Dennis Tuuri

You may mark in your Bibles before we get going here. Exodus 4:15 and 16, and Exodus 6:28 through 7:2. We’ll be looking at those in a couple of minutes.

This past week, I got a nice letter from Reverend Norman Jones, who as most of you know is the brother of Gordon Jones and a minister in the Reformed Church of the United States, who’s spoken to our congregation on several occasions and real good man, a theonomist and a real friend of this church, Becky.

And he sent me a couple of articles. One of the articles was from the Reformed Herald, which is the publication of their church, and in it he had an article that he wrote about how to grow a church and he used this church as one of two examples of successfully growing churches. He also sent me another newsletter, however, called the Mid America Messenger and I wanted to just read a short portion of one of the articles, the very beginning editorial called “The Noble Office of Elder” and it has to do with what we were talking about last week in terms of application to denomination.

So I just wanted to read it and sort of reinforce what I said last week. Okay, he’s talking about elders. Elders both ruling and teaching are essential. They are necessary for the being of the church. If it should ever happen that the Christian church are reduced to one congregation with its office bearers, then the church of Christ would still exist on earth. A consistory, a collection of elders and local elders is an essential assembly.

But in reformed church polity, when local churches acknowledge the same faith and covenant together to act in concord, a classis constituted a meeting of the classes is thus a broader, not a higher assembly which meets together periodically to give mutual assistance to its various churches. A classis contributes to the well-being of the church but it is not essential to the being of the church. Now that’s a very interesting statement coming from a reformed denomination with implications that some of you may think through, saying that the eldership in a local church is necessary but involvement in a classis is not necessary for the being of the church.

To go on, that is why no one and no classes may lord it over a local consistory. That’s also why it is not reformed to think of synods as the highest assembly of the church. Synods are the broadest assembly which meets periodically to contribute to the church’s well-being. If any assembly of office bearers is to be called the highest, it is the local consistory. So the point is that as we talked about last week, where you have an assembly and then representatives of the assembly who meet at the next air of government as it were, the princes or the senate.

And so in denominational affiliation, we see the same structure. What we tried to stress last week was that this doesn’t mean that there you have higher offices necessarily. They’re broader offices in that application. And we talked about how this country, of course, was founded politically along those lines. And denominations also are an outworking of that basic principle found in the Old Testament. So I thought it was interesting to have that reinforced through that newsletter and I appreciated that very much from Reverend Jones.

Today, however, we want to stress the fact that even though we’ve looked at some elements of civil government and ecclesiastical government from the old covenant. We’ve looked at judges, officers, elders, family structure. We’ve looked at the necessity of the assembly or representatives of the people meeting together to decide matters, and then the presidents, the princes or the senate—a better term—or presiding officers who are elected by the elected officials representing another layer of government, a broader layer as it were, as to use the editorial’s term.

If we look at these things as a great political system, it’s a great point of sadness for me to reflect on this in terms of America and see how much this country has lost. If those of you who have Vos’s The Hebrew Republic, if you would turn to the last four or five pages sometime this week and read the last couple of pages of that great book, you get an idea of the tremendous blessing that this country had in its original institution through the form of government which is based upon biblical polity. And we’ve fallen far from that.

However, having said that, it’s also important to recognize that was not the end of civil government or ecclesiastical government in the old covenant. This morning, we’re going to talk about the office of the prophet or the function of the prophet. And that also has to do with the governing of the old covenant people both politically, civilly, and ecclesiastically, and additionally to the families as well.

What we’re trying to say here is that we have a good institution of government here, a good structure of church government and civil government. That structure by itself is not salvation. That structure is still being exercised by people involved in that structure are still sinful men. And so you have the necessity in the old covenant of a prophet to address that situation. And we’re going to talk about that this morning from the verses beginning with the verses we read from Deuteronomy 18.

Now those of you who are thinking of such things will recognize that once again we turn to a part of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the law of Moses as it’s sometimes called, and specifically to the book of Deuteronomy which means the second law. And we turn to that again self-consciously because Deuteronomy and the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, establishes the foundation for the old covenant church.

And I think also then we see the new covenant church and the new covenant form of civil government also being built upon the law and the prophets. And so we begin with the discussion of the function of the prophet in the Pentateuch. And it’s been in the Pentateuch that we’ve seen all these various aspects of old covenant government. We’ve seen the initial teaching on it from the Pentateuch and then we’ve looked at application of that in the rest of the old covenant and then we try to make application in a limited sense to the new covenant as well, and we’ll do that in more detail as the weeks go on here when we get to the new testament verses relating to church government.

