119. Blessing for Obedience
Deuteronomy 11:26, 27 Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day.
The essence of the Mosaic Covenant and the Biblical History of its outworking is summed up in the conditional promise of these verses: A blessing if you obey, and a curse if you don’t. Life really is that simple. It really is black and white, no gray. We don’t see it that way, because we are spiritually blind. Therefore, we need the revelation of God’s Word to see the simple truth: there is a degree of blessing and curse in our lives according to the degree of keeping the Ten Commandments.
We do a bad job of Commandment-keeping and so we live under a curse instead of a blessing. This happened to Adam; it happens to us. But there is Good News on two fronts: 1) Jesus has kept the Law perfectly for us and He has earned for us complete righteousness, making us eligible for blessing; 2) the Spirit in us is actually working in us to make us better at keeping God’s Law, and thus enjoying the consequences of blessing.
This promise of conditional blessing and cursing must be believed in order to be seen, for we cannot measure, count, and add up cause and effect, or make the connections. The Spirit uses the Law to convict us of sin and remind us that it is our sin, our guilt, and our fault that life is not going as well as we wanted it to go. Then He uses the Gospel to convict us of Jesus’ death for our sin and His earning for us the righteousness (obedience) of God. The simple and ugly, but beautiful, truth: life is bad (cursed) because we are bad, and life is good (blessed) because God is good. This must be drilled into us every single day: “I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.” And every day we repent and believe the Gospel, and get ready for blessing.