The Promises and Curses of Obedience

from Deuteronomy chapter 28, if you'd find that in your Bible. This passage is dealing with a discussion with Israel before they even come in the land of promise. They're gathered, ready to go into the promised land, and Moses has covered all of the history of how from the time they left Egypt until now, this moment, they're ready to go into the land of promise. And he's told them all the great promises he's made to them, and how all the things God said he would do when they got there, to live in that land, and it is the description of all these promises we've covered up to this point. He's now talking about the curses that come to them. If you look at chapter 28, beginning at verse 58, if you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this precious and glorious name, the Lord your God, the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, severe and lingering illness. He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this book of the law, until you are destroyed. You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. Just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. You will be uprooted from the land that you're entering to possess. You'll notice in each of these that there is a distinct relationship between the promises that God made to the people of Israel. Now, I want to say in the context of this that this is about not individuals. When you look at the Old Testament and what he's talking about, he's not talking about salvation and that a person who's come to know God suddenly is now no longer going to be saved. He's not talking about that. He's talking about the people of God, talking about the church. Now, when you've been reading in the story in the book of Daniel, you see that the people of Israel were carried away into captivity because of their sinfulness. But then when you read the book of Daniel, you see that there are four of the most dedicated and powerful followers of God that you'd ever find anywhere who were part of these carried off. We don't know at what point is the tipping point with God. He looks at the people of Israel and he says, You're faithful to me. I accept you. I'm going to bless your life. And what point does it come whenever the majority of the people or the leaders of the people finally turn away from God and then he says, Now the time of my curse will come. We just know that it's a reality. Now, when you translate this promise in the Old Testament of what God is going to do for his people, it translates to what he's saying to the church, which is the people of God here. So when you read these stories about what he's saying, the application is for us to look at ourselves. What is the church like? What are we doing? How are we living so that the promises of God will be claimed for us and be fulfilled in what we and what God wants to do in our lives? Each of these promises and curses are the opposite of one another's promise and curse is. In verse 59, the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants and harsh and prolonged disasters and severe lingering illnesses. He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt you dreaded. Now, whenever he told them that they were going into the land of promise, he said to them, and you will not suffer the diseases that you found in Egypt. He promised to free them from the same kind of diseases either that were found in the plagues or that were found in the normal course of the nation of Egypt's life. Now he promises you're going to be able to go into this land and be free from those diseases. But if you fail to be faithful and following me, not only will I rescind that promise, I will make the diseases worse than anything that you ever saw in Egypt. He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded and they will cling to you. The Lord will bring upon also bring on you every kind of illness disaster not recorded in this book of the law until you're destroyed. So the promise is the opposite. The promise is the opposite of what the curse is. The promise that you're going to be free from these diseases. You'll be able to live a life free of the things that you had that were damning to you in Egypt and more than that until you're completely destroyed. God's promise is powerful and it's fulfilling. It's fulfillment brings great joy and strength to the people of Israel. But when they fail to do that, the curses are even worse. Now the curses come as a result of their failure to follow God. If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law which are written in this book and do not revere this glorious and awesome name, the Lord your God, then the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants. Now, whenever you talk about the church growing, you have to talk about what it means to grow as a church. Does having more people in your membership or in your building mean that the church has grown? It does in one way. There are more people there. It doesn't mean that there are more people who are faithful to the word of God. You can collect any number of people in a room. You can have a lot of people. But at the same time, you may have in that group of people, people who are rebellious to God. You can have people in the church who are very religious. They may read the Bible, they may pray, but who are not living out that pattern and find yourself in the situation that he calls here a curse to be called on you. What the Bible is concerned about is our faithfulness to obey the things that are in the scripture. And what he's asking the people of God to do are to be individually committed to a life of submission and obedience to God in our decision-making and in our behavior, to see the guideline that God gives for his people as the guideline for our daily life and the