The point is that the rest of the scriptures in the old covenant are built upon the law of the first five books. And so we have to go to that law for beginning to understand what these offices are. So we turn now to the passage before us in Deuteronomy 18. And it says specifically, and we’ll be looking at verse 15 for a couple of minutes here:

“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.”

And so we have here the promise in the second giving of the law with Moses about to die and not enter the promised land. We have the institution of a perpetual function or office. And I don’t think which term we use there is necessarily that important. It gets into quite a debate as to whether it was an office or a function. But in any event, there was a prophetic ministry throughout the rest of the old covenant that is instituted by God here in Deuteronomy.

He says after Moses dies, I’ll raise up prophets among you like unto him. And so you’ll have these perpetually.

We want to look at this morning is first of all, what is a prophet? What are the marks of a prophet? Who did God talk about when he gave us these verses? And then we’ll look at what the function of that person is to society.

So first of all, what is a prophet? It’s common in a lot of circles to think of a prophet as somebody who knows about the future, who can give an utterance about the future and that will come to pass and that man’s now a prophet. And certainly there’s some sense in which that’s true. And in the verses we read this morning, there was indications in there that in verse 21, that the false prophet would say something that didn’t come to pass and he was a false prophet. And so what the true prophets did as part of their function was predict certain future events that God had revealed to them in an inspired fashion. But to limit the idea of prophet as the one who tells about the future is of course incorrect.

In Exodus 4:15 and 16, which I mentioned earlier, and in Exodus 6:28–7:2, we see Aaron here called the prophet. And it’d be good to look at those scriptures for just a couple of minutes to get a little broader idea and a more accurate idea of what the prophet in the old covenant was.

Exodus 4:15 and 16 says, and you remember here that Moses was complaining because he didn’t think he was very good at talking. He said, “I’m not very good at talking. I don’t want to talk to Pharaoh. I don’t have very good mannerisms in my speech. I have uncircumcised lips.” And God’s response is he gives him Aaron and he says, “Aaron’s going to come out to meet you.” And in verse 15 of Chapter 4 of Exodus:

“And thou shalt speak unto him, and put words in his mouth, and I will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what he shall do. And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people, and he shall be even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God.”

So God is telling Moses here that Aaron will be his mouthpiece, as it were. And then in Exodus 6:28:

“Came to pass in the day when the Lord spake unto Moses in the land of Egypt, that the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, I am the Lord. Speak thou unto Pharaoh, king of Egypt, all that I say unto thee.”

And Moses said before the Lord, “Behold, I am of uncircumcised lips. His lips were closed, as it were. They weren’t pure. They weren’t dedicated to God. And so, he couldn’t speak good, he thought. I man of uncircumcised lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken unto me?”

And the Lord said unto Moses, “See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh, and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet. Thou shalt speak all that I command thee, and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh that he send the children of Israel out of his land.”

And so we see here that Aaron is called a prophet, not because Aaron can necessarily predict future events, although that would part of his ministry too in terms of Pharaoh. But Aaron is called a prophet because God puts his words in Moses’ mouth and Moses speaks them to Pharaoh or to Aaron and Aaron turns around and gives them to Pharaoh. So Aaron is the mouthpiece of Moses and he’s Moses’ prophet and Moses of course is God’s prophet because Moses takes direct revelation from God, speaks it to Aaron so that he can turn around and be a prophet to Pharaoh.

So we see from these verses that a prophet is one who speaks for God. He takes God’s words, God’s thoughts on a matter and tells other people those things. He’s God’s mouthpiece as it were, the conveyor of God’s truth.

And of course in the verses before us in verses 18 and 19, we see confirmation of that:

“I will raise them up a prophet from among thy brethren like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. And it shall come to pass that whoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.”

So God says here the same thing. I’m going to send prophets after Moses dies. And the prophet is the one who I’m going to tell the words to speak and he’ll turn around and convey them to whatever group of society I tell him to do or to whoever I tell him to speak it to.

So a prophet is somebody who speaks God’s words.

Ezekiel 3:4 gives us a good image of this. When Ezekiel is said to take the scroll that God gives him, he eats it. It’s sweet to his taste. The word of God is a sweet thing to us. And then he turns around and becomes God’s prophet by speaking those words unto the other people in the land.

