The bible says in Deuteronomy 28 that, “If you FULLY obey the Lord your God and carefully keep ALL His commands that the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the world and that you will experience all these blessings IF you obey the Lord your God… Deuteronomy then goes on to list many wonderful blessings…
After that, in verse 15 the Lord warns that if you do not FULLY obey EVERY law that you would be cursed… cursed in the city, cursed in the country, cursed shall be your children, cursed shall you
be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out. - The Lord will send on you
cursing, confusion, and rebuke in all that you set your hand to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly - the Lord will make the plague cling to you until He has consumed you - the Lord will strike you with consumption, with fever, with inflammation, with severe burning fever, with the sword, with scorching, and with mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish… you get the picture…
Before my revelation on the New Covenant of grace, I believed that the Lord would give us the blessings of Deuteronomy 28:1-14 if we did our best to obey Him… that is not what the bible promises! The bible promises those blessings in the light of TOTAL obedience, not making your best effort to obey – it then goes on to promise gruesome curses if a person disobeys even one tiny thing in the Law. Bottom line… not one person qualifies for even one of the blessings in Deuteronomy based upon their own obedience! Obedience does not earn blessing unless it is TOTAL obedience!
Thank the Lord for Jesus! Jesus TOTALLY obeyed EVERY law to the greatest detail… He then became sin on the cross of Calvary for you and I and endured EVERY curse of disobedience. Now, as believers in Christ, we qualify for the blessings listed in Deuteronomy and much, much more. We qualify because of Jesus and our faith in Jesus and His grace towards us, not because we have earned it through obedience!
I am not saying that we should not strive to obey the Lord… I am saying that our efforts to obey do not earn us anything from the Lord – every blessing from the Lord is a gift and cannot be earned… His blessings can only be gratefully received by faith in what Jesus has done for us.
The bible says in 2 Peter 1:3 (TPT) that EVERYTHING we could ever need for life and complete devotion to God has already been deposited in us by His divine power. For all this was lavished upon us through the rich experience of knowing Him Who has called us by name and invited us to come to Him through a glorious manifestation of His goodness – in other words, because of Jesus, every blessing from the Lord has been freely given to us… His pain, our gain!
Blessings on you, Nick
