Deuteronomy 28:15-68

Deuteronomy 28:15-68

After telling Israel about the blessings they would receive for their obedience, Moses closes out this section of Deuteronomy by reminding them once again of the consequences of not following God’s commands. Expounding on what he already mentioned in Deuteronomy 27, Moses outlines how every aspect of their lives will be affected by their disobedience. Remember that one of the blessings God promised them was to make them a great nation over all the other nations in the world. It would be through Israel that He would bless everyone else. So the opposite of this promise is Israel’s destruction. If Israel became disobedient to God’s commands, then He promised to send in these other nations into the Promised Land to destroy Israel. As a result, every aspect of their lives would be changed. Their physical bodies would endure pain, their crops and livestock would not produce as much as it once had, their homes and towns would be destroyed, they would be removed from their lands, and these other nations would gain control.

God had big plans for Israel, and He needed them to remain obedient so that He could work through them. Now understand that His plans are not dependant on us. God can accomplish anything He wants to and is powerful enough to overcome any of our shortfalls; He proves this time and time again in Scripture. God, however, chooses to use us in His plans, and that is what He was doing through Israel. To make sure that they remained faithful, the law had to be established, and so that they would remain obedient, these consequences or curses had to be outlined as well.

Deuteronomy 28 is somewhat prophetic. It mentions that Israel will one day have a king, stating that Israel would set a king over themselves. There would come a day when Israel would reject God as their king and request to have an earthly king like the rest of the nations. It also mentions that a nation far away, a nation with a different language, will come in and take over. This will later be seen when both kingdoms of Israel fall to nations that would come out of the East.

Moses wraps this all up in the closing verses, stressing why it is so important that they remain obedient. The promise that God originally made to Abraham was to make him a great nation, with numbers as many as the stars in the heavens. Here, God promises that if they do not remain obedient, He will reverse that blessing. Instead of being quite numerous in the world, they will be decimated to just a few. Instead of receiving God’s protection and blessings, such as they had since the time that they left Egypt, God would reign down the same amount of curses. Instead of leaving them in the Promised Land as one united nation, they would be scattered across the entire world. Instead of being free, they would once again become slaves. God grants so much freedom to His children, and the least that we can do is obey His commands. When we decide to live in sin, we are basically telling God that we do not care what He has done for us. We end up taking for granted all of the blessings that God has given us. Like Israel, God will also reign down curses on us, maybe not in the same way that He had promised Israel, but curses will come just the same. Yet even in the midst of this we see God’s love. God uses discipline to draw us back to Him. As we will soon see how Israel ended up in Exile, we will also see how they came back to God.

Matt