So the prophet is the one who speaks God’s words. Notice here that this is a command word from God. In verse 19:

“It will come to pass that whosoever will not hearken unto my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him. I will judge him, I will curse him as it were if he doesn’t listen to my words spoken through the prophet.”

God’s word is a command word. It always is. It was in the passage before us and it continues to be this day.

Psalm 82:4 is quoted by Jesus in John the 10th chapter verse 34. In John 10:34, Jesus calls Psalm 82 part of the law. He refers to the Psalms as the law. So here’s Jesus talking about a general book of the scripture, but he refers to it as law.

The fact that God’s scripture is a law word is taught throughout the scriptures. I remember when I first heard that expression used by Reverend Rushdoony, it seemed a little funny to me. I never heard such a thing and I was embarrassed to use it because it sounds like you’re just mimicking Rush. But that’s not what’s going on at all. Rushdoony is just using a contemporary word to express the idea that the prophet will speak God’s command word. That word commands us to do things and God will judge us as to whether or not we obey or disobey his command word.

The word of God is always a law to us. Now, it is not simply a set of instructions. It’s a revelation of the person of God. But that revelation of the person of God requires action on the part of the person that it’s being revealed to. The law word of God is an appropriate expression for the prophet’s words and for the books of the whole scriptures.

Hebrews 1:1 and 2 says that all the old testament—that in former times God spake through the mouth of prophets and now these days he speaks in the son, the final prophet. The point is that Hebrews 1:1 and 2 tells us that the whole old covenant is the result of prophets. Okay, men were inspired by God and they didn’t just have to make oral proclamation. The prophet could write God’s words for future use and the whole Old covenant is told to us—to be the old testament has told us in Hebrews 1 and 2—to be written by prophets.

So the idea of a prophet is somebody who speaks for God in a generalized sense. In a very specific sense rather, and generalized in the sense of it’s not simply predictive action. It’s speaking God’s command word to the rest of his creation.

Well, secondly, what are some of the marks or characteristics of these prophets? We’ll just run through these real briefly. You can study these out further if you’d like to.

But first of all, a prophet was a member of the covenant community. In verse 15 says that I’ll raise up a prophet. God says from the midst of thee of thy brethren. A prophet had to be part of the covenant community.

Secondly, the prophet spoke authoritatively in Jehovah’s name. We just looked at some of the scriptures about that. He spoke in Jehovah’s name. And when you speak in Jehovah’s name, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” you’re saying this is the law word of God, the command word, God’s required instructions for his people to follow. And so the prophet also spoke authoritatively as well as being a member of the covenant community.

Third, the prophet might, may very well have knowledge of future events and verse 22 tells us that of course as well as other scriptures. Prophets very frequently had knowledge of future events as one of their characteristics.

Fourth, miracles often accompanied the prophet and attesting to his being a prophet from God. Deuteronomy 13:1 is a good verse for that. As well as for instance, you have the example of Elijah and how he is demonstrated to be a prophet of God when the God before the prophets of Baal who were the false prophets, when God was the one who attested to Elijah’s prophetic work through consuming the wet wood, the water, the dirt, everything else there that Elijah had prepared for him. So Elijah was attested to be a prophet of God by miracles and that was frequently the case with other prophets.

So they had to be a member of the covenant community. They spoke in Jehovah’s name which is to say authoritatively. They had knowledge of future events typically. Miracles would accompany them.

And fifth, and this is quite important and is often overlooked, whatever this prophet spoke had to be in accord with previous prophecies. Deuteronomy the 13th chapter is an entire chapter devoted basically to this thought. Deuteronomy 13 says even if a guy predicts a future event and it comes to pass, but if in that prediction of that event and in the use of his prophecy, he tries to turn you away from Jehovah God, then he’s a false prophet.

Deuteronomy 13 says that whatever the prophet does, even if it’s attested by miracles, even if it’s attested by fulfillment of future events that he predicts, that prophet is not a true prophet unless his prophecy is consistent with what Jehovah God has told us or instructed us to do up to that point in time. It had to be consistent with the rest of scripture.

Now, of course, we see this very same thing in the New Testament in Galatians 1:8. We see where Paul says, if I or another or an angel from God even preach a different gospel than the gospel you’ve received, let him be accursed. This is, of course, the biggest reason or one of the biggest things point out to people of the Mormon persuasion that they have a book that contradicts other portions of scripture. So, we know that they’re false prophets and should be put to death accordingly.

