You will experience all these blessings
if you obey the Lord your God.
Deuteronomy 28:2
On just about everybody's list of favorite passages is the Beatitudes. From the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit ... blessed are the merciful ... blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness ... and blessed are the peacemakers."
In today's reading, Moses was giving a totally different sermon on a totally different mount -- Mt. Ebal. Moses, in Deuteronomy 27, started not with beatitudes, but with Cursed-Attitudes. In Deuteronomy 27, Moses give us the twelve commandments -- similar, but not identical to the ten commandments -- and says twelve times in a row, "cursed is anyone who ..."
Indeed, in Deuteronomy 28, Moses adds a thirteenth curse, saying, "15 if you refuse to listen to the Lord your God ... 20 the Lord himself will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning me."
Ouch!
Get me back to the Blessed-Attitudes, right?!
But here's the dilemma. All of us definitely want to be blessed ... BUT all of us definitely want to do what we want to do.
And the point of these two chapters is simple. God is saying, "I want to bless you." Read that again. "God wants to bless you, bless you, bless!!!" But God says, "I cannot bless what is not holy and right."
Therefore, since God wants to bless your life, a good question to ask is: Where in my life am I finding more challenge than blessing? One of two things could be happening: 1) You may be living in a thoroughly honorable way, and God is simply testing his faithful servant so that you can grow even deeper!!! Or 2) something in the way you are living may not be honoring God, and God cannot bless what is not holy and right."
In Christ's Love,
a guy who needs a microscrope
(I need to look at my challenges
more and more closely)
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