly murky. In fact, if you read
through a lot of the early Church fathers between about A.D. 100 to 300, most of them
think you have to be baptized by water in order to be saved. They're very
confused about that. Some of them even think that physical water baptism
literally washes away sin. This is why in the beginning of the 4th
century after the Emperor Constantine became saved he would not get baptized
until he was pretty close to death because he believed baptism took care of all
your sins up to that point and afterwards they didn't quite know what to do
with those sins that came after baptism. Post-salvation sins have been a
problem for Christians ever since the early Church. That was just one
manifestation of it.
So there was a certain amount of confusion. It wasn't an
ideal period. There were conflicts. There were difficulties. There were
problems and I guess that's just because we're all sinners and consequently we
don't understand things. There was a lack of clarity even in the early Church.
In terms of understanding the Word of God I would much rather live today than
in the early Church period. In the 1st century under the apostles
and prophets you were also dependent on extra-Biblical revelation because there
wasn't a closed canon. There wasn't a sufficient revelation yet. It wasn't
until God had completed giving all of the information in the New Testament
through the Pauline, Petrine, and Johanine epistles that people in the New
Testament Church really understood this unique spiritual life that we have.
In fact, as I pointed out previously, the first epistle is
not written until about A.D. 47 or 48 which is about
14 or 15 years after the death of Christ. It's not until the 50s in the 1st
century that you get most of Paul's epistles and a few into the 60s. The Johanine
epistles are written quite late. Revelation is quite late. The Petrine epistles
are written before the fall of Rome, probably in the 60s so we just recognize
that they lacked a lot of information and so they were dependent upon people in
the local church who had the Biblical gift of prophecy who could give guidance
and correction.
Those who were prophets were a much larger group than those
who were apostles. We studied the doctrine of apostleship before. To be an
apostle you had to have been directly commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ and
you had to be a witness of His resurrection. That limited it. There were some
people who were called apostles in the New Testament who were not part of the
original eleven plus the Apostle Paul. They were apostles in a derivative
sense. An apostle is someone who has been commissioned to a particular task or
mission. So you have to determine who commissioned them and what the task was.
Jesus Christ only commissioned a limited number. Local churches commissioned Barnabas
and Junius and four or five others and they were sent out from local churches
to take the gospel to other places in terms of missionary activity. So they're
apostles in a lower case "a" sense, not the gift of apostle.
But you also had prophets. You had many more. In our study
of Acts we've looked at Agabus and we looked at the fact that Phillips's
daughters prophesied and we looked at some of the issues related to the gift of
prophecy. It's possible that when you look at the authorship of the New Testament
that several of the New Testament authors were those who had the gift of
prophecy because remember according to Ephesians 4:20 the apostles and prophets
are the foundation of the church. Not all of the writers of the New Testament
were Apostles. Mark was not an apostle. He was the amanuensis for Peter and
wrote his gospel under the guidance and authorization of Peter. It's very
possible Mark could have had the gift of prophecy. The same is true for Luke.
Luke was arguably a Gentile with no Jewish background. If so, he was the only Gentile
who wrote a New Testament book. He was not an apostle. He traveled with the
Apostle Paul. It's possible he had the gift of prophecy.
It's the same with James who writes the epistle of James.
James is the half-brother of our Lord Jesus Christ but this James was not an
apostle. This is not James, the brother of John; this is James the half-brother
of the humanity of Jesus. The same is true of Jude. Jude is also a half-brother
of Jesus and a full brother to James. They weren't even saved until after the
resurrection of Jesus, when He appeared to them. They're not apostles but they
wrote under the authority of God the Holy Spirit and it's very likely they
functioned under the terms of the gift of prophecy. They had authorization
through their association with the Apostles. That's what gave credence and
authority to their particular writings.
Nowadays, if you fast forward to the 20th century
when you get the modern charismatic movement, they want to resurrect these
temporary gifts. You have people I've mentioned before like Wayne Grudem who
used to teach at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and wrote his PhD
dissertation on the New Testament gift of prophecy. Now he's a president of
Phoenix Seminary. He is involved with the Vineyard Association of Churches,
which is part of what's called the "third wave of the Holy Spirit"
that started back under John Wimber in the 1970s. I've gone through this before
but I'll just hit a couple of his quotes.
