Deuteronomy 27 | Benjamin Kandt

Hello everyone, this is Pastor Benjamin.

You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City Orlando.

At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer.

For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.

So pray with me.

Give us understanding that we may keep your law and observe it with our whole hearts.

Lead us in the path of your commandments, for we delight in it.

Turn our eyes from looking at worthless things and give us life in your ways through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Remain standing for the scripture reading from Deuteronomy chapter twenty-one and twenty-seven.

And if a man has committed a crime, punishable by death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day.

For a hanged man is cursed by God.

You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God has given you for inheritance.

That day Moses charged the people, saying, When you have crossed over the Jordan, these shall stand on Mount Gerizim to bless the people Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin.

And these shall stand on Mount Ebel for the curse, Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Nephtali.

And the Levites shall declare to all the men of Israel in a loud voice, Cursed be anyone who does not conform the words of this law by doing them.

And all the peoples shall say amen.

This is God's word.

You may be seated.

Do you remember this?

The Empire finds the Rebel Alliance's secret base and shows up with force.

Lando Calrycian betrays Han Solo and sells him to Jabba the Hutt.

And he's then frozen in Carbonite.

And right before, there's that amazing moment where Princess Leus looks at him and says, I love you.

And he, Harrison Ford, says, I know.

Which is a great moment in Hollywood, but would totally backfire in real life.

So don't do that.

And and then after that, you kind of see C3PO gets dismembered by some stormtroopers and Han Solos in the fight for his life with Darth Vader, a lightsaber battle that he gets wrecked in, loses a hand.

Hans or uh Darth Vader's like, I'm your dad.

And then he's trying to tempt him to the dark side, and Luke Skywalker jumps over the railing, descending, plunging to the depths of Cloud City, and is narrowly survives as Princess Leia comes with the Millennium Falcon and rescues him.

Do you remember this?

Do you remember how this ends?

That's what this sermon's gonna feel like today, okay?

It's gonna feel a little bit like that.

We're gonna talk about the curse today.

And so if you're a guest or a visitor, welcome to worship.

We're talking about the curse.

Uh, which, let me just be real, maybe a concept that is unfamiliar, strange to you, but it is an experience you know all too well.

I assure you that.

And I'm gonna try to make that plain in a moment.

So if you have a Bible or a device, get Deuteronomy chapter 27 in front of you.

Deuteronomy 27 · chapter mention

We're gonna look at God's word together today.

And the three points that I want to look at are cursed be anyone, cursed be everyone, and cursed be the one.

Some of you are like, dude, you really, I know, Halloween's coming up, you know, it's fitting.

Next week is gonna be about blessing.

It's gonna be candy and roses, I promise you.

Okay.

So, Deuteronomy chapter 27, verse 11 says this.

Deuteronomy 27:11

That day Moses charged the people, saying, When you have crossed over the Jordan, these shall stand on Mount Gerizim to bless the people, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin, and these shall stand on Mount Ebel for the curse, Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali.

Let me let me try to make this plain.

I've got a slide that hopefully helps illustrate this.

There's a natural amphitheater when they get into the promised land, and there's this place called Shechem right in the middle, which is a valley between two mountains.

And let's just kind of make it in here, okay?

So the southern mountain is called Mount Gerizim, and it is the mountain of blessing.

That's all you over here, okay?

You're the mount of blessing, Mount Gerizim.

Which a commentator says that Mount Gerizim was luxurious.

Okay, it's a nice mountain.

On the other side, on the north side, over here was Mount Ebal, the mount of cursing, which one commentator says was barren.

So I'm sorry for you sitting over here.

And all of the people of God were split in half, six tribes here, six tribes there, standing on this mountain with Shechem, this valley in between, and they were to pronounce blessings and curses to each other.

What is going on?

Well, this was instituted in Deuteronomy 27, but it was actually enacted in Joshua 8 when they actually got into the promised land.

And there's some areas that are a little unclear for us, but what we do know is the Ark of the Covenant, which represents the presence of God, was in the center, in the valley between the two mountains, and the Levites, most likely priests carrying the ark, would announce to the people the curses of the covenant, and the people would say, Amen to it.

It is this dramatic theatrical moment.

Why?

It was a moment of covenant renewal.

