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The Prophet Moses and the Prophets 1 of 2 By Edward Joseph Young

I've been asked to give particular emphasis to the interpretation of prophecy and the fulfillment of prophecy
with respect to the various schemes of interpretation that are prevalent among us today.
I'm going to do that not all at once, but more or less by way of laying foundations
so that we can, I think, better understand how prophecy should be interpreted.
And this morning I want to speak on the question, what is a prophet?
And allied with that is also the question, what divine warrant is there for the institution of prophecy?
We look to ancient Israel and there we find that there is a phenomenon that is unique in the history of the world.
Here was a body of men in Israel who bore the name of prophets.
And nothing like that has appeared anywhere else.
It is true that among the Assyrians there were men who occupied, at least in a formal sense,
a position somewhat similar to that of the prophet in the Old Testament.
But that's about as far as the similarity goes.
And then there have been soothsayers and mantix in many different regions who rise up and give prophecies.
But these can hardly be compared with the phenomenon that we find in the Old Testament.
First of all, we find then in the Old Testament a body of men who stand forth
and proclaim that they have been risen up by the Lord, the God of Israel.
All of them have this in common, that they claim to be spokesmen for the Lord.
Now, it is true that you might find in Assyria prophets who claim that they speak for their god Marduk.
But in Israel you find not only that men claim to be spokesmen for the Lord,
but that this body of prophets extends over a great period of time, perhaps 1500 years.
There is the continuity of the prophetic movement, and that point you do not find anywhere else.
There is no continuity of prophetism in Assyria, or in Egypt, or among the Hittites,
or anywhere else in the world of antiquity, or modernity for that matter.
But the prophets of Israel constitute not only a body of men who claim to be spokesmen for the Lord,
but a body of men extending over a great many years.
And all of them have this in common, that they claim to be spokesmen for the Lord.
Now there is a third point I think that we should notice here, and that is that
there is to the prophecies which they utter what we may call a teleological element.
That is, they look to the future.
They look to the coming of one who is to heal the breach which sin has introduced between God and man.
In other words, there is the phenomenon of messianic prophecy.
If you begin with the earliest of prophets and go right through the Old Testament,
you will find that they look to the future,
that they point to the time when God will send someone who is to be a redeemer,
and that the work of this person may be characterized as that of a prophet and a priest and a king.
There are then these three points which I think we must take into consideration in any true study of prophecy.
Here is this group of men in Israel.
They all claim to be spokesmen for the Lord.
They are not presenting merely their own messages, the thoughts of their own hearts.
Secondly, there is the continuity of the movement extending over so many years,
all of it characterized by this fact that they claim to be spokesmen for the Lord.
And thirdly, there is the content of the prophecy pointing forward to the coming of the Messiah.
That is the phenomenon that we meet in Israel, and that phenomenon calls for an explanation.
And everybody who opens the Bible has to give an explanation for that.
In fact, that is a problem that everybody has to explain. How did this happen?
Now, there are many explanations that are given today, and most of them come down to this,
that these prophets did indeed have the conviction that they were spokesmen for the Lord.
And they were men of very ethically gifted and sensitive and so on, ethically sensitive,
and they were above their peers and all of that.
But there is no real explanation given as to why this could be.
Now, the Bible gives us an explanation, and I want to direct your attention to that this morning.
For it seems to me that this is the only explanation that fits the facts.
Right here, I think we may notice that there is a bit of comfort for those of us who want to be Christians.
Christianity is not an easy religion. We are asked to believe things that are difficult.
We are asked to believe, for example, that Jesus rose from the dead.
And that doesn't agree with our experience. We don't see people rising from the dead.
It's difficult to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
And for that matter, every element of Christianity has its difficulty.
It is not an easy religion, looked at from one standpoint.
But the way to get out of the difficulty is not to throw Christianity overboard,
because then you really find difficulties.
Then you have no explanation for anything.
Then you are simply left with the shifting sands of human opinion.
You simply must go in accordance with what men think, and you have no answer.
And so here, we are called upon to explain this phenomenon of prophecy.
If we reject the biblical explanation, then we are simply left without an explanation.
