Curses for Disobedience
Deuteronomy 28: 15 -
.However if you do not obey the LORD your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees . . . curses will come upon you and overtake you:
You will be cursed in the city and cursed in the country.
Your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
The fruit of your womb will be cursed, and the crops of your land, and the calves of your herds, and the lambs of your flocks.
You will be cursed when you come in and cursed when you go out.
The LORD will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him.
The LORD will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess.
The LORD will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish.
The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron.
The LORD will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.
The LORD will cause you to be defeated before your enemies. You will come at them from one direction but flee from them in seven, and you will become a thing of horror to all the kingdoms on earth.
Your carcasses will be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and there will be no-one to frighten them away.
The LORD will afflict you with the boils of Egypt and with tumours, festering sores and the itch, from which you cannot be cured.
The LORD will afflict you with adness, blindness and confusion of mind.
At midday you will grope about like a blind man in the dark. You will be unsuccessful in everything you do; day after day you will be oppressed and robbed, with no-one to rescue you.
You will be pledged to be married to a woman, but another will take her and ravish her. You will build a house but you will not live in it. You will plant a vineyard but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.
Your ox will be slaughtered before your eyes, but you will eat none of it. Your donkey will be forcibly taken from you and will not be returned. Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no-one will rescue them.
Your sons and daughters will be given to another nation, and you will wear out your eyes watching for them day after day, powerless to lift a hand.
A people that you do not know will eat what your land and labour produce, and you will have nothing but cruel oppression all your days.
The sights you see will drive you mad.
The LORD will afflict your knees and legs with painful boils that cannot be cured, spreading from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.
The LORD will drive you and the king you set over you to a nation unknown to you or your fathers. There you will worship other gods, gods of wood and stone.
You will become a thing of horror and an object of scorn and ridicule to all nations where the LORD will drive you.
(and so on . . .)
By now I may think I have got the picture. Maybe you do too. We'd both be wrong. All the above is mere foreplay. As we shall see.
This stuff is taught in the hellfire and brimstone churches.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the old Welsh chapels which now stand empty and desolate if they haven't been converted into holiday homes for the English. My dad had to go to such a hellfire and brimstone theater three times every Sunday in a remote area of Snowdonia. He had to wear his sister's boots to make the trek across the mountainside, so poor the people were. The ignoramus in the pulpit, who ever he was, condemned the people who had to light their isolated houses with candles, who had no running water, whose children had to wash their faces in the grass on the morning dew, and the parents who liked shaves in a quarry for a pittance. It's no wonder I am like I am.
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