Deuteronomy 13

In the 13^th chapter of the book of Deuteronomy God guides the Jewish people in the process of identifying and dealing with a false prophet. God tells us that if the prophet encourages worship of gods other than the One that we know, we could be confident that the prophet is false (verses 2 – 6) . In this Biblical passage we learn how it is that the Jewish people came to accept the prophets of Scripture. Before the Jewish people could accept that any prophet is indeed an authentic prophet, they must first be reassured that the God of this prophet is the same as the God that they already know. We only have the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, Samuel and Daniel today because the Jewish people acknowledged and accepted that these men and women worshiped the same God as their fathers before them. This is the Jewish nation’s responsibility before God. They are charged by God to reject any claimant to prophecy who encourages worship of another deity. God handed this responsibility to the Jewish people. Anyone who accepts the validity of the Jewish Scriptures must accept that the Jewish people discharged their responsibility with accuracy. If one were to hypothesize that the Jewish people cannot accurately identify their own God, it would then follow that the Jewish Scriptures are an invalid document. If the Jewish people are not capable of making a reliable determination concerning the credibility of a prophet, then the Jewish Scripture has no leg to stand on. There is no way of knowing if Isaiah, Esther, Obadiah, and Nehemiah were truly inspired by God or not. If we do not accept the decision of those who accepted them as true prophets we cannot accept the validity of their books. How absurd then is the Christian position. Christianity is based upon the premise that the Jewish people are incapable of identifying their own God. Christianity believes that the Jewish perception of God is warped and inaccurate. The Jewish perception of God precludes the deification of a human, while Christianity claims that a true understanding of God includes the deification of a human. My challenge to the Christian is then: if you believe that the Jewish people are incapable of identifying their God, then why do you accept their Scriptural canon? If you believe that the Jewish people were mistaken when they rejected Jesus, then how can you stake your spiritual life on the assumption that they could not have been mistaken in their

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acceptance of Isaiah?