Deuteronomy 18:15 | Reading the OT in the NT

Good morning, everybody.
Welcome. Glad to have you here.
We’re going to jump in to our ongoing study here today,
looking at the Old Testament and the New.
It’s going to be a little bit of a different passage than what we’ve had in some ways.
Other ways it may strike you as being familiar,
but indeed, we’re going to begin in Deuteronomy,
as you see listed there.
So I’d have you turn in your Bible to Dr.
Deuteronomy.
If you don’t have a Bible,
I would definitely recommend grabbing one off the shelf over here.
I can bring you one also.
But you’re going to feel glad that you have a Bible in hand,
I think, as we study this together.
We’re going to start here in verse 15,
I believe.
Let me, while you’re getting your Bibles,
just give you a little bit of background here.
So here we have a significant list of different requirements and expectations for the people of Israel.
Way back in 16,
you’ll see we’re talking about Passover,
then we’re talking about some festivals.
Chapter 17, we’re talking about worshiping other gods,
then we’re talking about law courts,
then we’re talking about what it means for the monarchy,
that kind of stuff.
Chapter 18, we start talking about offerings for priests and Levites.
And so when we get to where we’re at here today,
we’ve just passed through in verses chapter 18,
verses 9 through 13.
We pass through a section here talking about some of the pagan practices of the nations surrounding Israel.
And as you see here,
that occult kind of language,
you shouldn’t be practicing divination,
sorcery,
omens, witchcraft, all this list of really bad things.
Now we start here,
we’re going to bump back now to 15,
but to verse 14,
and we’ll jump right in.
So the nations you will dispossess,
listen to those who practice sorcery or divination.
But as for you,
and remember that’s the condemnation that just came before this,
but as for you,
the Lord your God has not permitted you to do so.
The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you,
from your fellow Israelites.
You must listen to him,
for this is what you asked of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly when you said,
“Let us not hear the voice of the Lord our God,
nor see this great fire anymore,
or we will die.”
Okay, let’s have a pause here.
You need to know a little bit of your history here.
So the people of Israel have this pattern in the Old Testament where God will come to speak to them.
And you know, when that happens, there’s often a big thing that accompanies that fire or wind or earthquake.
When God shows up,
big things happen.
And the people of Israel are repeatedly afraid of that.
And so the way that God deals with this,
this happens in Exodus,
maybe as the best example,
the people see God happening on the mountain and they’re afraid.
And it’s at that point that God then sends Moses to be a mediator between the people.
And there’s this whole section in Exodus with the idea of Moses’s face glowing with God’s presence and the people being afraid of that.
So that theme has existed before.
Here, what we have is another variation on that,
where the prophet is going to stand in between the people and God.
The prophet is going to explain what needs to happen,
because once again, the people are afraid.
So that’s what’s happening in verse 16 there.
We move on to verse 17.
The Lord said to me,
“What they say is good.
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites,
and I will put my words in his mouth.
He will tell them everything I command him.
I will myself will call to account anyone who does not listen to my words,
that the prophet speaks in my name.
But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I’ve not commanded,
or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods,
is to be put to death.
You may say to yourselves,
how can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?
If what the prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true,
that is a message the Lord has not spoken.
The prophet has spoken presumptuously,
so do not be alarmed.”
Okay, I’m curious.
We’ll look at this more holistically before we move on to the New Testament selection here.
But I want you to turn your attention specifically here to verse 15.
So the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you from your fellow Israelites.
And I want to ask you,
if you are receiving this text,
how do you interpret,
how do you read the prophet like you?
If you were looking for this prophet,
what do you think that prophet looks like?
What’s the best that we could make of a statement like that?
Question clear?
It’s kind of an odd statement,
a prophet like you,
a human prophet.
What qualifications do you think you’re looking for in the future if you’re trying to find this prophet?
Someone from their own group of people.
Okay,
inside the circle,
Israelite,
probably practicing Judaism.
Moses is not a military leader.
There’s a battle where he holds up his hands.
But Joshua is the one that we think of as being the one in control of the military.
Moses is far more of that in-between religious leader.
So when you’re thinking a prophet like Moses,
what’s the pedigree you’re looking for?
Was Moses a Levi?
Does someone know the answer to that?
I don’t know what tribe Moses was from.
I don’t know that right off hand.
But to your original point,
he’s certainly in the Jewish family.
Well, the reason I’m asking you to think in this way is because this is the fundamental question that the people of Israel will carry forward.
Because imagine with me for a moment,
you have this promise in Deuteronomy.
Moses says there’s going to be a prophet like me.
And then you have all of these prophets in the inter-testamental period.
