Read the Fine Print

We're going to do something a little different this morning. We normally read God's word aloud, but we're going to do that the way this passage was designed to be read. Deuteronomy 28 was designed to be read on two mountains. This was a passage that the people of God read as they entered into the promised land—half of the congregation went up on Mount Gerizim and read the blessings, and half the congregation went up on Mount Ebal and read the curses. That's what we're doing this morning.

You on this side, you're my Mount Gerizim people. You're going to read verses one through 14 in just a second, and you're going to stand up and do it because that's what they did. We're going to have them up on the screen and also in the bulletin. You in the balcony can divide right down the middle here. You all are on the Gerizim side. After you're done, you're going to sit down. You all are going to stand up—Mount Ebal—and read with me. You all up there as well. You're going to read verses 15 through the rest of the chapter, those highlighted verses that we have.

I know you all can do this. Are you ready, Gerizim? Stand up. Verses one through 14 together.

Now if you faithfully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all his commands I am giving you today, the Lord your God will put you far above the nations of the earth. All these blessings will come and overtake you because you obey the Lord your God. You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. Your offspring will be blessed, and your land's produce and the offspring of your livestock, including the young of your herds and the newborn of your flocks. Your basket and kneading bowl will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The Lord will cause the enemies who rise up against you to be defeated before you. They will march out against you from one direction, but flee from you in seven directions. The Lord will grant you a blessing on your barns and on everything you do. He will bless you in the land the Lord your God is giving you. The Lord will establish you as his holy people as he swore to you, if you obey the commands of the Lord your God and walk in his ways. Then all the peoples of the earth will see that you bear the Lord's name and they will stand in awe of you. The Lord will make you prosper abundantly with offspring, the offspring of your livestock and your land's produce in the land the Lord swore to your ancestors to give you. The Lord will open for you his abundant storehouse, the sky, to give your land rain in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. You will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow. The Lord will make you the head and not the tail. You will only move upward and never downward, if you listen to the Lord your God's commands I am giving you today and are careful to follow them. Do not turn aside to the right or the left from all these things I am commanding you today, and do not follow other gods to worship them. — Deuteronomy 28:1-14

Great job. Well done. All right. Curses. Mount Ebal crew, stand up. Let's go. Just as many verses, but highlights from this chapter together.

But if you do not obey the Lord your God by carefully following all his commands and statutes I'm giving you today, all these curses will come and overtake you. You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country. Your basket and kneading bowl will be cursed. Your offspring will be cursed, and your land's produce, the young of your herds, and the newborn of your flocks. You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out. The Lord will send against you curses, confusion, and rebuke in everything you do until you are destroyed and quickly perish because of the wickedness of your actions in abandoning me. The Lord will make pestilence cling to you until he has exterminated you from the land you are entering to possess. The Lord will afflict you with wasting disease, fever, inflammation, burning heat, drought, blight, and mildew. Those will pursue you until you perish. The sky above you will be bronze and the earth beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your land into falling dust. It will descend on you from the sky until you are destroyed. The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will march out against them from one direction, but flee from them in seven directions. You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. You will sow much seed in the field, but harvest little because locusts will devour it. — Deuteronomy 28:15-38

You will plant and cultivate vineyards but not drink the wine or gather the grapes because worms will eat them. You will have olive trees throughout your territory but not moisten your skin with oil because your olives will drop off. You will father sons and daughters, but they will not remain yours because they will be taken prisoner. Buzzing insects will take possessions of all your trees and your land's produce. The resident alien among you will rise higher above you while you sink lower and lower. He will lend to you but you will not lend to him. He will be the head and you will be the tail. All these curses will come, pursue, and overtake you until you are destroyed since you did not obey the Lord your God and keep the commands and statutes he gave you. Then the Lord will scatter you among all peoples from one end of the earth to the other and you will worship other gods of wood and stone which you nor your ancestors have known. You will find no peace among these nations and there will be no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and a despondent spirit.

Good job. Well done. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

There's a moment that I know that every parent dreads, which is when you've given the loving warning and the kid does it anyway. Don't touch the stove. Don't chase the basketball into the street. Don't whittle the stick with the knife pointed toward you. I could go on and on. Those are little kid ones. Don't even get me started on the big kid ones. They do it anyway. The parent is not so much angry as heartbroken. Like, I warned you. I told you. No was meant to protect their joy, not ruin their joy.

And Deuteronomy 28 is just like that. God is saying to his people, these are the things that will lead to your life and your joy and your overflow and your abundance. Listen. The life God offers you, it's good, and it's beautiful, and it's overflowing with blessing. But if you turn away, there will be consequences. Harm will destroy you.

