Blessings and Curses

Leviticus 26-27

            The blessings and curses in Leviticus 26 must be understood as part of the covenant of Sinai. To understand this, I again direct you to a sermon I preached on Deuteronomy 30 on February 12, 2023. (The full service is here; the sermon itself begins at 29:15 and runs to 46:49.) In short, the covenant of Sinai applies only to the people of Israel, and it applies, as Paul argues in Galatians 3, only until it serves its purpose and the Savior comes.

            We must keep this in mind lest all of the conditional statements in this chapter lead us into a really bad understanding of our Christian faith. In summary, the conditions are: if you do good, the Lord will bless you; if you do bad, the Lord will curse you. That’s just pure works righteousness right there, if we apply it to anything other than Israel under the Sinai covenant.

            Paul (Gal. 3) points out that the Lord’s covenant with Abraham—to bless the nations of the earth through him and which came long before the Sinai covenant—was unconditional. Grace is unconditional. Our salvation is unconditional. It depends on faith, not works. (And faith is not a work; faith is simply the realization that what Christ did, He did for me.)

            The Sinai covenant with all its conditions was intended to keep Israel, as a nation, pure so that the promise of a Savior could come to its fruition among them. Once that Savior, Jesus, arrived, the Sinai covenant had run its course. Which is why Paul, a man who in his youth was incredibly dedicated to the laws of the Sinai covenant, could, after his conversion to Christ, dismiss kosher food laws, Sabbath laws, and circumcision as completely as he did. He understood that in Christ they had fulfilled their purposes and were no longer necessary.

            So, please don’t read Leviticus 26 as if God plays divine games of tit-for-tat! If we suffer losses in this fallen age of the world, it’s not that God is out to get us. His love for us is not bound by the conditions of the Law (Jeremiah 31:3; Romans 8:31-39). And so we accept trouble  without doubting the Lord’s good intentions toward us (Job 2:10), and we do this because we recognize that the Lord has shown his good intentions by giving His Son into death for us.