THE PROMISE TO SEND A PROPHET
14 Then Moses said, “In the land you are about to occupy, people follow the advice of those who practice divination and look for omens, but the Lord your God does not allow you to do this.
15 Instead, he will send you a prophet like me from among your own people, and you are to obey him.
16 “On the day that you were gathered at Mount Sinai, you begged not to hear the Lord speak again or to see his fiery presence any more, because you were afraid you would die.
17 So the Lord said to me, ‘They have made a wise request.
18 I will send them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will tell him what to say, and he will tell the people everything I command.
19 He will speak in my name, and I will punish anyone who refuses to obey him.
20 But if any prophet dares to speak a message in my name when I did not command him to do so, he must die for it, and so must any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods.’
21 “You may wonder how you can tell when a prophet's message does not come from the Lord.
22 If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what he says does not come true, then it is not the Lord's message. That prophet has spoken on his own authority, and you are not to fear him.
ACTS 21:1-16
PAUL GOES TO JERUSALEM
1 We said good-bye to them and left. After sailing straight across, we came to Cos; the next day we reached Rhodes, and from there we went on to Patara.
2 There we found a ship that was going to Phoenicia, so we went aboard and sailed away.
3 We came to where we could see Cyprus, and then sailed south of it on to Syria. We went ashore at Tyre, where the ship was going to unload its cargo.
4 There we found some believers and stayed with them a week. By the power of the Spirit they told Paul not to go to Jerusalem.
5 But when our time with them was over, we left and went on our way. All of them, together with their wives and children, went with us out of the city to the beach, where we all knelt and prayed.
6 Then we said good-bye to one another, and we went on board the ship while they went back home.
7 We continued our voyage, sailing from Tyre to Ptolemais, where we greeted the believers and stayed with them for a day.
8 On the following day we left and arrived in Caesarea. There we stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the seven men who had been chosen as helpers in Jerusalem.
9 He had four unmarried daughters who proclaimed God's message.
10 We had been there for several days when a prophet named Agabus arrived from Judea.
11 He came to us, took Paul's belt, tied up his own feet and hands with it, and said, “This is what the Holy Spirit says: The owner of this belt will be tied up in this way by the Jews in Jerusalem, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles.”
12 When we heard this, we and the others there begged Paul not to go to Jerusalem.
13 But he answered, “What are you doing, crying like this and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be tied up in Jerusalem but even to die there for the sake of the Lord Jesus.”
14 We could not convince him, so we gave up and said, “May the Lord's will be done.”
15 After spending some time there, we got our things ready and left for Jerusalem.
16 Some of the disciples from Caesarea also went with us and took us to the house of the man we were going to stay with—Mnason, from Cyprus, who had been a believer since the early days.
No comments:
Post a Comment