The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Deuteronomy 18:15-20 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him. 16 This is according to all that you asked of the LORD your God in Horeb 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, lest I die.’ 17 And the LORD said to me, ‘They have spoken well. 18 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. 19 And 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. 20 But the prophet who shall speak a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he shall speak in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.’” (NASB)
Prophet, Priest, and King. Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, Immanuel, God with us. The Messiah. The Lion Of Judah. All the various titles that begin with the “Son of” . . . as in the Son of Abraham, Son of David, Son of God, Son of Man, etc. The SUN of Righteousness. The Christ, the Son of the Living God. Savior. All these and more the Bible applies to Jesus.
Jesus holds a multitude of names, titles, and honors and each of these names, titles, and honors teaches us something about the nature and work of the Son of God Jesus the Christ.
The Old Testament lesson for this morning is Deuteronomy 18:15-20. In these few verses, Moses focuses one of Jesus’s titles. The title of prophet, more specifically the Prophet. The one likened unto Moses but so much greater.
Moses had been God’s great prophet to Israel for more than forty years. He’d done exactly what a prophet was suppose to do. He passed on to the people, friend and foe alike what the Lord God had given him to say and to do.
The first Word of God Moses was commissioned by God to speak was the message of deliverance. God’s Word was going to set the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob free from slavery in Egypt.
In so doing He wasn’t just undoing some kind of injustice. He was delivering this people because He had given their forefathers and them the promise that His Messiah would be born of the Hebrew line.
Moses spoke God’s Word and the people were set free. Moses spoke God’s Word and the waters of the Red Sea parted. God wrote down His Word on stone tablets and had Moses deliver the Ten Commandments to His children. Moses went on to write the first five books of the Bible. They were the first installment on God’s written Word and are called the Torah.
For the people’s part, they showed themselves to be the sinners they were. They repaid God’s faithfulness to them by becoming unfaithful. They made idols for themselves and as a result of their idolatry, God punished them with 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. For 40 years they were a people without a county – nomads and even though Moses had nothing to do with their idolatry he remained their prophet and the leader for those 40 years.
By the end of the 40 years the generation who had fallen into the sin of idolatry had died off. Moses was perhaps the last survivor of that generation and he would share in the fate of the people to whom he ministered. Like the people of Moses’s generation, Moses himself though the Lord’s prophet would not be allowed to enter into the promise land. Moses died in the wilderness. Thereafter, the children of God went in to make the land their new home.
Moses’s time in this world had come to an end, but the office and job of prophet was far from finished. So in Deuteronomy 18 God tells Moses to tell the people that “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him.”
As it would turn out, of course that Prophet to come was far greater than Moses. The Prophet to come would be more than the sum total of all the prophets sent by God. This Prophet would possesses all the titles, offices, and honors created by God in His written and spoken Word, especially the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King.
The Lord God had taken the Hebrews out of Egypt – out of their temporal captivity and more importantly He took them out of their spiritual ignorance, their spiritual darkness. They went from being a people with only a vague idea of who God was. They only knew Him as the God of their forefathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who had made a covenant with the same, to be their God.
Then came Moses. Through the prophet of Moses’s and the Torah, they came to know the Lord God not as a theoretical fact of history, but personally as their delivered by His Words and deeds. In fact the Old Testament prophets were sent time and time again to remind the people who God was and did so by reminding them what He had done for them and for their forefathers.
He delivered them out of the hands of their enemies. He parted the Red Sea. He brought them to the Mount Sinai where He gave them His Law, with special attention to the first Table of the Law, Commandments 1, 2, and 3.
But God gave more than just the Law through Moses. The Law is what most people associate with Moses. Even the Gospel of John says, “The Law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17)
But Law wasn’t the only thing given through Moses. The whole Torah was given and spoken through him. The Torah encompasses the Law and the Gospel. It consists of God’s commands and judgments and His promises of the Messiah and forgiveness of sins.