It was a moment of covenant reenactment, where Yahweh, the God of Israel, is saying, You are my people afresh.

Remind you, let me remind you, if you keep my covenant, you get Mount Gerizim blessings.

But if you break this covenant, you get Mount Ebal curses.

This is something that would have been imprinted on their memories, an experiential way of knowing what it meant to keep or break God's covenant.

And so the Levites in the center would announce these curses, and we're actually going to do this in here.

Um, I'm gonna pretend like I'm a Levite, I'm gonna read uh verses 14 and on, and you all will know your time, because I'll say, uh, and the people shall say amen, and you'll say amen.

You ready for this?

Okay, here we go.

Deuteronomy 27, 14 says this, and the Levites shall declare to all the men of Israel in a loud voice, Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast metal image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.

And all the people shall answer and say, Cursed be anyone who dishonors his father or his mother, and all the people shall say, All right, this is gonna take so long.

I'm gonna do the rest of them in omnibus.

So it goes like this Cursed be anyone who misleads the blind man, who perverts justice for the vulnerable, who uh, you know, some of these are about incest and bestiality.

We'll skip those.

Then we get to verse 24, it says, Cursed be anyone who strikes down his neighbor in secret, cursed be who anyone who takes a bribe to shed innocent blood, and all the people shall say, Amen.

Eleven curses, eleven amens, and then we get to the twelfth and final.

And it is totalizing, it's all encompassing.

And verse 26 says, Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them, and all the people shall say amen.

Now, if anybody has absolute authority, it is the Lord God Almighty, and yet in this moment he's asking for the consent of the governed.

And the people of Israel agree.

They say, Yes, cursed be anyone who does not abide by everything written in this law.

What is going on here?

Well, in order to understand, we need to start a little further in the story of Scripture and ask this question: what is a curse?

In order to get at that, I need to do a theology of cursing.

By which I don't mean four-letter words, I mean withering words.

What is a theology of cursing?

And it's really helpful, there's this principle which is that contrast is the mother of clarity.

So to understand what a curse is, let's start with what a blessing is.

Because in the story of Scripture, blessing goes first.

God creates all things by saying, Let there be, and it was, and he saw it, and he said it was good.

And then he says to the birds, to the humans, and to the Sabbath day, bless this.

And I believe what that is, is that a blessing is God's life-giving word.

That's what a blessing is.

So if you invert that, a curse is a word that brings death.

A curse is a withering word.

I get that actually from a little later in scripture in Matthew 21 and Mark 11.

Jesus is with his disciples, he's walking, he sees a fig tree that should be bearing fruit, but it's not, and he curses it.

And they come by it the next day in the morning, and Peter says, Rabbi, that tree that you cursed has withered.

A curse is a withering word.

Now, before you think that only God or the incarnate God Jesus Christ are the only people who can speak words of cursing that wither, consider that Jesus says in Luke 6, bless those who curse you.

You see, Proverbs 18 says that the power of life and of death is in the tongue.

Why is this?

Well, God made human beings in his image to reflect him.

One of the dominant questions of our cultural moment is, what is a human being?

And here's the answer: one answer.

A human being is the dust of earth filled with the breath of heaven.

And we were meant to stand between heaven and earth as mediators of God's blessing throughout the world.

That's what we were meant for.

And so God gave us the power of our tongues to bless and to curse.

And some of you have lived under withering words.

You've lived under words that have been spoken to you by a father or a friend, by a coach or a classmate.

And these words have been spoken and they've begun to wither you over time.

And you live with them to this day.

Words, maybe your curiosity has been cursed, and somebody said to you, Why do you ask so many questions?

Or for some of you, your emotions have been cursed.

Boys don't cry.

Or your intelligence has been cursed.

What?

How do you not know that?

Or maybe your appearance has been cursed.

You know, if you lost a little weight, you'd be prettier.

Some of you, you've been, you've had these withering words spoken over you.

Um, your personality, why can't you be more like your fill-in-the-blank brother or sister or whoever it might be?

Listen, we know the experience of living under the curse, under withering words.

All of us do.

Which brings the question of, well, then why does God speak a curse?

And I'm just gonna tell you up top, but then we're gonna look at it together.

