God’s Curses for Disobedience

Whose kid are you? Well, good morning. Good morning. Welcome to coffee and devotions. Never know where we're going to start this. Okay. This morning we're at Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy chapter 28 verses 16 through, Ooh, you ready for it? The end of the chapter, which is verse 68, 28, Deuteronomy 28, beginning at verse 15. We've got a lot to read today. Not a lot of time to get into it. So we're just going to have some coffee. We'll pray and we'll jump right in. Okay. Waiting to the end of the chapter. Mm-hmm.
All right for your coffee Yep, you're excited It's gonna be good right this is all the different curses right so if they disobey is a different curses, all right, so here we go But it shall come to pass if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God to observe carefully we didn't pray God, please care for us. Help us, Lord, to read and to understand. Don't let us grow tired. It is a long passage, but give us hearts to understand and absorb what you have for us. In Jesus's name. Amen.
Alright, if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God to observe carefully all his commandments and his statutes, which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall be, shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the country. Curse shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Curse shall be the fruit of your body and the produce of your land, the increase of your cattle and the offspring of your flocks. Curse shall you be when you come in and curse shall you be when you go out.
So you just read as long as you want now. The Lord will send on you causing confusion and rebuke in all that you set your hand to. Do until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly because of the quickness of your doings in which you have forsaken me.
The Lord will make the plague cling to you until he has consumed you from the land which you are going to possess. The land will strike you with consumption, with fear, with inflammation, with severe burning fever, with the sword, with scorching, and with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish, and your heavens which are over your head shall be bronze, and the earth which is under you shall be iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land to powder and dust, and from the heaven it shall come down on you until you are destroyed.
The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You shall go out one way against them and flee seven days before them. And you shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your carcasses shall be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and no one shall frighten them away.
The Lord will strike you with the borrows of Egypt, with the tumors, with the scab, and with the itch from which you cannot be healed. The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of heart. And you shall grope at noonday as a blind man gropes in the darkness. You shall not prosper in your ways. You shall be only oppressed and plundered continually, and no one shall save you.
Okay. So, so far that you're going to be cursed, you're going to be cursed, you're going to be cursed. They're going to have health problems, stuff like that. In verses 20 through 24, 25 through 29. Now it's going to be that they have like plagues that are going to come upon them and madness. Yeah. Right. So here we go with verses 30 through 35. Let's see what this curse is about. You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall lie with her. You shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it. You shall plant a vineyard, but you shall not gather its grapes.
Your ox shall be slaughtered before your eyes, but you shall not eat of it. Your donkey shall be violently taken away from before you, and shall not be restored to you. Your sheep shall be given to your enemies, and you shall have no one to rescue them. Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, and your eyes shall look and fail without longing for them all day long, and there shall be no strength in your hand. A nation whom you have not known shall eat the fruit of your land and the produce of your labor, and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually. You shall be driven mad because of the sight which your eyes see.
The Lord will strike you in the knees and on the legs with severe boils which cannot be healed, and from the sole of your foot to the top of your head. The Lord will bring you and the king whom you set over you to a nation which neither you nor your fathers have known. And there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, and you shall become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all nations, where the Lord will drive you."
What's that one talking about? That he'll take everything away from you and you'll show the nations, hey, this is what happened. You don't listen to God. Yeah, right. So they're going to be exiled and all their stuff is going to be taken from them. He's going to let somebody else rule over them. All right. You want to keep on? You shall carry much seed out to the field, but gather little in.
Locusts shall consume it. You shall plant vineyards and tend them, but you shall need to drink of the wine you gather. the grapes for the worm shall eat them. You shall have the olive trees throughout all your territory, but you shall not anoint yourself the oil for your olives shall drop off. You shall not beget sons and daughters, but they shall not be yours for they shall go into captivity. Locusts shall consume all your trees and the produce of your land.
Right. What's that saying? So you're going to plant vineyards, but are they going to get to have them? They're going to have kids, but what's going to happen to their kids? They're going to be taken into captivity. It's kind of like if you look in different portions, he uses very similar disasters, but in different ways. Like these are more kind of natural. The fields aren't going to produce well. All of this is just going to go bad. Who's the one in control of all that?