Listen to what God said to Moses here in chapter 18 in regard to what His children said when they were given a glimpse of God and heard Him speak. “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to him. 16 This is according to all that you asked of the LORD your God in Horeb 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, lest I die.’”
When the children of God got a glimpse of the holiness that is God, they were terrified. They were terrified and wanted to get as far away from God as they could because they were unholy. They instinctively understood that they needed a mediator between God and sinner. Without a mediator, they would surely die.
Listen to what the Lord God said about their request. 17 “And the LORD said to me, ‘They have spoken well.” God doesn’t say that of human beings very often. “They have spoken well.” It’s rare they human beings speak well about anything spiritual, let alone God.
Fellowship with God is fundamental to our relationship with the Lord God. That’s why real in the flesh church services are fundamental. The problem is the holiness of God and the unholiness of sinners. They don’t go together. What’s the solution? The Lord God gives the promise again. He said 18 “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.”
God will send the antepenultimate Prophet, the final and complete Prophet, the One that is full of grace and truth. The One who surpasses the great prophet Moses. He would be the mediator between God and sinful man.
1 Timothy 2:5-7 “For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time.”
Hebrews 8:6 “He has obtained a more excellent ministry, to the extent that He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.”
As the children of Israel came closer to the promised land, Moses knew that the end of his life here on earth was near. So the Lord God harkens back to something they said 40 year earlier and gives them the Promise again. The promise of the Prophet Messiah.
Christ Jesus is the Word of God in flesh. He takes up the office of Prphet in the waters of His baptism and from that moment on does what a prophet is suppose to do. He speaks the Word of God in season and out of season to people of low degree and to men in the highest offices in the land.
When Jesus speaks all the world is affected! The Word does what it is spoken to do. In the Gospel lesson even the demon is affected. “There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.’ But Jesus rebuked him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’” (Mk 1:23–25). So it did. It came out of the man.
God not only promised that He would send the greatest of all prophets, He also issued two warnings. The first; 19 “And 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.” I will require it means that God Himself will judge the person who does not believe in and listen to the doctrines of His Son.
John 8:31-32 “So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you continue in My word, then you are truly My disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Here’s the second warning. 20 “But the prophet who shall speak a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he shall speak in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.”
False prophets have always been present visible Church. But today the visible church has unleashed a such a vast number of false doctrines, it seems an impossible task to drive them back. Churches that were once marked by some measure of Gospel truth, churches that had some measure of the depth and beauty of God’s grace and Christian worship in spirit and truth, can no longer be called Christian Churches. Their apostasy thorough they are beyond recall.
Lutherans and Lutheran churches who were once confirmed in the faith once delivered to the saints have long abandoned the words of God’s true prophets and the ultimate Prophet Jesus Christ, who Himself said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6
Christ Himself said of the church that (Mark 13:22) “False christs and false prophets will arise, and will provide signs and wonders, in order to mislead, if possible, the elect. 23 But beware; I have told you everything in advance.”
Christ is the ultimate Prophet; He speaks with absolute and divine authority. He left to His church His words and the New Testament office of prophet, priest, and king called the Word and Sacrament Ministry. When He said to those first New Testament pastors, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; but the one who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me,” (Luke 10:16) these words carry with them His absolute and divine authority.
The words that God spoke to Moses were fulfilled when God raised up Jesus, our Brother, from our midst. John begins his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn 1:1–5).
God raised the great Prophet as He promised. He raised up Jesus the Christ from the midst of His children Israelites. God the Father raised up His and our Prophet on the cross on Good Friday to die for our sins. The Great Prophet was raised up on Easter morning on account of our justification. On Ascension Day, Christ the Prophet was raised up into heaven to be seated at the right hand of God. Before His ascension Christ the prophet, He made sure that the office of prophet with a small “p” (pastors, priests, fathers, and ministers) would continue to speak His words. Your sins are forgiven you.
AMEN
May the peace that surpasses all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.