According to Grudem, "Prophecy in the New Testament
churches was not equal to Scripture in authority but was simply a very human
and sometimes partially mistaken report of something the Holy Spirit brought to
someone's mind." He goes on to say, "New Testament prophecy is telling
something God has spontaneously brought to mind." You'll run into
Christians who have been influenced by this type of thinking and they will talk
very loosely about God speaking to them. This may be a soft form of mysticism
but it's still mysticism.
God has quit speaking today. He stopped speaking at the end
of the 1st century. There is no more direct revelation. The canon is
closed, that's what we mean by the closing of the canon. Whether God revealed
something to Paul and he wrote it down or He revealed it to Agabus and he
didn't write it down, it still was breathed out by God [2 Timothy 3:16-17] and
therefore it still has the authority of having come and originated from God and
is equally authoritative and equally infallible. Now what happens in the modern
sense is when people like Grudem come along and say that New Testament prophecy
is different form Old Testament prophecy and as a result they are minimizing
and diluting what's going on in the local church. It's a real source of error
because people think the so-called prophets today are giving out accurate
information.
There was a group in Kansas City that was a spin-off from
the Vineyard Movement and they were called the Kansas City Prophets. One of
their leaders was a guy named Mike Bickle who has gone on to head up an
organization called IHOP, the International House
of Prayer. They tend to bleed over and associate a lot with post-mils and
reconstructionists. A few years ago, if you remember, there was a lot of
controversy about the fact they were having a state-wide prayer meeting over at
Reliant Stadium and a lot of the people that influenced Governor Perry in that
were associated with Mike Bickle's group and some of these other groups.
It's because they had given rise to all of these really
confusing ideas related to prophecy. A lot of times these ideas filter out into
real time contemporary events and shake them. That's one of the reasons we need
to study this. Grudem says, "Much more commonly, prophecy and prophets
were used by ordinary Christians who spoke not with absolute Divine
authorityÉ" Now, where does he get that? Where in the Bible does it ever
shift the definition of prophecy from what it was in the Old Testament? It's a
word just like the kingdom of God that shows up at the very beginning of the
New Testament and there's no re-definition of the term. Anyone who would read
it or read of it would normally think of the Old Testament criterion as the
framework for understanding the gift of prophecy. So Grudem says they don't
have Divine authority but "they're simply reporting something God laid on
their hearts or brought to their minds". There are many indications that
this gift of prophecy had authority less than that of the Bible." Of
course his examples don't exactly support that. So he just makes that
contention.
On the other hand you have people like Bob Thomas who spoke
here several years ago on hermeneutics at the Chafer conference and he says that
"prophecy was speech inspired by the Spirit and therefore totally true and
authoritative." It doesn't change its meaning from the Old Testament to
the New Testament. Richard Gaffin who teaches at Westminster Seminary makes the
statement that "prophecy is not the interpretation of an already existing
inspired textÉ"
That addresses the problem that many of you have heard
that's very popular in some Baptist circles that prophecy is preaching.
Prophecy is not preaching. I've heard a lot of people say that. Prophecy is a
channel of direct revelation of God to your audience. That's different from
preaching. That's what Gaffin means when he says the interpretation of an
already inspired text is preaching so he's saying prophecy is not preaching or
oral tradition but is, itself the inspired non-derivative Word of God. That
means it is fresh revelation from God. So that's how we should understand
Biblical prophecy.
As I pointed out before the New Testament gift of prophecy
is not redefined in the New Testament. New Testament prophets were seen as
equal in divine authority as New Testament apostles [Ephesians 2:20]. Early
Church writing from the late 1st century, about A.D. 60 or 70 into the early 2nd
century understood that the gift of prophecy to be identical with the Old
Testament gift of prophecy and still applied the same tests of authentication
to New Testament prophetic claims and that New Testament prophecy died out with
the closing of the canon of Scripture.
Now critical to understanding prophecy is the test for
prophecy given in Deuteronomy 13:1-5 and Deuteronomy 18:9-22. So turn with me
to Deuteronomy 13 to begin. We'll just cover a few of the important principles
laid down here in Deuteronomy 13. First of all if you look at Deuteronomy 13:1
you should be making notes in the top margin of this chapter. You should write
"tests for prophet". That way you can find it the next time the topic
comes up. You should also write in the margin Deuteronomy 18:9-22 so the next
time you look at Deuteronomy 13 you'll see that you're supposed to go to look
at Deuteronomy 18 as well.
