The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. (Deuteronomy 18:15)This passage gives two tests for the office of prophet: 1) If a person claims to speak in the name of another god, no matter how accurate his prediction, that person is not a prophet and must be put to death. 2) If a person claims to speak in the name of the Lord, but what he says does not come true, then that person is not a prophet and must be put to death.
But the words spoken by the prophets were not necessarily predictive in nature. Most of the prophet's message was forthtelling rather than foretelling. In other words, most of what a prophet spoke was God's message for those to whom he was speaking. This is not to say there is no benefit for the 21st century reader of such prophecies, but that the message made sense to the people who were physically hearing it. In other words, the message for us should not be 180° opposite (totally unrelated) to the message intended for the original audience.
In Jesus' day, when people read that God would raise up a prophet like Moses from among the people of Israel, that Moses-like prophet was considered to be none other than Jesus Christ himself. When we get to the book of Matthew, we'll see to what great lengths that gospel writer went to identify Jesus with Moses.
On the verses about when they have a king, this verse stood out to me: (Deut 17.17) He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. I was thinking about how this later applied to Soloman, the wisest man on earth. Even with all his wisdom, his many wives ended up leading him astray. I also thought it interesting that the kings were supposesd to get a copy of the laws/scriptures and to read them every day so they could follow God better and have a long reign.
ReplyDeleteNot only that, Merry, Solomon's actions in 1 Kings 10:28-11:4 so closely mirror Moses' prohibitions from Deuteronomy 17:16,17, that it's difficult to believe the Deuteronomy passage was written before the 1 Kings passage. In fact, some would say it wasn't.
ReplyDeleteThere's some good foundational instruction in here, I note the entire judicial system in a nutshell (no partiality, no bribes, multiple witnesses) for instance. Interesting that the witnesses had to be first to put the person to death before others could join in - good nerve-wracking test for anyone who was false in their testimony.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Merry's point - who a person is surrounded by and joined to *definitely* will affect what they are used to being exposed to day-to-day. I like the leaders needing to study up on the law as well.
- Amy