After Moses gives all the blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, he describes someone who, hearing this oath, invokes a blessing on themselves anyway, thinking they'll be safe even while persisting in their own way — bringing disaster on the whole land as a result. The LORD would never be willing to forgive such a person; every curse written in the book would fall on them, and He'd blot their name out entirely, singling them out for disaster from among all Israel's tribes (a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 29:19–21).

Reading this, I thought again of prosperity gospel preachers, who often point to specific promised blessings in Scripture, telling followers God will bless them simply for believing. But what does Scripture actually say about the blessings in Deuteronomy 28? Does it say that if you believe, you'll receive? No — it says if you fully obey the LORD's commands, then all these blessings will come (a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 28:1–2). The requirement under the Mosaic Law for receiving blessing was full obedience — partial obedience, even 99% obedience, was never enough. So what's Deuteronomy 29:19–21 actually describing? Someone who invokes blessing on themselves without full obedience receives the Law's full curse instead of its blessing. Prosperity gospel teachers never present this side of the covenant — followers invoke all kinds of promised blessings pulled completely out of context, and in doing so, place themselves under God's wrath rather than His favor.

The same applies to Christian groups practicing legalism, encouraging strict Sabbath observance, dietary rules, and similar Mosaic requirements. But if someone places themselves under the Mosaic covenant to receive its blessings, aren't they also placing themselves under its curses for disobedience? Hebrews discusses the Mosaic covenant extensively, describing how it's been replaced by the New Covenant. Just like the Mosaic covenant, the New Covenant in Christ carries its own blessing — what is it? Eternal life! Christ is the mediator of a new covenant precisely so that those called might receive the promised eternal inheritance, since He died to redeem people from the sins committed under the first covenant (a paraphrase of Hebrews 9:15). He's freed us from the first covenant's curses entirely — our promised blessings aren't temporary, earthly ones, but everlasting, heavenly ones.

Praise be to God, who takes away our sins and cleanses our unrighteousness through Christ's blood, so we might have eternal life.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The self-deceiving figure this comment describes — invoking blessing on themselves while privately intending to keep going their own way — is worth noting for a detail easy to miss: this person isn't simply ignorant of the covenant's terms, they're specifically using its language of blessing as a kind of insurance policy against consequences they already know their behavior deserves. That's a subtly different, and arguably more dangerous, error than the prosperity preaching this comment critiques elsewhere — not innocent misapplication of Scripture's promises, but a calculated attempt to claim covenant protection while deliberately opting out of the covenant's actual terms.

Building on Chad's and Yujin's comments — after reading them, I started thinking it's not so much that this shows God's love or holiness, but that it shows our own wickedness. Even when we're given a list of blessings, and then presented with an even longer list of punishments, when left to our own devices, we're still not capable of respecting God as He deserves. It takes God to please God, and grace to be made partakers in that honor.

Yujin responds... Amen, Fernando. It certainly does show our wickedness, which in turn shows that we've violated the standards of a holy God. I think we're of the same mind on this. "It takes God to please God" is a great way of saying what the author of Hebrews says: without faith, it is impossible to please God at all (a paraphrase of Hebrews 11:6).

AI-Expanded Reflection

Fernando's phrase — "it takes God to please God" — is a compact way of stating something Paul argues at length in Philippians: it is God who works in believers both the desire and the ability to do what pleases Him in the first place (a paraphrase of Philippians 2:13). That closes the loop this whole exchange has been circling: the curses reveal wickedness, the wickedness reveals the impossibility of self-generated obedience, and the only way out isn't more effort but God supplying, from His own side, both the will and the power to actually please Him.

It is horrible, but I do enjoy seeing any future-telling God gives. Here we read about cannibalism, and later we see it occur in a siege. Then God talks about Israel being in exile and being forced to worship gods of wood and stone — also that God's absence is the reason for their way of living. We see men being horrible husbands and fathers, and women horrible mothers and wives. I've heard this week of outrageous advertisements for having affairs. Without God, what's the point? Everything becomes pointless and senseless. Thank the Lord for caring.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The cannibalism this comment finds so disturbing to read as prophecy wasn't left untested by history — it actually happened, more than once, exactly as described. During the siege of Samaria, two women are recorded resorting to eating their own children out of sheer starvation (2 Kings 6:24–29), an almost unbearable fulfillment of this exact warning. The Jewish historian Josephus records similarly horrific scenes during Rome's siege of Jerusalem centuries later. This wasn't rhetorical scare tactics written to frighten an ancient audience — it was an accurate description of what siege warfare, and the covenant unfaithfulness that invited it, would eventually produce, fulfilled in the historical record more than once.

Chad wrote... In this reading, the Lord details the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. The list of curses is much longer than the blessings. I think having more curses than blessings demonstrates the love the Lord has for His people, and the hurt it causes when we disobey. God is a jealous God and wants us to worship Him with our whole hearts.

Yujin responded... Interesting perspective, brother Chad! I had just the opposite sense from the greater number of curses versus the fewer blessings — it tended to show the greater weight of God's holiness over His love. There are a number of occasions where God is willing to bring judgment on the entire nation for the sake of His name. Also, the curses come in waves of increasing severity depending on the people's repentance or unrepentance, and since all of these curses eventually did come upon Israel, it foreshadows what God already knew — that Israel would be unfaithful to the fullest extent that would provoke His wrath against them. As for the blessings, they express one condition of "perfect peace and prosperity," such that you can't get much better than that.

AI-Expanded Reflection

Both readings this exchange offers are worth holding together rather than choosing between: the length imbalance can reflect God's holiness (Yujin's reading) precisely because it also reflects His love (Chad's reading) — a God who didn't care wouldn't need fifty-four verses spelling out exactly what unfaithfulness would cost. The sheer specificity of the curses (crop failure, siege, exile, named in vivid detail across Deuteronomy 28) functions almost like a parent explaining consequences in exhausting detail precisely because they want obedience badly enough to make sure there's no ambiguity later about what was at stake.