Cursed or Blessed?
God has a bad reputation nowadays. Have you noticed? While some people treat God as if He is weak and does not have anything to do with their lives and even deny that He exists, others act as if God is some cruel dictator who does not want anyone to have any enjoyment or fun in life. You know who gives God the worst reputation for being a cruel tyrant? Christians. The very people who claim to know God misrepresent Him to the world in a thousand ways. In this essay, I want to talk about just one of the ways that Christians give people the wrong understanding of God—curses and blessings.
Sometimes, we Christians get confused when we read Bible verses that speak of God cursing or blessing someone. All too often we apply a lot of superstitious ideas to the Bible instead of understanding what the words really say. What do I mean by a superstitious idea? For instance, in the Middle East, many people are superstitious about the evil eye. You know, the idea that someone can curse you just by looking at you with evil thoughts? In Arabic, the direct translation is not “evil eye.” Instead, it is called the “jealous eye.” Their way of thinking is that if someone is jealous of you, they can curse you and cause your good fortune to go away because of their jealousy. They do not believe the curse comes from some kind of witch doctor or shaman. No, they just believe that someone’s bad feelings toward you can curse you. Arab mothers fear this the most. I have had many friends from the Middle East who always put a pin with a little blue stone on their babies’ clothes to keep away the evil caused by jealous eyes.
We may laugh at such a superstitious fear of being cursed, but if we were to look at our own thoughts closely, we would discover that we have just as many false ideas about being cursed. We think of curses and blessings as something magic that we are zapped with like a witch casting a spell. Only, we attribute the magic to God instead of a human. However, that is not the picture of cursing found in most places in the Bible. Instead of inserting our own false ideas of curses into the word of God, we need to read carefully to understand what the scriptures are referring to when they speak of God blessing or cursing people and land. It would be helpful to examine a few verses that speak of blessing and cursing in the Bible.
The first example is the most similar to the common “magic curse” idea. Do you remember when Jesus cursed a fig tree? “As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him” (Mar 11:20-23). Does God’s word have the power to cause something to die? Yes, it obviously does. God created us, and we exist because He constantly replenishes our life. “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Gen 2:7). Just as Adam received the breath of life from God, we also owe our very existence to Him. If He disconnects from us and withdraws His life force from us, we die. Thus, it is logical that Jesus could cause a fig tree to die. The purpose, however, was not to punish the fig tree. It was to give a lesson of life to the disciples. It was an acted-out parable of what would happen to those who do not abide in God. If God withdraws His life-giving sustenance from those who refuse to accept it, they will die as surely as the fig tree. The question is not whether it is possible for God to withdraw His life from living organisms. The question is what does it mean when God curses something, and why does He do it?
Just because God has the power to withdraw life from something or someone, it does not mean that He arbitrarily goes around causing people to have bad situations happen to them by hitting them with a curse. Most times, when the Bible says that someone is blessed or cursed, people are receiving the natural outcomes of either depending on God or rejecting God. In other words, a curse is God’s warning that separating from Him will result in bad things happening in our lives and following God results in good things. To illustrate, if I drop a pen, what will happen? It will fall to the ground. Why? It’s a natural law of gravity that makes the pen fall. God’s curses are usually warnings about the natural laws of the universe. For example, if I say, “Hey, you’re going to knock your glass on the floor and break it,” and then you knock your glass over, and it shatters all over the floor, did I do something magic to make your glass break? No, I was simply warning you of the natural results of the actions you were taking. Many times in the Bible, this is what it means when it says that God curses someone or something. For example, in Jeremiah God speaks of cursing and blessing in this way. “Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jer 17:5-8). In these verses God is not causing the man who trusts in his own human strength and rejects God to live in a dry place with bad land for growing. No, God is saying that when we reject Him, we are rejecting the source of life. When we depend on ourselves, we are choosing to limit the resources available to us. This description is just the natural outcome of rejecting God. The same is true of the blessing. When we trust in God to keep us, God does not somehow love us more than the people who reject Him. He does not give us good gifts while making other people receive bad punishments, like Santa giving a bag of coal to bad children while supplying the well-behaved kids with brightly wrapped presents. No, blessings are just the natural result of being connected to God. Trusting in Him gives us peace and courage and the resources to face life’s troubles. We do not need to be anxious and fearful because we know that we can trust our Father in heaven. We Christians need to stop confusing curses with punishments and blessings with special favoritism doled out by God. Blessings are the natural gifts given by a God of love to any child who is willing to accept them, and curses are the natural results of a life separated from living in harmony with the ways of the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, the next time a massive hurricane sweeps through leaving death and devastation, do not blame it on a judgment of God. It is simply the natural result of what we humans have done to our own world. And when war breaks out and lots of people die, stop blaming God. That is us again. God warns us, but we simply ignore Him and follow our own bad choices.
Let’s look at an example of blessing and cursing in the New Testament. Paul talks about being cursed in Galatians. “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.” Now it is evident that no one is justified before God by the law, for “The righteous shall live by faith.” But the law is not of faith, rather “The one who does them shall live by them.” Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (Gal 3:10-14). We are sinful human beings who cannot by ourselves obey God’s laws. When we trust in ourselves to be perfect, we fail every time. We have a natural tendency towards evil. We see this everywhere in the world. On the news, we hear again and again about how horrible one person has been to others. God did not curse us to be like this. We did this to ourselves. God wants to rescue us from this curse, so He keeps trying to warn us of the problem and giving us the solution. What is His solution? Trust Him. When Paul says, “the righteous shall live by faith,” it is the same as when Jeremiah said, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord.” In the Bible faith, belief, and trust all have the same meaning. Paul is saying in Galatians that we are cursed if we think we can follow the law on our own. We will fail and receive the natural results of breaking the law. If I dishonor my mother, I am not going to have a good relationship with her. If I steal from you, you are probably going to be angry at me and not like me. Those are just natural results of breaking God’s law. Paul says that faith is the way around these natural results of depending on ourselves to keep God’s law. Then he speaks of how Jesus took the results of our curse for us so that He could bless us. This was God finding a way to intervene in the natural results of our own actions so that He could bring us back into connection with Him and we could receive the natural blessings that come from being connected with God.
We do not deserve the blessing of God. Naturally, we have cursed ourselves so that we choose evil over good and then suffer the results. However, God could not leave us to face the results of our sinful natures alone. He wants to reconnect with us so that we can be blessed instead of cursed. More than 2,000 years ago Jesus became a human, born to a teenage mother in a stable in Bethlehem so that we could be blessed. He became Immanuel, God with us, so that we would not be alone in facing the results of our choices. He became a curse so that we could have the blessings that come by simply trusting God to love us and take care of us. I invite you to remember that God wants you to be blessed, and you can receive that blessing by simply trusting in Jesus. The blessing is not a special magic that God zaps you with. It is the natural result of trusting the Giver of life.