And you have only to read the modern studies in prophecy to realize that no explanation,
no satisfactory explanation, is forthcoming.
Now there is one passage in the Bible, and I want to devote the rest of this hour
to a consideration of that passage.
There is one passage in the Bible that gives us the explanation of the prophetic movement,
and that is found in the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy.
If you have your Bibles and would open to this chapter beginning at the ninth verse,
I want to call attention to certain things that are stated here.
In the ninth verse of this chapter, the Lord addresses the people through Moses.
Notice that he addresses the people as an individual,
when thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
It's the singular that is used there.
The nation is individualized.
Now if you look through this chapter, you'll notice that that singular is not consistently maintained.
You'll find that sometimes the plural is used.
Look at verse 15, if you will, for an example of that.
The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst of thee of thy brethren, like unto me.
All of that, you see, is in the singular.
Israel is dressed as an individual.
But then it concludes, unto him ye shall hearken, and that is the plural.
Now I don't agree with these versions of the Bible that try to use you exclusively,
because I think they lose sight of a distinction that is very important both in the New and the Old Testaments.
And here that distinction is important.
Here, whenever the singular is used, it is a tender individualizing address.
God is speaking to the nation as though it were one person.
But this command, unto him ye shall hearken, this is a command that every individual in the nation is to obey.
And so the nation consisting of its individuals is in view here.
Some of the critics have suggested that wherever you have the singular, you have what they call Urdeuteronomium, that is original Deuteronomy.
And wherever you have the plural, you have later additions.
There are two things that militate against that.
In the first place, it doesn't make any sense.
If you go through Deuteronomy just reading the singular, it doesn't help very much.
The second thing is that this same phenomenon is found rather widely in the Semitic languages.
It's a common Semitic way of expression.
And very often we can see the reason for the change here.
Now in verse 9 then, the Lord addresses the nation as an individual.
When thou art come, he uses the participle there which expresses immediate futurity,
implying that the nation is about to come into the promised land.
And notice that Deuteronomy is written from the standpoint of a nation that is not yet in the promised land.
If Deuteronomy is the product of a centuries long afterwards when the nation has been in the land,
then you can't very well escape the conviction that it gives a wrong impression.
It implies that the nation is not in the land, whereas the nation has actually been in the land for a long time.
And so the implication here is that the nation has not come into the land.
This is the land which the Lord who is thy God is about to give to thee.
And there you have the true philosophy of the taking of the land of Israel.
It was a gift from Israel's God.
And that is the only explanation that fits.
Now modern scholarship of course doesn't agree with that.
Modern German scholarship at least says that the tribes were divided into two groups,
the Rachel tribes and the Leah tribes.
The Leah tribes had been in the land for many, many years.
It was theirs.
They had come from somewhere outside, probably from Mesopotamia, but they were in the land.
The Rachel tribes, on the other hand, had been in Egypt.
Only half the tribes had been in Egypt.
And they came into the land of promise,
and there they were united by their religious belief in this God Yahweh.
That is quite different from what the Bible teaches.
The Bible sets forth this land as a gift from God.
Thine own God, the Lord, is about to give to thee this land.
And we need to remember that, that God can give this land and he can take it away.
And when you hear people criticize the God of the Old Testament
as being arbitrary and capricious because he drove out the Canaanites,
remember that when the Israelites themselves sinned so greatly
that they no longer deserved to be called a theocracy,
they too were taken out of the land.
The land belongs to the Lord and he gives it to whom he will.
So Israel is to understand that this land is a gift from her God.
And she is to treat that gift as a gift.
In other words, she is to live in that land as the chosen nation.
But when she comes into that land, she will find that there are abominable practices.
These are the practices of the Canaanites.
And she is not to learn to do them.
The implication is that there would be many teachers who would show her what to do.
And it would be easy to learn these practices.
Now these practices are called abominations.
That is, the Lord detests them.
The Lord will have nothing to do with them and Israel is to have nothing to do with them.
Now there are those who say that when we read the Bible,
we are in an unfortunate position because we have a colored picture
that really the practices of the Canaanites should be evaluated upon their own
and not in the light that Deuteronomy throws upon them.