It's a long chapter. It's filled with all these overwhelming blessings, these crushing curses. It's really hard to read. And behind all of this is God, and a truth about God that I want you to understand. That God loves you enough to tell you the truth. God loves you just like a parent does. That obedience, it leads to life. And there's disobedience that leads to death. And the pathway, just like with our kids—we'll say, the pathway you're going down, that is not Disneyland at the end of that. That's destruction.

And Jesus said the same words. There is a wide path that leads to destruction. There is a narrow path that leads to life. If you read the Proverbs, Proverbs over and over say, this is the way of life. This is the way of death. This is all throughout your Bible. And it's about a God who tells us, who loves us enough to tell us the truth.

The Structure of Deuteronomy

Now this is the culmination point almost at the end of the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is structured—there's no mystery around how this book is structured. It's an old covenant document. Lots of examples of this in the ancient Near East all over the region. It's called technically a Suzuran vassal covenant, which is a stronger power with a weaker power. And the stronger power says, here's the history between us. Here's defining the terms of our relationship. Here's the individual rules. Here's the blessings if you keep this covenant with me. Here's the curses if you don't, and then there's a song at the end. That's the book of Deuteronomy. It's a covenant.

Now we don't use that word covenant very often, but God—right now they're on the verge of the promised land. They're about to step in. This is the second generation. All their parents have died. They've been wandering in the wilderness. Now they're about to step across the Jordan into the promised land, and God renews his covenant with them, and it's covenant language. It's not contract. It's the language like marriage vows. Like, I am gonna be this for you. Would you be this for me? God's language here is not karma. I think a lot of us read this like this—if I don't do all the right things, karma is just gonna come crashing down on me. This is covenantal language. This is I love you language. This is God saying, this is what our relationship is gonna be like.

And it begins with this verse:

If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commandments, the Lord will set you high above all the nations of the earth. — Deuteronomy 28:1

Now this is what's good news for us about a God who makes covenants with people. You need to know this. God doesn't change. Now we may take that for granted, but God doesn't change. God never stops being good. God never gets tired of being holy.

God never gets sick of loving his people. God never has a bad day where he's like, I don't feel like keeping my word today. God doesn't wake up grumpy. God isn't hangry. God is the same. And that is such good news for the people then and the people in this room.

God is a covenant God. Now I know I normally give you an outline to take notes on, but I realize I feel like I'm making you fat and lazy with that. I'm gonna make you tune in, listen a little closer today.

What Does Blessing Mean?

This language—the passage we just read—uses words that we don't use. Not a lot of us use the word blessing very much. That's kind of become the property of the prosperity gospel. You know, hashtag blessed. I haven't seen that on a single car in our parking lot ever. We're kind of allergic to that because it's been abused.

Or cursed. You know, we think of that maybe as the property of Pirates of the Caribbean. And for all non-pirates, we don't use the word cursed very often. So I want to define these and like how God uses those words.

So blessing. What does blessing mean when God says blessing? I got two words for you. It means one is what you already think of: affluence, riches, material goods. The other is affirmation. You and me, we good. We good. Affirmation and affluence. That's what blessing is.

Cursing is the inverse. I'll give you two other words for cursing. One is consequences. There are cause and effect consequences that will happen. The other is condemnation. You and me, we ain't good. We are not good. We are not friends.

So every blessing here is a picture of how God intended life to be. We use the word shalom a lot to describe this. God's word for peace is one of not just no hostilities, but universal flourishing—the way life should be. And then this is what blessings are. Did you hear this?

Blessing in the city, blessing in the field, blessing when you come in, blessing when you go out.

It sounds like Dr. Seuss: blessing on a train, blessing in a rain, blessing with a house, blessing with a mouse. Right? Blessing here, there, and everywhere. It's gonna be good.

And the other side of the covenant is curse. When Israel turns away from God, when we turn away from God, things unravel in our lives. Things are not the way they're supposed to be. And all the areas where life was full—in the field, in the city, with a house, with a mouse, in the rain, on a train—all that falls apart. Things disintegrate.

And this is what Moses describes: the horror of it. There was horrible language in here. Famine, disease, fear, exile, alienation. Why? Because God wants them to feel the seriousness of sin. The seriousness of covenant love. Of what life is, what's the good life, and what's life apart from God?

I almost made our teenagers come and stand in the middle aisle and listen. These are such powerful words. Life with God, life without God. Obedience is not God's way of taking life from you or ruining your life. It's God's way of giving you life.

