Discernment and Holiness: A Call to True Worship

"If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, 'Let us go after other gods,' which you have not known, 'and let us serve them,' you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams." [00:00:40]

"And Moses is giving them a test to recognize true prophets and false prophets. Now when we get to the middle of Deuteronomy at the top of our step pyramid, we'll see that Moses says one of the tests of a true prophet is if he says something and it comes true, then that's a sign he's a true prophet." [00:02:03]

"But Moses here is preparing us and adding another test and he's saying, 'It doesn't matter how powerful a prophet seems to be. If he wants to lead you into idolatry, you're not to follow him.' If he has miraculous powers, it doesn't prove anything if he's leading you against the Word." [00:03:27]

"And our test of them always has to be, in the first place not are they powerful, but are they faithful to the Word? And our Lord made that point as well, Mark 13 verse 22, again perhaps with Deuteronomy in mind, we don't know for sure, but certainly in the spirit of Deuteronomy." [00:04:34]

"Family and friends lead people astray, that's what Moses is saying here. We love our family members. We love our friends. We want to have that connection and fellowship. We don't want to see barriers drawn, and so Moses is absolutely right, isn't he? This could be the most kind of subtle and dangerous way of compromising our faith with the Lord." [00:06:29]

"False religion, idolatry is not only wrong but it's fundamentally corrosive and corrupting and destructive. It has to be rooted out. That's what Moses is saying here. And that's the great struggle in the history of Israel. They didn't root it out, and it constantly ensnared them, constantly lead them astray, and once again it speaks to us and says to us we have to be careful." [00:07:59]

"And 'worthless fellows' is actually almost a technical term for a really thuggish group of people, really bad guys in a kind of organized way. And it's more than just juvenile delinquents. It's committed bad leadership, and it's the same phrase that's used at the end of Judges, in Judges 19 and 20, with the horror of what happens in Gibeah of Benjamin and the slaughter there of a concubine." [00:09:13]

"And all of this, you see, is an illustration of how when you don't keep the law of God terrible things happen. There are terrible consequences to that, and that's illustrated there at the end of Judges. What's intriguing, of course, is that Judges has a special reason for including that." [00:10:38]

"As you approach worship, as you approach the questions of how we're going to worship, you have to ask first of all, who are you? Who are you? How do you understand yourself as you come to worship? What is your relationship to God in worship? And Moses is making two points." [00:13:34]

"You have to see yourself, first of all, as children of God and you have to see yourself as holy; holy in the sense of set apart. You're not like the world. You're different from the world. You're separated from the world, and at the heart of that separation is your realization that you are a child of God." [00:13:54]

"But what God is doing here is saying to His people, 'I want you to be a people set apart, and one of the ways I'm going to set you apart is that you're not going to eat like the nations. I'm going to set you apart by insisting that you think about what you're eating all the time.'" [00:18:49]

"Because Jesus had come so that there'd be a universal holy people, holy now in commitments to Jesus and to His law. But these dietary laws then are important. There are some animals we eat. There are some animals we don't eat; land animals, fish, birds, they're all covered." [00:21:49]