You have this hundreds of years long period where the people of Israel are in captivity.
They’re forced out of their homes.
Their families are separated.
They no longer have their places.
They no longer have their worship.
They no longer have their language.
They have nothing.
And so in the midst of that moment,
all of the attention,
understandably,
comes back to this promise.
This is the thing that the people of Israel are looking for.
Where is the prophet who’s like Moses?
And it’s fascinating because it appears that the religious leaders thought of that in a very literal way.
So they thought of the person who would carry them through the Red Sea,
the person who would feed them,
the person who would be the intermediary with God.
And that’s exactly the theme that Luke is going to pick up in the book of Acts.
The fundamental question to start with here today is what is the prophet like me mean?
So let’s look at Acts chapter 3 verse 17.
This is an exact quotation from Deuteronomy.
And Luke includes this in his telling.
We’re chapter 3 here.
So Pentecost just happened literally the chapter before.
So this is the first sermon ever recorded in the scripture.
Some beautiful words here.
I landed in the book of Luke,
not the book of Acts.
Here we go.
3, 17.
This is Peter preaching.
Who has been appointed for you, even Jesus.
Okay.
So let’s enter into this together here.
When Peter preaches the first sermon ever preached under the Christian
revelation of Jesus Christ,
he turns here to Deuteronomy.
And he speaks specifically of Moses’s promise.
What is striking is he says that you and your leaders behaved in
ignorance.
Did you catch that?
That is the most gracious way to describe the people who just killed Jesus.
Not malicious,
not seeking their own glory.
All the things you might think would be applied.
He simply says ignorance.
And I think it’s fascinating that in this same section,
he turns back to Deuteronomy.
He starts talking about this idea of the prophet who will be like Moses.
Because the ignorance,
if you will allow that phrase,
was fundamentally, they completely misjudged how this person would be like Moses.
They were looking for someone human.
They were looking for someone who would stand in between them and God and lead them to deliverance.
They expected,
like Moses,
led them physically through the wilderness,
that this person would lead them to a new time and a new era.
And we know from this side of the Christian revelation,
Jesus did not physically do any of that.
They were looking over here for Jesus to be like Moses when Peter preaches and says they were looking ignorantly.
They were looking in the wrong place and for the wrong signs.
Are you all with me?
So the fundamental question that’s happening here,
though this isn’t the language that the text used,
Peter here is preaching incarnation.
What he’s saying is that Jesus Christ is God,
and that is nothing like Moses.
That’s why he was missed,
is that fundamentally Jesus here is a prophet unlike any of the other prophets, including Moses.
So there’s this beautiful kind of connection on the first level reading when Peter’s talking about the human prophet here.
I think we can understand that idea that Jesus is the one who prophetically proclaims what is true.
That’s the that’s the office of prophet is a truth teller.
But on a deeper level,
Peter reads into these words from Moses and he sees in them a spiritual reality.
He’s saying that Moses isn’t making a claim that Jesus is going to be the same as Moses,
but rather he’s going to serve a like function that Moses did in an eternal and permanent sense.
And the point I want to make with this is sometimes we make the mistake of reading the Bible
and we make the same kind of ignorant mistake as the religious leaders.
We think to ourselves,
well, I’m reading Exodus and isn’t this just the story,
the people of Israel’s history?
It is.
That’s absolutely true.
But we,
like they are tempted sometimes to let our reading stop there
and to not live into that text and to allow the spirit to work on our hearts in that text,
because what Peter sees in Moses’s words is not that Jesus is going to be the same as Moses,
but he’s going to be like Moses,
but substantially different.
And I think it’s fascinating that that’s how he reads the Old Testament.
It may seem like a small point,
but I think it’s a substantial one.
Any thoughts,
comments, questions,
feedback?
It’s sort of fascinating to try to compare the two as one who was an intercessory from God.
I mean,
they both were in that respect,
right? Right.
They had compassion for the people.
They had,
let’s try to think,
what are some other comparisons?
I’m just going to bounce it out of my head,
let that roll off.
But I mean, obviously there’s a huge difference as you’re pointing that out.
Right. But I see a huge,
a lot of aliveness,
I think, in the two.
Right.
So this is a way that we often are uncomfortable reading scripture today.
And I think it’s largely related to our culture and our own sort of ways of understanding.
But when you go to,
when you go to history class at Spirit Lake High School and they teach Greek mythology,
they teach it as a thing that some people believed and wrote down a long time ago.
They put it in brackets and they make it historically defined.
Right.
That’s fair.
We teach it as stuff people thought.
When the Greeks themselves taught the mythology,
they taught it as reality.
