Woodlawn Evangelical Lutheran Church           

Deuteronomy 18:15-20 – “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. 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."

 The LORD said to me: "What they say is good. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers; I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him. If anyone does not listen to my words that the prophet speaks in my name, I myself will call him to account.  But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded him to say, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, must be put to death."

 Introduction – Are you listening? Have you ever had to ask that question? Have you ever been asked that question? Parents, as you were explaining to your children something very important about the family schedule for the day, did you ever see evidence that their minds were wandering, so you needed to ask: Are you listening? When someone needed to explain to you some very important details about a project that you were responsible for, did maybe someone ask you: “Are you listening?”

            There is a time for us to talk and there is a time for us to listen. When you are having a conversation with someone, you might need to humble yourself if you are going to listen. Listening can be humbling, because it often implies that the person to whom you’re talking has something that you need to hear and that it is more important than anything you might want to say at that time. You close your mouth and you process the information through your ears and into your mind.

Will you listen to the Prophet?

It was time for God’s people to listen. A very important event would soon be taking place. It was the end of an era and the beginning of a new future, filled with promises kept and wonderful possibilities for everyone. Who were they listening to? Moses. He was a giant of a figure among God’s people. A living legend. It is not because he was physically strong and powerful. We don’t know anything about his physical appearance. Maybe you picture Charlton Heston, maybe Ben Kingsley. Either could be close, but both probably way off. Moses was a living legend because he was a friend of God. His leadership had dominated the last 40 years. He was the prophet of God, God’s chosen mouthpiece to deliver God’s Word to his people. But at the age of 120 years, Moses was an old man and his time to lead was coming to an end.

It was time to listen to Moses and his final teaching as the people of God stood at the doorstep of the land that would become theirs, promised to them by God. The way in was across the Jordan River, but Moses was not going to cross with them. Because Moses had gotten an attitude with God, God said that he would not get to kiss the ground of the Promised Land and see God’s promise finally kept after hundreds of years. What God would allow Moses to see was a panoramic view of that land from a mountaintop. He would see the land that he and his people should have been enjoying for the past few decades. He would be reminded that God is just and deals with rebels swiftly and harshly, but offers his love and mercy daily to those that God keeps faithful.

It was time to listen to Moses as he pointed them to the future: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him.” I wonder if those words stung Moses as he said them, “You must listen to him . . .” You see, the people whom God had rescued from Egypt and chosen to be the inhabitants of the land they were about to enter and the keepers of God’s promise of the Savior, were often very stubborn and would not listen. I think we can all relate. There were many times while Moses was their leader when it seemed as though events in their lives were turning out for worse rather than for better. The people complained when they didn’t have food. They complained when they got tired of the food they were given. They disobeyed God and worshipped idols. They sometimes wished they could be settled back in Egypt where they had been slaves, thinking that the stability of that land was better than the uncertainty of living out in the desert. They often were tired of Moses and questioned his leadership, sometimes even threatening to kick him out and take over. Do you think it hurt Moses when he said, “You must listen to him” when he knew full well that people often did not listen to him and when they didn’t listen to him they didn’t listen to God and God became angry with his people?

Do you think it hurt the people to hear the command from the lips of Moses, “You must listen to him”? The people who stood before Moses on the day of his farewell lessons had aunts and uncles and grandparents who did not get to enjoy the blessings of the Promised Land because they had not listened to God’s prophet, they would not trust that God would give them the land. The generation that stood before Moses did trust in God’s guidance. All of them had the chance to reflect on the past and learn from the mistakes of those who came before.

But as I said, this was a new day, and God gave them a wonderful promise that would be a source of strength and reassurance for them as they entered the land of promise. “The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers.” A new leader. Someone like Moses. Someone from among the brothers, from the tribes of Israel. And someone who could represent the people to God and who could represent God to the people. Their parents’ and grandparents’ generation had experienced the power of the Almighty God with the noise of thunder and the heat and light of a great fire at Mount Sinai. And they were terrified to be in the presence of the Holy One. So, like Moses, the prophet who would come in the future would stand in the middle, between God and the people of Israel, a Mediator, an advocate for both parties, because sinful human beings cannot stand in the presence of God without a Mediator.

