October 23, 2011 – Deuteronomy 18

I think I would be pretty confused if I were with Israel here. The part about testing prophets seems to be putting God to the test, yet they are told not to. They are told, if the prophet predicts something and it doesn’t happen, then it was not from the Lord. First of all, if you are told something to prepare for, you don’t know if it is from the Lord or not until it happens, so you have to trust them until it happens. But if they are not, then you followed a prophet not from the Lord but didn’t know that yet. The role of prophets in the Old Testament is something that seems very important for the ones that were good, but it also appears that there were many that were called prophets but were not speaking Gods words. Your common everyday person from Israel must have had a terrible time keeping it all straight.