The word of God says that whatever revelation comes from God has to be consistent with what came before. That has implications of course for many things we’ll say this morning, but it also has implications for the fact that we know that the scriptures before us ultimately led up to or prophesied the coming of Jesus Christ, the true prophet.

We know that because the scriptures specifically tell us that in Acts 3:22–26. Let’s just turn to that for a minute:

“Ye men of Israel, for Moses truly said unto the fathers, ‘A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me, him shall ye hear, in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that every soul which will not hear that prophet shall be destroyed from among the people. Yay, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days.’

Then he says, ‘Ye are the children of the prophets and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, and in thy seed shall all the kindred of the earth be blessed. Unto you first God having raised up his son Jesus sent him to bless you in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.’”

Here we have Peter in his—I believe it’s his second sermon—telling us specifically that God is going to raise up a prophet. And what he means by this is that God is going to raise up Jesus Christ to be your prophet. He is the ultimate fulfillment of all the prophets.

Now that’s interesting, of course, because if Jesus Christ’s message is going to be a prophetic message, it has to be consistent with the rest of scripture, doesn’t it? He can’t come along all of a sudden and say, “I’m a God of grace, replacing the God of law, the old covenant.” He can’t do that. He would have been a false prophet.

Jesus Christ came in accordance with the rest of the prophets, in accordance with all the teaching of the old covenant and the law as well. Now, that’s rather obvious, of course, because Jesus Christ is the word of God from all eternity. And the old covenant prophecies prophesied to him. Okay?

And if their content was reminding people of the law of God, and it was, then that was a prophecy that Jesus Christ would also turn the hearts of the people back to his law and on the basis of his law back to the children, back to a correct understanding of his law word in every area of life. To posit Jesus Christ is coming and somehow making a radical break from the old covenant is to in essence accuse him of being a false prophet.

Now, Jesus Christ was the ultimate fulfillment of the succession of prophets prophesied in Deuteronomy 18 or told about in Deuteronomy 18. But in the interim, of course, there were many other prophets under the old covenant dispensation. And we know that throughout the time of the death of Moses on through to about 400 BC there was a continuous succession of prophets. Prophets were as it were always in the land so to speak.

Now there may be actual gaps in terms of the chronology we know. But I think what God is getting at here in Deuteronomy 18 is that I won’t leave you without a prophet, without a prophetic voice to help you understand and apply and correct the abuses that you’ll have on the basis of applying these five books of the law that I’ve given you. I’ll always leave you with this voice.

And so there was a steady succession of prophets up to the close of the old covenant, prophets in about the age of about 400 BC with Malachi. And then we have of course 400 years of silence as the world is waiting for the true final prophetic voice to come, who is the fulfillment of all the other prophets who had spoken prior to him with the coming of Jesus Christ.

Now, it’s interesting too in light of the fact that we’ve looked at these marks or characteristics of the prophets and then Acts—I won’t turn to it now, but in Acts 2:22—we’re told that again talking about Jesus being a prophet that was to be sent by God. Peter in his first sermon there says that Jesus of Nazareth was attested to you by signs and miracles. And of course we said that a prophet had to be one of the countrymen or the brothers of the people, had to be a member of the covenant community.

And so Peter says here was Jesus. He was a member of the covenant community or brother, a Nazarene. And he was attested to by signs and miracles, another mark of the prophet, he had attestations to his office, to his function by signs and miracles. And the context of Acts 2 of course is that what they see happening in the church is a fulfillment of the prophecies of Joel. And so in the very first sermon here of Peter, he says that not only does Jesus have these other characteristics of a prophet, but he is fulfilling the prophecies of Joel.

So he teaches them in the very first sermon that we have continuity between all the old covenant prophets that were to be found in the old covenant including the prophet Joel and the prophet to come, Jesus Christ. And the mark of course of the true prophet is building upon the authority of God’s word already delivered. And so Jesus was seen as in continuity with the old covenant people.

So God promised to raise up a prophet. He’d be a spokesman for him, to be his mouth as it were, to tell people the implications of his law on their lives. He had marks, the distinctions of that office. And then finally, that Deuteronomy 18 is finally fulfilled in Jesus Christ, although it also has other fulfillments in prophets throughout the ages leading up to the coming of Jesus Christ, the true prophet.