The Imbalance of Blessings and Curses

And what you may not realize as we read this—because I picked and chose all these different verses, I had you all read verses one through 15, I had you all read a bunch of verses all over this chapter—but without looking at your bulletin, 14 verses of blessing. Let's guess how many verses there are of cursing. Raise your hand if you think it's 14. Twenty-four? Thirty-four? Forty-four? Fifty-four?

Okay, 54 is right. I mean, the sheer imbalance of that is striking. If you go home and read this this afternoon, why so many curses? Is God being mean?

My mom used to say, "You being ugly? God being ugly?" No. God is pointing to us not only to the weight of obeying him and how powerful that is, but the heavy consequences of turning away.

Sin and Its Effects

Anybody have a mold allergy? Right. If you've walked into an old building, kind of like this one, and you are aware of something that other people aren't—there's something in the air that makes you feel not so great.

Now mold is one of those things in your house as a longtime homeowner. You know, you get mold in your house, you don't have to really deal with it. You can choose to paint over it or you can kind of contain it with a dehumidifier and just try to manage the mold. But anybody with a mold allergy can tell you that stuff's growing and that stuff's making people sick.

And if you don't actually do the big thing—tear off the wall, do the deep cleaning, the heavy duty chemical agents that come in and clean it—unless you do that, that mold is gonna continue to make you sick.

That's the way that sin works in our lives. This is the way that a life apart from God, the choices that we make to turn away from him, function. This is why God gets so upset over sin.

This is why there are 14 verses of blessing and 54 verses of cursing because we don't believe him. We're kind of like, really? Sinning? It doesn't seem that big a deal. Why does God make this such a big deal?

And it's like the mold that's growing behind the scenes. We don't even see it. This is what every person does on the planet. Everybody's like, "Well, I'm the exception. I can handle the truth, that kind of temptation. I'm kind of a bigger person. It doesn't affect me like it affects other people." And we don't see what's growing in the walls. We don't understand it's making us sick.

God is being so kind here. That sounds harsh, doesn't it? But God is being so kind to say, this is what happens. You could paint over it. You can manage it with a dehumidifier, but it's not gonna go away unless there's something deep that happens to clean this out.

We want God's blessing without submission. We want God's good gifts without a life that's under him. We want God's gifts without God's presence sometimes. And when we experience the consequences, we're like, why? Why is this going down in my life? No. This cause and effect goes deeper than we realize.

I'm gonna put this verse from the New Testament book of Galatians. This is Paul's way of describing the spiritual mold growing in our walls.

Cursed is everybody who doesn't continue to do everything written in the book of the law. — Galatians

It grows. Moses knew it. If we're honest with ourselves, we know it too. We're really not the exception to the rule. Many of you have stories. You have stories of decisions that you made that you wish you could go back and undo. You've dealt with consequences, things you carried around in this life that you're like, "Oh, I wish old me could go talk to young me. Have a little interview. Like, don't do that. Don't touch the stove. Don't run after the basketball. Don't carve the stick with the knife pointed towards you." There's a reason for these things.

But this is what's challenging, isn't it? We read a passage like this and we're like, if blessing only comes through perfect obedience, how in the world do I have a chance? How do any of us stand a chance?

The Real Covenant Story

And this is where this passage actually points us forward beyond this chapter into other parts of the book of Deuteronomy and then into our New Testament. Because it tells us about God's covenant, and yet it also tells us about the real expectations God has for his people and his provision.

What is the covenant expectation? We read all this and it's very conditional. Do this, you live. Do this, you die. Obey, the good things happen. Disobey, bad things happen. But that's not the whole story.

Here's the problem. By the time Israel is on the border entering into the promised land, they're just about to go in. They haven't broken the covenant in the future. They've broken it for years before this. They have never really lived up to their terms of God's marriage covenant with them, and neither can we.

So as Moses finishes his speech, and we're gonna look at this in a couple weeks in chapter 30, but I'm gonna just tip my hand today. In chapter 30, this is what Moses says:

When you return, when you return to the Lord your God and you obey him with all your heart and all your soul, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you. — Deuteronomy 30

What? Moses, didn't you just say that if you obey, live? If you disobey, you die? Moses is saying this here. He wrote 54 verses of curse and then he says this: when you return, when you return, the covenant keeping God is gonna be like this towards you because he never gets tired of being good. And yet he's never hangry, and he's never grumpy with sinners. He always turns his face back towards those who repent and come to him.

You hear the hope in this? You could read this chapter and hear kind of in the background the voice that's like, "You can do it." Moses isn't cheering that. This is what he's expecting.

I'm gonna tell you what life and death is, and I really want you to get it. God has been kind in telling us this, and yet he knows. He knows who we are. He knows we touch the stove and we chase the basketball and we whittle the wood and we cut our hand. He knows we do those things.

