Deuteronomy 18:15-20
“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. 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.’
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen. This morning's Old Testament reading is a well known story for for many people. It's a popular one for kids. We often tell this is a big feature strongly in VBS curricula, or in Sunday school curricula, because it's got a kid in it. Right? We've we've heard this story over and over again. And you imagine Samuel is in the temple? Well, that would have been the tabernacle at the time. Usually in our imaginations. He's like an eight year old boy, about that tall. And he hears the Word of the Lord and responds with joy. Pretty great, right? This story is one of those stories. There are lots of them, where we forget about the details. And imagine the story in our heads. We have lots of stories that have the traditional way of learning them have covered up with the Bible actually says, I think the most important one is the Christmas story from Luke. Do you know that story, right? Mary and Joseph, go to Bethlehem. Mary is giant. She's like nine and a half months pregnant. She's riding on a donkey. And just as they see the city of Bethlehem she goes, Oh. And Joseph goes banging on every Motel Six in the town. Right. John, just about everything I told you in that story is not in the Bible. No donkey. No in no rush to the pregnancy. You're like, wait, wait, wait. The Bible says in their word hotels back in the day. They didn't exist. That word is just, there is no room in the upper room of the house. Just about everything that we imagine in that story comes from tradition. And the retelling. What the Bible says is they went to Bethlehem, and the child was born. And that's it. And they placed him in a manger, because the guest room was full of other stories like that. And this one that we read today, sent about Samuel is like that. Samuel was likely not an eight year old boy. He was a young man, having served Eli in the tabernacle for many, many years. After Hannah, his mother had dropped him off. And the history of Samuel goes like that. So Hannah comes to the tabernacle, she can't have a baby. And the other wife of her husband is teasing her because of it. Because that's what happens when you have two wives. They fight over that kind of stuff in the Old Testament. So she's depressed, she's upset. She goes to the temple and she prays give me a child and I will give him to you, Lord. She has a baby Samuel. After the baby is weaned. She brings him to Eli and says here to take the child. And I want you all to know that the Punic household is not taking children as offerings.
Over the last couple of weeks, we've had something of a mini sermon series, all about the prophets. We began with Samuel, who was called to be a prophet as a young man in the temple. God came to him with a message of judgment concerning his, his surrogate father, Eli, we asked a question, do we tell the whole story? Did Samuel tell the whole story about judgment, Eli? And what about us? And we were reminded that the salvation we have in Jesus Christ doesn't make sense unless we also talk about the judgment of God on sin. You need to know what you're saved from, for a savior to make sense. Last week, we talked about Jonah, God sent the prophet Jonah to Nineveh with a simple message, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And what was amazing is the people heard that message of judgment and said, Let's repent. Show showed us that God's message of judgment always comes with the offer of forgiveness, just as Jesus proclaimed repentance, and believe in the gospel, so you can receive forgiveness. Now, today, in our Old Testament reading, we are seeing Moses established the Office of Prophet in ancient Israel. The Book of Deuteronomy comes at the end of Moses, his life, God's people have been wandering through the wilderness for 40 years, they are now at the edge of the promised land. And Moses gives them a series of instructions before they cross over. One of those instructions is about the prophet. He says, 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 to Moses actually had kind of a unique relationship with God. He was the one who spoke to God on a regular basis. If you look throughout those stories, it's almost like he could go to God and kind of have a conversation. Strange, right? But Moses, his main job was to hear the Word of God and speak it to the people to guide them through the wilderness, and call them back to the way of life. And now that Moses is about to go up to the top of the mountain to die, he says, God is going to raise up someone like me, for you, for your own good, a prophet that would give them the word of God. And he talks about what will happen, why they need this. He says, 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 anymore, lest I die. You might go, what? This is a part of the story of Moses and God's people at Mount Sinai, also called Mount Horeb, where they get there, and God calls a sacred assembly. We are used to reading in our lectionary, the part where Moses goes all the way up to the top, and he speaks to God and he gets the 10 commandments, and he's there for 40 days and 40 nights. We don't always read the part where God speaks to the whole of the people gathered around the base of the mountain. He is up on the top and there are clouds and fire and lightning, and it is super scary. And he says the 10 commandments to them, and all the people go don't talk to us again. We're so scared. Which I would be too, right. You're at the base of the mountain. And this like fire and lightning and crazy stuff has happened all that and the booming voice of God calls out I would Pareek out. I bet you would too. So God says that He will raise up a prophet. And what that means is from that moment on, God doesn't speak to His people generally. He speaks to them through the voice of someone he calls to give them the message that he sent. And that's the second Part of being a prophet is that there is a message that God wants that person to speak. He says, 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 commend him for. So part of this is that God will choose someone from among the people of Israel, to give this message to, and they will speak everything that God sets. And we see that men like Samuel, men like Jonah, Elijah, who was the chief of the prophets, the example that all the prophets would follow, after the Kings start going the wrong direction. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and all of the 12, at the end of the Old Testament, each one of these was a person like that, someone that God chose to speak His word to Israel, so that they could hear the Word of God. There's one more thing. He says, and whoever will not listen to my words, that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. So what that means is, God's people were supposed to listen, the word of the Prophet was binding on them. God threatened all those who would turn away from those words. Now you can ask, Why does Israel need a prophet? Doesn't that make sense? That kind of question. Especially if you are one of those people at the base of that mountain, right? You're looking up at the mountain, and at the top, you see the fire of God and the clouds and the lightning, and you hear the booming voice, and you're so scared that you say, never talked to me again. Wouldn't you remember that? Wouldn't you be like, That guy is pretty powerful and kind of scary, I should do what he says. You would think, right? And facts. They don't do over and over and over again. The people of God and Moses, go through this dance, they complain, God sends a punishment, and Moses has to get has to deal with it. And then God takes it away. God would redo things like give them manna bread on the ground every morning, and feed them quail that would fall out of the sky. You give them water out of Iraq, and over and over again, they would turn away. And the same thing happens for us. I think. That's because the same thing that infected ancient Israel does the same thing that's in every human beings heart, the desire to be like God, not creatures, not people who accept their role in God's place of creation. But people who want to forge our own way, who think that we know what's right. Because we all have a little bit of Adam and Eve in us. You know, the word that God gave them. He said, You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for on the day that you eat of it, you shall die. And what happened? Not too long later, Adam and Eve are at the tree. And the serpent says, Did God really say? God really tell you that they kind of want to be like God. So they both go for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of evil, because they want that knowledge and they want to be their own masters, to make their own decisions, to turn away from God's path. Israel needed a voice to constantly call them back. Because they had that same Adam and Eve inside them, calling them their own way. And so God sent them the prophets gave them Moses, when they were wandering through the wilderness. It gave them Samuel when they needed a leader and finally chose a king gave them Elijah when those kings had that Adam in them, turn them away from God and lead the people after a false god. ads.
And he kept doing it over and over and over again. Until finally it came to Jesus. Jesus, the ultimate and true prophet. Because that's the one that Moses was really thinking about. When he looked ahead to find a prophet among us, from our brothers. It was Jesus, the Son of God, who became one of us to speak God's word to all of humanity. Hebrews one says, 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. That final ultimate prophet is Jesus, the only one who was there with a father who came to earth to let us know everything we need for salvation. Because Jesus, this prophet is here for our good to give us this message of life, and hope. John one says, no one has ever seen God, the only God who is at the father side, he has made him known is the son, who is from the father's side, was sent into the world to proclaim a very simple message of grace and love, and the Father's will. Now, one thing that our lectionary doesn't give us is a simple task to understand who is a prophet it, Moses tells the people right after our reading, in verses 21, and 22, it goes like this. 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 the Lord has not spoken? Well, that seems pretty easy, right? If a false prophet predicts something, and it doesn't happen, then they're a false prophet. Plain and easy. Nothing that the God says, falls flat. Everything that God says, comes true. And what we see, in Jesus Christ, are words that always come true words of a prophet who teaches with authority. And that's what happens in our gospel reading. Jesus comes into the Sabbath, and he teaches with authority, the message of God, and then he backs it up with the power of His words, a demon comes before him. And he casts it out, very simply be silent, and come out of him. That is 1234567 words. And the demon can't handle it. The power of the Prophet, the power of the Son of God. But even better than that, Jesus predicts something that would happen. He tells his disciples throughout the gospel, that the Son of Man will be betrayed and handed over and crucified. And after three days rise, and then it happens. Isn't that amazing? If someone came to you and said, Hey, I'm gonna go die, be buried and come up after three days. You think they were crazy? To say No way. But Jesus said it. And it happened. And his message is for us, to guide us back to eternal life. Every time that little Adam or Eve in US causes us to pull away to say to ourselves, I am my own true Master. I don't need the word of God. And I think that's what we do. Each of us has something that pulls us away from that little bit of our sinful nature that wants us to make our own decisions to forge our own path, to turn away from the call of God. And I think for us, it's not that we chase after the false gods that the Old Testament people did. I think for us, it's that we want to be Gods ourselves. I mean, none of us would say that we wouldn't be like, Oh, my God today, but we do have a lot of control over our lives, more than any people at any time in history, think about your home, like my home, it can be 40 degrees outside, and 75 degrees in my house. Do you know how crazy that is in the history of the world? How nuts that is. And I could hit a button and drop it to 74 degrees or the other direction and make it 76 degrees. It can be 105 degrees outside. And you can have your house at 75. Or if you're really, really rich 60. Right? Isn't that crazy? What about what about this? How many of you have or know someone who has a joint replacement? Isn't it kind of weird? Like, our joints were out. And the doctors are like I have a new one. No big deal. Right now, we have so much control over our lives, so much control over our bodies, and we think I can do whatever I can manage my world create my life. And when we do it our sin can pull us away from Christ. As our hearts say, Well, maybe God didn't say that. And so we hear the message of Jesus again and again, to call us back to him to call us back to His love and His grace, because he gives us forgiveness, and life. Because Christianity isn't really a knowledge thing. It's a constant pull back to the message of Christ, a constant calling back to the way that Jesus wants us to be to receiving His grace and hearing His word because our hearts are constantly trying to pull us away. And we need to hear that voice of the Prophet with His love and His peace, to fight against that little atom and that little Eve and turn us back to him. And what a joy, that we have a Savior who comes to speak that word of God to us all the time and turn us back to life. In his name, amen.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai