Word of Salvation – December 2025
CHRIST THE PROPHET
Sermon by Rev John Haverland
Text: Deut 18:15-19 (read v 9-22)
Readings: Num 12:1-8; John 1:19-28
Heidelberg Catechism LD 12
Theme: The Lord through Moses promised Israel a prophet like him to whom they must listen.
Purpose: To show that Jesus fulfilled the promise of a prophet like Moses and to urge you to listen to him.
Church Year: Advent sermon
In the Church Calendar the four Sundays leading up to Christmas Day are known as the Advent season. These Sundays help us focus on the person and work of Jesus Christ and his coming into this world, which happened 2000 years ago.
The name ‘Jesus’ means Saviour, or God Saves. That was his personal name.
The word ‘Christ’ was his title and it described who he was and what he came to do. The Old Testament Hebrew word was Messiah. Christ, or Christos, was a Greek word. Both Messiah and Christ mean ‘anointed’. Through the OT God appointed some men to be prophets, others to be priests, and still other to be kings.
Today some people are appointed to be teachers, or a headmaster or headmistress, or the chairman of a company, or the Prime Minister of our country. They hold this position or this office.
In the OT some men were appointed to the office or position of being prophets, priests or kings. To commission them another prophet or priest would pour oil on their head as a sign that God had given them this task and office.
When Jesus came into this world as a human person he was anointed by the Holy Spirit to be a prophet, a priest and a king. He held all three offices. All the prophets, priests and kings of the OT pointed forward to him.
The technical word for this is that they were ‘types’ of Christ; they anticipated what he would be and do. When he came he fulfilled all the prophets, priests and kings of the OT.
Today we are looking at Jesus as our Prophet. The Heidelberg Catechism says that he is our “chief prophet and teacher”; he was not merely another prophet in the long line of them but he is the prophet; he is unique and superior to all the others, and he fulfilled all that the others had spoken about him.
We’ll see that Moses was the first prophet and Jesus is the final prophet.
1) THE FIRST PROPHET
a) After the people of Israel had left Egypt they went down into the Sinai Peninsula and camped in the desert at the base of Mt Sinai. While they were there Moses went up onto the mountain and received the law of God, which he read and explained to the people.
Because the people refused to go into the land God had promised them God made them live in the desert for 40 years until all the adults and parents who had heard the law had died in the desert.
At the end of those 40 years Moses repeated the law to the next generation who hadn’t heard it. The law is recorded in the Bible in the book of Deuteronomy. A duet is two people singing, and nomos is the Greek word for law. So Deuteronomy means “2nd law”.
So now the people were about to go into the land of Canaan and live there. In Deut 18:9-14 Moses warned them not to follow the religions and practices of the nations who already lived there, who had fortune tellers, sorcerers, mediums and wizards.
Moses warned them against those means of trying to look ahead and predict the future and condemned them as abominations. Have nothing to do with them! v 14, “The Lord you God has not allowed you to do this.”
800 years later the prophet Isaiah warned the people against consulting mediums. “Should not a people inquire of their God? To the teaching and to the testimony!” (Is 8:20) He pointed them to the teaching of God and the Scriptures.
We need to remember this warning today as well. Some people claim to be able to tell the future by reading your palm, or by studying tea leaves. Many people try to find out about the future by studying horoscopes and star signs and astrology readings. Google also offers you many options for predicting your future. All this is nonsense and it is evil and we must have nothing to do with these abominations.
Remember the expression, “Curiosity killed the cat”. It is a warning against being too curious, against poking your nose into matters that are not your business. There are many areas of life that are better left alone. Moses told the people of Israel; “The secret things belong to the Lord, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law” (Deut 29:29).
b) Moses urged the people of Israel to remember and obey the words God had given them through him. When they were camped at Mt Sinai the mountain was covered with thick cloud and smoke and there was thunder and lightning, trumpet blasts and earthquakes! The people were afraid of the Lord and asked Moses to go and listen to all that the Lord had to say “and we will hear it and do it” (Deut 5:24-27).
Moses reminded them of this, that God had appointed him as a prophet who would speak the words of God to them (v 18). He had gone up onto the mountain and stayed there for 40 days and 40 nights and received all the laws of the Lord.
As we read in Numbers 12 God had spoken directly to Moses, clearly and not in riddles. This book of Deuteronomy closes by saying, “there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (34:10).
Many prophets followed after Moses – Samuel in the time of Saul, Nathan in the time of David, and then Elijah and Elisha, Amos and Hosea preaching to the Northern kingdom, Isaiah and Jeremiah to Judah, Ezekiel to the exiles in Babylon, and Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi to the people who returned to Jerusalem. Then after Malachi God did not send another prophet for 400 years – we call these the silent years – the intertestamental period.
At the end of that time God sent the John the Baptist, the last prophet of the Old Testament, who spoke about the one coming after him, who “has surpassed me because he was before me… For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:15f).
Moses was the first prophet.
2) Jesus Christ is THE FINAL PROPHET
a) Moses had prophesied that “the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers…” (v 15). The puritan commentator, Matthew Henry, says that this is the clearest promise of Christ in all the Law of Moses.
1500 years after Moses the Lord God fulfilled this promise and sent his One and Only Son into this world; a prophet like Moses but far greater than him; a prophet like the OT prophets but far greater than any of them as well!
Jesus was not only a man but he was also the eternal Son of God who came to make God known (John 1:18). The priests and Levites asked John the Baptist, “Are you the Prophet? (John 1:21). John said, ‘No’. (v 21) He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’.” (v 23).
When Jesus began his public ministry in Galilee and Judea many of the people recognised him as The Prophet (Matt 21:11,46; Lk 7:16; John 6:14). Jesus himself claimed to be this Prophet (Luke 13:33).
And soon after he had ascended into heaven the apostle Peter told the Jews that Jesus fulfilled these words of Moses in Deuteronomy 18 (Acts 3:22f). As Moses had predicted Jesus came “from among you, from your brothers” (Deut 18:15). He came from the people of Israel, from the tribe of Judah; he was a son of David.
He was human, a man like all the other prophets; but he was also divine, he was God. He had come from heaven to earth; he had a divine nature and a human nature.
He was born into this world as a man to die for the sins of his people, those whom the Father had chosen. But he also came to teach people about his Father, to reveal him, to explain him, to make God known (John 1:17f). He spoke the word of God to his people (John 3:34).
He could speak and teach and prophesy because he was anointed and filled with the Spirit. The Scriptures tell us that as a boy Jesus “grew and became strong and the grace of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40).
Later on John the Baptist told people that he was baptising people with water but one more powerful than he was coming, “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Luke 3:16).
When John baptised Jesus in the Jordan River we read that “heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove.” As Jesus exercised his ministry he preached and spoke and taught in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus knew that this prophecy of Moses pointed forward to him. He rebuked the leaders of the Jews for their failure to believe in him: “Do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses… If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:45f).
b) Jesus spoke these words to the people of Israel in the 1st century AD, but this applies to us here today. Are you listening to Jesus? Are you paying attention to the Word of God in the Bible?
Are you listening to God’s words as they are read here in our worship services, as they are preached from this pulpit, as they are read in your home, and as you read them on your own?
This applies to us today as much as it did to the people of Israel back then. We are the New Testament people of God. We have the complete Bible, the Old & New Testaments, 66 books in all.
God himself gave a solemn warning in v 19: “And whoever will not listen to my words that he (that is, the prophet) shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him.”
God holds you responsible for how you listen to his words. Will you give your full attention to the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, the great Prophet promised by Moses? Will you listen to Jesus as the eternal Prophet of God?
c) But you must not only listen to Jesus the Prophet, you must also speak about him.
If you call yourself a Christian you can say, in the words of the Heidelberg Catechism – “by faith I am a member of Christ and so I share in his anointing. I am anointed to confess his name.” (LD 12 Q. 32)
The Catechism references Matt 10:32, where Jesus said, “everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge him before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny him before my Father in heaven.”
The apostle Paul wrote, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, ‘everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame’” (Rom 10:9-10).
Are you open to others that you are a Christian? Are you doing this at school, at polytech, at university? Are you doing this on your building site, in your office and in your factory? Are you acknowledging Jesus to your neighbours?
Those of us who acknowledge Jesus as our Lord and Saviour must be willing to confess his name. Are you thinking about how the teaching of Jesus applies to you at home, at work, at school, and to the issues going on in our society and in the wider world?
What does Jesus have to say about the marriage relationship between a man and a woman? What does he say about protecting the life of the unborn child and the lives of the elderly members of our society? What does Jesus say about loving your neighbour, about speaking the truth, about being a salt and light, about not looking lustfully at a woman, about keeping your word, loving your enemy, and not worrying about clothing or food or drink?
We are getting close to the end of this year and are about to step into the next. In this year ahead will you put your trust in Jesus Christ? Will you read his words as they are recorded in the Bible?
Will you listen to his voice as the Bible is read in your homes and as it is read and preached in this church? Will you listen to Jesus Christ, the One anointed to be “our chief Prophet and Teacher”? (HC Q 31).
Amen