If we could study Canaanitish religion upon its own,
why, we would find that it too is probably as fine a religion as any of the others.
But here we have a colored impression.
Well, surely we have a colored impression.
We have the truthful impression.
And truth must contend with error.
These religious practices of Canaan are classified as abominations.
Moses lists nine of them here, as you will notice.
And the exact identity of some of them is difficult to determine.
But they for the most part have to do with methods of obtaining information.
Obtaining information about local situations and also about the future.
But notice that at the very head of them there is made this statement.
There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire.
That practice which we know was observed by the Moabites
in causing the son and daughter to pass through the fire to Moloch,
that practice also entered into Israel later on.
Now what the actual purpose of it was is difficult to determine.
It may have been a kind of an ordeal.
But at any rate, whatever it was, it is regarded as an abomination.
It was widespread.
And archaeology has shown that not only in Canaan,
but even over in Carthage in North Africa where the Canaanite Phoenician settlement later moved,
there was the passing of children through the fire,
that children were offered to the god Moloch or Saturn,
that they were burned alive very often,
and the remains found even today show that that practice was common.
There are burial urns in which the bones of infants have been found,
often used as foundation rites.
And this is mentioned as perhaps the worst of all these practices.
Now the others that follow have for the most part to do with obtaining information.
The translation here is satisfactory for our purposes.
There is question as to the precise force of every one of the words,
diviners, observers of times and enchanters and so on,
people that in one way or another tried to obtain information.
You see, when the Canaanites needed information about a number of subjects,
about local questions, about the future, about the dead and so on,
they would go to these people and get that information.
And it's interesting to notice that the list closes with three practices
which are various forms of spiritualism.
And if anyone ever has any question as to whether a Christian
should have anything to do with spiritualism,
it seems to me that this passage answers that very convincingly,
that we are to have nothing to do with it.
It is an abomination unto the Lord.
Now I do not know,
and I wonder if anybody knows whether the spiritualist practices
are anything more than fakes.
We have a work down in our library called 50 Years of Psychical Research,
and the man who wrote that is a believer in it.
But he made this statement that he investigated seances all over the world,
and if I remember correctly, he was able to understand
how all of them were performed with one exception.
There was one seance that he was unable to understand.
He did not know how it was performed.
But although he was a believer in it,
he said that these people would cheat upon every opportunity,
that some of it was so crude that it was almost laughable,
but that even the best of them would take opportunity to cheat if possible
in order to give the impression that they were producing something supernatural.
There may be the influence of Satan in this.
Quite possibly there is.
But whether there is or not, the Christian is to have nothing to do with it.
It is an abomination unto the Lord.
And so after listing these nine practices,
Moses sums it up by saying that not only are these things abominations,
but all that do these things are an abomination of the Lord.
In other words, and this is important,
it is not only the practice that is an abomination,
but the people that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.
And the reason for that, I think, emerges as we proceed.
Because of these abominations,
the Lord, who is thy God, is about to dispossess them from before thee.
There is a play upon words here.
The word dispossess and the word possess are from the same root, yarash.
Israel is to possess the land,
the Canaanites will be dispossessed of the land because of these things that they do.
I heard an archaeologist say once that he used to be troubled
by the fact that the Canaanites were driven out of the land.
Why would the Lord do that?
Was not that an unjust thing to do?
But he said since he had studied archaeology
and seen what the religion of the Canaanites was,
he was troubled by another question,
not why did the Lord drive the Canaanites out of the land,
but why didn't he do it a lot sooner than he did?
Because the Canaanitish religion was an abomination to the world
and for the very good of mankind.
And in order that the plan of salvation might be carried out,
the Canaanites had to go.
There's a very practical lesson here, and that is we don't own the earth.
We have no right to expect that we can continue on
and that all will go well irrespective of how we live.
And when a nation engages in abominable practices such as this,
that nation is soon bound to go.
God is no respecter of persons.
And so this matter is summed up by this statement,
thou, in distinction from the Canaanites,
thou shalt be perfect before the Lord thy God,
that is in thy dealings with the Lord who is thy God.
