Who's the Jerk Here?

God is good. His is the BEST good. He is good in a way that we can't aspire to.

But when I read Deuteronomy 28 I begin to wonder.

It starts with fourteen verses on how blessed we are when we stay close to Him, when we follow His law. Fourteen wonderful verses-cozy and comfortable. Verses I want to dwell in, unpack, and talk about in Small Group-embroider them on pillows and doodle them in my journal.

But then verse 15 hits and I find myself speeding up. The next 50 verses discuss how terrible life becomes when you move away from God. FIFTY verses on how wrong things will go when I ignore God's instructions and His call to intimacy.

As I continue in the chapter I move from reading fast to scanning and by the end, I'll be honest-I just skip whole chunks of the passage. As I "finish," I find my heart annoyed with the list, uneasy and tense. I am wondering why a good God would harp on curse after curse after curse? OK! I get it! It's BAD! And why not this much detail in the blessing section?

At first I have no answers to these bratty questions, no ideas about why God communicated with His people (and us) in this way, but luckily I was studying this passage with my friend John Hanna.

We are told more about the curses because we are more prone to wandering than we are to faithfulness. He gives us a full look at the consequences of our rebellion because in His goodness He knows and communicates who we truly are and what we are bent toward. And we are really objects of horror bent toward violence and destruction. We are not a people who choose goodness and blessing and closeness with our God. We are a people who flee His presence, His heart, His goodness.

Left to ourselves we move toward all the curses listed in Deuteronomy.

Left to myself I am cursed, and I curse those I try to love.

But luckily God didn't leave me to myself. He came and He rescued me.