operation of the church. We are called to be people living in dedicated submission to God. Now, it's so easy in any organization, in any person's life, to want to be like the people that are around us. Christians in this world, we want to watch the same things other people watch. We want to buy the same things other people buy. We want to manage our money like our friends and neighbors do. But God has different requirements of us than the world has of itself. So when we start looking at the nature of the church as comprised by us, what standards do we hold ourselves to that mark us as being followers of God, different than our neighbors? The Bible tells us that what God wants from us is to be holy, that is to be separated from the world, to live a life different than the world. So whenever we stop and start living the way the rest of the world lives, then God from Israel erased them off the face of the earth. Because when people look at you, Israel, they see you doing the same thing that the Canaanites are doing. Now, it's true. Not all of them did. But so many of them were that way that he said, no longer do people think of you as being distinct or different or separate. Now, when you think about the church, when you think about what people that don't go to the church think about us, do they think of us as people who are moral? Do they think of us as people who are loving to neighbors and ourselves and loving to our enemies? Do they see us as people devoted to helping others? Do they see our lifestyle as self-centered? How do they see us? What are we like? It's not enough to know the Bible. It's not enough to go to church. If that were true, then all the Sepharisees and Sadducees would have been in heaven. What they lacked was the willingness to be open to anything and everything God wanted them to do. What they lacked was the unwilling spirit to listen to the voice of Jesus say to them, I want you to change what you are and what you've done and how you live. It is easy for us to see our lifestyle and think that because we don't get drunk or take dope or do the moral things that are out there in the world that God is pleased with us. You would find no more righteous people in the world than you'd find with the Pharisees and the Sadducees. But their heart was not submissive to God. I want you to do what I tell you to do. It doesn't matter what you want. It matters what I want. In every human being, we have a resistance to someone telling us what to do. We have to erase that with God and say, I'm willing to do what you want. There's a lot of reasons why this idea impacts a lot of things in our church that we do. I was talking about the Stewardship Committee and how we operate in our church. We always try to say, you do what you know God wants you to do. When you're making decisions about what you're going to give, we ask people to take a job in the church. You ask God if he wants you to do this job. Whenever I talk to people about making a commitment to Christ, and they say, yeah, I'm ready to commit my life to Christ, I could say to them, now the Bible requires you to be baptized. And it does say they should be. But what I start with is saying, I want you to start praying to God and saying, God, what do you want me to do? And I explain what baptism is. And you ask God if this is what he wants you to do. Because from the very beginning of the Christian life, we must begin to shape people with the idea, I am determined to live in obedience to God. What he's upset about with the people of Israel is if you get to the place where most of you are not doing this, then I have to destroy you. And it may seem cruel. It may seem hard to us. But when you have a raging forest fire, and it's burning toward your house, you want to see that fire put out. And if there is in the church a culture of resistance and disobedience to God, God has to destroy that before it destroys his people. This is serious stuff for God. And these are the hardest words that you'll find in the Scripture. And God is saying them to his own children. I will not tolerate rebellion from you. Now, he's not talking about individuals losing their salvation. What he's talking about is the church losing its witness. Chapter 28 of the book of Deuteronomy. Now, I want to read verse 62. You who were as numerous as the stars in the sky will be left but few in number, because you did not obey the Lord your God. He promised them that when they entered the land of promise, they would multiply until their nation was as the sands of the sea. That's a promise he made to Abraham, that someday your nation will be as numerous as the sands of the sea, seashore. The promise of God in Christ was that the church would prosper, that the church would grow, that it would be powerful, and that nothing would stop it. The same promise he made to Israel. But he said, if they fail to follow what God wants them to do, and did not obey the God, just as it pleased the Lord to make you prosper and increase in number, so it will please him to ruin and destroy you. Why would it please him to do that? It would please him in the same way that if someone told you, you had colon cancer, and they came in after the surgery and said to you, we cut eight inches of your colon out and all your colon, that eight inches and cancer is gone. You would be pleased. And whenever the church becomes a cancer, a local group of people become a cancer on the body of Christ, he not only will destroy it, it pleases him to get rid of that cancer on his body. And you look around at churches, and they'll get started and grow to huge churches, and then something happens that reveals the nature of that church to be different, and it's gone. God does not promise just because we have a building, and just because there's a preacher standing in the