Now the word perfect here does not necessarily mean freedom from sin,
but it means upright.
Thou shalt be whole, complete in thy dealings with the Lord thy God.
These practices are not to be found among God's people.
And then in the fourteenth verse, the matter is summed up again,
and the contrast between the Canaanites and Israel is brought out,
as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not given thee literally so to do.
There is the contrast then.
Now what does this all mean?
It seems to me it's a truth that's very important today.
The Canaanites were seeking for wisdom from human sources.
Now they did it crudely.
But if you will turn over to Greece a few centuries later,
you will find the same thing.
The Greeks were seeking for wisdom.
And they did it in a more refined way than the Canaanites.
But they looked to the human heart as the source of wisdom.
And the same is true today.
The world looks for wisdom to man.
That's the only place it knows to look.
And all of the philosophies and religions that engage the attention of men today
spring from the human heart.
And that's all that man seems to be interested in.
There is a distinction, however, between the world and God's people.
God's people are to look not to man,
but rather, as Isaiah says, see ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils,
for wherein is he to be accounted of.
They are to look not to man for information on these things,
but they are to look to the revelation that God has given them.
What distinguishes the Christian today from the world, then?
One thing that distinguishes him, at least, is that he has the revelation of God.
And when he wants information, he goes to the revelation of God
and he interprets all of life in the light of God's revelation, God's word.
And that was also the case in ancient Israel.
They were not to listen to the wisdom of man as that expressed itself among the Canaanites,
but rather they were to hear the voice of God as God spoke to them.
Now, God did not give to them the Bible as we have it today,
but he spoke to them in a different way.
In verse 15, and the English loses a bit because in the Hebrew,
the first word that is mentioned there is the word prophet, navi.
A prophet shall the Lord thy God raise up unto thee from thy midst of thy brethren like unto me.
Unto him ye shall hearken.
The word is singular here, navi,
a prophet over against the superstitious practices of the Canaanites.
God will raise up a prophet so that the prophetic institution is of divine origination.
It is Israel's God, the Lord, who raises up the prophets.
Raised up, and furthermore, he is to be an Israelite.
He is to come from the midst of Israel.
He is to be of Moses' brethren, and he is to be like unto Moses.
Now that is important, that phrase, like unto Moses.
In what sense will he be like unto Moses?
I think the answer is given in the following verses.
Some say that just as Moses was an Israelite, so the prophet will be an Israelite.
But that obviously follows from what has just been stated,
and that doesn't show that the prophet is any more like unto Moses than he is unto any other Israelite.
I don't think that's what this means.
But it's in a different sense that the prophet will be like unto Moses.
For in verses 16 and 17, the Lord says,
according to all that thou desirest 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.
And the Lord said unto me, They have well spoken that which they have spoken.
There I think you get the answer as to how the prophet will be like unto Moses.
You go back now about 40 years to Mount Sinai,
and there when the Lord appeared upon the mouth, the people trembled.
And they did not want to hear the voice of God, because they feared that they would die.
And they did not want to see the Theophany for the same reason.
And so they said, Let Moses speak unto us.
Moses therefore intervened between the Lord and the nation.
Moses was a mediator between the Lord and the people.
And here God commends them in what they have done.
They have spoken well, he says.
Literally the words mean they have done well in what they have spoken.
Because they have realized the great distance that their sin has created between God and themselves.
And if they as sinful people approach unto the Lord, they will die.
They need a mediator.
They need someone who will represent the Lord unto them.
Who will speak the word of the Lord unto them.
And God commends them for this choice.
It is then in that sense that the prophet is to be like unto Moses.
He is to be a mediator.
Now if we look back into Israelitish history, we find that there were really two kinds of mediators.
There was the prophet, and the prophet spoke for God before the nation.
And there was the priest, who really represented the nation before God.
Now the functions of the two were combined in some of the prophets, such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel and others.
And perhaps the line of demarcation is not very clear cut after all.
But at any rate the prophet was the representative of God unto the nation.
The prophet spoke the word of the Lord unto the nation.