They taught us this is the way that it is,
that this is how you order and give meaning to your life.
Because this God defines chaos and this God defines blessing and this God defines curses.
That they understood that as part of their framework.
Right.
The point I want to make with that is this,
is that at the end of the day with the Christians,
when the earliest Christians looked back to Deuteronomy,
they didn’t just see it as history.
It wasn’t just words written down that they should remember.
They looked for it to see what revelation would be there.
And I think revelation is the right word.
The idea that Jesus reveals who God is when they look back to Moses’s words.
Peter says,
whoa,
Moses must not have been like me as human,
but rather like me as one who is going to be the intermediary to use your language might to be the intercessor.
In that way, Jesus was like Moses,
but Peter sees that as being just half of the story,
maybe even a quarter of the story.
There’s way more than Jesus than what anyone thought Moses meant all the way up to that point.
That clear?
Well, let’s keep pressing on here.
We got a little bit more time.
I think one way to frame this text is reading Jesus as the one who supersedes Moses in ways that no one expected.
But I think there’s another aspect of this text that is also really, really interesting.
If you have your Bible there,
look in verse 18.
My translation translates it this way.
I will raise up for them a prophet.
Sorry, this is Deuteronomy verse 18 here.
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites.
And I want to emphasize the fellow Israelites.
The idea there being that this prophet is going to come from the people.
It’s going to be in the Jewish circle.
Then you turn here to the book of Acts.
I find this really,
really striking.
Verse 23 here of chapter 3.
Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from their people.
And then verse 25.
Are you and you are heirs of the prophets.
And then you keep going there through your offspring.
All peoples of the earth will be blessed.
And then you keep going into verse 26.
He sent his servant to you to bless you by turning each of you from your wicked ways.
This is, I think, a fascinating way that he is beginning to already tease out the difference of communities.
So Moses was sent to the Israelites, right?
And Jesus too is sent to the Israelites.
But there’s already this problem that’s been presented.
Because what about the ignorance of those religious leaders,
right?
The ones who crucified Jesus.
Peter is already making a distinction between those who see Jesus’
revelation and those who are ignorant.
Let’s step back here and tease this out a little bit.
We all are used to this distinction between Jew and Gentile.
And fundamentally in Acts,
that’s one of the biggest questions of the entire book.
Yes, how does the church move from being a predominantly Jewish religion to being encompassing of the Gentiles?
And in fact, if you wanted to,
you could draw a line right here.
And somewhere in the middle of Acts,
that entire story changes.
You have Peter in the council and you have Cornelius’ house.
And you have this moment where suddenly everything past that line is about the Gentile expansion of the church.
But we,
as Gentiles ourselves, might forget the entire first half of the book,
which is related to the spreading of the gospel within the Jewish community.
And this is what’s really interesting.
I think Deuteronomy here is essentially framed within a community-defining narrative.
This is what it means.
If you are in Deuteronomy 18,
it means that you will be a person of Israel if you follow these rules.
If you do these things,
if you don’t worship these gods,
or in the case of this,
if you listen to the prophet who God sends to you,
then you will be inside the nation,
the people of Israel.
You’ll be inside God’s blessing.
But here’s the thing.
Peter is now standing post-crucifixion, post-resurrection,
post-ascension.
And he’s essentially condemning those standing there.
How can you look at the revelation of Jesus Christ,
which has been confirmed by his resurrection and his ascension?
How can you do that and you still be ignorant?
How can you still be in the circle of Judaism if you see who Jesus is and you don’t see the prophet that he has been?
Because his actions have proven who he is.
So a text that might on its surface just seem like it’s a sermon about,
hey, you should consider Christianity very seriously.
I think it’s actually a crossroads moment for Judaism because Peter is essentially asking,
who do you believe?
Do you believe the ignorant leaders who are telling you that the like Moses is going to be a human who’s going to lead you through the wilderness?
Or do you believe Jesus,
who speaks the word of God,
who died, was resurrected and ascended,
and will therefore be the one who calls you into the Christian community?
And that, I think, is a really interesting term because here Peter is looking back to Moses’s words to begin to define what it means to be Jesus’s people.
And that’s a really,
really interesting turn.
And quite frankly, we as a church don’t quite know what to do with that because what about the stuff that came right before this,
right?
In Deuteronomy, the stuff about don’t worship like the pagans worship.
Don’t do witchcraft.
Don’t do these things.
It’s fascinating because as Peter’s reading the Old Testament here,
he sees this as being a bridge into what it means to be the people of God,
the people of Jesus today.
And we probably just see that to be like a footnote in the text as we’re reading along.