Moses starts off saying, "If a prophet or a dreamer of
dreamsÉ" Notice he doesn't act as if this isn't going to happen. He
doesn't say this is a pseudo-prophet or a pseudo-dreamer. He doesn't qualify
anything. He recognizes that someone is going to come up with some sort of
legitimate revelatory background. Legitimate not in the sense that it comes
from God but in the sense that he's not just making it up out of whole cloth,
either. He goes on to say, "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises
among you and gives you a sign or a wonderÉ"
Now a lot of what we see today in contemporary healing
events is just fraudulent. They're just all kinds of things that go on that are
just totally bogus but he's assuming for the sake of argument that there's some
sort of revelation, maybe not from God but some sort of revelation from Satan
or a demon or something and that he has the ability to perform a miracle. We
would call it a pseudo-miracle because it's not from God but he's not denying
that something miraculous occurs. This is the kind of thing that will happen in
the Tribulation period under the authority of the false prophet. There will be
true miracles that take place but the origin of that power doesn't come from
God.
So there's a real healing or a real miracle that takes
place. In Deuteronomy 13:2 he says, "and the sign or the wonder comes
trueÉ" See he's not questioning at all the legitimacy of what happens.
That's what we would do. We'd say, "Well that really didn't
happened." So he's assuming it did happen. Don't question the experience.
We have to go back to two basic principles in life. Are you going to evaluate
your experience from the Word of God or are you going to evaluate the Word of God
on the basis of your experience? Now if you're evaluating it on the basis of
your experience or you talk to people who are evaluating it on the basis of
their experience you'll be confused. For example we have some of those books
like Is Heaven
Real? It's the story of a three-year old boy who had appendicitis and he
went under surgery and while he was under surgery he saw a lot of things. Now
we can't explain how he came to know some of the things he came to know.
What most people do is challenge his experience. You can't
challenge someone's experience. If someone says, "Well, this happened to
me." Great. Fine. I'm not going to say it didn't happen to you. I'm going
to say maybe you didn't interpret it correctly. You can't challenge a person's
experience. I remember a lady in my church in Irving about 30 years ago and she
had gone to a faith healing thing the night before she was to have an operation
on cancer, major surgery on stomach cancer. She felt some sort of power at the
faith healing and when she went in the next day to the surgery they could find
no evidence of the cancer. Now I can't explain that but I don't have to. The
Word of God doesn't tell me I have to explain it. There are lots of things in
this life I can't explain. I don't know enough information.
It's just like in marriage counseling. People come in and
they tell you what's going on in their marriage but that's their rather limited
view and interpretation of what's going on. They don't even have enough
information to know what's actually going on between them and their spouse. If
someone comes in and say they had a certain experience you get their
interpretation of something that happened and you get less than one tenth of
one percent of the facts. It's sometimes impossible to get the rest of the
facts. We do live in the devil's world and we're in an invisible warfare. There
are lots of things going on that we're unaware of. So I don't have to explain
certain things that happened and what's going on. I just know what God's Word
told me and what God told me is sufficient.
Therefore, whatever you think happened your interpretation
is wrong if it's contrary to the Word of God, and that's all I need to know. So
here's a case in point where there's someone who performs a miracle, claims to
be a prophet, claims to be a dreamer of dreams and he claims the sign and
wonder and it actually comes to pass. But the issue isn't his experience. The
issue isn't his claim. The issue is what does he teach? It's the content of his
message that determines if he's from God or not, not whether he performs a
miracle.
Today we have people who think if someone performed a
miracle they must be right. Don't get distracted by the miracle. Don't get
distracted by the claim of a sign or a wonder. Don't get distracted by the
experience. Focus on the Word of God. This is what Moses says about this person
who comes along and they perform this miracle and they say, "Let us go
after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them," See the
message is false. That's how you know they're a false prophet: not because the
miracle was screwy but because the message was screwy. It's the content that
matters. Going after other gods is a direct contradiction of the Word of God.
See you have to judge your experience by the Word of God, not judge the Word of
God by your experience.
The command from Moses comes in Deuteronomy 13:4, "You
shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for
the LORD your God is testing you to
find out if you love the LORD your God with all your
heart and with all your soul." See, God is going to test you by having
someone come into your life that performs something that you can evaluate. It's
a real healing. It's a real miracle. God allowed that miracle to happen to test
you. Are you going to put the Word of God first or are you going to put
experience first?
Then comes the command in Deuteronomy 13:4-5, "You
shall follow the LORD your God and fear Him; and
you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him, and cling to
Him. But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because
he has counseled rebellion against the LORD your God who brought you
from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, to seduce
you from the way in which the LORD your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil
from among you."
