Systematic Theology – Covenant

Covenant Curses and Blessings

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: 06-22

Genre: Speech

Track: 6 of 22

Dictation Name: 06 Covenant Curses and Blessings

Location/Venue:

Year:

Our subject in this session is Covenant Curses and Blessings. Covenant Curses and Blessings. The great chapter on this of course is Deuteronomy 28. I shall not read all of the chapter but just a few portions of it, let’s begin with the first verse.

“And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth:

2 And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God.”

That speaks of irresistible blessings.

“3 Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field.

4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

5 Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

6 Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

7 The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face: they shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways.

8 The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

9 The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God, and walk in his ways.

10 And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee.

11 And the Lord shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

12 The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow.

13 And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the Lord thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do them:”

Notice in all of this it’s not this may happen, this shall be so. Now, verse fourteen:

“And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.

15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:”

Irresistible curses, this is what we are told.

“16 Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

19 Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.”

Let’s skip over to verses 28-34.

“28 The Lord shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart:

29 And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall save thee.

30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her: thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof.

31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.

32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand.

33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway:

34 So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.”

God’s covenant with man has penalties as well as rewards. Our relationship with God is a covenant relationship and therefore there is heaven and there is hell. As man to whom God in His grace has given His law is faithful to the Lord of the law and to his every written word he receives blessings and for his disobedience he receives curses. The curse of the law therefore and its penalties are upon all those who despise the Lord of the covenant and His law word. The first curse pronounced in all scripture is death in Genesis 2:17, verses 16 and 17 of Genesis 2. Man wants to see himself however as a victim rather than as a sinner. And man has tried to take away the fact of death as a curse by saying it’s something natural. It’s a product of evolution, the universe was born out of death and therefore all things return to that condition. But the bible does not tell us that death is natural but that it is unnatural, it is a judgment upon mankind for their sin. And that when we are redeemed the power of death is broken over us and with a resurrection of our bodies this mortal shall put on immortality. Death shall be abolished from God’s kingdom, from His new creation. Death is a curse. It is not a natural thing, it was brought in by man out of his rebellion against God, it is the fruit of man’s sin, it is the judgment upon sin. Death is not a part of God’s original creation. Man wants to naturalize all the curses and to say they are just a part of life, this is the way that life is and we are the victims and it is a device to remove the onus of sin.

The second curse is of sickness, plagues and epidemics. Read the whole chapter of Deuteronomy 28 when you go home, it will spell out this fact of sickness, plagues and epidemics as the curse of God. One of the meanings of the word salvation is health, salvation means that health comes to our spiritual being and in the fullness o time with a new creation health comes to our bodies so that we put on the resurrection of the body and we have the fullness of health, the fullness of salvation from sin which is the source of sickness, plagues and epidemics. And again the ungodly try to naturalize these things but they are curses not a normal part of creation. God did not create this world with sickness, plagues, epidemics or death. When He created all things we are told in Genesis 1:31:

“And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.”

There was no death, no sickness, no plague, no problems. Sickness, plagues and epidemics are a curse and then third we are told the drought is a curse. That when a people rebel against God he sends drought and the sky becomes as brass and the earth like iron because there is no rain and the earth will not bring forth its harvest. And people try to tell us this is part of a natural cycle and overlook the fact that it is judgment and we are in judgment now.

There are portions of the world now where Africa alone we are told, the most recent word is, that twenty million people may die of hunger in Africa. And that there may be death because of hunger in many parts of the world and unquestionably there will be serious hardships. Behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, Red China is now experiencing near famine conditions. Drought, the shortage of food and famine, these things are all a curse by God in His word, not something natural. Then fourth poverty and disasters are said to be curses not that all people who are poor are accursed but that poverty comes into the world and sometimes affects innocent people because God’s judgment is upon the land. The widow of Zarephath was a godly woman, 1st Kings 17:8-16 gives her story and God sent his prophet to minister to her. Her poverty was not because of her sin but when a generation, when a nation is in sin many innocent people become hurt. And so poverty and disasters represent a curse and then fifth war, invasion, defeat, conquest and captivity, all these things represent a curse by God upon men and nations. To be accursed of God therefore means that these things come because of His judgment and we are to see that they are not simply parts of a world, simply not things that are natural, the doctrine of evolution has done more to blind mankind than any other single doctrine because men have used the doctrine of evolution to take away the fact of curses and to say that’s the way things are. To say that mankind is a victim of natural forces rather than a sinner and under God’s judgment.

