Deuteronomy 28:15

"But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of Jehovah thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day, that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee. Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy kneading-trough. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, the increase of thy cattle, and the young of thy flock. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out."

It is obvious that these five verses are the exact reverse of Deuteronomy 28:3-6. Entry into Canaan would in no sense EXEMPT Israel from the obligations of the covenant. Can it be otherwise in the kingdom of God? There is a powerful parallelism between what happened to Israel and what can and frequently does happen to members in the body of Christ. Many have pointed out that Israel received the promised land as "an unmerited gift"; and indeed they did, in exactly the same way that the grace of God, through his unmerited favor, receives followers of Christ today into his kingdom. Furthermore, even if Israel had faithfully obeyed God's commandments and kept his statutes, even the fullest possible measure of their obedience could never in a million years have altered the "unmerited" and "unearned" nature of blessings which they received.

However, reckless disobedience and rebellion against God's rules could, and in the case of Israel, did forfeit all of those unmerited favors. Is it not also true in the kingdom of Christ? Saved by grace as we surely are, recipients of unmerited favor from God, rejoicing in a salvation we did not earn nor could we ever earn; but we may surely forfeit all such mercies and blessings through willful and continual disobedience and rebellion against the ordinances and statutes God has commanded. Is not this exactly what Paul was saying in the following passage?

"All your fathers were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and did all drink the same spiritual drink. Howbeit, with most of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness ... Now these things happened unto them by way of example; and they were written for our admonition ... Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall." (1 Corinthians 1-10)

What follows in this chapter is a series of parallel pictures, five successive tableaus, each depicting in specific and severe language the total ruin of the Chosen Nation. These five paragraphs are in Deuteronomy 28:20-26,27-37,38-48,49-57, and Deuteronomy 28:58-68. In each of these presentations, there is nothing less than the loss "of Israel's status as the people of God's kingdom."[2] It is most regrettable that the Protestant world as a whole, even today, have failed to recognize that, without exception, all of the vaunted privileges of the once Chosen People have been taken away. Indeed, God once promised to make them first in all things, high above all nations, above only, but not beneath, etc., but is this the status of Israel now? NO. Repeatedly, the N.T. declares that them "is no distinction" between Jew and Gentile (Romans 12:10), Peter was commanded to go to Cornelius "making no distinction" between Jew and Gentile (Acts 11:12). In the instance of that great type of Israel, the prophet Jonah's refusal to preach to Nineveh, he was "cast overboard," a figure of God's rejection of Israel for her refusal to receive Gentiles as fellow-heirs of God's grace. In the prophecy of Zechariah, God commanded the prophet to break both of his staves - Beauty and Bands. One symbolized the abrogated covenant which God cancelled, and the other symbolized the removal of all racial considerations as being connected in any manner with redemption. And, if all of this should leave any doubt, let the reader turn and digest Hosea 9, where God flatly declared, "Therefore, I hate you (Israel), and I do cast you away, I shall not love you any more." (Hosea 9:15,16). (See my comment on this chapter in my commentary, Vol. 2 on the minor prophets.)

Furthermore, in the epistle of 1 Peter 2, all of the once-proud titles of Israel were preempted and applied to the New Israel in Christ Jesus, which throughout this whole dispensation is the only Israel God has!

In these next five paragraphs, we shall marvel at how God said all this five times in succession!

FIRST DENUNCIATION

Here is Cook's summary of this paragraph: "The curse of God shall rest on all they did, and should issue in manifold forms of disease, in famine, and in defeat in war."[3]