Why did God raise up these prophets? What was the necessity for them? And we’ve talked about this a little bit, but we’ll look at it a little bit more in detail. Now, one of the things we can look at is Acts 3 that we just read. After all, Acts 3 says this is the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 18, the coming of Jesus Christ.

And God now is raising up Jesus to what end? Why did God institute this? And he tells us in verse 26:

“Unto you first God having raised up his son Jesus sent him to bless you to turn you away every one of you from his iniquities.”

So the scriptures tell us the purpose of the coming of the prophet Jesus Christ was to instruct the people in their iniquities that they might be blessed by turning away from them. And that’s the overall thrust of all the prophetic offices to convict the people as to their sins that they might be turned and that they might be blessed.

Now frequently the prophets were given the bad billing that they were prophets of doom and their whole point was to bring doom upon the people. But the whole point of their message was not one of doom. It was one of blessing, not cursing. They predicted God’s curses upon the people, but only if they continued in their iniquity and in their sin. They did that so that they might turn the people, not so that they might be seen as saying, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, we told you so.”

They did it to turn the people away from their sins. And Jesus Christ is said to come as the last final prophet, the fulfillment of all prophecies to turn away every one of you from his iniquities and thereby to bless you. That’s the overall purpose of the prophet.

Now the prophet is necessary because people are sinful. We have, as I said before, good establishment of civil government in the old covenant. We’ve seen the blessings that will shower forth upon the people in a representative form of government, a government actually whose blueprints were sketched out by God. And we’ve seen that blueprint also applies to church government. These are blessings from God, but people are sinful and they’re going to fall away from the word of God.

And so a prophet will be necessary to restore them. The obvious implication of the statement in Acts 3:26 is that people will be in iniquities when the prophet comes. And that was the point, I think, of the prophets of the old covenant as well. They were around to reinforce to the people the necessity of obeying God.

God’s law, having given them the first five books of the Bible and God’s instructions for holiness, his instructions in terms of the sacrificial system and the grace extended to the people through the coming Messiah, the coming covenant mediator, having given his people clear instructions on all these things, they needed reminding. They needed refinement as the people then went into the land and lived out history leading up to the coming of the great redemption of Jesus Christ.

So the prophets were as it were the teaching, the exposition of the law of Moses as it applied to the specific society that people would find themselves in. Their constant message was to turn to the law of God. Their point wasn’t to make new laws for the people. Their point wasn’t to create new revelation that was somehow different or would give them more information. Their point was to simply reinforce what had already been said to God and exposit it and explain it how it applied to the temporary situation the people found themselves in.

In Malachi 4:4, Malachi instructs the people to remember the law of Moses my servant even in statutes and testimonies.

Isaiah 8:19 and 20: “When they say consult the mediums and the wizards who whisper and mutter, should not a people consult their god? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the law and to the testimony.” The prophecies, the prophesying of Isaiah was to instruct the people to not turn to the dead for instruction for the land of the living but rather to turn back to the law of the testimony, the laws they had already been given by God and was now being in an inspired fashion exposited for them in terms of their present use and situation.

The fact that the prophet was to be a blessing to the people of God and not a curse is also evident from the fact that Psalm 74:9 tells us specifically that when there are no prophets in the land, that’s a sign of a curse upon the land. So although the prophets may have been seen as uncomfortable men to be around, still their absence was a mark of the curse of God upon his land. He had given them over to their iniquity. Their iniquity wouldn’t cease. But the voice of God reminding them of that iniquity and the specific way in which it was being manifested in the family or in the church or in the civil government, that was being removed.

So the prophet was to apply the law of God in everything that they did. The function of the prophet was to develop and to apply God’s word to the history of the old covenant community and as a result of that to produce the old testament canon, the balance of it, to add to the inspired word of god and give us a written history as it were.

There were basically three things Calvin points out in his introduction to his commentary in the book of Isaiah that there are three areas in which we can think of the prophet’s message fitting into. The first was an exposition of the law specifically—this is the law of god. Here’s what it means. The second was an indication of God’s curses and blessings, the blessings that would come upon people who walked in obedience to that exposition of the law and the curses of God’s word upon those who would walk in disobedience.

And then third, the prophets talked about the grace to come in Jesus Christ, the coming of the covenant mediator. And although that was all three things, these three elements—the law, the blessings, and the cursings, and the grace of a covenant—although all three of those things are found in summary fashion in the first five books of the Bible, the prophet expounded on each of those things, infallibly inspired by God to do so under the old covenant administration.

