The Curses of the Disobedient
Leviticus 26:46
Introduction.
Last week we looked at the wonderful blessings of God.
We noted that these blessings actually meet the needs of anyone who is faithful to Him.
The Lord would take care of one’s basic needs of food and water.
He would take care of one’s needs for peace and safety.
He would take care of one’s need to belong, building them up by dwelling with them.
He would take care of us…. IF we are faithful to Him.
While some of these are material blessings in the OT, there is a NT spiritual equivalent.
Is that the case with the curses? That’s the topic for today.
Of course, many of you are parents.
You no doubt have given your children instructions, and rewarded them or punished them accordingly—as we stated, God is no different here.
We saw the instructions in the first 25 chapters.
Lev. 26 now tells them ahead of time what the outcomes will be which depend upon their faithfulness.
We should note something else before we begin.
I don’t want anyone to think that if you or anyone you know has personally suffered any of these things, then God is punishing them for some wickedness.
We don’t want to fall into the same mistake that Job’s three so-called friends fell into, by condemning an innocent man.
Quite frankly, we don’t know always know if the suffering we face is because we are being punished like David or tested like Job.
It should, however, cause us to pray and reflect on ourselves to make sure we are right with God.
After all, we are quick to jump on His blessings, but His curses are no less real, no less serious.
Divisions in Lev. 26.
In the first 13 verses we find the blessings given to the faithful.
In the remaining 33 verses the curses are promised to the disobedient, far outnumbering the blessings.
This apparent imbalance is actually typical of ancient covenants given at the time.
So today, we will be focusing on these curses.
Preview.
Curses and Punishment (26:14-39).
Repentance and Restoration (26:40-46).
Body.
Curses and Punishment (26:14-39).
Condition (26:14-15).
Some like to think that the Lord’s salvation is unconditional.
While there are some unconditional promises in Scripture, salvation is not among them.
There are many conditional phrases in Scripture.
This chapter is nothing but conditions.
In 26:14, we see that a lack of obedience and failure to observe all these commandments will result in the curses that follow.
On top of that, they despised and abhorred God’s Law to the point of breaking the covenant.
Let us be careful to love His commands rather than to despise and abhor them.
After this we see an escalation of punishments that almost read like a history book.
This is so accurate as to seemingly predict the future that some liberal scholars think this was written after the Babylonian Captivity.
First Tier of Punishment (26:16-17).
Terror over them—dismay, sudden terror or ruin, alarm.
Wasting disease—consumption, a wasting disease of the lungs, possibly tuberculosis.
Fever—inflammation, “burning ague” (KJV), which is a fever (probably due to malaria) marked by regular fits of chills, fever, and sweating.
This will cause them to go blind and lose heart.
Their enemies will take their crops so they’ll have little food.
Their enemies shall defeat them and rule over them.
How many times throughout the OT do we read of plagues and enemies ruling over them.
In fact that’s what Judges is all about, with so many enemies coming to rule over them.
When the Midianites came to oppress the Israelites in Judges 6, we note that there was a famine in the land because they kept destroying their crops (Jdg 6:1-6).
From a spiritual perspective, if we abandon God, we will become spiritually sick.
James hints at that when he calls for the sick to be prayed over (James 5:14-15).
Second Tier of Punishment (26:18-20).
We note that after the first tier, the people are expected to repent, but if they don’t, the punishment escalates.
They will receive seven times the punishment they had before—this could mean a literal seven times, or it could symbolic, meaning “as much as is necessary.”
We note that their pride would be broken.
This second line of vs. 19 is a colorful way of saying that drought would come (heavens like iron, earth like bronze) – they would be closed up and not produce anything.
They had been prosperous, and according to one commentator, “Prosperity leads to pride, but divine judgment strips people of that pride” (Ross 479; cf. Deut. 32:15).
You see, when we are satisfied, we end up not caring so much what God wants and we go our own way.
As for the application, consider that we are now starved for righteousness.
Jesus tells us that who hungers and thirsts for righteousness shall be filled (Matt. 5:6).
But if we turn away from Him, we turn away from the Source of true spiritual nourishment, so we become starved for it and perhaps not even realize it.
Third Tier of Punishment (26:21-22).
Again, they were expected to repent, but if they did not, a further escalation of the plagues occurs seven times.
Wild beasts would come in, destroying so many things.
Even their highways would be desolate, which also is said to have happened in Judges and in the prophets (Jdg 5:6).
The wild beasts may or may not be literal (as Peter himself referred to wicked men as “brute beasts” in 2 Pet. 2:12), but the outcome is the same.
Are our children robbed from us, become unfaithful, because we have refused to repent?
I know some of us have unfaithful children, and I’m not blaming anyone here (unlike Job’s friends), but when such things happen, it should always cause us to pray, to look deep within ourselves, and to question if we are being punished or tested.
Fourth Tier of Punishment (26:23-26).
This time, the Lord uses the word “reformed,” “If by these things you are not reformed by Me” (26:23).
When we go astray, brothers and sisters, we need a reformation!
We need to return to Him, so that we might walk with Him again.
We always need to be “transformed by the renewing of [our] mind” (Rom. 12:2).
Again, seven times the punishment comes if the Israelites were not reformed.
Then, it says He will bring the sword! War is upon them.
Then the people will seek refuge in their cities, and what should happen but another plague breaks out, forcing them to surrender.
