Week 10 Deuteronomy 28
The subtitle added to this chapter in my bible is: Curses for Disobedience.
My own (mental) subtitle: forgetting God is a pretty direct route to national catastrophe.
I tallied-up the number of curses in this passage. In 53-verses I counted 55 curses (a little over 1 curse per verse.) I don’t have time to cross-reference the OT to check that the 55 individual curses panned-out in actual literal real life developments. But I’ve read about the judges. About the topsy-turvy kingdoms. About the nation’s slow grinding down into exile.
Anyway reading this passage it’s easy to form an impression about the Lord. He’s pretty harsh. Pretty nasty. I re-read what Moses said:
a) You can abide by the commandments & be benefitted
b) You can disregard the commandments & be maledicted
I wonder about other outcomes. Two theoretical possibilities are:
c) You can disregard the commandments and be benefitted
d) You can abide by the commandments and be maledicted
But it’s only the first two that are (realistically) on offer.
Mulling over the passage I don’t think Moses’ intention was to show that the Lord was a heartless goon. I figure he intended to impress on his audience a simple binary: Take Path A to a Good Life. Take Path B to walk off A Cliff.
So I don’t think chapter 28 is a description of God-the-Ghoulish-Tyrant. I think it’s more a straightforward & guaranteed list of outcomes: What my compensation will be when I decide to forget about God.
Note: Deuteronomy 28:15-68