Deuteronomy 28: God Gives It Straight

The word Deuteronomy is not only one of the hardest books of the Bible to spell, it is also has a meaning most people don’t know. It means “Second law.” That is the focus on this book. Deuteronomy is the last sermons Moses will preach to this young nation who is about to enter the Promised Land.

What are his final words of motivation? Trust and Obey. It’s the only way to keep the freedom God has given them.

What about you? What will you pass on to the next generation? Let’s read Deuteronomy as the final sermon of a man who saw the miracles of God. His final words are to trust God completely and obey God completely. It’s the way of continued freedom.

Outline

1. Prologue (1:1-5)
2. Moses’ First Speech: Historical Prologue (1:6-4:43)
3. Moses’ Second Speech: General Covenant Stipulations 4:44-11:32)
4. Moses’ Second Speech: Specific Covenant Stipulations (12:1-26:19)
5. Moses’ Third Speech: Blessings and Curses (27:1-28:68)
6. Moses’ Third Speech: Final Exhortation (29:1-30:20)
7. Succession of Leadership (31:1-34:12)

“Today I have given you the choice between life and death… choose life. You can make this choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him.” Deuteronomy 30:19-20 NLT

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Scripture quotations taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation (NLT).
Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome and Today’s Focus
• 0:27 God Gives It Straight: Carrot or Stick
• 1:02 Community CTAs and Mindset Question
• 1:35 Setting Deuteronomy’s Context
• 2:35 Reading the Blessings: Obedience and Favor
• 5:38 The Turn: Consequences of Disobedience
• 10:05 Siege, Exile, and National Collapse
• 13:10 History Confirms the Warnings
• 15:05 Hope After Consequences: God’s Heart
• 18:57 Prayer and Call to Choose Life

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

Hey everyone, and welcome to the Bible Breakdown Podcast. In this podcast, we will be breaking down the Bible one chapter a day. Whether you are a new believer or have been following Christ for a while, we believe that you will learn something new and fresh every single day. So thank you for joining us. Let's get into breaking down the Bible together.