That's a harsh penalty. It's a capital crime to claim to be
speaking for God when you're not. Now there's nothing that seems to change that
in the New Testament: that the prophet is the channel for direct revelation
from God and is the most serious claim you can make because if you're wrong it
would invoke the death penalty. Now in the New Testament you're not under the
Mosaic Law but the principle of the seriousness of the claim to be a spokesman
for God continues to be the same.
Now let's go to the second passage that gives us a test for
genuine prophecy and that starts in Deuteronomy 18:9. In Deuteronomy 17 and 18
the broad context is that Moses is giving regulations for the leadership.
Regulations related to kings, regulations related to the priests and the
Levites and regulations related to prophets. In Deuteronomy 18:9, he says,
"When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you
shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations." Don't
fall into the trap of the false prophets and the false prophecies of the
religions around you. "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes
his son or his daughter pass through the fire, who uses divination, one who
practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who
casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead."
These are all aspects of demonism. "For whoever does these things is
detestable to the LORD." So he's listing
aspects related to some sort of revelation into the future or the dead that
doesn't come from God.
Then we come to Deuteronomy 18:15. When we look at verses 15-22
we have to recognize that there are two divisions here. The first is
Deuteronomy 18:15-19 and then Deuteronomy 18:20-22. In verses 15-19 we're
talking about one of the greatest prophecies about the Messiah in the Old
Testament. It says, "The LORD your God will raise up for
you a prophet like me [Moses] from among you, from your countrymen, you shall
listen to him." This is a Messianic prophecy.
There are some people who deny that. You may have a study
Bible that doesn't identify this as such but this is a Messianic prophecy. We
know this first of all because of the wider context that I talked about because
He's the head of all offices and authorities in surrounding passages. He's head
of the priests, the kings, and the prophets. Secondly, the immediate context
which I just read to you in Deuteronomy 18:9-14 talks about the negatives of
rejecting paganism and divinations and that contrasts with the Messiah who is
going to be the perfect and complete revelation of God. Third, the discussion
of false prophets in Deuteronomy 18:18-22 is consistent with an individual
prophet in Deuteronomy 18:15-19. This is important to understand.
In verses 15-19 he talks about [a] prophet. The word
"prophet" is without the definite article so in the way he's
describing this he's describing an individual. When you get into verses 20-22
he's talking about general principles relating to the prophets. So the definite
article is used in verses 20-22 in terms of stating gnomic principles of
discerning who's a prophet. So in verses 15-19 we're talking about a specific
individual prophet using the singular noun.
We see this in a general contrast that occurs beginning in
verse 20. The Hebrew word that is translated "but" is the Hebrew word
ak which
is sort of a soft word in contrast so it is contrasting these prophets who have
the arrogance to speak the word in My name with the true Prophet mentioned in
verses 15-19. The noun that's used in verses 15-19 is a singular noun defined
as a specific individual, one who is like Moses. When you get into verses 20-22
it includes the article and it is the generic use of the article indicating
anyone in this class who claims to be a prophet. So this just gives you a
little bit of the framework here. It's a very important passage in terms of understanding
its exegesis.
A young woman who graduated from Trinity Seminary wrote a
PhD dissertation on this as a Messianic prophecy. She did a fabulous job on
this and pointed out about six things that are important to understand. One is
that the singular of nabiy here points to a specific individual. It's amazing how many
so-called exegetes overlook that. They want to say that because it's singular
it's a collective noun but when a collective noun is intended that's usually
followed in the context with a mix of singular and plural pronouns. That
doesn't occur here. All you have is singular pronouns so grammatically it
points to a single individual.
The second thing which you get from the context is the
prophet is compared to a single, exalted individual, Moses. So there's a
comparison of kind to kind or apples to apples which means since he's compared
to an individual the prophet here must be an individual as well. The individual
future prophet is compared to the individual Moses. Third, in the history of
the Old Testament period no ordinary prophet exercised all the authority Moses
did. Moses had legislative authority, executive authority, priestly authority,
and mediatorial authority and no other prophet in the Old Testament had that
degree of authority.
