Scripture: Deuteronomy 11: 26-32
Sermon: Blessings, Curses, Covenant, and the Kingdom of God
Topics: blessings, curses, covenant, kingdom
Preached: September 29, 2019 AM Woodlawn CRC
Rev. Mike Abma
Preamble:
Before turning to our text, do you mind turning to Deuteronomy 27.
There we read about the curses to be proclaimed from Mount Ebal.
Then in chapter 28 there are the blessings, those presumably proclaimed from Mount Gerizim. Both those mountains are in Canaan, the Promised Land.
Chapter 28 ends with even more warnings.
Chapter 29 is the big covenant renewal in Moab that Moses leads before his death.
All those big chapters of blessings and curses and covenant renewal are the conclusion of what Moses begins to mention in Chapter 11.
Deuteronomy 11:26-32
See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: 27the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today; 28and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn from the way that I am commanding you today, to follow other gods that you have not known.
29 When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that you are entering to occupy, you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. 30As you know, they are beyond the Jordan, some distance to the west, in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Arabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oak of Moreh.
31 When you cross the Jordan to go in to occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and when you occupy it and live in it, 32you must diligently observe all the statutes and ordinances that I am setting before you today.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION — BLESSINGS and CURSES
The Wednesday Morning Bible Study group is looking at the Book of Job this fall.
You know the Book of Job.
You know his story —
an innocent man, a righteous man
who nevertheless seems cursed.
He endures one catastrophe after another.
His story does not seem to make sense.
His story seems to stand in complete contrast to our passage this morning.
Our passage makes things seem very clear and straightforward:
* if you obey, you receive blessings
* if you disobey, you receive curses.
So I would like to start out by saying that blessings and curses are not always so obvious.
Take the blessings described in Deuteronomy.
Israel is promised the blessings of
* a well-watered land
* well-fed stomachs
* well-armed forces
* well-stocked herds and flocks.
But here is the thing.
All these blessings eventually become curses.
They begin to turn people’s hearts away from God rather than toward God.
Think of one of the most blessed people in the Old Testament – Solomon.
That guy had Everything, and a Lot of Everything.
And yet, in the end, his heart was turned away from God.
So that is the first thing I would like you to realize.
It is not always abundantly clear what are blessings and what are curses.
Last week, Pastor Bryant reminded us that
wandering in the wilderness for 40 years
could easily be considered a curse for Israel.
But, in fact, in their memory, it was a blessing.
Why? Because it drew them closer to God.
This week, I want to remind you of the flip side of this:
that the Promised Land and all its apparent blessings
can actually end up being a curse,
because they can pull us away from God.
The only way we can really tell blessings from curses are
that blessings draw us into the orbit of God’s life and love;
and curses draws us away from that orbit.
COVENANTAL CONTEXT
But here is the main thing I learned this week as I pondered blessings and curses – blessings and curses must be seen within the context of the Covenantal Relationship between God and His People.
The Covenantal Relationship.[1]
We like to talk about a Personal Relationship with God.
But a Covenantal Relationship is deeper than that.
It is both Personal and Formal.
It is Personal because it is all about
who we are and to whom we belong:
We belong to God, and God belongs to us.
We are His; and He is Ours.
It is Personal.
But it is also Formal.
It involves promises, commitments, terms, requirements.
Deuteronomy is filled with what those terms and requirements were.
In Deuteronomy,
God promised to be faithful to his people;
They promised to be faithful to him.
That faithfulness is measured by their obedience.
The thing about Covenants is that they are serious stuff.
They are binding.
There are consequences for faithfulness.
And there are consequences for unfaithfulness.
Deuteronomy says again and again
faithfulness and obedience will mean blessings and life;
unfaithfulness and disobedience will mean curses and death.
So when we read in our passage
“See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse”
we need to see that within this Covenantal Context.
COMMITING TO THE COVENANT
The Book of Deuteronomy is all about the last thing Moses does before he dies:
he is making this covenant official while Israel
is still on the border of the Promised Land.
But he is also looking ahead to when Israel is in the Promised Land.
He insists that this Covenant has to be renewed
once Israel is in the Promised Land.
So he tells them,
“Once God has brought you into this land,
You need to assemble by the Oak of Moreh.
You need to assemble in that mountain pass
that has Mount Gerizim on one side
and Mount Ebal on the other side.
That is where you need to have another Covenant Renewal Ceremony:
6 tribes, half the people, will stand on Mt. Ebal,
where the curses will be read.
6 tribes, half the people, will stand on Mt. Gerizim
where the blessings will be read.”
Why does Moses insist that this is done?
So that Israel would be absolutely clear on the Consequences of the Covenant:
faithfulness and obedience would lead to blessings;
unfaithfulness and disobedience would lead to curses.
And what or who was in the middle
between these two mountains?
The Ark of the Covenant,
the Presence of God was in the Middle.[2]
TENSIONS IN THE COVENANT
We know the story.
We know God’s people did not remain faithful.
We know they disobeyed. We know they went their own way.
We know they deserved curses.
But what about God?