For the people to have hope and a future, they needed to listen to the voice of the Prophet. God said, “I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.” Like Moses, the words this prophet would speak would be God’s own words, the truth that the people needed to hear about their sin and about God’s grace, about condemnation and freedom.

            They would need to listen to this prophet because there would be a lot of confusing messages from the people around them. The nations that would remain in power after the people of Israel conquered the Promised Land were nations that had false prophets. Foreigners listened to them as they searched for knowledge of the supernatural by means of divination. Perhaps some read the movement of the stars and tried to predict the future based on that. Sound familiar? Perhaps some butchered animals and tried to predict the future by dumping out the internal organs and seeing how they lay. Sorcery and divination means interpreting and manipulating nature, thinking that somehow supernatural forces are giving us clues to our existence and the good, bad, and ugly of our future. God said to his people in the verse right before this section, “Don’t buy into that nonsense!” He says the same to us. Our lives and our future are in his hands and his prophets are the ones that we must listen to.

            Moses did not introduce them to this Prophet before he died. He was not there at that time, not living among the people at that time. The people would have to hang on to Moses’ words and keep them in their hearts as a constant source of hope. They would have to pass the promise on to their children and grandchildren to look for the Prophet. Moses’ aide, Joshua, became the leader of the people who led the conquest of the Promised Land. But he was not the Prophet. There were many prophets among God’s people who served as the mouthpiece for God’s Word to his people. As faithful servants and leaders, they guided God’s people. But no one stood out as the fulfillment of God’s great promise given through Moses. Not one would we place on the level with Moses, through whom God had given the entire structure of their society, their moral foundation, their worship and their sacrifices.

            Over the centuries, there were always a faithful few who would continue to listen to Moses, long after he had spoken the words of this promise of God, long after he died. Some 1400 years later, in the first century AD, a Jewish man from the town of Bethsaida had been listening and hoping until one day, Jesus said to him, “Follow me!” and he went and told his friend Nathanael, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the law – Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph!”

            Jesus our Savior is everything Moses was and more. He is the Prophet who has the very words of God in his mouth and tells everything his Father in heaven commands. All people will be judged on the basis of whether or not they believe in the word spoken by Jesus Christ. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that Moses was faithful as a servant in God’s house, but Jesus was faithful as a Son over God’s house. It’s the difference between a manager and an owner. A manager can take pride in how well the building he manages looks and works hard so that it is well kept. But for the owner, it is his investment. He works hard because it belongs to him.

            God had chosen Moses to speak to the people because he was one of them. God’s Son became one of the people and yet he was more. They were his people because he became one of them, but they were also his people because he made them who they were and he was the one who needed to make them his forever.

            When the Prophet spoken about through Moses was born, the situation of our lives was a mess. Sinfulness was too deeply infected in the veins of all people. You would have thought sin was essential to being human. But God did not create sinful people. He created holy people. And it would take an act of God to make people holy again.

That act of God began with the obedient Prophet honoring God’s Word and teaching with the authority that only he has. Jesus showed that he had the authority to teach the truth by performing miraculous signs. That act of God that saved our immortal lives continued when the Prophet of God let himself be arrested, tortured, killed, and buried. On his own he did this, in order to straighten out the mess of our lives. On his own, he put himself in your place and accepted God’s just punishment for all of our sins. Hell and damnation for him, because your freedom from sin and guilt and death was that important to him. And, as the greatest sign to show that he had the authority to teach and to rule and to save, that the word of God was in him and came from him, he came to life after he had been dead – Jesus walked out of the grave to show that even death is powerless when faced with Almighty God.

            This is the one worth listening to. You have heard the voice of the Prophet again and again, calling you each day to follow. “Faith comes from hearing the message and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” Your faith in our Triune God is the most valuable treasure God has given to you by his Holy Spirit. To have faith in Jesus Christ can be rephrased in a very simple way, based on the words of our text. To have faith means that you “Listen to the words of the Prophet.” His words tell you that God accepted his sacrifice and all that you have done wrong is forgiven. His words tell you that he won the battle and you get to enjoy being champions with him. His words are deep and powerful. May we never grow tired of listening to the words of the Prophet, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.