Our Father Provides for His Priests
18 1 The Levitical priests—all the tribe of Levi—shall have no portion or inheritance with Israel. They shall eat the food offerings made to our Father, his inheritance. 2 They shall have no inheritance among their brothers; our Father is their inheritance, as he promised them. 3 This shall be the priests' due from the people, from those who offer a sacrifice, whether ox or sheep: they shall give to the priest the shoulder, the two cheeks, and the stomach. 4 The firstfruits of your grain, your new wine, and your oil, and the first fleece of your sheep, you shall give him. 5 For your Father has chosen him out of all your tribes to stand and minister in the name of our Father, him and his sons for all time.
6 If a Levite leaves any of your towns throughout Israel—wherever he lives—and comes to the place our Father will choose whenever he desires, 7 then he may minister in the name of our Father, like all his fellow Levites who stand there before our Father. 8 He shall eat equal portions, besides what he receives from the sale of his family possessions.
The Father Forbids Occult Practices
9 When you come into the land your Father is giving you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable practices of those nations. 10 No one among you may sacrifice his son or his daughter in the fire, practice divination, be a fortune-teller, an interpreter of omens, or a sorcerer, 11 a caster of spells, a medium, a spiritist, or one who consults the dead. 12 For whoever does these things is detestable to our Father, and because of these detestable practices your Father is driving them out before you.
13 You shall be blameless before your Father. 14 For these nations, whom you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and diviners. But as for you, your Father has not permitted you to do so.
The Father Will Send a Prophet
15 Your Father will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—you must listen to him. 1 1 v15 Peter and Stephen name Jesus as the Prophet our Father promised to raise up—the one every Israelite was to listen to (Acts 3:22-23; Acts 7:37). 16 This is just what you asked of your Father at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, "Let me not hear again the voice of our Father, nor see this great fire any longer, or I will die."
17 And our Father said to me, "They are right in what they have spoken." 18 I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. I will put my words in his mouth, and he will speak to them everything I command him. 19 And whoever will not listen to my words that he speaks in my name, I myself will call him to account. 20 But the prophet who presumes to speak in my name a word I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet must die.
21 And if you say in your heart, "How can we know the word our Father has not spoken?"— 22 when a prophet speaks in the name of our Father and the word does not take place or come true, that is a word our Father has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; do not be afraid of him.