'When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee,
thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. 10.
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his
daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an
observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, 11. Or a charmer, or a
consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. 12. For
all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because
of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before
thee. 13. Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God. 14. For these
nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times,
and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered
thee so to do. 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; 16. According to all that thou desiredst of the Lord thy
God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again
the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see this great fire any
more, that I die not. 17. And the Lord said unto me, They have well
spoken that which they have spoken. 18. I will raise them up a Prophet
from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put My words in His
mouth; and He shall speak unto them all that I shall command Him. 19.
And it shall come to pass that whosoever will not hearken unto My words
which He shall speak in My name, I will require it of him. 20. But the
prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in My name, which I have
not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other
gods, even that prophet shall die. 21. And if thou say in thine heart,
How shall we know the word which the Lord hath not spoken? 22. When a
prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor
come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken, but the
prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of
him.'--DEUT. xviii. 9-22.
It is evident from the connection in which the promise of 'a prophet
like unto Moses' is here introduced that it does not refer to Jesus
only; for it is presented as Israel's continuous defence against the
temptation of seeking knowledge of the divine will by the illegitimate
methods of divination, soothsaying, necromancy, and the like, which
were rampant among the inhabitants of the land. A distant hope of a
prophet in the far-off future could afford no motive to shun these
superstitions. We cannot understand this passage unless we recognise
that the direct reference is to the institution of the prophetic order
as the standing means of imparting the reliable knowledge of God's
will, possessing which, Israel had no need to turn to them 'that peep
and mutter' and bring false oracles from imagined gods. But that
primary reference of the words does not exclude, but rather demands,
their ultimate reference to Him in whom the divine word is perfectly
enshrined, and who is the bright, consummate flower of the prophetic
order, which 'spake of Him,' not only in its individual predictions,
but by its very existence.
A glance must be given to the exhaustive list of pretenders to
knowledge of the future or to power of shaping it magically, which
occurs in verses 10,11, and suggests a terrible picture of the burdens
of superstition which weighed on men in these days of ignorance, as the
like burdens do still, wherever Jesus is not known as the one Revealer
of God, and the sole Lord of all things. Of the eight terms employed,
the first three refer to different means of reading the future, the
next two to different means of influencing events, and the last three
to different ways of consulting the dead. The first of these eight
properly refers to drawing lots, but includes other methods; the second
is an obscure word, which is supposed by some to mean a 'murmurer,' and
may refer rather to the low mutterings of the soothsayer than to the
method of his working; the third is probably a general expression for
an interpreter of omens, especially of those given by the play of
liquid in a 'cup,' such as Joseph 'divined' by.
Two names for magicians follow, of which the former seems to mean one
who worked with charms such as African or American Indian 'medicine
men' use, and the latter, one who binds by incantations, or one who
ties magic knots, which are supposed to have the power of hindering the
designs of the person against whom they are directed. The word employed
means 'binding,' and maybe used either literally or metaphorically. The
malicious tying of knots in order to work harm is not dead yet in some
backward corners of Britain. Then follow three names for traffickers
with spirits,--those who raise ghosts as did the witch of Endor, those
who have a 'familiar spirit,' and those who in any way consult the
dead. It is a grim catalogue, bearing witness to the deep-rooted
longing in men to peer into the darkness ahead, and to get some
knowledge of the purposes of the awful unseen Power who rules there.
The longing is here recognised as legitimate, while the methods are
branded as bad, and Israel is warned from them, by being pointed to the
merciful divine institution which meets the longing.
It is clear, from this glance at the context, that the 'prophet'
promised to Israel must mean the order, not the individual; and it is
interesting to note, first, the relation in which that order is
presented as standing towards all that rabble of diviners and
sorcerers, with their rubbish of charms and muttered spells. It sweeps
them off the field, because it is truly what they pretend to be. God
knows men's longings, and God will meet them so far as meeting them is
for men's good. But the characteristics of the prophet are set in
strong contrast to those of the diviners and magicians, and lift the
order high above all the filth and folly of these others. First, the
prophet is 'raised up' by God; the individual holder of the office has
his 'call' and does not 'prophesy out of his own heart.' The man who
takes this office on himself without such a call is _ipso facto_
branded as a false prophet. Then he is 'from the midst of thee, of thy
brethren,'--springing from the people, not an alien, like so many of
these wandering soothsayers, but with the national life throbbing in
his veins, and himself participant of the thoughts and emotions of his
brethren. Then he is to be 'like unto' Moses,--not in all points, but
in his receiving direct communications from God, and in his authority
as God's messenger. The crowning characteristic, 'I will put My words
into his mouth, and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command
him,' invests his words with divine authority, calls for obedience to
them as the words of God Himself, widens out his sphere far beyond that
of merely foretelling, brings in the moral and religious element which
had no place in the oracles of the soothsayer, and opens up the
prospect of a continuous progressive revelation throughout the ages
('all that I _shall_ command him'). We mutilate the grand idea of the
prophet in Israel if we think of his work as mainly prediction, and we
mutilate it no less if we exclude prediction from it. We mutilate it
still more fatally if we try to account for it on naturalistic
principles, and fail to see in the prophet a man directly conscious of
a divine call, or to hear in his words the solemn accents of the voice
of God.
The loftiness and the limitations of 'the goodly fellowship of the
prophets' alike point onwards to Jesus Christ. In Him, and in Him
alone, the idea of the prophet is fully realised. The imperfect
embodiments of it in the past were prophecies as well as prophets. The
fact that God has 'spoken unto the fathers by the prophets,' leads us
to expect that He will speak 'to us in a Son,' and that not by
fragments of His mighty voice, but in one full, eternal, all-embracing
and all-sufficient Word. Every divine idea, which has been imperfectly
manifested in fragmentary and sinful men and in the material creation,
is completely incarnated in Him. He is the King to whom the sins and
the saintlinesses of Israel's kings alike pointed. He is the Priest,
whom Aaron and his sons foreshadowed, who perfectly exercises the
sympathy which they could only feel partially, because they were
compassed with infirmity and self-regard, and who offers the true
sacrifice of efficacy higher than 'the blood of bulls and goats.' He is
the Prophet, who makes all other means of knowing the divine will
unnecessary, hearing whom we hear the very voice of God speaking in His
gentle words of love, in His authoritative words of command, in His
illuminating words of wisdom, and speaking yet more loudly and
heart-touchingly in the eloquence of deeds no less than divine; who is
'not ashamed to call us brethren,' and is 'bone of our bone and flesh
of our flesh'; who is like, but greater than, the great lawgiver of
Israel, being the Son and Lord of the 'house' in which Moses was but a
servant. 'To Him give all the prophets witness,' and the greatest of
them was honoured when, with Moses, Elijah stood on the Mount of
Transfiguration, subordinate and attesting, and then faded away when
the voice proclaimed, 'This is My beloved Son, hear Him,'--and they
'saw no one save Jesus only.'