Fourth, the prophet who is like Moses is so unique that only
the Messiah could fulfill those qualifications. Numbers 12:6-8 after Moses had
organized the elders and God said that he would speak to them and would speak
to Miriam and to Aaron. But God said, "I don't speak to them mouth to
mouth like I speak to you, Moses." Moses had a unique relationship with
God and the revelation he received from God was unique form everyone else
because of his intimacy with God. In Deuteronomy 34:10 at the conclusion of
Deuteronomy written after Moses died the writer writes at the end that to the
time that he wrote no prophet had arisen. That means it's not Joshua, not
Nathan, not Gad, not Isaiah, and not Jeremiah. This unique prophet had not yet
come by the time of the exile.
So this is a Messianic prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:15-19.
"The LORD your God will raise up for
you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to
him. This is according to all that you asked of the LORD your God in Horeb [Mt.
Sinai] on the day of the assembly, saying, 'Let me not hear again the voice of
the LORD my God, let me not see
this great fire anymore, or I will die.' " Remember at Mt. Horeb when God
began to speak to them they all cowered. They were afraid. The very voice of
God just scared them to death and they just fell on their face and they said
Moses had to talk to God because they couldn't stand to hear His voice. It's
too much.
"The LORD said to me, 'They have spoken well. I will raise up a
prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his
mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. It shall come about
that whoever will not listen to My words which he shall speak
in My name, I Myself will require {it} of him.' " There will be judgment
on those who reject Him. Then we have the contrast in verse 20. "But the
prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded
him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall
die."
The Hebrew there means to speak arrogantly and to reject
authority. It's saying if the prophet claims falsely that God spoke to him, he
shall die. How many times I've heard people say that. That's presumption. Once
again it's a death penalty to claim God spoke to you falsely. This applies to anyone who claims to be
a prophet.
Then we have a validation. "You may say in your heart,
'How will we know the word which the LORD has not spoken?' "
They're asking how to evaluate a prophet. Anyone can come along and claim God
said something to him. How do we know that God didn't speak to them? Well,
that's Deuteronomy 18:22, "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not
come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The
prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him."
Even though there were many prophets who gave long-term prophecies that
wouldn't be fulfilled in their lifetime, they all gave numerous short-term
prophecies that could validate that they were genuine prophets. You could test
them to see if these things came to pass. If it doesn't come to pass then
that's the thing the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it
presumptuously. That's the criteria.
That goes directly again Grudem's assertion that the New
Testament prophet isn't speaking with the authority of God and can make
mistakes. Grudem says he's going to misidentify things and that's okay because
he's a New Testament prophet and he just doesn't have God with him, really.
That just destroys the authority of God's Word because these people are saying
God told them. Well, either God told you or He didn't. So the punishment is
death in Deuteronomy 18:22. So this gives us the primary test for being a
prophet.
Now there's another thing that comes along that gives us a
connection with the Old Testament. Turn to Joel 2. Joel is quoted by Peter on
the Day of Pentecost. In Joel 2:28, Joel is predicting what will take place on
the Day of the Lord. "It shall come to pass afterwards {after the
Tribulation} that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind and your sons and
daughters will prophesy." Now that's not the spiritual gift of prophecy
that we have in the Church because there was a gift of prophecy in the Old
Testament under Israel. There'll be a gift of prophecy in the Tribulation
because we're back in the Age of Israel. But it's not the spiritual gift of
prophecy which is designed as something unique for the Church, the body of
Christ, but there's a contention here that your sons and your daughters will
prophesy.
The meaning of prophecy here is the same as it's been all
through the Old Testament so when Peter quotes it in Acts 2 he doesn't change
the meaning of the word "prophecy". Prophecy is the same in the New
Testament as it was in the Old Testament. That's the only point I'm making
there. The way the word is used from the very beginning of the New Testament in
Acts 2 it comes out of an Old Testament quote and means the same thing as it
did in the Old Testament. It means divinely given revelation mediated through a
prophet that's not based on any interpretation of an already given revelation
or the Word of God.
That brings us up to a conclusion in Romans 12 that those
who prophesy in "proportion to our faith" which means in accordance
to the standard of faith have a check. Even in the Old Testament it had a
check. Whatever the prophet said had to conform and could not contradict
already accepted Divine revelation. So there was a standard. A prophet could
just come along and say anything and you couldn't just take it for granted. You
had to evaluate it on the basis of previously accepted truth. That's the same
thing that Paul says here is that if you prophesy it's in proportion or
according to the standard of faith.
Then he's going to go into other spiritual gifts which we'll
look at next time related to ministry, teaching, exhorting, and giving, and
then we'll get into the next section which talks about the foundation for
utilizing everything, which is love.