Will Fitzgerald
February 1, 2009
In this passage from Deuteronomy there is the promise of a Prophet, or series of prophets, that will come and bring the word of God to the people of God. Moses literally brought God’s words down to the people, going up to the mountain and returning with the words of God engraved on the stone by God by God’s own hand.
But Moses didn’t live forever, and the way God was to speak to the people was to change. Prophets were to come later who would speak God’s word given to them for the people. This is a strong promise, and it came with a bit of a truth condition: how would people know whether what a prophet was saying was true? A prophet’s messages would be of two kinds, at least, as implied by this passage. One kind would be words to heed—things that the prophet would tell the people to do. The other kind would be words of prediction—what we usually call “prophecy,” but what is clearly not the only role of a prophet. The predictive words were given so people could have an idea as to whether what the prophet was saying was true: if the predictions came true, you could trust the prophet for the other things God was saying through them.
I don’t know Hebrew, but it’s interesting to note that this passage in the New Revised Standard Version can not quite make up its mind whether to use ‘prophet’ in the singular or ‘prophets’ in the plural. But what I’ve been reading in the commentaries is that the Hebrew does have it in the singular, but that it can be read as a representative singular—that is, this one prophet stands for all prophets. And so we get a nice ambiguity—a deliberate ambiguity—between the singular prophet and a multitude of prophets.
As we have been studying for the past few weeks, the New Testament writers bear witness to Jesus as the Word of God, God’s messenger and God’s message. When Jesus came, he was this singular prophet. This passage from Deuteronomy is cited or alluded to, I think, eleven times in the gospels and Acts [1]. Jesus comes as the singular Prophet, the fulfillment of Moses’s prophecy; his replacement and better. The New Testament book of Hebrews largely takes up the question of Jesus and his relationship to Moses.
The lectionary passage from Mark does not cite Deuteronomy, but it does something better—it shows Jesus in action. As we saw last week, this is occurring at the beginning of his ministry, and people are just starting to hear about him and make up their minds about him. First of all, they are impressed (one commentator says they were ‘out of their minds’ impressed) with how he taught. This is because, of course, Jesus isn’t just offering commentary on the old (although he did this too), he is bringing a new message of the coming of the kingdom of God.
And if that were not enough, Jesus came with both destroying and healing power. He came to destroy the strongholds of the devil. He is in the synagogue, and the demonic makes its destructive presence known, perhaps the demonic trying to gain some intelligence about what manner of person this Jesus is, and what he came to do, and definitely trying to shout Jesus down.
This demon, we may assume, thought it was lying about Jesus, calling him the Holy One of God. But the thing is, the demon was right: Jesus was the Holy One of God, the Great Prophet spoken of in Deuteronomy, the Word of God.
The prophets of old were to be judged by seeing whether their predictions came true. Jerimiah’s prediction about the death of Hananiah, part of his prophetic showdown with Hananiah [2], for example, took a year to come true. And this is the amazing thing about Jesus as the Word of God: his Word had immediate power to act, and Mark records both this, and the people’s reaction to this. Jesus speaks and the ‘unclean spirit’ convulses out of the man and just goes away. The people didn’t have to wait to see if the words of Jesus came true: they were true, and had immediate power. It is no wonder that “his fame spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.”
Joseph Hart wrote:
Come, ye sinners, poor and wretched,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus, ready, stands to save you,
Full of pity, joined with power.
He is able, He is able;
He is willing; doubt no more.
Lo! The Incarnate God, ascended;
Pleads the merit of His blood.
Venture on Him; venture wholly,
Let no other trust intrude.
None but Jesus, none but Jesus
Can do helpless sinners good.
Deuteronomy writes that the prophet will be judged by whether his or her prophecy comes true. Jesus came in power, demonstrating the truth of his own origins as the Word of God. Jesus is no less powerful now than when he first came among us. We can “venture wholly” on Jesus. What do you need to venture on him today?
[1] Alluded to eleven times:
[2] Jerimiah 29