The Lord, right? You shall carry him. You just read that one. The alien who is among you shall rise higher and higher above you, and you shall come down lower and lower. He shall lend to you, but you shall not lend to Him. He shall be the head, and you shall be the tail. Moreover, all these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God to keep His commandments and His statutes which He commanded you. And they shall be upon you for a sign and a wonder, and on your descendants Forever all right, so what's that saying?
So you have to send these and he'll either buy or you Well, it doesn't even give the Intel part. Yeah, right. It's just this is happening. Why? Because you just read yeah, and Everybody else is gonna see it, and they're gonna be astonished. Oh man those people who they got judged hard Okay, let's go ahead and keep reading. You want to start with verse 47?
Because you may not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart for your abundance of everything. Therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you in hunger and thirst and nakedness and in need of everything. And you will put a yoke of iron on your neck till he has destroyed you. The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar from the end of the earth as swift as the eagle flight. A nation whose language you will not understand. a nation of fierce countenance which does not respect the elderly nor show favor to the young. And they shall eat the increase of your livestock and the produce of your land until you are destroyed. They shall not leave your grain or wine or oil or the increase of your cattle or the offspring of your flocks until they have destroyed."
So what's that saying? You didn't serve the Lord so you're gonna serve them You're going to serve some type of other cruel kings, right? Notice verse 47. Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart for the abundance of everything. Did they have every good reason to worship and serve the Lord? But instead they refused to. So it says, OK, you want to go serve other gods? You want to go serve other people? You want to be like the other nations of the world?
I think it's kind of when he does this, he And I'm like, oh, so you don't think I was good enough. I wasn't that good that you could praise me. Then I'll then find whatever you can do. But he sends them off to. Yeah, but but notice, I want to I want to lean in, though. I notice the opportunity that they have. Is God. Showing to them his judgment first, or is he showing them his grace first? All right. You got to serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart for the abundance of everything. But you wouldn't. But you wouldn't.
That's the call of the covenant of grace. There's joy and gladness in serving the Lord. There's joy and gladness in the abundance will provide. But if you don't, if you reject the Lord, but it always starts with He is a good, merciful, loving God, serve Him. But our natural heart doesn't want to turn away from Him, right? That's why we need Him to give us a new heart that would actually listen and obey and serve. It just keeps going with these curses.
And they shall besiege you at all your gates, until your high and fortified walls in which you trust come down throughout all your land. And they shall besiege you at all your gates throughout all your land, which the Lord your God has given you. You shall eat the fruit of your own body. the flesh of your own sons and daughters whom the Lord your God has given you, in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemies shall distress you, the sensitive and very refined man among you will be hostile toward his brother, toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the rest of his children whom he leaves behind. so that he will not give any of them the flesh of his children whom he will eat, because he has nothing left in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy shall distress you at your gates. The tender and delicate woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground because of her delicateness and sensitivity, will refuse the husband of her bosom, and her son and her daughter, her placenta which comes out from before her feet, and her children whom she bears, for she will eat them secretly for lack of everything in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemies shall distress you at your gates.
Did you catch what that was saying? What's this judgment going to be? You know, what was it? Yeah, they're going to the war against you is going to be so bad. You're going to be so starving for food that the most delicate of women. You even need her own children. That God's saying that it's going to be that bad. I remove my grace from you when my favor, the favor of my face no longer shines upon you. Judgment is going to be that severe. Let's go ahead and I'll let you read the next paragraph.
58. If you do not carefully observe all the words of this law that are written in the book, that you may feel this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, then the Lord will bring upon you and your descendants extraordinary plagues and great prolonged plagues and serious and serious and prolong sickness. Moreover, He will bring back on you all the diseases of Egypt, of which you were afraid, and they shall cling to you. Also, every weakness and every plague, which is not wishing in the book of the law will the Lord bring upon you till you are destroyed you shall be left few in number whereas you were as the stars of heaven multiple multitude because you would not obey the voice of the Lord your God. You want to read verse 63 too?
And it shall be. And it shall be that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good and multiply you, so the Lord rejoiced over you to destroy you and bring you to nothing. And you shall be plucked from the land which you go to possess. OK, so what's that saying? You better follow my commandments or bad things are going to happen. Yeah, right. This this is a covenant relationship between them, right?