I think God is willing to speak a curse because anything that turns away from him in disobedience cannot, by definition, experience his blessing.

Cannot experience his flourishing.

But the first time curse shows up is actually in Genesis chapter 3.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

Man and woman, Adam and Eve, humanity represented in them, turn away from God.

They choose to say no to God and yes to the temptation from the serpent.

And actually, what God speaks is a curse over the serpent, not the man and the woman, although the conditions of the curse the man and the woman experience.

In that case, it's thorns and thistles for the man's work and pain and childbearing for the woman's womb.

And then eventually God curses the ground because of Adam.

Do you remember he's the dust of the earth?

He's meant to be the mediator over all of all of earth.

And he's failed, he's turned away, and so a curse is pronounced.

And we here to this day live in the conditions of a creation that's been cursed.

That's what we experience.

So when your body breaks down because of age, or when your heart breaks because of loss, or your womb is barren, or your work produces thorns and thistles, or some of you have heard a doctor say there's nothing more we can do, or a marriage that began tender ends and hard hearts, or the moment when I stood over my grandfather's graveside and I tossed dirt on his casket and said, Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.

When we experience those moments, we are feeling the curse.

I told you, you might be unfamiliar with the concept, you are familiar with the experience of living in a world under a curse.

So what do we do?

Well, something I gotta make plain here is that nobody in this room, what what I want you to hear in what I'm saying is you are not necessarily suffering for your own sin.

Some of us are, but not all suffering is a result of your own sin.

I want to be really clear about that.

But all suffering is a result of someone's sin.

And that someone's name is Adam.

And if you think that's unfair, just wait till we get to redemption.

And the beginning of God's reversal of the curse came in Genesis chapter 12 when he called a man named Abram.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

And if you read Genesis 1 through 11, the first 11 chapters of the Bible, the word curse shows up five times.

And then you get to Genesis chapter 12, and the first three verses, the word blessing shows up five times.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

This is what I think is happening there.

The call of Abram was God's intention to reverse the curse.

Listen to the language of Genesis 12.1.

It says this.

12-2, and I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you, I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

This is a significant moment in the story of Scripture, and we're going to come back to it in a moment.

But the reason why this matters is because it brings us back to Deuteronomy 27.

You see, when Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and Shechem and the people of God are standing there, these are the children of Abraham.

These are the people that God set apart for himself to be a blessing to the entire earth.

These are the people of blessing.

So when they stand there on that mountain and they say, Yeah, idolaters and murderers and people who corrupt justice, of course, cursed be on all of them, but then they end by saying, and cursed be everyone who does not abide by and confirm and continue in every word written in the law.

They go from being spectators to being in the courtroom.

Because who among Israel and who among us can say that we have loved the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbors ourselves?

Everyone in this room has sinned in what we've thought and what we have done and what we have said, by what we've done and left undone?

We all by nature and by choice live under the curse.

But how much more the chosen people of God who were meant to be a sign of God's blessing in a cursed creation?

What happens when they fail?

Well, if you fast forward about 900 years to Daniel chapter 9, verse 11, Daniel is exiled in Babylon, no longer in the promised land anymore, and he says, This all Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice.

Daniel 9:11

And the curse and oath that are written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, has been poured out upon us because we have sinned against him.

You see, even God's redemption plan for creation has failed.

Because Israel, the people of God, the children of Abraham, have failed.

Which brings us to this place of what is what are we gonna do?

How are we gonna abide under withering words in a creation that's been cursed?

Well, there's good news, actually, a hint of hope in Deuteronomy chapter 27, verse 4.

Deuteronomy 27:4

You see, on Mount Ebal, not Mount Gerizim, the mountain of blessing, but on the mountain of curse, there was meant to be set up an altar.

Why?

Why have it there and not there?

Well, because God knew that in the place of cursing there needed to be a provision for sacrifice.

And so that fast forwards us all the way 1,500 years later, not about Mount Gerizim, the mountain of blessing, nor about Mount Ebal, the mount of cursing, but Mount Galgotha, the mount where we see cursed be the one.

And I want to fast forward if you have a Bible or device, go to Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

And the reason why we're gonna skip forward is one of the principles for reading the Bible is that the Bible interprets itself.

And if you ever want to understand the Old Testament, you need to understand that there is a holy spired, Holy Spirit-inspired apostolic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament.