Yes, everybody?
Yes, that’s good curiosity.
I’m thinking, as I’m sitting here today,
we have this wonderful book in front of us.
We have this incredible book that is put together for us,
and it leads us to the Lord.
What did they have?
I mean, what do these folks have?
Right.
I mean, they have a prophet.
Right.
Is that it?
Right.
I mean, is that it?
Religious leaders yet?
Right.
Nothing written, right?
Right.
All oral.
It’s all that way.
It’s received that way.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I think it even goes one step deeper than that.
They not only don’t have the scriptures that we call the New Testament in front of them,
but I think they’re also they’re wrestling with what is reality because the guy who’s
standing here today was the guy who watched Jesus be crucified a couple of weeks,
40 days,
50, 60 days earlier.
That is a remarkable transformation.
And we we know that word conversion,
but maybe we’re a little too acclimated to it.
Maybe for us, that idea of conversion is related to like I sinned a lot and now I don’t sin a lot.
But for these individuals,
for Peter, what he’s calling this crowd to this day is not
think a little differently or stop drinking so much or swearing so much.
That’s not what he’s calling them to.
He’s calling them to revisit what they’ve always thought they knew and allow it all to be changed.
So you were waiting for this profit.
Stop.
You missed him.
You missed him.
In fact, you were part of the killing him.
But allow me to turn you back to what Moses said,
because maybe if we look a little closer,
we missed what Moses meant.
Right.
That is conversion.
That’s the 90 or 180 degree turn that that’s the moment in which Peter is calling people
to say everything you thought you knew is now in question because of it.
And once again,
the word I want to leave you with today,
this is nowhere in either of these texts.
And I’m throwing this out there.
So just bear that mind.
But I think that fundamentally what Peter is talking about here as he talks about Jesus
is that idea of revelation.
It’s the idea that Jesus reveals something that no one saw before his existence.
And I just can’t get out of my head.
So the catch phrase for today is this word like because Jesus is like Moses except in
the way that he’s entirely God and therefore not like Moses at all.
And everyone interpreted like
to be that he’s going to be a guy like Moses.
And we do that.
I think this this is the point where I turn a tiny bit to sermon.
I think that Peter’s reading of scripture here turns to be incredibly practical to say
that we should be the people when we read scripture to be more and more like Jesus.
We shouldn’t read scripture and get caught in putting scripture in its spot historically.
Right.
Like we should allow ourselves humbly to see more of Jesus than less.
And I think he’s calling people here to a really really interesting and probably strange
task in some ways to revisit everything that they thought they knew about who Jesus was
and what they thought Moses meant and to see that all of that gets turned on its head
because Jesus is something they didn’t expect which is why they killed him.
And Moses meant something that they didn’t see coming.
And that is a kind of faith practice that I think we would all do well to practice in our own reading.
What if you too were surprised when you read scripture including the New Testament.
What if you expected to come to a writing of Paul or to a passage in in Matthew Mark Luke or John.
And what if you expected got invited maybe even God would you please show me something of Jesus today
that I would have never seen before because that’s exactly what Peter is doing in Deuteronomy.
He’s seeing something that they just didn’t see before because they hadn’t seen the light and revelation of who Jesus Christ was yet.
Some remarkable things happened to Peter and think about Peter and his denial of Christ.
I mean right up right in the end.
Right.
You know I don’t know the guy.
I don’t even know who else.
Right.
And all of a sudden he has all of this.
He has all of the strength.
Is that the Holy Spirit.
I mean is that what came upon Peter.
Right.
Is that what did it.
I don’t know.
I mean I’m asking.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What would it take for you and I to stand before the our kinsmen.
What would it take for us to stand before a church like first pres and to tell people you’ve all misunderstood.
I was with the guy who you hung on the cross and I’m telling you he’s changed reality forever.
You would have to be pretty darn certain.
I would think I would.
I mean I’d be with Thomas probably like Jesus can I need to touch you.
Peter here is making a brash claim.
May I remind you.
But remember do there on me the end of that text.
What’s supposed to happen to the prophet who prophesies wrongly.
They’re supposed to be killed.
So by that metric by the way when Jesus stands in front.
I was also going to work this in today but I didn’t in the beginning of Luke.
You might remember when Jesus goes to his home church and he reads Isaiah.
He says today in your sight.
These words have been fulfilled.
The people were rightly executing the punishment meted out by scripture.
You realize that but yes the crowd was wrong but they were right in their interpretation.
Like they actually understood what Jesus was saying and they were doing the thing they were supposed to do to the prophet who claimed the bind right that they didn’t have.
