Have you ever noticed that you can hear 10 good things and one bad thing, and that one bad thing seems to overshadow the 10 good things??? Weird, isn’t it? What is it about those bad things that make them stand out. Moses does kind of the opposite here: he lists about 10 bad things to one good thing, but it did make me wonder why he emphasized the curses so much. Like, he HEAPS them on. He only mentions the blessings one time in the beginning, and then he trails off into a tirade with some gruesome “what ifs.” Just gruesome, some of them are.
It’s also easy to read this chapter and go, “Doh! This is exactly what happened in ‘such and such’ country. They must have been complete heathens. They got what they had coming to them.” It’s no secret that modern-day Christians have used chapters like these to try and (what I would call) “guilt” people into loving Jesus. And like we’ve talked about before, sometimes it works, and people come to Jesus through horrible personal experiences. If you get a little judge-y while reading chapters like this, maybe take a minute to pray for countries and people who don’t know Jesus and for God to speak to them on their own levels, for He knows their hearts.
Writing prompt: blessing
What if Moses would have gone the other way? What if he’d listed the curses first and dozens and dozens of blessings next? Turn this text around today by doing just that. Compare the impact of heaped blessings to heaped curses.
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