And we get that in Galatians chapter 3.

Galatians 3 · chapter mention

That was my way of giving you time to get there.

Galatians chapter 3, verse 10.

Galatians 3:10

Look with me at this.

It says, For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse.

For it is written, now here Paul quotes Deuteronomy 27 from our text.

Now, if you're if you want me to make that plain, what that means is if you rely on you to stand before God, you are cursed.

Just make that plain.

I still talk to people to this day who, when I ask them, hey, like, are you good with God?

They'd be like, Yeah, I'm a good person.

And usually the next question would be like, Well, by what standard?

Well, you know, I I kind of look around and I'm not as bad as some other people.

That's fine.

If you want to use comparison as your standard, that's okay, I guess, but it's not the standard God's gonna use.

God's gonna use his moral law, and it is an exacting standard.

The law is good and just and righteous and perfect.

The law is not the problem.

The problem is breaking that law.

Everyone who relies on themselves for their standing before God is under a curse.

Some of you are hearing that and you're like, okay, so what?

It's all doom and gloom?

That's the spirit.

That's the spirit right there.

Will bring us to the point where we come to the end of ourselves.

And that's what happens in the rest of Galatians 3:11.

Galatians 3:11

It says, now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law.

No one.

For the righteous shall live by faith.

But the law is not of faith.

Rather, the one who does them, that is, obeys the commandments, shall live by them.

Let's just make this plain throughout the whole story of Scripture, it is clear: those who obey God receive blessing, those who disobey receive cursing.

Now there's some exceptions that make us go, wait, Lord, why does Job have to suffer?

And why does the people in Psalm 73 seem to flourish?

But in the end, the obedient are blessed, the disobedient are cursed, in the ultimate sense.

Except no one is righteous, no, not one.

No one has kept the law of God perfectly.

If you rely on you, for your standing before God, you are under a curse.

That's what it said so far.

But there's good news for us in Galatians 3, 13.

Look with me there.

It says this Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

For it is written, here Paul again knows this Bible, quotes Deuteronomy 23 21, which is in our scripture reading.

Now listen, this was a stumbling block for the Apostle Paul, who penned these words.

When Paul first heard about Jesus Christ, the supposed crucified Messiah, it was a stumbling block for him because a crucified Messiah is a cursed Messiah.

If you hang on a tree, you're cursed.

But Paul just needed to read the Bible a little bit more.

Because remember in Genesis 3:15, when the serpent is cursed, I said there's in there the hope of blessing.

Genesis 3:15

Because it says that there will come one, the seed of the woman, who will have his heel bruised, but will crush the head of the serpent.

That's what's called the first gospel, the proto-Uangalion that points to the moment that we see here in Galatians 3:13.

Galatians 3:13

So let me just make that plain.

The curse breaker is the serpent crusher.

Same person.

His name's Jesus Christ.

And the Holy Spirit had to open the eyes of the apostle Paul to see that a crucified Messiah is a cursed Messiah.

Why?

Look with me again at Genesis, I'm sorry, Galatians 3 13 again.

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law.

How?

By becoming a curse for us.

If you have your Bible, underline those words.

For us.

You see, all Christians agree that Jesus Christ died on a cross.

It can't be a Christian, if you don't believe that.

But Christians debate over the why and the how of his death on the cross.

And this text right here plainly teaches what's called substitutionary atonement.

One of the reasons Jesus died on the cross is to take your place and my place.

In my place he stood condemned, so that in his place I could stand blessed.

This is the good news of the gospel.

This is the hope that we have in Jesus Christ.

Let me just say this differently.

Now, I like how Martin Luther makes this plain in his Heidelberg disputation.

He says it like this the law says, do this and it's never done.

Grace says, believe in this and everything is done already.

Believe in this.

What is that this?

Well, it's Galatians 3.14.

It's trusting that Jesus Christ came to take your place and to endure your curse so that you could take his place and receive his blessing.

That's what's happening here.

The cross says two things about you simultaneously.

The cross speaks a withering word because it says, in order for you are so far gone that the only hope you had is that the Son of God would become, take on flesh and die in your place.

That's how bad you are.

That's a withering word.

Worse than anything anybody else has ever spoken over you.

