Deuteronomy 18

CHAPTER 18THEME: Priest and prophets; the test of a true prophetGod gives rules regarding the maintenance of the priests. Then there is another warning against idolatrous practices which resort to the satanic powers. This is followed by one of the outstanding sections of the Book of Deuteronomy which deals with prophets, and there is a wonderful prophecy about the Lord Jesus, the Prophet who was to come. The section on prophets concludes with the very interesting and important test for determining true and false prophets.

Deuteronomy 18:1

THE CARE OF THE PRIESTSThe priests came from the tribe of Levi. All the Levites were employed in the temple service. They had no land inheritance among the children of Israel, but the Lord was their inheritance. The Lord provided for them in this particular way. It is interesting that God did not mention how a king was to get his salary, but he did give instructions about how a priest was to get his. Yet the preacher’s salary is the one thing that is always a touchy issue in the church. God just laid it on the line. He said, “This is what the priests are to receive.”

Deuteronomy 18:3

This is a great principle that God is laying down here. This is still the method God uses to carry on His work in the world. He expects His people to support the people who are giving all of their time in getting out the Word of God to the world. If people started bringing shoulders of beef and of lamb we might have T-bone steaks and lamp chopsof course I do not think He means for us to do it in this same way, but the principle is still true.

Deuteronomy 18:9

When these people would go into the land, they were not to resort to the pagan, heathen practices of the people in the land. This warning is repeated in the New Testament. Paul warns “…that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1Ti_4:1). They will be resorting to the unseen satanic world. Now let me venture my own judgment, and you can take it for what it is worth. I believe we have now come into that period. As I write, there is a great manifestation of Satan worship. Here, in Southern California, there are churches of Satan where he is actually worshiped. In Hawaii, I saw a group of young people falling down before a picture of Krishna, which is nothing in the world but satanic worship. Some people pass this off as a fad because it is a tendency of human nature to go after fadsespecially in America.

However, there is a great deal of reality in Satan worship. It is not a group of stupid people, nor is it only the uneducated who are indulging in this sort of thing. There must be reality in it and, since Satan is real, I believe there is a certain amount of reality in it. But God warns against this. He says it is an abomination unto Him. I want to add this because someone needs to say it today. There is a danger in playing with astrology. Remember that in the previous chapter we read the condemnation of the worship of sun, moon, and stars. There are a great many people today who are placing more emphasis on astrology than they are on the Bible. Stores and magazine racks are loaded with material on astrology. The media is promoting it.

We see it everywhere we turn. My friend, astrology is an abomination unto the Lord. Don’t find fault with me for saying this. It is God who calls it an abomination. Why is it an abomination? It takes people away from the living and true God.

It plunges them into darkness and demonism. There is reality in the world of demons. There are fallen angels and a spirit world. This thing is real, and today people are intrigued with it. They use drugs and every other means they can think of to try to make contact with this unseen world. And the satanic world is very glad to make contact with them.

A child of God should let this thing alone. Anyone who turns in that direction has a weak faith and is not really trusting Christ as Savior. He is turning away from the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. God has given warnings about this sort of thing. His warnings have happened to be very accurate in the past. His batting average, friends, is excellentHe hasn’t missed yet.

He hits a home run every time, and I am going to go along with Him.

Deuteronomy 18:13

These nations in the land were judged and would be removed from the land because of this very thing. Israel has been called to be a witness to the true and living God.

Deuteronomy 18:15

PROMISE OF THE COMING MESSIAHThe children of Israel were to listen to God’s prophets. Why? Because they were telling them the truth. That was the basic reason. But the second reason was to prepare them to listen to the final messenger, the final Prophet, the Lord Jesus Christ. Some people still ask why God does not reveal Himself today. Friend, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, God put the period at the end of the sentence. God wrote finis at the end of the book. He has nothing more to say to the world than He has said in Jesus Christ. We are to hear Him. We are to hearken unto Him. At the Transfiguration, God the Father said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (Mat_17:5). Listen to Him. He has the final Word. For believers today the Lord Jesus Christ is God’s ultimate, God’s full, God’s final revelation to man. This is what Moses is saying way back here in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 18:18

You will recall that the Lord Jesus said again and again that the words He spoke were not His own but the Father’s. For instance, in Joh_5:30, and several times in John 6, the Lord Jesus says that He came not to do His own will but to do the will of the Father. After the Lord’s earthly ministry was finished, he prayed in that great high priestly prayer, where He is turning in His final report to the Father, “…I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do…. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me …” (Joh_17:4, Joh_17:8). If God were to speak out of heaven at this very moment, He would not say anything that He had not already said. He would just repeat Himself, because all He intends to say to you and to me is in the person of Christ. That is the reason we are to let astrology alone. It is the tendency of human nature to want to explore the unknown, to know about the future. There is an insatiable desire to probe the mysterious. There is some of the spirit of Columbus in all of us. Right now we are exploring space and the depths of the oceans. We like to reach out into new areas.

