Observation: This is a sobering collection of verses about the consequences of Israel's breaking its covenant with the Lord, and no longer following God's laws. Lasting afflictions and maladies, including the plagues God brought on Egypt. Dwindling numbers. Slavery. Ruin and destruction. It's grisly stuff. It reminds me a little of the pop-culture definition of the eastern concept of "karma", that "if you do bad things, bad things will happen to you." I notice in this warning from the Lord, however, that it isn't just general moral "badness" that will yield these bad results. It is covenant unfaithfulness: the failure of God's chosen people to obey God, and to live in the specific way God outlines, which they are here promising to do.
Application: I don't really believe in "karma", neither in the Eastern version, in which bad choices in this life yield bad results in future lives, nor the simplified "pop culture" version, that some divine force will immediately "zap" you with calamity as a direct result of specific choices you made yesterday. I've seen way too many terrible things happen to loving and conscientious people, and way too many wonderful things happen to hateful, selfish people. Jesus says God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.
That said, I do believe in cause and effect. I know that tiny choices we make everyday, added with tiny choices of billions of others, can make the world a better or worse place: a place, for instance, where famines, drought, pandemics, and a host of other things warned about in Deuteronomy, are more or less likely to happen across the world. Unfortunately, the result of my choices doesn't always fall squarely on my head. It might affect my neighbor more. And the choices of my neighbor, who might be thousands of miles away, might come and smack me upside the head. I don't believe it's God pulling levers on every little thing that happens to me daily.
I do, however, believe God has given me a framework for a better world. It starts with small choices--for me, as an individual, because I'm the only one I can change--but over time and across the globe, it can make a huge difference. Even though I'm under a new covenant as a follower of Jesus, the first covenant, in Deuteronomy, has some really helpful guidance for living in community. It's a gift. If we unwrap it and learn from it together, might just make this ride on planet earth a bit less bumpy, between now and the Day of the Lord.
Prayer: God, thank you for the gift of your law. Help me greet it as a gift: protecting me from harm, showing me where I still need work, and guiding me into a better way of being in the world. Amen.
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