pulpit with a Bible, that he will honor every individual church. When the time comes, and that church fails to be the kind of community of faith that he wants it to be, it pleases him to ruin and destroy it. You will be uprooted from the land that you're entering to possess. No longer will you have the authority to control and live in the land that I've given you. I take it away from you. Verse 64, Then the Lord will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods, a God of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known. What he promised them is, when you enter this land that I'm giving you, I'm going to make sure that you and I are together. I'm going to be with you. You will have the living God as a daily presence in your life. Now, when he finally finished this and gave them the temple, there the temple had the room of the Holy of Holies, which was a constant reminder that God was right there in their midst. Now, they knew God didn't live in that room. They were smart enough to know that he was bigger than the whole world. But what he was doing was saying, this is evidence that I am here with you right now. Now, when they're leaving, they're being called into exile. Whenever this finally takes place and they're called into exile, one of the visions Ezekiel had was of the Spirit of God leaving the temple and leaving Jerusalem so that it was no longer there. That was one of his visions. God will remove his presence from the people who are not faithful to him. And then we will have no longer the spiritual presence of God. We will simply have memories of who he is. I tell you, you know, you can tell when you walk into a church where the Spirit of God is there. If you visit many churches, you can tell it. You can't always tell it if you're a member of a church and that happens to you. It's kind of like getting fat or losing your hair going gray. It happens so subtly that you don't realize it until suddenly all the day, all one day, you recognize, wow, look what's happened to me. In a church it grows cold and indifferent to God little by little over the years, may not ever see it. But someone who's been a part of a church where there's the life of the Spirit with them comes into that church building, sits down to worship with you, they can tell instantly that God is not there. The Bible will be read, songs will be sung, wonderful things will be shared in fellowship with each other, but God is not there. I will not allow my presence in the place where idols are worshipped. Well, what are the idols that could be worshipped in a church? It's materialism. We're more concerned about money than we are concerned about the kingdom of God. All kinds of interests in our part that draw us away from God, focus our attention on success, focus our attention on ourselves, focus attention on pleasure. All kinds of things that would draw us away from what God is trying to do. So what I will do, God said to his people, is when you enter the land of promise I will build my house there and I'll live with you and I'll be with you and you'll have the living God with you. But as you draw yourself away from me, I'll draw myself away from you until finally what you're going to be doing is worshipping idols made of stone, of wood, of gold that are dead and could never ever answer any of your prayers. God gives us a powerful warning that the failure to live in submission to him, and here's the key for the church, living in submission to God allows the Spirit to live in our lives. When he directs our song service, when he directs the preaching, when he directs the Sunday school teacher, when he directs the class, when he directs the congregation and the Spirit is there and people are anxious to hear and willing to respond, there is a presence of the Spirit of God. As we turn away from those things, he slowly withdraws it from us until it's cold and empty. The power of God to be our present help is then lost. And then you do things, and the church can do a lot of things on human nature. We can have a lot of programs, we can have a lot of energy, we can have a lot of enthusiasm, we can have good times with each other. But the difference between an exciting human-led church and a church led by the Spirit is the difference between a firecracker and an atom bomb with regard to spiritual results. And what God said to his people was, I will give you my presence, but when you leave me, then I will leave you too. There you worship other gods, gods of wood and stone, which neither you or your fathers have known. Among those nations you will find no repose, no resting place for the sole of your foot. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind, eyes weary with longing and a desperate heart. You will live in constant suspense, filled with dread, both night and day, never sure of your life. In the morning you will say, if only it were evening. In the evening you will say, if only it were morning. Because of the terror that will fill your hearts and the sight that your eyes will see. The people of Israel, he told them when they went into the land, they were not to be afraid of anything, because he was with them. He would defeat all of their enemies. He would make sure that no one could ever take hold of them and defeat them, because he would give them the victory. Now, without his presence, things change. When you face a fear, and you don't have confidence it's going to be taken care of, you become afraid. Why do we get afraid of something? If you walked up to somebody who had a gun, and they pointed the gun at you, you would say, well, I'm afraid if he pulls the trigger on that gun, I'm gone. But if you believed that you had an invisible shield around you, that bullets could not penetrate, you would only laugh at the man with the gun. If you got a