Then finally in verses twenty eight through thirty four we are told that frustration unto madness is the curse of God. Calamity upon calamity, frustration upon frustration bringing madness so that a man dare not look at the world because it is one horror after another and today all too many people are unwilling to look at the world as it is, unwilling to face the fact of judgment. Men both in the church and out of the church who are saying to all as the evil generation did in Jeremiah’s day, speak unto us smooth things, say to us only that which will please us, do not deal with the harsh realities of God’s judgment, of His curse for violation of the covenant but all these things God’s word declares are products of man’s own sin. They are curses that God has laid upon him for his sin. But God also because we are in covenant with Him brings blessings onto all that are faithful to His covenant. The first and the great blessing which we all experience day by day if we are redeemed is the grace of life. 1st Peter 3:7 speaks of life as a grace when we are in the Lord. To walk with the Lord means that life itself is a grace: though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death behold Thou art there, Thy rod and Thy staff, even your discipline, that’s what the rod and the staff means, they comfort me. The grace of life. Our Lord Himself says I am come that they might have more life and that more abundantly. Jesus Christ declares I am the life and so life, the grace of life, is a joy, a blessing to all that are redeemed.

Then second we have in Christ the principle of health and we are blessed in Christ. We have prosperity, not necessarily always materially but we prosper in the Lord. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord and the people whom He hath chosen for his own inheritance, Psalm 33 tells us. We have health, health such that we shall in time rise again from the dead, health unto eternal life so that whatever our problems and our sufferings are in the here and now the principle of health is in us because of Jesus Christ, one which the world can never know and third we have the blessing of providential care. Blessed shall be thy going out and coming in, blessed shalt thou be in the city, in the field, wherever you are. God’s providential care is with us. We are told in scripture that in Hebrews one the very angels of God are ministering spirits, servants to the heirs of salvation: ourselves, and 1st Peter 5:7 summons us to cast our every care upon Him for He careth for us. God’s law is grace, it pronounces curses but it also pronounces blessings. And so it was from the beginning and remember when Abraham made covenant with God what happened? He was required to divide the sacrificial animals and lay a half on each side and walk between them even as God Himself by His spirit did so also. Both parties walked between the divided animals to indicate so be it to me, so may I be killed and cut asunder if I violate the covenant and we are told that a deep horror as he concluded this covenant fell upon Abraham as he realized the seriousness of it, to be in covenant with the Almighty God , to be under the curses as well as the blessings. But when God spoke to him subsequently He told him Abraham thy seed shall be as the stars and as the sand upon the seashore innumerable. And while indeed because of their sins they shall go into captivity they shall also be blessed and they shall be mighty in the land that I have chosen for them.

The covenant thus is always both curses and blessings. The blessings are promised at the one and the same time as the curses and we cannot substitute anything as we approach God for covenant faithfulness nor can we substitute partial obedience. This is what Micah condemned in Micah 6:6-8 when he declared:

“Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?

7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

8 He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

Israel’s sin was that it was ready to use a portion of God’s law and forget the rest and to pick and choose and say this I like to do, to offer sacrifices but not obedience. Or to tithe the [unknown] and bypass the weightier matters of the law, as our Lord declared. To say I will choose what I will obey and I’ll be very finicky about that and forget other things.

I’ll be a stickler on the Sabbath but I’ll forget about tithing, no. We cannot pick and choose because it’s not our way but it’s God’s way that God blesses and we cannot as ancient Israel and as the Pharisees did use a portion of the law as an excuse to set aside or nullify the rest. To set aside the covenant and the law of the covenant to any degree is to set aside the God of the Covenant. Curses and blessings are very, very real because the covenant is an everlasting covenant and the sad fact is that our generation talks so little about the covenant and pays so little heed to it and thus it does not know the blessing in too many pieces and the curses are fulfilled upon it and it does not recognize even that it is accursed. It simply shrugs its shoulders and says that’s the way the world is. They grope for the wall at noonday like blind men. Are there any questions now? Yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Question is, why were the nations such as Russia and those surrounding it first placed under the terrible curse of Communism? That’s not an easy question to answer from one point of view and very easy from another, I have a great deal of fondness for things Russian so it’s hard to speak harshly when you have a fondness for a people and for much in their culture but the plain fact is that Old Russia while it had many things to commend it, say in the political sphere, economic sphere and others, religiously was dead.

