Deuteronomy 13:1-3

Deuteronomy 13:1

I. If the text teaches us how the true Jewish prophet would speak to his people, and in what spirit they would hear him, it teaches us who read him how we are to receive his words. The real significance of prophecies is felt when they are viewed in connection with the course of the Divine government. The interpreter is not to be heard unless he speaks to us first of a present God, of One who is in covenant with us, as He was with our fathers, who is calling on us every hour to turn from our idols to Him. If this is not the substance of his teaching, if all his predictions do not flow out of it, he is not speaking in the spirit of Scripture; for us, at all events, he is speaking falsely.

II. What I have said of prophecy applies also to miracles. The text does not separate them, nor can we. We turn to the signs and wonders in the New Testament, as in the Old, to prove that God was speaking them. Do we not rather need the assurance that God is speaking to explain the signs and wonders? If we try to ascend from the sign to God, do we really ever find Him? How meanly we think of the Gospel when we suppose that it cannot be presented at once to the hearts and consciences of sinful men, but must be ushered in with a long array of proofs which the great majority of people find it much harder to receive than that which is proved, nay, which I suspect they never do receive till they have first embraced that.

F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 274.

Reference: Deuteronomy 13 Parker, vol. iv., p. 229.