Deuteronomy 18:9-14 “When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you. You shall be blameless before the LORD your God, for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this.God knows the human heart better than anyone. He made it. And God knows how impatient we get with life, with our circumstances, and with Him. He also knows we are fickle, unfaithful, that we are easily led astray. God gave his people the Law, and the priesthood to teach the Law. It was the duty of the Levites to instruct the people in the Torah. God also anticipated what would happen years down the road when the people saw the false worship of those around them and desired to follow some of the methods of communication which those people had invented to converse with their false gods. Let's look at them: (1) appeasement of or purchase of favor through human sacrifice, (2) the attempt to tell the future through the reading of signs in nature, (3) the attempt to communicate with the dead for the same reason.
If the highest act of virtue is bringing proper praise and glory to God, then it follows that the highest crime that can be committed is to take that which properly and only belongs to God and give it to someone or something else. If we trust in God with all our heart, then we have no need of seeking any sort of divine or supernatural knowledge elsewhere. God had called them away from superstition and false worship and toward spiritual and theological truth. To go back was a slap in the face of the Holy.
Deuteronomy 18:15-19 “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.Did you recognize the reference to our passage from the previous post? Here, however, Moses tells us more of what God said in that day. God made a promise to send a prophet like Moses to speak to them so that He would never again have to speak to them in the way that he did that day at Sinai. There is a two-fold fulfillment of this prophecy in Israel's history. Let us look at the first:
Deuteronomy 18:20-22 But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.The first part of the fulfillment of this promise is in the many prophets God sent to Israel from Moses to Malachi of whom Isaiah was one. These spoke God's word to God's people. They were to be tested for authenticity and a method of discernment is given. These did not add to the Torah in the sense of changing it or contradicting it. Their prophecies were consistent with the Torah and could be tested by it. They pointed the people back to God and to God's Law and reprimanded them for breaking it. In this they were reminders of what Moses had been and they also typified the second and truest fulfillment of the promise which is found in Jesus Christ. Observe the words of Peter in Acts 3 from his sermon on Solomon's porch:
"But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, ‘The LORD God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ And all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days. You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.”There's our passage again. God promised a Prophet. All of the pre-Prophet prophets spoke of him . . . including Isaiah. They pointed back to the Torah given through Moses, but also they pointed forward to the Prophet who would come after. What was it the author of Hebrews said again? We never did finish that quotation:
"Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world."And John echoes this as well in John 1:17--
"For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."This is what Isaiah is to us. He is a bridge from Moses to Jesus. He links them together.
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