He told the people in more detail what that law meant in terms of application to their civil situation or to the ecclesiastical rulers or to their family. He gave the people more detail the blessings and cursings of God’s law. Whereas the law of God might say—uh, Calvin puts it this way: whereas the old covenant would say, “Thy life shall hang as it were on a thread. Thou shalt tremble at the rustling of a leaf,” quoting from Leviticus and such like—on the other hand, the prophets would say, “God will arm the Assyrians against thee, but he will call for the Egyptians by a hiss. He will raise up the Chaldeans. Israel shall be carried into captivity. The kingdom of Israel shall be destroyed. The enemy shall lay waste Jerusalem and burn thy temple.”

So although the curses that the prophets would proclaim were found in summary fashion, they would give details. They would say specifically, “Here’s the nation that’s going to come and beat you up for not obeying God’s word.” Or, “Here’s the way you’re going to be carried off out of the land because you engaged in the same sort of superstitious beliefs that the people originally there engaged in. So, they were driven out and so now you’ll be driven out.”

And they give them specifics in terms of times, in terms of political entities that would come upon them, etc. Same thing’s true, of course, of the coming of the covenant mediator. The whole function of the ceremonial law given in the first five books of Moses was to demonstrate the graciousness of God’s covenant. And so the prophets also would speak to that and would expound upon that and enlarge as it were our body of inspired scripture to help us understand the grace we have in Jesus Christ and his purpose.

And that of course, one of their functions of the prophets then was for comfort—to comfort the people. They comfort the ones who were being obedient and yet were suffering, covenantal blessings because the balance of the nation was being disobedient. They would comfort them because of teaching them the grace of Jesus Christ, the covenant mediator.

So the point we’re trying to make here is that the foundation for what the prophets said to the people in the old covenant was laid with the first five books of Moses with the law. And they then expounded upon that and applied it to every situation. Prophecy was an exposition of that law and correcting the errors, mistakes, and the sins of the people and of the priests and of the civil government as well. It was an external corrective—is one way to think of it—to the civil, ecclesiastical, and family institutions that we’ve been talking about for the last two months.

Those institutions are profitable. They’re good. But they fall into disuse. They fall into being vehicles for sin when the external corrective of God’s word isn’t constantly coming upon them. The model of the reformed church was a reformed church always reforming. The church as the civil government and individual in the land as well fall off into error and they need the corrective word of the prophets in the old covenant, in the word of God today to bring them back to a position of righteousness before God.

The historian Sawer puts it this way: We hear in the prophets the voice of true patriots who standing upon a provision of the law of Moses spake the truth to the people, to the priest and to the kings. True patriots because if their word was heeded then the nation would prosper. And if their word wasn’t heeded, the word of God was not heeded among the people. Their nation would fall.

Milton in Paradise Regained says this:

“Their orators, though extol, thou then extolest, as those the top of eloquence, status indeed, and lovers of their country as may seem, but here into our prophets far beneath, as men divinely taught in better teaching the solid rules of civil government, in their majestic, unaffected style, than all the oratory of Greece and Rome, in them is plainest taught and easiest learned. What makes a nation happy and keeps it so? What ruins a kingdom and lays cities flat.”

So the prophet was an essential element of the old covenant government of the state and the ecclesiastical system as well and of course the family. It was an essential requirement of the outside corrective voice of God’s word placed upon those various institutions. That was the purpose of the prophet and that continues to be the purpose of the prophet Jesus Christ as he speaks through his vehicles today.

What does all this mean to us today? What this means to us, the significance in terms of our study of government is that we’ve talked about the fact that God has given us these great institutions. But now we must see that God also requires the outside voice, the corrective voice to all these institutions as well for them to function properly under God. So here we have one more part of the government of God’s people both in family, church, and state.

This country is in obvious need of prophets. If you’ve gone to the grocery store in the last couple of days and you stand like I did yesterday and standing there in line, you look at all the various magazines that are up, all of them are extolling the life of Liberace. What a great American hero he was. Now, here’s a man who was a profligate, who was a homosexual, who died as a result of God’s curse upon people that live in such a way, coming from the hands of God’s disease upon those people, AIDS.

And yet the country turns their back on the warnings of God and continues to extol such men as being paragons of what we want in our American society. This land is in dire straits. This land, although it had been founded upon constitutional provisions inherent in the law of Moses, needs the outside corrective of the prophets of God to speak to that civil magistrate and to correct them.