The church was totally controlled by the state, just what our country is trying to do now. And as a result of that control the Russian church had stagnated, it had become a rubber stamp, a bureaucracy could at any time rebuke and control and move churchmen around at will. Moreover theologically they had very serious errors, one of the worst was their doctrine of kenosis, which said that Christ when He came to this world forsook His deity, laid it aside, well that’s a fearful error, He was fully God and fully man. They also had strong streak of Neo-Platonism and much, much more and the Bible of course had too small a place in the life of the people. Traditionalism was quite rampant, as a result a handful of communists were able to take over the country, by preying upon the greed of the people. I recall reading some years ago a book in which the person visiting the Soviet Union when some of the older people were still around who had been through the revolution heard them say again and again it was our fault. We knew what they were but they promised us land and we were ready to turn against people because we figured we’d get more acreage and more of this and that. They took it away from the lords but then they took it away from us also. Envy was too big a factor. Today we have the politics of envy here in this country too and it’s a deadly thing. The question is, will we repent and mend our ways and escape judgment, the whole world right now is moving towards judgment. Does that help answer your question?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes, it was. There was an extent of corruption and stagnation there that Rome did not have. Since then of course Catholicism and Protestantism have both gone downhill and we’ve become quite modernistic and so on. Any other questions or comments, yes?

[Question Unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The whole of Indo-China or Southeast Asia is under fearful judgment now, yes. That has been an area of most intensive missionary work, a number of groups from [unknown]’s day to the present have worked very extensively there. A few years ago when the Vietnam War was underway I read the great religious classic, in a sense some have called it their bible, The Tale of Tahiu, T-h-i-u. Which is the religious classic and expressive faith of Vietnam and it made clear to me that that nation had to be destroyed as the Old China also for what it was because the essence of their faith was that man is a victim, that the gods or god, they’re vague on that point, have loaded the deck against man and they are playing games with man and making man suffer needlessly and man is the pure innocent who is pure at heart, who is the perpetual victim. It’s a very evil book although it’s a very moving thing, it carries you along, it tears at your heart because it is so full of humanism. It’s like a soap opera really. What the Tale of Tahiu does is to take this very innocent girl and shows her life’s story being subjected to every kind of evil, rape, kidnapping and so on.

The moral of the story that it draws over and over again is this is what life is and this is what the gods have made of it. The problem with everything is god or the gods. Now, that’s their faith. Do you think God honors that kind of faith in a people whose religious work, whose great religious classic is a long indictment of God? Or China, I just finished a very interesting book on one year in the Ming Dynasty, 1587. The communists didn’t originate land reform, that was very old, the Ming Dynasty was going to have a nation of small land owners, divide up all properties so nobody had too much acreage and all they did was to create massive corruption and hinder the economic scene. And it’s an intensely interesting story of the absurdities and hypocrisies that people get into and the vast bureaucracy they created so that even the Ming Emperors could do nothing. They were bound hand and foot by the very bureaucracies they set up. Very interesting account.

[Question] What’s the name of the book?

[Rushdoony] 1587 by Ray Huang. The subtitle is ‘A year of no significance’ [laughter, people talking]. It should be in the library, recently published, if not they will have it in soon. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us bow our heads in prayer.

Our Lord and our God we thank Thee for the glory and majesty of Thy word. We thank Thee that through the blood of Jesus Christ we have been reestablished in the covenant. That we have been made members of the household of faith and that we are now heirs of all things, heirs of blessings. Make us ever joyful in our so great salvation, dismiss us now with Thy blessing, give us traveling mercies in our homeward way, a blessed night’s rest and joy in our labors on the morrow. In Jesus’ name, Amen.