Big Healing Book - The Curse Was Corporate, Not Personal, So You Could Not Be

Objection: The Curse Was Corporate, Not Personal, So You Could Not Be Personally Redeemed from It

Many parts of the curse in Deuteronomy 28:15-68 and Leviticus 26:14-39 only make sense when applied to Israel as a whole as opposed to individuals. No sensible person would think that the “good” people would stay in Israel while only the “bad” ones would hauled off to foreign lands. Likewise, having cities besieged cannot be a personal thing; either your city is besieged with everyone in it, good and bad, or your city is not besieged. You can’t have just some people in the same city besieged because they broke the Law while others who keep the Law are not besieged.

So objectors could use this as another argument that “the curse of the Law” must refer to the Law itself and not to the curses contained within it when Paul says that Christ redeemed us from the “curse of the Law.” This particular interpretation is refuted elsewhere, so we don’t need to deal with it here. We know that Paul was not talking about the Law itself as being a curse – it was just, holy and good. So what DID he mean then? If we were not redeemed from the Law itself, the only other reasonable explanation left is that Christ redeemed us from the curse contained within the Law, as Galatians 3:10 makes clear anyway.

So now we have to wrestle with the issue that parts of that curse that Christ redeemed us from were corporate. How could we personally be redeemed from foreign invaders taking our children, sieges on our cities, famine in the land, being exiled, and so on? We know (and have discussed elsewhere) that Christ could not have personally taken the entire curse on Himself, though the Bible affirms that what He did redeemed us from the curse of the Law.

However, the context of the curse in Deuteronomy 28:15-68 is that an individual would be cursed for not keeping the entire Law. It would not just be a situation where a few kids in study hall blew spitballs around the room and the entire class got a “class detention.” Galatians 3:10, quoting the last verse in Deuteronomy 27, makes it clear that cursed is everyone who does not keep the whole Law. (This refers to Old Covenant people before Christ’s redemption was wrought for us.) That means plainly that an individual would be under the curse for not keeping the Law, not just the entire nation.

Galatians 3:10-14 makes it quite simple – you as an individual are cursed if you are relying on keeping the whole Law, but Christ became a curse for you and redeemed you from the curse for not keeping the whole Law. Regardless of what the curse is, you’re redeemed from it.

I went through the curse verses and found that we can classify the curse components into the following general categories:

Sicknesses and plagues

Misery and mental torment

Premature physical death

Crop failures and famine

Losing your property and animals

Hunger, thirst, nakedness, lack

Military defeat and enslavement to enemies

Losing your wife and children to enemies

Curse on your children

Curse on your animals

Being cursed in general (unspecified)

The first three can be categorized as a whole as:

Sickness

The next three can be categorized as a whole as:

Poverty

The others, except for being cursed in general, could not have applied personally to Jesus, who had no wife, children or animals.

What we see from Scripture is that Jesus took the parts of the curse that it would be possible for a single person to take – sickness and poverty. He was made sick and weak, and He lost everything He had. He didn’t get to leave His clothing to the person of His choosing – the Romans took it away and kept it themselves, leaving Him with literally nothing.

I believe this is why Scripture is specific about two aspects of His substitution being cursed for us – He was made sick (Isaiah 53:10), and by His stripes we are healed (1 Peter 2:24), and He was made poor so that we through His poverty might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). Substitution is the only sense in which anyone’s poverty could enrich anyone else. A man living under a bridge near you could not possibly make you rich; he doesn’t have the means to do it “through his poverty.” But Jesus bore the curse of poverty so that you don’t have to be poor.

Looking at the Passover, which symbolized Christ who was to come, we see that before they ate the body of a spotless lamb and shed its blood, they were slaves. But immediately after the Passover, the biggest mass healing in history took place and “there was none feeble among their tribes” (Psalm 105:37), and they “plundered the Egyptians” and instantly became rich! If people could be healed and prosperous after partaking of the mere symbol of Christ, how much more should they be healed and prosperous after knowing Christ Himself?

We see throughout Scripture that sickness and poverty are associated with sin, while health and prosperity are associated with righteousness. Jesus took what was associated with unrighteousness so that we could have what is associated with righteousness.

Obviously, God credited Jesus with redeeming us from the curse when He was cursed for us, despite the fact that there were parts of the curse He could not have borne personally. Similarly, one could nitpick that He could not have borne ovarian cancer in His own body, and thus did not bear every possible illness, but as the response to the objection along those lines says, bearing cancer would be enough, regardless of where it might manifest in male or female bodies.

Similarly, while someone could nitpick that He did not bear every aspect of the curse, He bore the parts that He could, and that was enough to satisfy God as payment for us so that we would not have to pay for our sins by being cursed.

He bore personally the parts of the curse that it is possible to bear personally so that you do not have to bear any part of the curse that you could bear personally.

It was obviously enough to satisfy God, so it’s enough to satisfy me.