You know, there's two strands. If you pay attention to your Bible, when you read the Old Testament, it's hard to make sense of two strands that are parallel tracks in the Old Testament. The parallel tracks are like this: obey and there's life, disobey and there's death. Conditional. Do this and live, do this and die. There's a conditional strain that runs through all the covenant documents of the Old Testament.

And then there's this other strain: God's unconditional love for his people.

And if you read your Bible closely, those never get resolved in the Old Testament. That's why modern Judaism remains such a confusing religion. The Old Testament without the New never resolves the chord. It's this minor chord. It's like it doesn't quite go together. If I had Danny up here, I'd make him play something discordant. These only get resolved in the New Testament. These only get resolved centuries after Moses when another Israelite would stand on a different mountain. And he would say all these words of blessing.

Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn for they will be comforted. — Matthew 5:3-4

Jesus in his beatitude goes down his own version of Deuteronomy 28. But unlike Israel, he wouldn't just read the words out loud on top of a mountain—he did them. He did all of them. He loves the Lord his God.

As we read in Deuteronomy six, with all of his heart and his soul and all of his... — Deuteronomy 6

He walked in perfect obedience. He was the only true covenant keeper. He did all the things. His life ended not in blessing, but in curse.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us as it is written, cursed is everyone who's hung on a tree. — Galatians 3:13

If you go back this afternoon and read again Deuteronomy 28, take your bulletin home and read it. You could find all the covenant curses appear at Golgotha, at the place of the skull. The curses of becoming hungry, thirsty—Jesus on the cross says, "I thirst." The curses of weeping and unending sorrow—Jesus in the garden weeps with tears like blood pouring out. The curses of nakedness and exposure—Jesus wore one thing on the cross and it was a crown of thorns, exposed. He received the curses of exile and abandonment.

He cries out, my God my God, why have you forsaken me? — Matthew 27:46

All the covenant curses. He bore line after line after line of Deuteronomy 28 on himself. He took all the covenant curses. Why? So that you can receive the covenant blessings. So I can receive the covenant blessings.

The Mountains Come Together

If you could picture, remember the first slide I showed of the two mountains? Mount Gerizim over here. Mount Ebal over here. There's a third mountain. It's like at the cross, two mountains come together at Mount Calvary. And the curses and the blessings of God in his covenant come together at this one mount where Jesus hangs.

I visited Calvary this summer in Israel. You can go to Jerusalem today and visit a church called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It contains two really important monuments. You walk in the door and up a flight of stairs, and upstairs is exposed rock over which they've put all this gold—it's the rock of Golgotha. You can actually reach down under this altar and touch the rock. There's all kinds of people from all over the world worshiping Jesus at the place where Jesus was crucified.

What's fascinating is you can go down those stairs and go across the chapel to another room where there's a piece of flat stone where they laid his body for burial. And what's fascinating when you go to Jerusalem is what's not there. Jesus ain't there. His body isn't there. It's kind of the whole point.

In the centuries that intervened, there's been a lot of wars and destruction. At one point, Golgotha—which is where the cross is—was a high point over the city. It was a garbage dump. You could see this above everything. The Romans did this on purpose so everybody could see: "This is what happens to people who disobey Rome. They turn into garbage, and we hang them out here to die."

One of my favorite things in this chapel is the modern church that's been built over it—the place you can walk up to and see where Jesus was crucified and the tomb where he was laid. But somebody—Christians in the intervening centuries—have dug under the rock of Golgotha and carved out a cave. They've named it the Chapel of Adam.

I don't know who did this. There's not a lot of great records on it, but it's fascinating and it's great theology. Because under where Jesus was crucified is this chapel remembering Adam—Adam of Adam and Eve. And it tells a story theologically that is true for every person that we all need to know. The second Adam, Jesus, did what the first Adam could never do. He obeyed all the words of the covenant.

And that first Adam who failed, that little chapel that's under Golgotha, the symbolism of the blood flowing from that second Adam straight down the rock over Adam's race, over us, is exactly what we need to pay for the curses. Jesus not only fulfilled all the parts of obeying God and fulfilling the covenant, but he also in his death took on the curse. And you and I like standing in that little chapel under the cross. This is exactly what we need. This is the heart of the gospel.

You know, there was a day in high school I was the Easter bunny. So my mom talked me into this. She claims she did not, but I know she did. So she signs me up to be the Easter bunny at this gathering of little kids, and I show up that day and the costumes there and the giant head with the screen eyes that you can look through. So I put on the Easter bunny costume and I go out and lo and behold, amazing things began to happen to me. People took my picture. Kids, some of them cried, but most of them wanted to see me. Most of them wanted their picture made with me. I got praise and embrace and adoration and love for being the Easter bunny.

