Lord, speak through me to this congregation. I pray that you will take your word and accomplish your purposes through it. Change your people into your image. Create faith in our hearts and empower us for life and godliness, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Hear the word of God as recorded in Deuteronomy 18.1-8.
Deuteronomy 18:1 "The Levitical priests, all the tribe of Levi, shall have no portion or inheritance with Israel. They shall eat the Lord's food offerings as their inheritance. 2 They shall have no inheritance among their brothers; the Lord is their inheritance, as he promised them. 3 And this shall be the priests' due from the people, from those offering a sacrifice, whether an ox or a sheep: they shall give to the priest the shoulder and the two cheeks and the stomach. 4 The firstfruits of your grain, of your wine and of your oil, and the first fleece of your sheep, you shall give him. 5 For the Lord your God has chosen him out of all your tribes to stand and minister in the name of the Lord, him and his sons for all time.
6 "And if a Levite comes from any of your towns out of all Israel, where he lives—and he may come when he desires —to the place that the Lord will choose, 7 and ministers in the name of the Lord his God, like all his fellow Levites who stand to minister there before the Lord, 8 then he may have equal portions to eat, besides what he receives from the sale of his patrimony.
1) God has proclaimed that his servants should receive provision for all their needs.
This passage is not talking about the priesthood of all believers. Let's look at the context and see what kind of people it is talking about. The Levites were chosen as the tribe of Israel which would serve as the firstfruits offering to God. They were essentially the national tithe. They did not normally have inheritances, because the Lord was their inheritance. God chose them for particular types of service enabling the Israelites in their worship. Among the Levites were the descendants of Aaron, who were the priests. But there were many other Levites who were not the priests. They were more or less ancillary servants of God, who assisted the priests in every way necessary. But unlike the average person, their lives were distinct due to their being supported by the offerings of the people and the fact that their inheritance was from the Lord rather than from property held by their parents.
What is our Lord's attitude about the Levites?
1) They should be welcomed to minister to the people.
2) They should receive provision for their needs.
3) They are chosen by God to enable his people in their worship.
Is there a modern parallel within the body of Christ for the Levite in the time of Moses? Yes. These would be the elders leading your congregation, those serving before the Lord our Great High Priest, proclaiming Scripture to you and enabling you in your worship, whether ruling elders or teaching elders. These are the people who watch over you. They pray for you, encourage you, and seek to understand the Scripture well so as to bring Christ and his answers to you. They have a high calling.
What is our attitude about these leaders in the body of Christ? All too often we take these servants of Christ for granted. We ask for their prayers, their counsel, their admonition, then we harden our hearts before our Lord and refuse to bow to the admonition our elders bring, we refuse to heed their wise counsel, thus giving them reason to admonish us further, we harden ourselves even to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. We are a stubborn and rebellious people, just like the people of Israel. We sing the praises of our shepherds and we refuse to heed their word. We make trouble for our leaders. We think they should always be present for us in the hard times but we neglect their care in the good times, making the hard times even harder. We withhold their due from them out of self-serving greed while we claim poverty, a desire to avoid exalting human leaders, even a need to be more involved in this mission or that charity. Rather than providing for God's servants freely and with a willing heart we close our hearts, our lives, our bank accounts. We do not appreciate what the Lord appreciates. We deny his appointment of provision for his servants and make them go out to beg or glean fields. Surely we take what God has called good and call it an evil burden. This ought not to be so. Our Lord has provided for our need. He has brought us his undershepherds. They are a gift from him to equip the saints for the work of ministry (Eph. 4.12). Let us not reject God's gifts. Let us rather receive this precious gift.
Under the leadership God has provided for us, we move on to our next point today. Hear the word of God as recorded in Deuteronomy 18.9-14.
Deuteronomy 18.9 "When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. 10 There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer 11 or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, 12 for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations the Lord your God is driving them out before you. 13 You shall be blameless before the Lord your God, 14 for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do this.
2) God's people bring a biblical faith into the walks of life he has given them.
