January
30, 2014 - Thursday
Start Time: 5:43
A.M.
End Time: 8:40 A.M.
Title: Curses for Disobedience
Scripture: Deuteronomy 28:15 – 68
God’s Message / God’s Promise / God’s Commands:
→
However, if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his
commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come on
you and overtake you: You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed. The fruit of your womb
will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds and
the lambs of your flocks. You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when
you go out.
NOTES:
Ø God’s heart is for His people to obey! The purpose of all the curses written on the
same chapter where the blessings of obedience is written shows that our Lord
God wants us to obey. Chapter 28 started
with all the blessings that comes with obedience that will encourage and
inspire us to follow the Lord’s words; the next verses then shows the impact of
disobeying but even with all the curses after the blessings, the intention is
for us to have no reason to disobey.
That our hearts will always be set to follow because not only does God
inspires and encourages us to choose obedience, HE warns us and reminds us of
the result of disobedience and no one wants to have what disobedience has for
its followers. Ultimately, disobedience
= curse. When we disobey, the natural
impact is that curse follows us wherever we go and anything we do, it is
devoured by the curse both internally and externally. So why even choose to disobey? This is the main question God wants us to
think…why even consider disobeying when we know what it has for us. So choose obedience!
→ The Lord will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed
and come to sudden ruin because
of the evil you
have done in forsaking him.
The Lord will
plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are
entering to possess. The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and
mildew, which will plague you
until you perish. The
sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from
the skies until you are destroyed.
NOTES:
Ø God does not want to curse us! Our disobedience puts God in a position where
He must do what He doesn’t want to do to His people – curse them! The above passage mentions “Lord” – which in
the old testament is used as a substitute to
“YHWH” (tetragrammaton – meaning four letters – and was referred to the
Lord’s name in early Judaism). Note that
YHWH is often connected with God’s revelation to Moses in Exodus of who He is
(God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM’ – God is the self-existent One, I AM, who
is worthy of all worship and honor). So
the Lord is literally telling us that He, the Lord, the self existent One, YHWH,
will send us curses when we disobey, including confusion and rebuke in
everything our hands do, until we are destroyed and become ruined because of
the evil in us. He will need to plague
us with diseases and strike us with it.
So these curses are placed on our bodies (internal – diseases and
sicknesses) and what our hands do (work) and it will go with us wherever we
are, in the country or in the city.
→ The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction
but flee from them in seven, and you
will become a thing of horror to all
the kingdoms on earth. Your
carcasses will be food for all the birds and the wild animals, and there will be no one to frighten
them away. The Lord will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you
cannot be cured. The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of
mind. At
midday you will grope about
like a blind person in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do;
day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no one to rescue you.
NOTES:
Ø God’s heart is broken whenever we disobey for
He will have to allow defeat to consume us and failures to take over our
lives! God is a God of
life and sovereignty! He is all-powerful,
almighty, omnipotent, omniscient, self existent, and He will have to step aside
and turn His back to His own people and allow defeat, failures, curses,
negativity to take over them. This is
heart-breaking for a God who loves His people so much! Yet, His words will stand and will not be
broken! So YHWH is saying to us… “Obey
Me! For I want to bless you and not curse you.” – What a God we serve! Amazing, truly amazing! God is saying to us let me bless You so
choose obedience!
→You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but
another will take her and rape her. You will build a house, but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to
enjoy its fruit. Your
ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your
donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep
will be given to your enemies, and no one will rescue them. Your
sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after
day, powerless to lift a hand. A
people that you do not know will eat what your land and labor produce, and you
will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days. The sights you
see will drive you mad. The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet
to the top of your head.
NOTES:
Ø God, despite of His love for us, will do as
He says and will need to permit everything He has given for us be taken away from
our hands by His own enemy! He will have to restrict Himself from His
passionate desire to save and protect us.
He will have to contain His yearning of delivering us and put a stop to
His power to take care, defend, and guard us from His own enemy. So again, YHWH is saying…”Obey me for I
desire to bless you more than you want to.” – Choose obedience today!
→The Lord will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your ancestors.
There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone. You will become
a thing of horror, a byword and an object of ridicule among all the peoples where the Lord will drive you.
NOTES:
Ø God, who wants nothing but to bring His
people together, will have to separate and drive them to a land that is not
their home! God will have to make His people Homeless
and foreigners to lands that are not their own when His people disobey and this
is not what God wants to do. Note that
God is in covenant with us and we are to do our part with His help so He can do
what He has promised. (Note that God
does not want this for His people yet He has planned everything that in the
end, He will be able to unite us back.
Why? Because previous learning I
had confirmed that God has a big heart for the homeless and foreigners and He
hears their cries – which in the end leads us back to Him. Praise God!)
→You will sow much seed in the field but you will
harvest little, because
locusts will devour it. You
will plant vineyards and cultivate them but you will not drink the wine or gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. You
will have olive trees throughout your country but you will not use the oil,
because the olives will drop off. You will have
sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into
captivity. Swarms
of locusts will
take over all your trees and the crops of your land. The foreigners who reside among you will rise above you
higher and higher, but you will sink lower and lower. They will lend
to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, but you will be the tail.
NOTES:
Ø God, who promises abundance prosperity to us,
will have to shut down His Storehouse of blessings for us and watch His people
scrape for food and beg for scraps!
The
God who provides will have to see His people plead for crumbs to eat. God will watch His people get into captivity
and become slaves of their enemies. The
foreigners who live among them will rise above them and become the head while
His people becomes the bottom (But in all these, God sees what is ahead and
sees the future cries of His people and He awaits for the right time to deliver
them once again! Hallelujah!)
→ All these curses will come on you. They
will pursue you and overtake you until you are destroyed, because
you did not obey the Lord your God and observe the commands and
decrees he gave you. They
will be a sign and a wonder to you and your descendants forever. Because
you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire
poverty, you will serve the enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed
you.
NOTES:
Ø God, who clothed you, will
have to allow the enemy to strip you naked and will have to watch you serve
other gods! God’s
heart will be crushed to see His beloved in humiliation, in hunger and thirst, but
most of all, God’s heart will be squashed and pounded down to see His people
serving other gods in poverty. So today
God is saying, “Serve me in joy and gladness in the abundance of my
prosperity. Choose obedience!” Thank You Lord for Your heart is for us to
obey!
→The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will
not understand, a fierce-looking nation without
respect for the old or pity
for the young. They
will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you
are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or olive oil, nor any
calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. They will lay
siege to all the cities throughout your land until the
high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the
cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you.
NOTES:
Ø God, because of His love for
us, will have to allow our enemies to swoop us down and devour everything we
own and leave us with nothing! All these will have to happen so we will remember and will
know the signs and wonders that God told us, which will lead us to humble
ourselves and repent and call upon the Name of our One and True God! What an Amazing God we serve! Truly, undeniably, the greatest and no other
Lord and God! The True and Only Lord of
all!
→Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict
on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the
sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. Even the most
gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother
or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and
he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is
eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will
inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. The most gentle
and sensitive woman
among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the
ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her
own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For
in her dire need she intends to eat them secretly because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on
you during the siege of your cities.
NOTES:
Ø God will then have to watch His people fight
against each other and consume them with evil when we decide to disobey
continuously to our Lord! Our disobedience pulverizes
God’s heart to see evil eating us up alive.
Our Lord who is the God of love, will have to witness His people
thinking and acting against one another and slowly losing the power of love in
their hearts. Disobedience hides the
truth and power of love!
→ If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name—the Lord your God— the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh
and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. He
will bring on you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster
not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. You who were as
numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. Just
as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land you are entering to possess.
NOTES:
Ø God will turn His love against
you because of your disobedience and when it happens, though it pains Him, He
will be pleased to destroy you because of the evil in you! God is abounding in
love and slow to anger but when we decide to choose disobedience despite of His
warnings, His love, His goodness, etc.
We choose our fate, which leads to destruction. God even with His everlasting love, still
managed to pour out His grace and love and would choose to destroy and
eliminate us in the face of the earth rather than see us become totally evil
and become His ultimate nemesis! He
would be pleased to uproot us from the earth rather than see us become His
adversary because He knows that our fate will be worse than death when we
battle against Him. Again, His mercy and
grace just continue to flows even in our choice to disobey Him! Who else is there like Him? None!
Only our Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus, Almighty God! Thank You!
→Then the Lord will scatter you
among all nations, from
one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods—gods of wood and stone,
which neither you nor your ancestors have known. Among those nations you will find
no repose, no resting place for the
sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing, and a despairing heart. You will live
in constant suspense, filled with dread both night and day, never sure of your
life. In
the morning you will say, “If only it were evening!” and in the evening, “If
only it were morning!”—because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the
sights that your eyes will see. The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you
should never make again. There
you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves,
but no one will buy you.
NOTES:
Ø God will then allow the past
to become our present – meaning, the tragedies in our lives in the past will be
repeated again and ultimately allow us to serve other gods! The ultimate
curse is for us to serve other gods and repeat the mistakes we did. Why?
Serving other gods is the ultimate curse, not because it hurts the Lord,
but because these are false gods. We
will be calling upon gods who cannot hear, gods who cannot speak, gods that
cannot do anything. We become insane for
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Our life will become a cycle of mistakes and
it becomes a trap that will bring us deeper to a hopeless life. No love, no hope, no faith. Everything becomes a repeat of failures. There’s just nothing to believe in, nothing
to look forward to, and no one to love… This sounds very familiar in our
generation…God is saying, “obey me so you will never have to face lost again! Choose obedience so You will have love, faith
and hope!”
Prayer:
Lord Jesus, I am speechless and amazed of Your great love,
grace and favor to Your people. In
everything, Your heart is seen that is for us!
Lord I am truly feeling breathless of Your love and sovereignty! God, You are amazing! Truly none other! Even in times that You speak about curses for
disobedience, Your love just overflows!
Jesus, thank You! Holy Spirit, I
am grateful and continuously dumbfounded with Your power, Your Grace and how
You set things right! Despite of how
many times we crushed Your heart, it remains unbreakable for us! No matter how many times I stepped on Your
love and pulverized it again and again every time I disobey, Your love remains
whole and solid and unchanging for me!
Lord I am truly moved and touched by Your greatness and goodness. Words are just not enough to speak it out and
describe it. Lord know that today I choose
to obey. I choose obedience because I
want You to bless me and to love me more and just pour out Your abundant prosperity
in my life! Lord I want You to do what
You want and not put You in a position to do what You don’t want to do to
me. Lord thank You for the gift of choice
and thank You for helping me choose!
Holy Spirit, help me to choose obedience every day, especially when I
struggle to do the right thing. In Jesus’
Name, Amen!