SPEAKER_01: 0:23

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Bible Breakdown Podcast with your host, Pastor Brandon. Today, Deuteronomy chapter 8. And if I were to give this a title, it would be God Gives It Straight. God just gives it to us straight up. And that is, I got all kinds of good things I have one for you, but there's also some challenges you're gonna have to face as well. And I love that. You ever been in a conversation with somebody and you weren't exactly sure what they were trying to say because they were just so all over the map. And you were like, wait a minute, are we are you challenging me? Are you encouraging me? Or what's going on here? And so I love how God doesn't do that. He tells us the good news, he tells us the bad news, and gives us a choice about it. And we're going to talk about that in just a moment. But as always, if you like what we're doing here, make sure you like, share, and subscribe to us on YouTube. Listen to it on a podcast, you're my favorite. Make sure you leave us a five-star review. Make sure you are commenting on YouTube videos and go to our Facebook group, Bible Breakdown Discussion, and let me know. Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person? Now, some people say that they're somewhere in the middle and they say, I'm not a glass half full, glass half empty. I'm just that there's water in the glass. Well, that's okay. But if you were to be one, would you be a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person? And that can definitely come into play when you read a chapter like Deuteronomy chapter 28. Now don't forget, this is written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by Moses, who is not going to get to go into the promised land. But he can cheer on the next generation that is going into the promised land. And he is telling them, trust and obey the Lord, and man, you're going to have a great time. It's going to have its challenges, but man, God's going to be with you. Trust and obey. It is the only way. And that's what Deuteronomy means. It's a Greek word that means second law. So he is laying the groundwork again that's all started with the previous generation, starts with the covenant Ten Commandments, and then builds on it from there. And now he is in this place, in this series of sermons, where he is saying, When you go, God wants to bless you. But remember that all the promises of God are true, the good ones and the bad ones. And God loves us enough to give it straight. And depending on whether you see glass half full or glass half empty, is how you are going to engage with that. Because what we're going to see today is the first half of this chapter is all about what God wants to do. He wants to bless us. He wants every area of our life to be full of his goodness. On the other side is there's also negative sides. And the idea is, is I want to bless you, but if that doesn't motivate you, I'm also willing to discipline you. I don't want to discipline you, but I'm going to need you to do what I'm calling you to do for your own good. And it's either the carrot or the stick. You ever heard that before? The carrot is the blessing, the stick is the punishment. Whichever one motivates you, do the right thing. And it's almost like God is doing that. And so I'm one of these people. I see this as a good thing. I see that God is saying, I want to bless you. So stay in my blessing the first half. But if you choose to go your own way, here are the consequences. Don't do that. Stay in the blessing. So let's read this together and let's see what God wants to do and what God is also willing to do if necessary. So if you get your Bibles open with me, Deuteronomy chapter 28, New Living Translation, verse 1 says this. You will experience all these blessings if you obey the Lord your God. Your towns and your fields will be blessed. Your children and your crops will be blessed. Your offspring, the offspring of your herds and flocks will be blessed. Your fruit baskets and breadboards will be blessed. Wherever you go, whatever you do will be blessed. The Lord will conquer your enemies when they attack you. They will attack you in one direction and they will scatter from you in seven. The Lord will guarantee a blessing on everything you do and will fill your storehouses with grain. The Lord your God will bless you in the land that he is giving you. If you obey the commands of the Lord your God and walk in his ways, the Lord will establish you as his holy people, as he swore he would do. Then all the nations of the world will see that you are a people claimed by the Lord, and they will stand in awe of you. The Lord will give you prosperity in the land he swore to your ancestors to give you, blessing you with many children, numerous livestock, and abundant crops. The Lord will send rain at the proper time for his rich treasury in the heavens, and will bless you with all the work you do. You will lend to many nations, but you will never need to borrow from them. If you listen to these commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today, and if you carefully obey them, the Lord will make you the head and not the tail. You will always be on top and never at the bottom. You must not turn away from any of these commands that I am giving you today, nor follow after other gods and worship them. Pause. So what God is saying, this is what I want. I want you to live with joy and with goodness. That's why I'm giving you all these commands. Think of it like that. God is saying, you want to know why I'm telling you these things, is because this is where it leads. It leads to blessing and goodness and conquering your enemies and all these things. Like that, this is the end result, is goodness. So God is saying, that's the carrot, that's the glass half full, that's what I'm trying to do. However, if you choose to go a different direction, if you choose not to listen, you refuse to obey, there are consequences for living outside the protection, outside the favor and blessing of God. This is the stick. This is what happens if you live outside of God's goodness. So here's the other side, verse 15. If you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and do not obey all the commands and decrees I am giving you today, these are the cur curses, consequences that will come and overwhelm you. Your towns and your fields will be cursed. Your fruit baskets and breadboard boards will be cursed. Your children and your crops will be cursed. The offspring of your herds and flocks will be cursed. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you will be cursed. The Lord Himself will send on you curses, confusion, and frustrations in everything you do, until at last you are completely destroyed for doing evil and abandoning me. The Lord will afflict you with diseases until none of you are left in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. The Lord will strike you with wasting diseases, fever and inflammation, with scorning scorching heat and drought, and with blight and with mildew. These disasters will pursue you until you die. The skies above will be as unyielding as bronze, the earth beneath will be as hard as iron. The Lord will change the rain that falls on your land into powder, and dust will pour down until the sky from the sky until you're destroyed. The Lord will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will attack your enemies from one direction, but you will be scattered from them in seven. You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth. Your crops will be food for all of the scavenging birds and wild animals, and no one will be there to chase them away. The Lord will afflict you with boils from Egypt and with tumors and scurvy and the itch, and which will not be cured. The Lord will strike you with madness and blindness and panic. You will grope around in broad daylight like a blind person groping in the darkness, but you will not find your way. You will be oppressed and robbed continually, and no one will come to save you. You will be engaged to a woman, but another man will sleep with her. You will build a house, but someone else will live in it. You will plant a vineyard, but you will never enjoy its fruits. Your ox will be butchered before your eyes, but not but you will not eat a single bite of the meat. Your donkey will be taken away from you, never to be returned. Your sheep and your goats will be given to your enemies, and no one will be there to help you. You will watch as your sons and daughters are taken away as slaves. Your heart will break for them, but you will not be able to help them. A foreign nation you have never heard about will eat the crops that you work so hard to grow. You will suffer under constant oppression and harsh treatment. You will go mad because of all the tragedy you see around you. The Lord will cover your knees and legs with incurable boils. In fact, you will be covered from head to foot. The Lord will exile you and your king to a nation unknown to you and your ancestors. There in exile you will worship gods of wood and stone. You will become an object of horror, ridicule, and mockery among the nations which the Lord sends you. You will plant much, but harvest little. Your locusts will eat your crops. You will plant vineyards and care for them, but you will not drink wine or eat the grapes, for worms will destroy the vines. You will grow olive trees throughout your land, but you will never use the olive oil, for the fruit will drop before it ripens. You will have sons and daughters, but you will lose them, they will be led away into captivity. Swarms of insects will destroy your trees and crops. The foreigners living among you will become stronger and stronger while you become weaker and weaker. You will lend they will lend money to you, but you will not lend to them. They will be the head and you will be the tail. If you refuse to listen to the Lord your God and to obey the commands and decrees that He has given to you, all these curses will pursue and overtake you until you are destroyed. These horrors will serve as a sign and a warning among you and your descendants forever. If you do not serve the Lord your God with joy and enthusiasm for the abundant benefits you have received, you will serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you. You will be left hungry, thirsty, naked, and lacking in everything. The Lord will put an iron yoke on your neck, oppressing you harshly until he has destroyed you. The Lord will bring a distant nation against you from the ends of the earth, and it will swoop down on you like a vulture. It is a nation whose language you do not understand, a fierce and heartless nation that shows no respect to the old nor pity the young. Its armies will devour your livestocks and crops, and you will be destroyed. They will leave you no grain, no new wine, no olive oil, no calves, or sheep, or lambs, and you will starve to death. They will attack your cities and to all the fortified walls in your land, and the walls you trusted to protect you are knocked down. They will attack all the towns in the land the Lord your God has given you. The siege and terrible distress of the enemy's attack will be so severe that you will eat the flesh of your own sons and daughters, whom the Lord your God has given you. The most tenderhearted man among you will have no compassion on his own brother, his beloved wife, or his surviving children. He will refuse to share with them the flesh of it he is devouring, the flesh of his own children, because he has nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns. The most tender and delicate woman among you, so delicate that she would not as much as touch the ground with her foot, will be selfish toward her husband she loves, and toward her own son or daughter. She will hide from the the afterbirth, from the new baby that she has born, and she herself can secretly eat them. She will have nothing else to eat during the siege and terrible distress that your enemy will inflict on all your towns. If you refuse to obey all the words of instruction that are written in this book, and if you do not fear the glorious and awesome name of the Lord your God, then the Lord will overwhelm you and your children with indescribable plagues. These plagues will be intense and without relief, making you miserable and unbearably sick. He will afflict you with all the diseases of Egypt that you feared so much, and you will have no relief. The Lord will afflict you with every sickness and plague there is, even those not mentioned in this book of instruction, until you are destroyed. Though you become as numerous as the stars of the sky, few of you will be left because you would not listen to the Lord your God. Just as the Lord has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the Lord will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land that you are about to enter and occupy, for the Lord will scatter you among all the nations, and no one uh from one end of the earth to the other. There will worship foreign gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods made of wood and stone. There among those nations you will find no peace, no place of rest. For