Big Healing Book - Leviticus 26:14-39

Leviticus 26:14-39:

But if ye will not harken unto me, and will not do all these commandments;
And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments, but that ye break my covenant:
I also will do this unto you; I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague, that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.
And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall flee when none pursueth you.
And if ye will not yet for all this harken unto me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.
And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your heaven as iron, and your earth as brass:
And your strength shall be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.
And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not harken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.
I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number; and your high ways shall be desolate.
And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will walk contrary unto me;
Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.
And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.
And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.
And if ye will not for all this harken unto me, but walk contrary unto me;
Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.
And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat.
And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols, and my soul shall abhor you.
And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.
And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.
And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.
Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies’ land; even then shall the land rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.
As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.
And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of the enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth.
And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies.
And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.
And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them.

Notes on Leviticus 26:14-39:

Deuteronomy 28:15-68 is the best-known compilation of the “curse of the Law” (i.e., the curse for breaking the Law), but this rather substantial passage also contains details of the curse. The punishments are similar to the ones in Deuteronomy.

The Old Covenant contained threats for those who “broke” the covenant, as in the passage above. One of many reasons that the New Covenant is superior to the Old Covenant is that it is literally unbreakable. That is because the New Covenant is not between God and man; it is between God and Jesus Christ. It is between God and Abraham’s Seed, not Seeds. (See Galatians 3:16.) You get in on it by virtue of being in Christ. Your sins cannot break the New Covenant. There is no New Covenant curse that comes down on you for failure to do everything God commanded in His Word.

One wonders in light of this passage and the one in Deuteronomy how anyone could ever avoid all the curses, seeing that violating anything in the Law made your liable to receive the entire curse. The answer is that even in the Old Covenant, forgiveness was available through shed innocent blood. If the proper sacrifices were made, your sins were covered, and God could deal with you as if you hadn’t sinned, which meant that the curse would not come upon you. Under the New Covenant, your sins aren’t covered (despite what many modern Christian songs have said over the years) – they’re GONE! They’re washed away! That’s better than anything Moses and his followers ever had.

Some out-of-town guests came to visit a house we had on the ocean. They wanted to go wading around in the mud flats at low tide. They went out and slipped and fell and got totally caked with mud. An Old Covenant answer would have been to supply them with clean clothing to put on over their muddy clothing before they came into the house so that the mud wouldn’t show. I invoked the New Covenant solution, which was to wash them down with the garden hose so that the mud wasn’t covered; it was washed away. That’s an illustration of the superiority of what we have today in the New Covenant.