In Isaiah 1 is an example of the way this would work. Isaiah 1 talks about the princes becoming needs and one of the ways that they’ve corrupted the system of government is by debasing their silver. He says your silver has become mixed with dross and your wine has become water. Gary North has done an excellent exposition of that passage and shows the result of inflation is a result of a debasement of currency, silver becoming mixed with dross, and as a result of inflation you have product devaluation, wine being mixed with water.

Now I think that the specific use of that term in Isaiah 1 refers to the idolatry of the people and being adulterous. In other words, in taking the system that God had given them and encou and mixing in base elements of the system of the people around them. But a specific application is certainly the debasement of their currency. And this nation today has done that to a great extent and needs the prophetic voice of Isaiah or of modern day preachers to tell them that monetary inflation based upon the debasement of currency is a sin, a sin to be repented of, and it will destroy the foundations of the society if it’s left unchecked.

This country needs to hear that their public schools are sin. To take money from people at the point of the gun in essence to pay for the education of other children is a sin. And this country needs to hear that from the prophetic voice of his church.

I was real pleased this week to read a presentation that Denny’s going to make to a group this week or next week. I’m not sure when it is. They’re going to be hearing from a man who wants to clean up the public schools. And we’re not necessarily maligning his motives, but the point is that people need to hear the prophetic voice of God’s church. The public schools are in themselves government schools and hence an abomination to the true government that God expects us to conduct in our families. To compel people to go to government run schools becomes the schools then become a product of politicization of the society.

Specific example: we’ve been talking about child abuse. Yesterday in the mail, I got the new set of legislation from Attorney General Frohnmayer’s office that he wants to inculcate into the statute law of the state of Oregon. He’s introduced these bills. Probably many of them will pass. One of the specific things he wants to do is to have child abuse classes now in every public school in Oregon to instruct every student every year as to what child abuse is and how they have the right not to be abused and how to report people that have abused them.

They’re going to teach your children that they’re being abused if their parent applies corporal punishment consistently to them. They’re going to teach them all the things that we’ve talked about in terms of the child abuse definition. The state will now be required to instruct those to the children.

We already have lots of instances in this state where children turn in their own fathers or their parents for child abuse because they don’t like them because they want a greater degree of autonomy or they want to operate under their own authority. We haven’t seen anything yet. When they institute that in the public school system required of all students, you’re going to see a tremendous avalanche of parents being taken with their children taken away because of being abused.

After they instruct these children in all these various methods of child abuse after the conclusion of the class sessions, they’re going to have private counseling sessions with each student so that they can tell the teacher in private if they’ve been abused. I mean, this is a terrible thing that they’re proposing. It’s an abomination. It’s a direct attack on the family structure that God has required of us and the civil magistrate should hear that it’s a violation of God’s law for which you will suffer the damnation of God if you continue in it.

Abortion. The state needs to hear that abortion is murder and that people who commit abortions, participate in them are murderers and should be put to death. The state needs to hear that from a prophetic voice today.

I could go on and on. By the way, in this child abuse legislation, he also calls for the suspension of the evidence rules against hearsay in child abuse cases. So now a person could be convicted of child abuse on the basis of hearsay and not direct testimony of the child anymore.

Additionally, another proposed part of the child abuse legislation is that the confessional privileges of clergy and of lawyers be done away with in terms of child abuse where there’s reason to suspect the child has been damaged somehow or abused somehow. Clergy or lawyer confidentiality be thrown out the window if the state has its way.

Now, these are tremendous assaults on the very foundation of our society, the family, and they will wreak havoc in this land. And today the country needs, in spite of the good civil institutions we had, it needs a prophetic voice to tell it: stop. Thus sayeth the Lord, that is wrong. Continue in that sin and error and you will suffer the judgment of God upon you.

People need to be saying today that AIDS is a judgment of God upon this country, not just for homosexuality, but for all sinful sexual sins that people engage themselves in. Now, we can’t say that if an individual gets AIDS that’s necessarily a judgment on that individual, but we can say that disease normatively from the scriptures is a judgment of God upon specific action. When we have disease kept to a specific promiscuous sexual activity on the part of people, we can say that disease is God’s curse upon people that engage in that type of sin and it needs to be said. It’s not just that we can say it, that it’s correct. God commands us to warn the people who are engaging in these practices.