And the weirdest thing happened after it was over, when I took off the costume, nobody wanted their picture taken with me. Nobody hugged me, no kids came up to celebrate me, nobody adored me. You know, as long as I was in the Easter bunny, I was treated like the Easter bunny. All the praise and adoration. But once I was no longer in the Easter bunny, all that just went away.

This is what it means to be in Christ. God looks at you in Christ as Christ. You receive all the praise and celebration and embrace of Jesus, and you can't take it off. There's no taking off the outfit. If you're a Christian, if you've owned him by faith, the covenant blessings are yours, and you are celebrated as if you are Jesus. Isn't that amazing? You're in Christ. This is what it means to be a Christian. All of the covenant of obedience credited to you, all of the covenant curses taken on him.

The Role of Obedience

So here's the million dollar question. What about obedience anymore? Do we need to do that? If Jesus has taken the curse and he's given us the blessing, what about obedience? Do we need to obey? Absolutely. Grace doesn't erase obedience, it empowers it.

In the old covenant, obedience was the condition for blessing. In the new covenant, obedience is the consequence of blessing. I'm already blessed. So I obey God. When you know you're loved, you stop asking, well, how much do I have to do to get God off my back? And you start asking, what can I do that pleases the Lord? What can I do that brings him joy? That's new covenant life in Jesus.

The Morning's Invitation

Here's the invitation this morning. Is there an area in your life where you are cutting corners and you're fudging the record and you're pretending like you're the exception to the rule? Is there an area in your life where you're giving yourself a pass on sin? And you know, I'm beginning to experience some of the yuck that comes with the mold growing in the walls. I don't feel so good anymore. I'm lacking joy. I don't have this deep sense of loving God and knowing that I'm okay.

I want to invite you to bring that to the Lord this morning and to repent.

I've done some flying recently and I don't love to fly. I found it really frustrating. But one of the things about modern air travel is there's almost nothing I can do as a passenger on an airplane to crash the plane. I really can't wreck the plane. Now I can ruin the journey for everybody around me. I can be obnoxious and rude, and I can be mean to people around me, and I can actually get arrested by an air marshal when I get to the airport and kind of ruin my weeks after that to come. And I could be banned from travel in the future, but I can't really crash the plane.

I've been thinking about this. The good news of the gospel is that if you are in Christ, you really can't wreck your life. You really can't crash the plane. If you are in Christ, you are forever in Christ. And yet, you can be rude and obnoxious and ruin your journey and somebody else's, and you can end up making your fellow passengers miserable around you, but you can't really crash the plane.

But two things I want you to remember this morning. When we experience God's fatherly discipline for us being rude and obnoxious and making our lives and other people's lives miserable, that is not God withdrawing his salvation from us. That's God lovingly pursuing his kids and saying, again, this is the path of life, this is the path of death. Don't confuse fatherly discipline with losing your salvation.

The other is turbulence. You know, most times it's pretty smooth.

You hit one of those flights where you get rocked and they can't do the service of the drinks or you got a drink and it spills because the plane's doing this and we hit those moments in our lives of hardship and sadness and suffering and we're like, God has left me. Surely I'm not a Christian anymore. Don't confuse it. Again turbulence isn't losing your salvation. You can't crash the plane. I know the pilot. He takes all of his home. He never fails to make a connection.

Again today, maybe you feel the dryness this morning. You feel the dryness of disobedience, you feel the sense of distance. I want you to take that home today. I want you to wrestle with the Lord. I want to encourage you to repent. Repentance just means, Lord my life is not moving toward life but death. I am choosing things that don't bring joy, peace, shalom. I'm choosing things that rot in my mouth and I know it.

Remember, at the cross the two mountains came together. At Mount Calvary, the blessings of God were such that Jesus opened up a never ending stream of blessings that flow to his people. And if you are in him, nothing can prevent that. And Jesus took on himself all of the covenant curses, so those are taken on him and forever done within the cross.

Brothers and sisters, we have every reason to rejoice today. Welcome to be in the Easter bunny. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. And I thank you how seriously you warn us against which pathway leads to life and which one leads to death. Lord, there are things today in this room that we are carrying. Decisions we've made, places we've gotten ourselves in, where we know the mold is growing in the walls, and we pray for courage today to allow you to come and do the clean out.

We thank you, Father, that your love is an everlasting unconditional love. We thank you that Jesus met all the conditions of the covenant, Lord, so that we can enjoy all of its blessings. And we pray today, Father, for joy to savor these things. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's stand and sing together in response to God's word.