Blessings and Curses
“‘They will come against you with weapons, chariots and wagons and with a throng of people; they will take up positions against you on every side with large and small shields and with helmets. I will turn you over to them for punishment, and they will punish you according to their standards.’”
Today’s Text: Ezekiel 23:22-35 (Living Life Daily Devotional)
Fair warning: this post is theological, philosophical, and abstract.
God is God. He is all-knowing, all-powerful, present everywhere, and eternal. He is at the same time transcendent and immanent. We do not have the capacity to fully grasp His true nature apart from what He has revealed to us in Scriptures and, to a certain degree, in the world and in history.
God is a Person (three-in-one!) with whom we may have a relationship. God wants to have a relationship with us! The Creator with the created, the Infinite with the limited, the Righteous One with sinners.
And this infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, holy-holy-holy God has manifested Himself so that we might know how to have a relationship with Him, according to His purpose and will. In particular, God has revealed the fullness of His being in His Son and our Lord, Jesus Christ—Immanuel, God with us (Colossians 2:9).
When it comes to understanding the nature of God, specifically with respect to His “wrath” and His “love,” we have His word—yes—but even with His word, we only have the confines of space and time and history and language to help us understand these things. Using language, we can express that there are things we know nothing about, but there is no language to describe what we know nothing about, unless God reveals it to us.
We believe that God can act in history to do whatever He has in His heart to do. At the same time, we trust that God is not whimsical. He will act according to His nature, insofar as it has been revealed to us.
But I think it’s important to recognize that God has already set before us blessings and curses (Deuteronomy 30:19). And He leaves it up to us to choose which path to take.
We know that God is sovereign. But the sovereignty of God is a concept that describes the activity of an infinite God who breaks into time and space and history. And so God says, “I will turn you over to them for punishment,” as if He will cause that punishment to occur. And in a sense, He will.
In space and time and history, God is actively and constantly engineering the circumstances of our lives (all of our lives!) to enforce the blessings and curses He had established since before time began and to effect circumstances that will fulfill His purposes in the future.
And so, it is telling that God also says, “they will punish you according to their standards.” Israel chose the path of curses, and they entered into the ways of the world. As a consequence, they came face to face with a world that also chose the path of curses but is also much bigger and stronger than Israel, according to God’s sovereign allowance.
According to God’s sovereign allowance, sin is like a snowball that gets bigger and bigger as history chugs along. And the only protection from being squashed by it is to choose God, to choose life, to choose blessings.
Bottom line: The words of God through His servant Moses echoes in my heart: “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live,” insofar as it is NOW.
Father, who can understand Your true nature. How can we even fully understand Your ways. You have revealed Yourself and Your purpose to us through Your word. But even then we have a hard time understanding. Maybe I’m making it too complicated. So help me to keep it BASIC and to choose life. For Your name’s sake and for Your glory and for our good. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