They were going to throw him off the cliff and take his life.
And I think what’s really what’s just really fascinating here is Peter standing in front of people and he’s making a claim about who Jesus is.
And there’s no ambiguity about that claim.
We all thought he was like Moses but turns out the like was different than we thought.
And we are now people of the resurrection and ascension and this is really critical look at the end of this section here.
When God raised up his servant he sent him first to you to bless you by turning each of you for your wicked ways.
This is beautiful.
Luke is a genius.
Peter is a genius.
Luke is great for recording it.
This idea first to you anticipates that it’s going to come second to who?
The Gentiles.
Luke Peter in the first sermon.
This has got to be the Holy Spirit.
Because in the first sermon he is somehow intuited
a thing that’s not even happened in the story yet.
And this idea of Cornelius’s house and the Jerusalem council and what do we do with these Gentiles right.
The spirit of God is descending upon them.
None of that’s happened yet.
And he’s saying first to the Jews which gives us the idea that next there’s the Gentiles.
And that is once again I think where this is a cross point for the Jewish community.
So they have been given first this revelation to bless you for the idea of turning from your wicked ways.
But if you don’t turn you’re part of this community of ignorance.
You’re with the religious leaders,
the people who hung them on the cross.
That’s now your crew.
Or you’re
the people who are willing to turn.
You’re the people who are willing to allow your imagination to be transformed.
You’re the people who stand in the light of revelation.
Once again use that word.
And if that’s the case then it’s come first to you.
But then for the sake of later to be shared to the Gentiles.
And you know if you know your book of Romans how vexed Paul was.
By the fact that the Jews were given the gospel first and they rejected it.
That for Paul was I think if you look at his life and his teaching.
That was the most vexing theological question.
If these are the people of the covenant.
I mean we had this all the way back in Deuteronomy.
The idea of the generations of Abraham right.
Like if you’re the people
who God promised to be faithful to.
How do you not see the Savior when he’s literally crucified resurrected and ascends in front of you.
How do you miss that?
And Paul later answers if you know Romans.
He answers that by saying well God sent Jesus first to the Jews.
So that then the Gentiles might be saved.
So that the Jews might see the Gentiles being saved.
And through jealousy then come back into the fold.
Which I think is you know that’s a sign of Paul’s genius.
But once again we’re not there yet.
We’re just at a point where Peter’s at the crux of this conversion moment.
Saying it’s first come to you.
And the question that comes to you Jews who are gathered here this day.
Is are you on Jesus’s revelation side.
Or are you on the other side.
Are you going to read it in light of who he is.
Or read it in light of what we used to think.
And that was the question that people responded to that day.
And I believe correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe at the end of that day was five thousand people added to the church.
It’s an amazing I mean if any preacher had five thousand people respond with gratitude to the gospel.
That would be a good day.
They wanted a warrior.
They wanted a warrior.
They wanted a king in our sense.
No.
They wanted a warrior.
They wanted somebody to lead the insurrection against the Romans.
Jesus didn’t fit that mold did he?
We do too.
I mean fundamentally.
I won’t labor this too long.
If you’re in a Presbyterian church you will I’m not going to say never because I have not been in every Presbyterian church in the world.
You’re you’re almost never going to see Jesus hanging on a cross in one of our sanctuaries.
Ever.
If you’re in a Catholic church you will almost exclusively see Jesus hanging on the cross.
Right.
The point I want to make in that is.
The downside of our tradition and there’s a lot of historical reasons why it is this way.
But the downside of the reform tradition
is we forget the humiliation
of the man on the cross.
We forget that that is the man who we are following.
And to your point my I think.
When you have an empty cross it’s easy to imagine Jesus being whatever you want him to be.
When I was growing up the church that I was part of imagined Jesus to be wealthy and a teacher of how you can get wealthy.
I like that Jesus most days.
That’s a pretty great Jesus.
But that’s not the Jesus on the cross.
And I’m not suggesting we should have crucifixes in our sanctuary so I won’t make that 100 percent clear.
But the upside
of having that in your imagination is the reminder that what Peter is calling people here today is not obvious.
It is to us now on this side of faith.
But to the people gathered that day they were fundamentally being asked by Peter to say well do we take the thing that we all learned in Sunday school and unlearn it.
Or do we just say this guy is crazy.
And I think if we’re going to be humble we could see how they got to the side of saying many of them.
He’s crazy.
And I think there’s something instrumental in that.
Last words thoughts.
This was a little.
This was a little more theological philosophical than our following conversation will be.
So thanks for being good sports about this one.
But I hope there’s something in there that was challenging and encouraging.
Thanks for being here everybody.