Curses for Disobedience

Why do we suffer from corruptions, poverty, betrayed relationships, oppressions, injustices, aggravations, stress, ailments and death? Because we have placed ourselves under the curse. 

¹⁵ If you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all His commands and decrees I give you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:

¹⁶ Curses in the city; Curses in the fields [countryside]; ¹⁷ Curses on your fruit and bread; ¹⁸ The fruit of your womb will be cursed;   Curses upon your crops; Curses upon the fertility of your cattle [herds] and flocks; ¹⁹ Curses when you come in and when you go out. ²⁰ The Lord Himself will send His personal curse upon you. You will be confused and a failure in everything you do, until at last you are destroyed because of the sin of forsaking Him.

²¹ The Lord will plague you with diseases… ²² The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish.  

²³ The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. ²⁴ The land will become as dry as dust for lack of rain, and dust storms shall destroy you.

²⁵ The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will march out to battle gloriously [from one direction], but flee before your enemies [in seven directions] in utter confusion; and you will be tossed to and from along all the nations of the earth. ²⁶ Your dead bodies [carcasses] will be food to the birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away.

²⁷ The Lord will afflict you with boils from Egypt and with tumors, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. ²⁸ The Lord will afflict you with madness, blindness and confusion of mind [fear and panic].

²⁹ At midday you will grope about like a blind man... You shall not prosper in anything you do; you will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will save you.

³⁰ Someone else will marry your fiancée; someone else will live in the house you build; someone else will eat the fruit of the vineyard you plant. ³¹ Your oxen shall be butchered before you eyes, but you won’t get a single bite of the meat. Your donkeys will be driven away as you watch, and will never return to you again. Your sheep will be given to your enemies. And there will be no one to protect you. ³² You will watch as your sons and daughters are taken away as slaves. Your heart will break with longing for them, but you will not be able to help them. ³³ A foreign nation you have not even heard of will eat the crops you will have worked so hard to grow. You will always be crushed and oppressed.

³⁴ You will go mad because of all the tragedy you see around you.

³⁵ The Lord will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.

³⁶ He will exile you, you and the king you will choose, to a nation to whom neither you nor your ancestors gave a second thought; and while in exile you shall worship gods of wood and stone! ³⁷ You will become a thing of horror, an object of scorn and ridicule to all the nations where the Lord will drive you.

³⁸ You will sow much but reap little, for the locusts will eat your crops. ³⁹ You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you won’t eat the grapes or drink the wine, for worms will destroy the vines. ⁴⁰ Olive trees will be growing everywhere, but there won’t be enough olive oil to anoint yourselves! For the trees will drop their fruit before it is matured.

⁴¹ You will have sons and daughters but you will not keep them, because they will go into captivity.

⁴³ Foreigners living among you shall become richer and richer while you become poorer and poorer. ⁴⁴ They shall lend to you, not you to them! They shall be the head and you shall be the tail.

Warning!

⁴⁵ All these curses shall pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed—all because you refuse to listen to the Lord your God. ⁴⁶ These horrors shall befall you and your descendants as a warning:

⁴⁷ Because you did not serve the Lord your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, ⁴⁸ therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve your enemies the Lord sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you.

⁴⁹ The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the far ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, ⁵⁰ a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. ⁵¹ They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your field until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. ⁵² They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the highly fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you.

⁵³ Because of the suffering that your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb—the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord has given you. ⁵⁴ Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, ⁵⁵ and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. ⁵⁶ The most gentle and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter ⁵⁷ the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For she intends to eat them secretly during the siege and in the distress that your enemy will inflict on you in your cities.

Wake Up!

⁵⁸ 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— ⁵⁹ [then] the Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. ⁶⁰ He will bring upon you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. ⁶¹ The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disease not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed. 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.

⁶³ 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 you are entering to possess. ⁶⁴ Then the Lord will scatter you among the nations, from one end of the earth to the other. DEUTERONOMY 28 (Verses in italics from tlb)

  ²⁴ All the nations will ask, “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?” ²⁵ And the answer will be, “It is because this people abandoned the Covenant of the Lord…” DEUTERONOMY 29