Well, who are the prophets today? As Jesus Christ has come and completed the prophetic office, so we don’t have old covenant prophets anymore. Who are the prophets?

I think that one element of the prophetic voice of the world today is the church, the ministers of the church. Thomas Watson in his great book, The Body of Divinity, an exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith—or catechism rather—talks about the church’s ministry. He quotes from Ephesians 4:11 and Hebrews 12:25 and he says this:

Christ the point he’s making is that Christ uses means. Christ is still the prophet of God, but he uses the means of his people today to instruct the people in the word of God. Christ is said to speak to us from heaven now by his ministers as the king speaks by his ambassador. Such as wean themselves from the breast of ordinances—and by ordinances he means the means in terms of the church officers—who wean themselves from the breast of ordinances seldom thrive. Either they grow light in the head or lame in their feet.

The word preached is Christ’s voice in the mouth of the minister. And those that refuse to hear Christ speaking in the ministry, Christ will refuse to hear speaking on their deathbed. Strong words.

It’s important to recognize that Christ speaks through means. Christ tells us specifically that the keys of the kingdom have been handed over to the officers of the church. The church institutionally has the keys of the kingdom to open and to close. And Christ tells us in other chapters of the gospel, in other portions of the gospel that the Pharisees shut up the kingdom of God. They locked the kingdom of God. And how? By replacing God’s law with their traditions, by not being true to their prophetic voice, their necessity of teaching the word of God and thus opening the kingdom to the people of the nation and the community they were in.

They shut the kingdom by replacing God’s tradition—God’s law—with traditions of men. And churches today are closing the kingdom of God when they deny the applicability of God’s law and the requirements of God’s law upon people.

The church institutionally has a prophetic ministry to the world. They are to open the kingdom of God. They are to make open that kingdom through the use of the prophecies of Jesus Christ which is the teaching of his word which he has given us in scripture.

The churches today that mix as it were the teaching of God’s word as it relates to civil government or to the church or to families, if they mix that word with either warmed over liberalism or hot-blooded conservatism that’s founded without a Christian base, when they mix those things into their preaching of the word, they have become false prophets. They’ve taken the word of God and adulterated it with the traditions of man and so closed up the kingdom of God and denied their prophetic ministry.

Ezekiel 13 tells us what God will do to such men. The same thing was true, of course, of the covenant community in the old covenant. God said to Ezekiel:

“Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who prophesy and say to those who prophesy from their own inspiration, listen to the word of the Lord. Thus sayeth the Lord, because you have spoken falsehood and seen a lie. Therefore, behold, I am against you. So my hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. They will have no place in the council of my people, nor will they be written down in the register of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel, that you may know that I am the Lord your God. It is definitely because they have misled my people by saying peace when there is no peace.

And when anyone builds a wall, behold, they plastered over with whitewash. And so tell those who plastered over with whitewash that it will fall. A flooding rain will come upon you. King James calls that untempered mortar is what they use to build the house of God as it were. They mix it with other elements outside from the written word of God in the new covenant sense and so become false prophets and bring God’s curse upon them.”

The church that sounds an unclear sound when it comes to abortion or to the importance of the family or to the sins of the public school system or to the sins of the current child abuse legislation being proposed in the state of Oregon—the church that sounds an unclear sound and says there might be some reasons we should do this even though the word of God says it’s wrong—that church has become a false prophet.

And from Deuteronomy 18 we read the punishment for the false prophet is death and exclusion from the kingdom of God.

Those churches that sound no trumpet at all on these issues, of course, are even more condemned by scripture. We talk often of the fact that in Ezekiel 33rd chapter, we have the watchman being required to warn the people when terror or when raiders are coming upon them. And we talk about that in terms of evangelism. That’s certainly a proper application of that verse of scripture to warn people of their sin and their guilt before God and to turn them to Jesus Christ.

But specifically, the primary application of that verse is that Ezekiel is the watchman over the house of Israel. And that if Ezekiel doesn’t sound forth the warning to his people, if he doesn’t exercise the function of the prophet by telling them God’s judgment, the application of the law to their particular situation and God’s resultant curses and blessings upon them, if he refuses to do that, then the blood of their heads will be required from his head. Ezekiel will be damned by God.

And so, church today that refuses to address contemporary issues and refuses to use his prophetic voice and denouncing the sins of the state suffers the same condemnation that Ezekiel would have suffered. The blood, the sin, the guilt will be required of their hand and they’ll be cut off from the people of God again.