bill for $5,000, and you didn't have any money, you would be anxious and worried. You might stay awake all night worrying about losing your house or losing your car, because you had no way to be able to figure out you could pay it. But if you got a bill for $5,000, and the Lord said to you, I will pay that bill, or let's say someone else came up to you and said, whatever bills you get, no matter how much they are, I promise you I'll pay them. You wouldn't worry about that. Why does a believer worry? Because we do not have confidence that God will take care of our circumstances. It's the only reason there is. What promises has God made to us that can come out of this world to hurt us or destroy us? What are they? Nothing. You go through the Bible, he's promised everything for us. And it doesn't make any difference in this world what happens. God's result for his people is always victory. And when they killed Jesus, you know what happened next? He rose to eternal life. You know what happens if you're a follower of Christ and somebody kills you? You're raised to be with Christ. I'm going to put you in a place when you abandon me where you look around you and you have fear and terror, listen to what he says, night and day, among those nations you will find no repose, no way of rest, no resting place for the sole of your foot. You'll be running all the time. There the Lord will give you an anxious mind. Everything you think about will cause you to worry about it. How's this going to work out? What am I going to do? I don't know how it's going to happen to me. Eyes weary with longing, looking for every single thing that you can to solve your problems, but never finding it. And a despairing heart inside thinking, oh, how terrible things are going to be in my life. Why would a Christian have a negative outlook on life? Well, it's only because you think that God is not going to allow things in your life to get better, that he's not going to take care of you in the circumstances that you're in. So whenever you leave me, you will have a despairing heart, and you will live in constant suspense about what's going to happen, filled with dread both night and day, and never sure of your life. In my lifetime, this has been a long one, I've seen the time come from when people were afraid to go to a psychologist to where now there are psychiatric places in every town and they're all crowded. What are people trying to find? Peace of mind, peace of heart. Our world is filled with people who are afraid, filled with people who are constantly alarmed about the future. What God promised is, if you believe in the living God who can part the water of the sea, who can make the dead bodies be raised from the dead, if you can believe in that, none of that's going to happen to you. But if you leave it, then you're going to find yourself in terror, it'll fill your heart, and you'll be afraid of everything you see. The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey, I said you should never make again, and there you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you. He said, I delivered you out of Egypt in a miraculous way, led you through the desert, and now I'm bringing you to the edge of this river, and you're going to cross it, and you're going to possess it. But I'll tell you this, if you turn out to turn your back on me, I'll lead you right back to Egypt and the slavery you so wanted to get free from. And there you will try, they'd been slaves before, and they wanted to be free from being slaves, they want to say, oh, we want to be free, we don't want to be slaves here. And your life will be so miserable that you'll go back to what you left, and you'll be begging to be slaves. You'll be willing for people to buy you and put you in slavery because of what you have. There you will offer yourself for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but then no one will even buy you. The most desolate picture of what it means to turn away from God, it ought to set terror in our hearts as a congregation, to look at ourselves to see if we're people who live passionately in obedience to God. You can have everything in the world and have nothing at all. And what happened to the people of Israel is they were set free from all their slavery, saw the miracles of God take place, they were entering this land that God was going to give them, they didn't even have to buy it. But in the future, they would get so resistant to God that they wouldn't listen to Him, they wouldn't listen to His preachers, they lost interest in the Scriptures, they had other things more important to do, they wanted to be like their neighbors until He destroyed both Israel and Judah and turned them over to the Babylonians and the Assyrians. He did exactly what He said He was going to do because they did exactly what He warned them not to do. And the story of Scripture doesn't end with the Bible. That's God's Word to us. We have to be as a church constantly alert to the spiritual temperature of our hearts. Are we submissive to God? Are we passionate for obedience to Him? Or have we forgotten what it's like to love Him with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind? Let's pray. You made it really clear to us what you expect. But if my heart is cold toward you, I'm probably not going to know it without your help. So I ask if there's anything in me that is turned off toward you, that you would do whatever it takes to make me aware of it. I'm not afraid of you, Father. But I am afraid of being against you. Give us the fear of you that would cause us to open our lives, our hearts, and our minds to be obedient to you in every way. For what you promise is the most horrendous destruction that the human mind can imagine. Help us to avoid it. In the name of Christ, I ask this. Amen.