the Lord will cause your heart to tremble, your eyesight to fail, and your soul to despair. Your life will constantly hang in the balance. You will live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive. In the morning you will say, If only it were night, and in the evening you will say, If only it were morning, for you will be terrified by awful horrors you see around you. Then the Lord will send you back to Egypt in ships to a destination I promised you would never see again. There you will offer to sell yourselves to enemies as slaves, but no one will buy you. It's terrible. It's absolutely horrible. And so what God is saying is, please, I'm begging you, don't do this. It reminds me of when my girls were little, you know, we would uh we set up rules in our house, you know, guidelines, guardrails to follow house rules. And I would tell them, if you do what we ask you to do, we have this thing every Thursday called check-in. And on check-in, they had to have their homework done and they had to have their chores done and um their soap Bible studies, what we do here is have them done. And said, if you do these things, all of these blessings await. You know, you'll be able to have friends over, you'll be able to go do these things, all the good stuff. If you don't do these things, there's consequences involved. And can I tell you how many times I'd wake up on a Thursday morning and I'm looking around at the chores are not done, and I would go to my girls and say, please, please get your stuff done by by this evening. I don't want you to experience punishment. I want you to be blessed, but to be blessed, you got to do the things. And sometimes they would say, Yes, sir, that sounds good, and they'd go do the things. And then sometimes they would look at me as though I was crazy. Dear sir, you cannot expect me to do the dishes. I'm too busy. And I would beg them. And then when the time would come, I would even tell them, What you have done is unfair. You know why it's unfair, is because you have now put me in a place where I can't be a f a father of blessing, I have to be a father of justice. And so now here is the justice that you have asked for. And they would tell me, they would say, How could you? How could you, Dad? And I would say, No, no, no. The question I have is, how could you? How could you, knowing what to do, have done this to put me in this position? And so when I read this, I don't read a God of judgment, I read a God who is desperately begging his people, these are the bad things that happen when you get out from under my goodness, when you cause me to have to be just and to only do what is just. Because all these bad things were the bad things that God had done to the enemies of Israel because they were in sin, because they had turned their back on God and all these different things, and so God is saying, All these things as a just God, I'm gonna have to do to you, and I don't want to. So please don't make me do it. But as we know from history, these things happened. These things happened when God did allow them to go into the nation, he allowed them to establish kings and kingdom kingdoms, but as they turned their way, their back on God, God would send prophets, prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Isaiah, who would beg them to turn back to God. And especially in the reality of Jeremiah's life, it became obvious that the nation of Israel was not going to turn back to God. And so Jeremiah started to prophesy that these things right here were going to happen. And they did. They did. Babylon came in, Assyria came in, destroyed, destroyed these people, and these things happened. The sieges happened, they were led away to foreign nations, and for 70 years they were in captivity. But even after judgment, God did not give up on the nation of Israel. And so I want to say this to you today. Maybe God has begged you in the past, in one way or the other, please don't take the bad road, please don't sin against me because judgment awaits, and I don't want to be a God of judgment in your life. I don't want to have to to do that, I want to be the blessings and all the good things, but you chose to take the wrong road, and now you're in a season of difficulty. Can I tell you? God's not mad at you. God has not turned his back on you. And if, like the nation of Israel, if you're having to pay for the consequences of bad decisions, they had to pay for their consequences for 70 years. But but you know what? God never gave up on them. And he brought them back to the land of blessing. And so if you're going through a season of consequences right now, can I tell you Jesus still loves you, He's still for you, and even then He's still planning for your comeback, He's still planning to bring you back to a place of blessing. So if you're here and listening to this rather and you've not been in that place, can I beg you don't go there. Obey God's word so that you don't have to go through seasons of justice and consequences. But if you have, God has never stopped loving you. He's never stopped being for you. And he's given it to you straight so that you don't go there. But if so, he always has a way back because he loves you more than you can ever understand. Let's pray together. God, thank you so much. Thank you that you are for us and that you give it to us straight, God. You want us to be in your blessing, but God, all of your promises are true. And Lord, I pray for everyone listening to this right now that maybe they have found themselves in a season of consequences, a season where they're having to pay the price for bad decisions. I pray, God, that we will take comfort in knowing that you are still for us. And even if we're having to walk through and pay the price for some of our decisions, you're already planning a comeback for us. You never give up on us, you never stop leading us in the right direction. And I pray you'll open our eyes today to be encouraged that even when we go through the darkest valley, you are still there. God, I'm so encouraged that your word says that that you still are with us, even in all these bad things. And I'm thankful for you today. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. God's word says in Deuteronomy chapter 30, today I've given you choice between life and death. Say it with me. Choose life. You can make that choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him. Don't forget, God doesn't want these bad things to happen to you. Even if they do, he's still with you. And I pray that brings you encouragement today. I'll see you tomorrow for Deuteronomy chapter 29.