And in that sense he is to be like unto Moses.
Now you'll notice that so far this has simply used the singular, the prophet whom the Lord raises up.
But then it goes right on in verse 19 and says,
If the people don't hearken unto the words of God which he speaks through the prophet,
why God will require it of him.
And if the prophet speaks a word in God's name that God has not commanded him,
that prophet shall die.
And then you ask, how will we know whether the prophet is speaking the word of the Lord?
It's a very practical question that is raised here.
And the answer here given is, if the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord,
and the prophecy does not come to pass,
then you know that that is not a prophecy that the Lord has spoken.
The prophet has spoken presumptuously, thou shalt not be afraid of him.
Now let's go back for just a minute because this involves the question,
Who is this prophet that the Lord will raise up?
There have been a number of different interpretations.
Some have said that this is Joshua.
Others have said that it is Jeremiah.
Those are two of the Jewish interpretations.
I think you can see that those don't fit very well.
Others have said that it is simply the body of prophets.
That is the common modernistic view.
Others have said that it is only Christ.
I'm inclined to think that what is intended here is a reference to the body of prophets
as that finds its culmination in Christ.
For Christ is the prophet who is like unto Moses.
And you remember in the 34th chapter of Deuteronomy,
the statement is made after Moses' death that there has not arisen in Israel
a prophet like unto Moses whom the Lord knew face unto face,
literally mouth unto mouth.
So there is then, it seems to me, reference to a body of prophets,
but also to Christ as the chief prophet.
Now let's look at the evidence for that.
First of all then, you find that this prophetic body is set forth
to be a counterpart to the superstitious practices of Canaan.
One prophet, one individual would hardly stand as a counterpart to Canaan.
If the reference were fulfilled in Joshua, Joshua would soon die,
but the Canaanite superstitions would go on.
And so it seems that there is need for something to be a counterpart
to the religions of Canaan.
And that also is brought out, is it not, in the questions that are asked here?
How shall we know whether the prophet is speaking the words in the name of the Lord or not?
That's a good practical question.
A man comes forth in the name of God,
how do you know whether he is a spokesman for God or not?
That implies, however, does it not, that there are more than one
who will speak in the name of the Lord?
And we are told here very clearly that certain things will happen
if men speak in the name of the Lord.
If a man speaks the word that God has not commanded him,
in other words, becomes presumptuous, he will die.
Now, there are possibly two cases of that recorded in the Old Testament.
One is in 1 Kings 13, you remember the account of the old prophet.
The other is with Nathan.
You remember when David wanted to build the house of the Lord,
Nathan said, Go, do all that is in thine heart, for the Lord is with thee.
But that night the Lord appeared unto Nathan,
and Nathan had to go back to David the next day and say, Thus saith the Lord.
He had to retract everything that he had said
and make it clear to David that David could not build a temple.
But I'm inclined to think that the reference here
is more to what we call the false prophets.
For example, Hananiah in Jeremiah's day.
That was a difficult time.
Jeremiah prophesied that the exile would last for 70 years.
Hananiah said, No, only two years.
And Jeremiah had to turn on Hananiah and expose him as a false prophet.
You see, the people had a problem
because there were men who stood up and said, Thus saith the Lord.
And the Lord had not spoken.
You and I have that problem today.
There are plenty of men who stand up and say, Thus saith the Lord.
How do you know whether they are true spokesmen for God or not?
What is the test today to tell whether a minister is a minister of God or not?
Well, my friends, there's only one touchstone,
and that is the revelation of God, the word of God.
If the minister does not preach the scriptures
or in accordance with the scriptures,
he is not preaching the word of God.
And we need to keep that in mind.
That is the touchstone by which to judge what we hear,
not whether the majority likes it or not,
or whether we like it or not, but whether it is scriptural.
For, in effect, the modern minister is prophetic to this extent
that he is expounding the word of God.
He is not setting forth the actual words of God as did the prophet.
But we can tell, and I think God's people do know,
where they hear the word of God and where they don't.
A friend of mine said that he had been among a group of ministers,
all of whom were modernistic except himself.
