How to Know Which Prophets Are True or False (Week 21, Part 5/7) Deuteronomy | May 16-22 – powered by Happy Scribe
As we learned in past lessons, the Book of Deuteronomy is structured as a second retelling of the covenantal instructions that God had given to the people at Mount Sinai.
The word Deuteronomy literally means second telling of the law. In this law, we hear lots of instructions and guidance that God gives the people about how they should live their lives and order their lives when they get into the Holy Land. Now chapter 18 of Deuteronomy has a variety of things that are of interest to us.
Now, the passages that I’d like to spend the rest of our time on today is in verses 14 to 22. This one is significant because God is laying out how the people should look to know which prophets are true and which are false. And let’s actually look at some of these verses here. Verse 15. The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee of thy brethren, like unto me, unto him Ye shall hearken.
Now, here’s the thrust of this. Moses is teaching the people. The Lord is through Moses saying, you should look for prophets who are like Moses, follow those kinds of prophets. These are prophets who are intermediaries between the people and God. These are prophets who teach people the Torah or the law, or that is, Covenant instructions about how to be on the Covenant path.
These are prophets who speak in the name of the Lord, and what they speak comes to pass. Now you might note, if we look carefully at the Book of Mormon, prophets like Lehigh, Mi, Fi, Abinidae, and others actually all fit the mosaic pattern of Prophet hood quite well. It’s actually quite stunning. We have this one really important passage in Deuteronomy where God says, this is the kind of profits that I will raise up, and that is actually what we see happening in the Book of Mormon with a number of our key prophets. In particular, you have a Benedict.
Fascinating that a Benedict is speaking the Ten Commandments at the court of Noah. Noah has not been teaching people the Covenant instructions of the Ten Commandments of how people should show their love and loyalty to God. Instead, he’s been telling them to do the opposite of basically being disloyal to God and Obeda shows up as a true Mosaic Prophet, just as we would expect to see based on what Deuteronomy chapter 18 says. And he preaches the Ten Commandments, the good news and what happens. The priests and the guards try to lay hands on the Benedict and his face shines with luster.
What’s brilliant about this is in the Old Testament, when Moses face was shining with luster that he had availed himself, that was a symbol of divine presence. And here again we have in the abandoned story that abidai now looks like Moses. He, too has a divine presence as he sends the message out that we need to be covenantly loyal to God and if so, we’ll have peace and prosperity in the land. And taking the Book of Mormon story further, we learned that the people of King Noah got kicked into captivity. They did not prosper in the land because they did not keep the Covenantal instructions of loyalty that God had revealed first to Moses in the Ten Commandments and was revealed again to them and retired to them by a bit of this is an important passage because is God in Deuteronomy Chapter 18 because he has expressed what he expects of prophets that they keep people on the Covenant path just like Moses did.
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dyejo