But the cross comes and speaks a blessing over you and says, and yet it was the joy of the Son of God to endure the cross for you.

That's a flourishing word.

No greater blessing will ever be spoken over you than that.

And so we look at Galatians 3, 13, we see how Jesus took our place.

I don't think anybody has put this in better words than a guy named Andrew Murray.

He says this Christ came and took my place.

I must put myself in his place and remain there.

And there is only one place, that is both his and mine, and that place is the cross.

His by virtue of his free choice, mine by reason of the curse of sin.

He came there to seek me.

There alone can I find him.

When he found me there, it was the place of cursing, this he experienced, for cursed is everyone who's hanged on a tree.

He made it a place of blessing, this I experience.

For Christ has delivered us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

When Christ comes in my place, he remains what he was, the blessed of the Father, but in fellowship with me, he takes on my curse and dies my death.

When I stand in his place, I am still what I am by nature, the accursed one who deserves death, but united to Christ I receive his life and share his blessing.

End quote.

But what is that blessing?

In a way that's surprising, at least to me, look with me at Galatians 3, 14.

It says this so that in Christ Jesus, that's united to Jesus by faith, the blessing of Abraham, remember we talked about this in Genesis chapter 12, that Abraham's blessed to be a blessing to all peoples.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

What is that blessing of Abraham that might come to the peoples, the nations, the Gentiles, you and me?

So that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.

The blessing of God for Abraham is the Holy Spirit.

The same spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, the same spirit that released resurrection power into the world, the same spirit that kicked off new creation in our space-time history, so that the creation that was cursed under Adam could be made new under Jesus Christ.

The Spirit of God now dwells in all who receive Jesus by faith, and we receive the promise of Abraham.

We receive the Holy Spirit to live and dwell in us so that we now are new creations.

This is significant because God's plan to bring a people of blessing into a cursed world, it's still in effect, and it's through you and me if we are united to Jesus, the Messiah, by faith.

You are meant to be a people of blessing in a cursed world.

We, the ones who deserve to be cursed, but take the place of King Jesus, the Blessed One, because he took our place, the cursed ones, are now a people of blessing among our neighbors and beyond.

That's the hope of this text.

And new creation looks like this.

Revelation 22 says that there will no longer be any accursed thing when Jesus comes back and makes all things new.

No death, no pain, no crying, no tears, no mourning.

All of it's been done away.

Because Jesus Christ has come to bring blessing.

That's the good news.

And we get to live as new creation people here and now, but not all of us.

You have to hear this.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 6, 16, 22, says, May those who do not love the Lord Jesus be accursed.

Jesus Himself in Matthew 25, 41, says that those who don't trust in him, they will be the cursed ones who go to hell with the place prepared for the devil and his angels.

So this is not a promise for everybody.

Let me say that differently.

Some will still die living under the curse because they refuse to look to Jesus Christ in faith.

But for those of us who look to Jesus Christ in faith, Bernard of Clairvaux says this the earth under the ancient curse brought forth thorns and thistles, but now the church beholds it, laughing with flowers in her hands and restored by the grace of a new benediction.

You see, we come here and worship every Sunday, and God's calling us to Himself.

He's forming us through Scripture and sacrament, and then He's sending us back out with a new benediction.

A people of blessing in our city.

And this is the joy in God's heart that enabled him or moved him to send Jesus is so that you and I could be set free, redeemed from the curse of the law, and set free to be a people of blessing in our city.

That's what it means to be the new city here in the city of Orlando.

And so, as we are called to be a people of blessing, the the great old hymn says it best no more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground.

He comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found.

And all God's people say, Amen.

Let's pray.

King Jesus, the Blessed One, we praise you now for taking our place to be cursed on the cross.

I pray for my friends in this room who do not yet believe in you, Jesus.

Holy Spirit, that's your work.

Just like you did to the Apostle Paul, would you open the eyes of the blind that they might behold in Jesus all of the blessing of God?

I pray for my brothers and sisters in this room that we would be strengthened.

That Christ bore our curse so we could be free from it in every way.

We can live as a people of blessing, filled with your Holy Spirit, to bring new creation goodness into this old city.

Holy Spirit, fill us and send us as a people of blessing.

We pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.