Not only do we do this in space, but man also likes to reach out in time. He wants to know about that mysterious future. What is beyond tomorrow? What does the future hold? All would like to know that, would they not? People are anxious about the future.

There is always the question: What about tomorrow? The future is a closed door. Memory can take you back into the past, but there is no vehicle to take you into the future. Written in the door of the future are the words, “Keep Out!” Today was tomorrow only yesterday. Man is limited as to time and also space. To satisfy this insatiable longing, there arose among the heathen spiritualists, necromancers, and diviners. God warned His people against it. This was connected with idolatry and was satanic in origin. Could they tell the future? Yes, there was a certain degree of accuracy. The Greeks used the Oracle of Delphi and, apparently, got a certain amount of accurate information therebut it was satanic. They say that Hitler resorted to some type of fortune-teller. I understand in Washington today, fortune-tellers do a land-office business. The classified ads in any city will show you that there are many fortune-tellers making a very fine living by speaking of the future. Now the future is an area in which man has never been given dominion. God alone can predict the future, and it belongs to Him. A unique character of the Word of God is that it moves beyond the present. The greatest proof to me that the Bible is the Word of God is the fulfillment of prophecy. One-fourth of the entire Bible was prophecy at the time it was written, and a large portion of that has already been fulfilled. God has recorded prophecies concerning cities and nations and great world empires.

Under such circumstances, there would arise false prophets, as there are today. They wanted the status and the position that belonged to the true prophet of God. How could Israel protect themselves from the false prophets? God lays down a test by which they could be certain a man was either a true prophet of God or a phony.

Deuteronomy 18:20

TEST FOR DETERMINING TRUE AND FALSE PROPHETSThere were false prophets among the people; that’s quite evident. Unfortunately, Israel would not apply God’s rules by which they could identify them. We find this passage in Jer_14:14: “Then the LORD said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.” It was easy enough for a false prophet to speak of the coming Kingdomcenturies in the future. The prophet Jeremiah spoke of the future. Today we can know because a great deal of Jeremiah’s prophecy has been fulfilled, but how could people know at the time it was spoken? Well, God put down a very accurate test. Listen to Him: Let us take time to look at this for a moment. Isaiah is a prophet of God, a true prophet of God. How do we know? He prophesied that a virgin would conceive and bring forth a son. He clearly marked out the coming of the Lord Jesus, His birth, His life, His death. Suppose someone had asked Isaiah when all this would take place.

He would have answered that he was not quite sure but that it could be hundreds of years. (Actually, it was seven hundred years.) Well, that crowd would laugh and say they would never be around to know whether he was telling the truth or not. The test of the prophets was that they had to give a prediction about a local situation that would come to pass right away, and they had to be completely accurate. They couldn’t miss in any point of their predictions. Any inaccuracy at all would immediately disqualify them as a true prophet of God. Now let us look at Isaiah again. He prophesied the virgin birth, and we today can look back 1900 years to the fulfillment of that and know that he was accurate. But how could the people in his day know that? They could know because Isaiah went to the king, Hezekiah, with a prophecy concerning a local current event. There was a great Assyrian army of trigger-happy soldiers surrounding the city, but Isaiah said that not one arrow would enter the city. Those Assyrians had conquered other nations and they were there to conquer Jerusalem and to carry Israel into captivity. Isaiah told them what God had said about it: “Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning the king of Assyria. He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shields, nor cast a bank against it. By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall not come into this city, said the LORD” (Isa_37:33-34). All of those fellows in the Assyrian army had bows and arrows. You’d think that just one of them might let an arrow fly over the wall just to see if he could hit someone. Now if one arrow was shot into the city, Isaiah would lose his job as a true prophet of God. He would be out of business. That was one of the tests which Isaiah passed. There were others where Isaiah spoke to a local situation, and it came to pass just as he had said. The true prophet had to be correct 100 percent of the time. Now what about today? This test would disqualify everyone on the contemporary scene who claims to be a prophet by predicting the future. I grant you that some of them sometimes hit the nail right on the head, but more often they miss the nail altogether. You don’t hear of their misses; you only hear of their accurate guesses. I could give many instances of false prophecies. We have folk predicting the end of the world on a certain date, the Rapture of the church on a certain date, calamities that will come to a particular section of the country on a specific date, and a host of other things. If we applied God’s test to these self-acclaimed prophets, they would be out of business in short order. A true prophet must be accurate in every detail every time. But do you know that there are no warnings about false prophets for the church today? Why? Because there is no more prophecy to be revealed. Everything has been revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ and in His Word. Our warning today is not against false prophets; our warning is against false teachers. “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you …” (2Pe_2:1). The warning to us is to listen very carefully today, because there are many sweet, soothing voices that sound very pious, but are not teaching the Word of God. Oh, how important it is for us to beware of false teachers!