And he said at one of their meetings they began to let down their hair,
so to speak, and make confessions.
And one of them said,
I don't understand why it is that the people don't pay any attention to us
and our churches are empty.
And then they pointed to my friend and said,
You're the only one to whom people come to listen.
And obviously they didn't come to listen to him,
but they came to listen to what he was saying
because he was preaching the word of God.
God's people know when they hear the word of God
because they can judge it by the scriptures.
Now in Israel, when you have Hananiah saying one thing
and Jeremiah saying another thing,
Jeremiah says the exile is 70 years,
Hananiah says the exile is two years,
both of them claim to be spokesmen of the Lord.
Why, what are we to do?
We will know that one speaks the truth and the other does not
because the one will be punished with death.
God will protect his people.
And furthermore, if the prophecy does not eventuate,
if it does not come to pass,
we will know that it is not a prophecy that the Lord gave.
Now I suppose then that in ancient Israel
the prophets speak on many subjects,
but inasmuch as their local prophecies, so to speak, were fulfilled,
they could be believed when they spoke of things to come of the Messiah.
Men like Isaiah and Jeremiah would speak about local subjects, let us say,
and people soon learned that they were trustworthy,
that just as with Samuel the Lord allowed none of his words to fall to the ground,
so would the true prophets.
Hence, when they spoke of Christ, they could be believed
because they were accredited as true spokesmen for the Lord.
There is another test given in the 13th chapter of Deuteronomy,
and that is that no matter whether a prophet performs a miracle or not,
if he does it in the name of other gods, you're not to hearken unto him.
And so today we are not to judge religious phenomena by so-called outward success,
but only by one standard, whether it is done in the name of the Lord or not.
That is our only standard.
And so you see this chapter does speak of a body of prophets.
At the same time, it speaks of an individual.
The word in verse 15, navi, is a singular, as I said.
And there is only one who is like Moses in the fullest sense.
And I want to go into that with the Lord willing this afternoon.
But there you see there is a prophecy about a group of prophets which culminate in one.
And so when Christ was here upon earth, they asked him,
Art thou that prophet? Referring, of course, to Deuteronomy 18.
Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?
And the woman at Samaria said, I know when Messiah is come,
he will teach us all things, reflecting, you see, upon what is written here.
And Christ also said that Moses wrote of him.
And this is the only passage where you might really say that Moses himself wrote of Christ.
So it seems to me that here we have a divine authorization for the prophetic institution.
But this prophetic institution cannot properly be understood
unless we realize that it points forward to Christ,
that the prophets are typical of Christ, that he is the great prophet.
He is the prophet that is like Moses.
In a certain sense, we may say that Moses was not a prophet.
He was above the prophets.
But the institution itself pointed forward unto Jesus Christ.
Now there is given to us here a definition of a prophet
that I think is the best definition we can find anywhere, and that's in the 18th verse.
You may have noticed that I skipped over that verse so far.
The Lord says, 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.
There I think you have about as good a definition of a prophet as you can find any place.
And every element in this definition has to be taken into account.
If you leave any element of this definition out,
you're really not doing justice to the scriptural representation.
First of all, the prophetic body is a divine origination.
The prophet is raised up by the Lord.
That distinguishes him from the so-called prophets of antiquity, the false prophets.
He did not have to go through a long process of initiation.
He did not have to go through a school of training.
He did not have to work his way into the prophetic body as it were.
He was called by God, raised up by God,
and so the Lord took hold of Amos when he was about his work and sent him to prophesy.
And the Lord took hold of Isaiah and uttered that rhetorical question,
whom shall I send and who will go for us?
And Isaiah responded, here am I, send me.
And so the Lord could say to Jeremiah,
before I formed thee in the womb I knew thee,
and I set thee apart, I gave thee to be a prophet unto the nations, and so on.
It is the Lord then who has chosen these men.
Now they are Israelites.
And God puts his words in their mouth.
Now the Bible doesn't tell us how God does that.
You see, we're right here with this question of inspiration.
And Paul, in writing to Timothy, says something very similar to this
when he says, all scripture is God breathed.