What was God to do in this Covenant?
We tend to have a fairly soft view of God.
We tend to think that God is all steadfast love, and all mercy.
We tend to think the answer is easy – of course God is going to forgive them,
even when they disobeyed; even when they rejected him;
even when they broke their side of the covenant.
But this is a lob-sided view of God.
God is loving and forgiving, yes.
But he is also holy and just.
He cannot simply endure sin.
He cannot simply turn a blind eye to evil.
And he cannot simply dismiss all the many violations to this covenant.
In fact, God says as much in Deuteronomy 29:19.
He says to all those who think they are safe
and who think they can go their own stubborn way:
I, the Lord, will Not forgive you.
I, the Lord will Not forgive you.
Can you see this Covenantal Tension?
God wants to bless his people.
But he cannot simply bless a disobedient people.
The Covenant is Binding:
the Covenant is binding on God’s people.
but the Covenant is also binding on God himself.
This is the Great Tension of the Old Testament.
How can God, the holy God, remain in this covenantal relationship,
this binding relationship, and still bless his disobedient and unfaithful
people?
Throughout history,
we humans have tended to resolve this great tension
by either being Legalistic or by being Permissive.
The legalistic ones say,
“Yes, God is loving,
but in the end, we Must obey the holy God,
because without our obedience, there can be no blessing.”
The permissive ones say,
“Yes, God is holy,
but in the end we really do not Need to obey God,
because even if we’re disobedient, He will always forgive us.”
This has been our way of trying to resolve this covenantal tension:
either through the legalism of the Pharisees
or through the permissiveness of the Sadducees.
These are our human attempts to resolve this tension.
But from the beginning God had something else in mind.
COVENANTAL RESOLUTION
Our passage mentions meeting at the Oak of Moreh.
The Oak of Moreh is mentioned in only one other passage – Genesis 12.
In Genesis 12
God first calls Abraham;
God first enters into a covenant with Abraham;
At the Oak of Moreh, Abraham makes his first altar to God
in the land of Canaan.
In Genesis 12 and 15,
Abraham is absolutely awestruck by God’s covenant promises.
But he cannot help but wonder, how can I know they are true?
This is what God tells him.
God tells him to take a heifer, a goat, a ram, a dove, and a pigeon.
He tells him to cut them in half:
half on one side; half on the other.
What was this?
This was a primitive covenant ceremony,
sometimes used by kings with their vassals or servants.
Kings made their vassals or servants walk in the middle
so they would know the consequences of this covenant –
on the one hand, obedience meant blessings
on the other hand, disobedience meant curses.
Walking through those halves
was the sign that you were binding yourself to the covenant;
You were binding yourself to the blessings of keeping the covenant
but also to the curses of breaking that covenant.
Now here is the wonder of that first Covenant Commitment Ceremony:
Abraham never walks through.
No, in the darkness of night
a fire, a divine, mysterious fire, passes through the two halves.
It is as if God says:
“I will take on the consequences of both sides of this covenant;
Not only the consequences of whether I am faithful or unfaithful,
but also the consequences of whether you are faithful or unfaithful.”
Can you see how this prefigures, how it foretells,
what will happen years and years later
when God comes, not as fire, but as flesh and blood?
When God comes to fully resolve the tensions of the covenant,
and to fulfill its requirements?
Jesus comes,
fully God, thus representing God’s side of the covenant.
Jesus comes,
fully human, thus representing our side of the covenant too.
And the Cross,
the Cross only makes sense
when we see it as fulfilling the conditions of the covenant.
How does Jesus fulfill the conditions of the covenant?
Jesus fulfills the blessing of the covenant
by being absolutely obedient.
And Jesus fulfills the curse of the covenant
by carrying the full punishment of disobedience.
And by the way,
It is Deuteronomy 21:23 that says
“anyone hanging on a tree is under God’s curse.”
Let me let this sink in for you.
Blessings, curses, covenant – it all comes together at the Cross.
Christ’s perfect life fulfills the terms of obedience in the Covenant,
earning for us blessings, his blessings.
Christ’s sacrificial death fulfills the terms of disobedience in the Covenant,
he bore the curse, he paid the price.
The Cross fulfills the conditions – the blessings and the curses — of the Covenant.
CONCLUSION
We are still God’s covenant people.
The covenant still applies –
The blessing
The curses –
They still apply.
And we are still so like those people of long ago:
Our best intentions go crooked;
Our obedience gets side-tracked;
Our devotion gets distracted;
Our blessings get twisted into curses.
In this covenantal relationship
we wonder whether we have squandered the good graces of God?
we wonder if we have taken him for granted?
we wonder if the blessings of his kingdom are for us?
That is when we need to see Jesus,
standing there as the New Moses.
That is when we need to hear him
proclaiming blessings:
blessed are you, you poor in spirit;
blessed are you, you humble and meek;
blessed are you, you down and out;
blessed are you –
For in me,
for in me
all the blessings of the Promised Land,
all the blessings of the Kingdom of Heaven
are yours.
So rejoice, and be glad.
Amen
0 Comments