Curses Do Not Lie

“Suppose you sin by violating one of the LORD’s commands. Even if you are unaware of what you have done, you are guilty and will be punished for your sin. [Leviticus 5.17] 

How does one know he has sinned if he is unaware of it?

The answer to this question is simple. However, the implications of it are complex - at least, when a person is proud and arrogant...

In simplest form, when one of God's commands are violated, there is punishment. What is the punishment? The Bible is actually quite clear about the punishment (curses) for sin and disobedience to God (I apologize for the length of the passage to follow, but its relevance is paramount):

“But if you refuse to listen to the LORD your God and do not obey all the commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come and overwhelm you: Your towns and your fields will be cursed. Your fruit baskets and breadboards will be cursed. Your children and your crops will be cursed. The offspring of your herds and flocks will be cursed. Wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be cursed. “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. The LORD will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land you are about to enter and occupy. The LORD will strike you with wasting diseases, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew. These disasters will pursue you until you die. The skies above will be as unyielding as bronze, and the earth beneath will be as hard as iron. The LORD will change the rain that falls on your land into powder, and dust will pour down from the sky until you are destroyed. “The LORD will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will attack your enemies from one direction, but you will scatter from them in seven! You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your corpses will be food for all the scavenging birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away. “The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumors, scurvy, and the itch, from which you cannot be cured. The LORD will strike you with madness, blindness, and panic. You will grope around in broad daylight like a blind person groping in the darkness, but you will not find your way. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you. “You will be engaged to a woman, but another man will sleep with her. You will build a house, but someone else will live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will never enjoy its fruit. Your ox will be butchered before your eyes, but you will not eat a single bite of the meat. Your donkey will be taken from you, never to be returned. Your sheep and goats will be given to your enemies, and no one will be there to help you. You will watch as your sons and daughters are taken away as slaves. Your heart will break for them, but you won’t be able to help them. A foreign nation you have never heard about will eat the crops you worked so hard to grow. You will suffer under constant oppression and harsh treatment. You will go mad because of all the tragedy you see around you. The LORD will cover your knees and legs with incurable boils. In fact, you will be covered from head to foot. “The LORD will exile you and your king to a nation unknown to you and your ancestors. There in exile you will worship gods of wood and stone! You will become an object of horror, ridicule, and mockery among all the nations to which the LORD sends you. “You will plant much but harvest little, for locusts will eat your crops. You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you will not drink the wine or eat the grapes, for worms will destroy the vines. You will grow olive trees throughout your land, but you will never use the olive oil, for the fruit will drop before it ripens. You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, for they will be led away into captivity. Swarms of insects will destroy your trees and crops. “The foreigners living among you will become stronger and stronger, while you become weaker and weaker. They will lend money to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head, and you will be the tail! “If you refuse to listen to the LORD your God and to obey the commands and decrees he has given you, all these curses will pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed. These horrors will serve as a sign and warning among you and your descendants forever. If you do not serve the LORD your God with joy and enthusiasm for the abundant benefits you have received, you will serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you. You will be left hungry, thirsty, naked, and lacking in everything. The LORD will put an iron yoke on your neck, oppressing you harshly until he has destroyed you. “The LORD will bring a distant nation against you from the end of the earth, and it will swoop down on you like a vulture. It is a nation whose language you do not understand, a fierce and heartless nation that shows no respect for the old and no pity for the young. Its armies will devour your livestock and crops, and you will be destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine, olive oil, calves, or lambs, and you will starve to death. They will attack your cities until all the fortified walls in your land—the walls you trusted to protect you—are knocked down. They will attack all the towns in the land the LORD your God has given you. “The siege and terrible distress of the enemy’s attack will be so severe that you will eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the LORD your God has given you. The most tenderhearted man among you will have no compassion for his own brother, his beloved wife, and his surviving children. He will refuse to share with them the flesh he is devouring—the flesh of one of his own children—because he has nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns. The most tender and delicate woman among you—so delicate she would not so much as touch the ground with her foot—will be selfish toward the husband she loves and toward her own son or daughter. She will hide from them the afterbirth and the new baby she has borne, so that she herself can secretly eat them. She will have nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns. “If you refuse to obey all the words of instruction that are written in this book, and if you do not fear the glorious and awesome name of the LORD your God, then the LORD will overwhelm you and your children with indescribable plagues. These plagues will be intense and without relief, making you miserable and unbearably sick. He will afflict you with all the diseases of Egypt that you feared so much, and you will have no relief. The LORD will afflict you with every sickness and plague there is, even those not mentioned in this Book of Instruction, until you are destroyed. Though you become as numerous as the stars in the sky, few of you will be left because you would not listen to the LORD your God. “Just as the LORD has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the LORD will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy. For the LORD will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship foreign gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone! There among those nations you will find no peace or place to rest. And the LORD will cause your heart to tremble, your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair. Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive. In the morning you will say, ‘If only it were night!’ And in the evening you will say, ‘If only it were morning!’ For you will be terrified by the awful horrors you see around you. Then the LORD will send you back to Egypt in ships, to a destination I promised you would never see again. There you will offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves, but no one will buy you.” [Deuteronomy 28.15-68]

Regardless what proud religion tries to pawn off on people today in effort to retain their numerical and monetary support, curses point straight to sin that must be dealt with. Curses don't lie.

Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse will not land on its intended victim. [Proverbs 26.2]

Curses are the outcome of God's Justice! 

He repays people according to their deeds. He treats people as they deserve. Truly, God will not do wrong. The Almighty will not twist justice. [Job 34.11-12]

Curses are God's merciful call to reckoning and rescue: 

But by means of their suffering, he rescues those who suffer. For he gets their attention through adversity. [Job 36.15] 

This is just as true in New Testament times as it was in Old Testament times. Curses have not changed because God has not changed. Curses remain the result of sin and are God's call to repentance and faith. 

As we see in today's One Year Chronological Bible reading, the meticulous Old Testament protocols to follow when curses were present were repentance and sacrifices. And, as the New Testament bears out, there are no uncertain New Testament protocols to follow when curses indicate sin: repentance and faith in Jesus. The timeless common denominator is repentance. There is little chance of effective repentance however if God's people refuse to acknowledge the implications of the curses they experience!

When we experience curses in our lives, it is arrogant foolishness to simply say, "I just live in a fallen world" as it that relieves us of any responsibility to repent. And, what's worse is that when curses come, we simply mitigate their effect with popular man-made solutions, the most popular of which are the idols of debt, insurance, medicine and technology. Through these idols we, to our own eternal peril, proudly deny responsibility for whatever curse we are experiencing. To be sure, asking for prayer for the doctors to find a solution is NOT repentance.

The most damning belief prevalent among "believers" today is to tout "Jesus paid it all!" even though they are still experiencing curses.

But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” [Galatians 3.13]

If Jesus rescued us from the curse, how then can we still experience the curse? To declare "Jesus paid it all" while still experiencing curses is to slander, belittle and confuse the work of Christ on the cross! God has always made a distinction between His people and those who are not His people:

Then the LORD told Moses, “Get up early in the morning and stand in Pharaoh’s way as he goes down to the river. Say to him, ‘This is what the LORD says: Let my people go, so they can worship me. If you refuse, then I will send swarms of flies on you, your officials, your people, and all the houses. The Egyptian homes will be filled with flies, and the ground will be covered with them. But this time I will spare the region of Goshen, where my people live. No flies will be found there. Then you will know that I am the LORD and that I am present even in the heart of your land. I will make a clear distinction between my people and your people. This miraculous sign will happen tomorrow.’” [Exodus 8.20-23]

How can God's people today claim they are "His people" when they suffer all the same curses as the world? How can they claim they are "distinct" when they patronize all the same idols as the world (debt, insurance, medicine and technology)?

This might all mean something entirely different had Jesus NOT come to earth healing the sick, raising the dead, and performing all manner of unexplainable miracles in clear demonstrable distinction between God and the world!

If we are experiencing curses today, something is wrong, and repentance and faith are necessary.

“Why don’t people say to God, ‘I have sinned, but I will sin no more’? Or ‘I don’t know what evil I have done—tell me. If I have done wrong, I will stop at once’? [Job 34.31-32]

The pride of man knows no bounds. In the face of curses everywhere, the alleged "Church" proudly and  unrepentantly suffers indistinguishably along with the world audaciously defending their suffering with complicated "doctrines" to that end. In open mockery of the Bible and God Who authored it, the alleged "Church" remedies their suffering with the world's solutions. In contrast, anyone who suggests genuine repentance and faith in response to curses (and, until the curses are removed) is discounted as fanatical or spiritually imbalanced. All the while, the Bible stands firm that curses don't lie.

Curses don't lie any more than God lies! But their is a liar... Jesus pointed him out:

For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies. [John 8.44]

Satan's lie always comes back to the same root: it is his pride-provoking question "Has God really said...?" 

God does not lie. Curses do not lie. Jesus does not lie. Satan cannot help but lie, and the Church en masse has believed Satan's lie that even though God said curses are inseparable from disobedience, they do not necessarily mean a person needs to repent and believe until they are gone.

Father, help us get our facts straight. Help us get our facts from You. Help us see there is a liar who would twist Your truth any way he can to prevent us from genuinely repenting and believing until curses are removed. May Your people today be distinguished by their miraculous walk on earth (as was Jesus) as they genuinely repent and genuinely believe in Jesus, giving up their own way, taking up their cross, and following Him. So be it.