I think our word inspiration is really unfortunate there.
Inspiration, according to the etymology, means to breathe into something.
That isn't what Paul is talking about.
The scriptures are not a body of writings into which God has breathed something,
but rather the scriptures are breathed out by God.
The Greek word is theotnostos,
and that means simply to be breathed out, to be spoken by God.
And so God says, I will put my words in his mouth.
The words of the prophet are of divine origin.
They are the very words of God.
And he shall speak unto them, that is, unto the nation, all that I shall command him.
There you have the function of the prophet.
The prophet was a mediator between God and the nation.
The prophet spoke the exact words of God unto the nation, unto Israel.
Now someone will say, what do you do with Balaam then?
Because Balaam is said to be a prophet.
Well, I would answer that by saying that Balaam had the prophetic gift,
but Balaam was not a prophet in the true Old Testament sense,
because he was not an Israelite.
He was a Bepir, which was outside of Israel, toward the east.
He was not an Israelite, but the prophet is actually an Israelite,
raised up by God, who speaks the actual words of God unto the nation.
To hear the prophet speak, in other words, is to hear the word of God.
So the prophets might say, Thus saith the Lord.
Now that phrase has been discovered on a number of the cuneiform tablets.
Thus says so and so.
And that means that the words that follow are the exact words that are given to the prophet,
are given to the spokesman.
The older liberal school used to say that only the ethical content of the message was revealed by God.
It was because Amos and Hosea and the others were men of such ethical integrity
that they perceived the will of God to be a will that detested evil and chose the good.
And that was the ethical content of their message, but the rest of it they developed on their own.
They worked it out in accordance with their own ideas and their own personality.
That is not what the Bible teaches.
The prophet spoke the actual words of God, and therein he differs from a modern minister.
A modern minister preaches the word of God, but no man can honestly say
that the precise words that he speaks have been revealed to him by God.
He preaches the word of God insofar as he expounds what God has given him in the scriptures.
There is a difference then.
Technically, the prophet was an Israelite, a mediator between God and the nation,
a man who spoke the words of God unto that nation.
Now just one more question, then we'll have to stop and we can have a few minutes for questioning then.
Does not this make of the prophet, we are told, a kind of a machine?
Is not this mechanical inspiration?
Well, I would like to say that if that were the case,
I don't see that there's anything derogatory to a prophet in that.
If a man can be so honored of God as to be the spokesman of his message,
that is a great honor indeed, and there's nothing derogatory to a man about that at all.
When the secretary types our letters or our manuscripts,
she is not doing anything derogatory because she doesn't contribute something of her own to the work,
because she simply does what we want her to do.
In a certain sense, she's being honored.
I, for one, try to choose somebody whom I know will do a good job of it
and won't have a lot of mistakes on the page.
It's an honor, really, to be asked to do a certain piece of work.
And the prophet is honored by God if he is a spokesman for God.
But there is nothing in the Bible to imply that the prophet was treated somewhat like a stick or a stone,
just a tool with no personality.
Rather, God chose those men whom he felt could best carry out his work.
And so you have a man of the personality of Ezekiel to speak forth God's message in a certain way,
a man like Jeremiah to speak it forth, a man like Amos and Isaiah.
God did not treat these men as sticks and stones, but he treated them as living human beings.
And while they did not contribute to the message, the message in a certain sense fitted them.
I do not mean that the message was changed, not at all.
It was the very word of God.
There is mystery here, as there is mystery in the doctrine of inspiration.
But we must insist that the prophet was a spokesman who spoke for God.
And with that we part company completely with the modernistic view,
which says the spokesman thought that he was a spokesman,
was convinced that he was a spokesman for the Lord.
Yes, he was.
But the actual fact is that he was such a spokesman,
not merely that he thought he was, but he actually was.
Now, I've tried to sum up some of the salient points of this chapter.
Our time is up, and I think we can stop now, and perhaps you will have questions.
The tape runs out, I understand, at exactly 45 minutes,
and that's why I'm stopping at this point.
I won't promise to do it every time if I get wound up too much,
but maybe you'll have some questions now.