On top of that, there was more famine; bread would become scarce.
Often, our Christian walk is put in terms of spiritual warfare.
And when we fail and continue to fail and we do not repent, we will begin to lose that spiritual war over our souls.
We will continue to lose that war until we repent, or we face the fifth and last tier.
Fifth Tier of Punishment (26:27-39).
It’s amazing the mercy and longsuffering of our God.
He doesn’t just give His people a second chance, but a third and a fourth.
And that’s assuming they don’t repent in between punishments.
Instead of just walking “contrary to you” (26:24), He will now “walk contrary to you in fury” (26:28) – if that doesn’t send shivers up your spine…
Cannibalism will occur, eating your own children.
We see this happening in 2 Kings 6 when the Syrians besieged Samaria, but also Jeremiah records this happening in the Babylonian Captivity (Lam. 2:20).
Josephus also records this happening in the Siege of Jerusalem in AD 70.
So much death and destruction would occur upon the children of Israel for their continued acts of evil and wickedness.
They were to be scattered among the nations, again, clearly seen in the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities, along with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
The word for “scatter” indicates a winnowing, that the chaff would be driven away, but the wheat, the faithful remnant, would return, which we do see happening at the end of the 70-year Babylonian Exile.
Then the land would rest, it would enjoy its Sabbaths once again when the wicked people were removed from it.
Those who remain in the land would be terrified, even at the “sound of a shaken leaf” (26:36), as you might imagine since their world was just turned upside down. You might recognize much of this when you read Jeremiah.
The idea is the wicked will waste away in these foreign lands, and only the righteous would remain and return home (26:38-39).
As Christians, we might expect to be in exile from our Lord, from His church, when we are in sin and refuse to repent.
This is what happens when we have been withdrawn from as we see in 1 Cor. 5.
That is merely recognizing the state that the Lord has already put the individual in.
This also applies at a congregational level, as Jesus warned the churches in Asia that their candlestick would be removed if they did not repent (Rev. 2:5).
Both of these represent a spiritual exile that can only be remedied by repentance.
Repentance and Restoration (26:40-46).
Repentance (26:40-41).
If this isn’t a great description of true repentance, I don’t know what is.
First they had to confess their sins and the sins of their fathers.
Obviously this didn’t mean confession of every single transgression—there’s no way they could know all their fathers did.
But they would know some, and at the very least know that they had failed the Lord and needed to turn back to Him.
They couldn’t just pay lip service to repent; they had to really mean it.
When we sin, we too need to acknowledge what we have done wrong before God and let Him know about that (1 John 1:9).
We may even need to confess them before others, either privately or publicly, depending on the nature of the sin (James 5:16).
We are to show our humility to the Lord, because only then will He come near to us (James 4:7-10).
We also need to accept our guilt. This is simply a realization that what we did was wrong, and recognizing that our Lord was just in His punishments upon us.
Only then will He remember us.
Restoration (26:42-45).
The covenant will be remembered, but restoration may not come right away.
Spiritual restoration came immediately, but physical restoration was not quite so quick.
It’s like being grounded or put in a time out, or even serving a prison sentence. We may repent of our sin the moment punishment begins, but we still have to serve that time, paying the consequences of our actions.
We see this in the cycle of the judges. The people would cry out and eventually a judge would arise to deliver them.
We see this especially contrasted in the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities.
We don’t have much on what happened to the Northern Kingdom when they were taken away by Assyria, but it can be assumed that they did not repent and confess their sins.
They wasted away in Assyria, and many of them were assimilated into Assyrian culture.
In Babylon, those of the Southern Kingdom of Judah were kept separate for the most part and were able to maintain their religion and culture—by the grace of God.
And also, it was clear a remnant of Judah repented of their wickedness, so the Lord did “not cast them away, nor [did He] abhor them, to utterly destroy them” as He did the Northern Kingdom (26:44).
It does not explicitly state they would return home, but that they had to endure their punishment and the Lord would remember His covenant with them.
Remembering this covenant would mean eventually restoring them to their land promised them through Abraham.
After the Jews were responsible for the death of God’s Son, however, they had about 40 years to repent before Jerusalem would be destroyed in AD 70.
The only way they can be restored now is spiritually in Christ.
We see this in the apocalyptic speeches of Jesus in Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21, along with several other passages, including Rom. 11, which I don’t have time to expound upon tonight.
In any event, we can apply this by repenting of our sin and confessing it, knowing that He will restore us spiritually.
Conclusion.
We know the ultimate curse of being disobedient and unfaithful to our Lord.
If we haven’t just talked about it, we will talk about it next week in our class on Mark concerning hell.
We certainly want to avoid these chastisements, but always remember, “For whom the Lord loves He chastens” (Heb. 12:6).
If we have strayed from the path, He will push us and nudge us back in the right direction.
He wants our souls to be saved, and will help us get there whether we like it or not.
Of course, we can always reject His correction and turn away completely, but then that ultimate curse awaits.
They had the Law of Moses to follow, but we have the Law of Christ.
We must be obedient to it, the NT.
If we are already a Christian, we can repent & confess and expect to be restored.
If we are not, we need to become one, and obey the gospel of Christ.
That ultimate curse of hell is upon all mankind for their sin until they obey that sweet and precious gospel.
Obey the gospel today and enjoy in the blessings of the faithful (as we discussed last week).