Carrots, sticks, and covenant

"When the sunshine don't work, the Good Lord will bring the rain in." A word from Deuteronomy 28.

If is the longest two-letter word.

“No” closes doors. “If” opens them. Until you hear what comes after “if,” you can hardly breathe or think of anything else.

Deuteronomy is called a “restatement” of The Law. While I’d never endorse Deuteronomy as a workaround from reading Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, someone who had read Genesis and skipped to Deuteronomy would be able to talk Pharaoh, golden calves, and unfaithful scouts with someone who read the whole thing.

Deuteronomy 28 is Moses’ last restatement of the carrot and the stick of Israel’s covenant with God. Only Israel can choose what happens next. Only Israel can choose which side of “if” it will live on, the blessed or the cursed. Moses hopes Israel will do right, and tells it to, but knows it won’t.

In a chapter of 68 verses, only 14 describe the blessing. The remaining 54 describe the curse, in great detail.

Moses decided that Israel, a “stiff-necked people,” needed 4X the amount of insight into curses than blessings. Covenant is serious business. It was important to review the terms of service.

If Israel is faithful and keeps God close, Moses says in Deuteronomy 28:13, God “will make you the head and not the tail…above and not beneath.”

But if Israel instead worshipped idols, “gods their fathers knew not,” things would be just as bad as God made them for Pharaoh.

And God had made an example of Pharaoh. When people talk of Biblical plagues, they’re referring to the 10 plagues God launched on Egypt to free the Hebrews. On that journey God gave Israel 10 commandments.

Exodus 8:2: “If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs.”

Usually, when God or Moses invoked Pharaoh, or Egypt, it was as a reminder of God’s “mighty hand,” and how it loosed them from slavery. That changes in Deuteronomy 28.

Deuteronomy 28:60: “He will bring upon you all of the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you.”

In Deuteronomy 28:68, Moses warns that God would even reverse the exodus from Egypt, if Israel broke covenant. God used the exodus to bind Israel to himself. He was willing to return Israel to Egypt’s hand once again, if it broke covenant after being given a homeland.

“The Lord will send you back in ships to Egypt on a journey I said you should never make again,” reads the last verse of Deuteronomy 28. “There you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.”

Covenants are conditional love. Israel was being offered a choice. Parents do a version of this with their children, when they ask: “Would you like to do this the easy way, or the hard way?”

Under the easier way — there is no easy way — “The Lord will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your hands,” as in Deuteronomy 28:12.

The hard way? “The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron,” as in Deuteronomy 28:23. That’s quite a step down from milk and honey.

The easier way is walking alongside God. You stumble along the path, but you keep walking it. You understand that today’s actions will affect tomorrow.

The hard way is going it alone. Left to your own devices. Led by your own mind, and the desires of your flesh. Judged by your ledger of good deeds and bad.

You were better off in Egypt, you say? Go back. You want to worship gods of wood and stone? Now pray to them, that they save you.

In Deuteronomy 31:17, God tells Moses that after his death, when Israel reaches the Promised Land, “they will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.”

God adds: “Many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, ‘Have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us?’”

Oftentimes when we break covenant, we then accuse God of abandoning us.

But to break covenant is to abandon God. Ask God to stand down, and he will. And then the flood will come.

The hard way is your way. Your punishment is being stuck with yourself, crying out to a wooden god who can’t hear you.