Most of us would read this passage from Deuteronomy 18.9-14 and deny the kind of "abominable practices" Moses mentions. Though watching network news sometimes seems rather like consulting mediums or fortune-tellers, really relatively few people, and especially very few people who genuinely would call themselves biblical Christians seek out this kind of spiritism. But let's look a little bit below the surface. Listen to verse 9 again. "You shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations." What are the practices and priorities of our nation? Granted, some of them are downright biblical and good. Well enough, we want to practice those things which are biblical and good. But looking at the end of verse 13, what has the Lord not allowed us to do? Do we support those things? What do we find scintillating? What kind of sin tickles your fancy? I'll wait a moment. You're supposed to be honest with yourself. A while ago we had some time for repentance and forgiveness. Did we manage to skip over something? We all have sin we cling to. And many times we see that our sin is sin which our community thinks is quite all right. Which one of those ten commandments do we violate first thing in the day when we wake up? What do we honor and serve rather than the true and living God?
God's people bring a genuine biblical faith into their communities. While the people we work with, volunteer with, go to the ball park with, and pick up trash by the road with may not have a problem with the sin that besets us, they were never made our moral standard. God did not give the unbelieving nations to proclaim Scripture and confront sin. Who did he give to do that? We're back to point one again. God has given us leaders in his church who proclaim Scripture, who confront sin, and who proclaim God's forgiveness again from Scripture. We do not live under the moral code of our nation, whether it be Constitution Party, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, or Republican (note the alphabetical order and forgive me if I left out your flavor of choice). We bring a genuine biblical faith wherever we go. We are the people God is equipping "for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes" (Eph. 4.12-14, ESV). That's what we are. It's in the nature of the believer. And our Lord has not left us without help. We realize we need help. So do our leaders. What will we do? We must look to God's provision, not our human cunning.
Now hear the Word of God as recorded in Deuteronomy 18.15-22.
Deuteronomy 18.15 "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen— 16 just as you desired of the Lord your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, 'Let me not hear again the voice of the Lord my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.' 17 And the Lord said to me, 'They are right in what they have spoken. 18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. 19 And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him. 20 But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.' 21 And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?'— 22 when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.
3) God raises up a prophet like Moses (but greater).
We are easily deceived. We are quick to listen to the prophets who speak falsehood, whose message is not the message our Lord has given us for our life and for our good. And we see that those words of the false prophets are not God's words. They are not steadfast and sure. They are not eternal. They are inferior building materials being stacked higgledy-piggledy, sometimes on the foundation of Christ and sometimes on no foundation at all. But we try to identify truth and falsehood in those people we hear, in the books we read, in the conversations we have.
All our leaders, though the Lord has appointed them for us, are sinful men. We all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. If we were to be justified by our works we would be hopeless indeed. If we were to speak only truth we would need to have our mouths stopped forever, for even in reading Scripture we use it wrongly, as Satan did in the temptation of Christ. There is only one Man, the Man of God's own choosing, the Lord our mighty fortress, the Lord of Hosts, God with us, who speaks rightly. He is the prophet God has raised up who sees God face to face and who speaks his words. We need to hear from this prophet, Christ the Lord.
Verses 18-19 serve as the climax of God's command here. "And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him." The Father has given to the Son the words of life. He speaks them to all to whom the Father has commanded. And he speaks them to us here today. He speaks them in the words of Scripture which we have read. He speaks them in the Gospel which is proclaimed, the forgiveness of sins in the name of and for the sake of Christ. See the frightful statement God makes. If we do not listen to his words he will require his comands from us. And what has God just commanded us? Many things, things we do not and can not accomplish. We stand condemned. Our Lord has spoken. We can hear and believe his words of forgiveness or we can try to work out forgiveness ourselves, with our own human cunning, with our deceitful schemes, creating new winds of doctrine.
Let us not leave off there. Let us turn to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We confess that Jesus, fully man and fully God, unconfused in his natures, lived a sinless life in his human nature on our behalf, then took our sins upon us and paid the penalty for them all. Having lived in our place he also died in our place. He received the condemnation of the Father for our sin and was raised to newness of life. He was raised from the dead to be the firstfruits of the resurrection, the firstborn among many brothers, and will make us who believe to be brothers with him. Jesus Christ speaks the words of forgiveness, saying on the cross that it is accomplished, that the penalty for sin has been paid in his body, and that he is in fact the resurrection and the life. Put to death for our sins, he is raised for our justification, and is able to redeem both soul and body for eternity. This is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! We stand forgiven because he has proclaimed us forgiven. We do not have to prove our faith. We do not have to earn righteousness before his throne. We have nothing but our filthy rags to stand in, but our Lord has placed a royal robe of his righteousness on us. And we receive it as we hear and receive his words, words of forgiveness.
No comments:
Post a Comment