If they're going to continue to enjoy being his people in the promised land that he's giving them, they must serve him as their covenant king. But if they create treason against him, turning away from him. Right, they won't fear his name. They won't keep the laws written in this book. What would happen? And destroy them. He would just as he rejoiced to bring them into the land.
So would he now that was the hard part He would rejoice in their destruction So What I see is didn't he say that he would Like he chose his rule and so he couldn't take to the destroyer like completely Well, he says even here that he's going to leave a remnant. Right. But the point is, is that we're going to talk and we'll go ahead and talk about now the Lord did this. Exactly what this says, if you read Jeremiah or especially the Book of Lamentations. This is exactly what the Lord did.
If you read Second Chronicles, this is what happens and it's ugly and it's gross. You hear the weeping and the wailing of the people in Jerusalem when the Babylonians come. There's literally people, women eating their children. Nursing mothers who are so famished, so without calories that their babies are weeping and crying and dying because the mothers can't produce any milk. the fields that are utterly destroyed.
And yet, God leads a remnant. And yet, they go into captivity just like he told them they would, just like he said in these curses. But yet, for some reason, he decides to bring them back. You read the book of Isaiah, and Isaiah is telling them someday Cyrus is going to come. Actually, he mentions it by name. and there's going to be a king who will send back. And it happens. The Lord doesn't utterly forsake his covenant. So you're right in a sense. But God's not a toy. If he threatens judgment, there is judgment. Let's go ahead and read this last part.
Then the Lord will scatter you from among all peoples, and from one end of the earth to another. And there ye will serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known, wood and stone. And among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place. But there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul.
Your life shall hang in doubt before you. You shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life. In the morning you shall say, O that it were evening! In the evening you shall say, O that it were morning! Because of the fear which terrifies your heart, and because of the sight which your eyes see, the Lord will take you back to Egypt in ships. By the way, which I said to you, you shall never see it again. And there you shall be offered for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves. But no one will buy you. It's going to say in those foreign lands are going to be worthless.
So. That was a really happy passage. Yep. What was it about? Curses. Lots and lots and lots of curses. For what? For what happens when you don't obey God. Yeah, right. Remember, this is a covenant ceremony that's going on, right? Remember the two different mountains, and half the people on this mountain, half the other people on this mountain, and they're reading the blessings and the curses, and the people are going to say amen, right? The people are going to agree to this. and when they willfully agree and then willfully disobey and disregard the Lord, what's going to happen? Bad things are going to happen.
Yeah, the curses are going to come to pass, almost exactly how he said. So I've got a whole bunch underlined under best first, but in my Bible, I have verse 47 underlined. And then I have verse 58 underlined. I also have verse 62 and 63 underlined, but let's go ahead and talk about calling.
What are you called to do? What am I called to do? How does this show us Jesus Christ in any way? I think it shows us Jesus that to do so of that judgment. Yeah. Because we don't obey God. We don't follow him perfectly. Yeah, right. Have we transgressed his law? Now, every day, thought, word, and deed. There's no unrighteous, no not one. But the iniquity of all of us all was laid upon Him.
Cursed is everyone who hangs on the tree. Jesus took all these curses for us. This is just a small taste of what the ultimate judgment's going to be. Jesus says it's going to be like Gehenna, a place of unending fire, of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Jesus took that for us. He who knew no sin became sin for us that we may be the righteousness of God. If this curse is that we see, this is how much God hates sin. That's exactly why He sent His Son to die for us. I don't get that part. Just being honest with you, this is the tough part for me, buddy. Why would God love me a sinner? And even while I was yet a sinner, what sent His Son to die for me?
It's just grace. It's just love. So now we follow Him, not because of a slavish fear that somehow He's going to judge us in similar ways, but because He took that judgment for us. And if He loves us that much, how could we not turn from our sin and follow Him?
Let's pray. God, this has been a hard passage. We can't imagine seeing the atrocities, the pain and the hardship. But Lord, neither could we imagine Jesus Christ suffering on that cross for us. Thank you, Lord, for sending us our Savior who took our sins.
God, please let us live lives worthy of the calling that you have given us in Christ Jesus. as obedient children. Thank you for your son. In his name we pray. Amen. May you love the Lord. May you follow Jesus Christ. May you have hope that endures throughout the ages. I'll see you next time. Say bye. Bye.