Leviticus 26:14-46--Punishment for Disobedience

Punishment for Disobedience​
14 “But if you will not listen to me and will not do all these commandments, 15 if you spurn my statutes, and if your soul abhors my rules, so that you will not do all my commandments, but break my covenant, 16 then I will do this to you: I will visit you with panic, with wasting disease and fever that consume the eyes and make the heart ache. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it. 17 I will set my face against you, and you shall be struck down before your enemies. Those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. 18 And if in spite of this you will not listen to me, then I will discipline you again sevenfold for your sins, 19 and I will break the pride of your power, and I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze. 20 And your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.

21 “Then if you walk contrary to me and will not listen to me, I will continue striking you, sevenfold for your sins. 22 And I will let loose the wild beasts against you, which shall bereave you of your children and destroy your livestock and make you few in number, so that your roads shall be deserted.

23 “And if by this discipline you are not turned to me but walk contrary to me, 24 then I also will walk contrary to you, and I myself will strike you sevenfold for your sins. 25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall execute vengeance for the covenant. And if you gather within your cities, I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy. 26 When I break your supply of bread, ten women shall bake your bread in a single oven and shall dole out your bread again by weight, and you shall eat and not be satisfied.

27 “But if in spite of this you will not listen to me, but walk contrary to me, 28 then I will walk contrary to you in fury, and I myself will discipline you sevenfold for your sins. 29 You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and you shall eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 And I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your idols, and my soul will abhor you. 31 And I will lay your cities waste and will make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your pleasing aromas. 32 And I myself will devastate the land, so that your enemies who settle in it shall be appalled at it. 33 And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will unsheathe the sword after you, and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.

34 “Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies' land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. 35 As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it. 36 And as for those of you who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. 37 They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues. And you shall have no power to stand before your enemies. 38 And you shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. 39 And those of you who are left shall rot away in your enemies' lands because of their iniquity, and also because of the iniquities of their fathers they shall rot away like them.

40 “But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery that they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me, 41 so that I walked contrary to them and brought them into the land of their enemies—if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, 42 then I will remember my covenant with Jacob, and I will remember my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. 43 But the land shall be abandoned by them and enjoy its Sabbaths while it lies desolate without them, and they shall make amends for their iniquity, because they spurned my rules and their soul abhorred my statutes. 44 Yet for all that, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not spurn them, neither will I abhor them so as to destroy them utterly and break my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God. 45 But I will for their sake remember the covenant with their forefathers, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, that I might be their God: I am the Lord.”

46 These are the statutes and rules and laws that the Lord made between himself and the people of Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai.

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This passage goes hand-in-hand with the last one, and it makes sense that if there are blessings for obedience, there will probably be punishment for disobedience.  We'll see a long section of "blessings and curses" when the covenant is reconfirmed at the end of the book of Deuteronomy.  God wanted to bless His people, but blessings would be withheld, there would be natural consequences to actions, and sometimes God will even intentionally take corrective action in a loving way to discipline His children to get them back on the right path.  God is not the kind of father that lets His children go off the rails without making every attempt at intervention, though we'll see that even He eventually gets to the point of letting them get exactly what they ask for--for example where we studied in our Gospel Foundations lessons about the people rejecting God and asking for a king (Saul) so that they could be like all the other nations.

God's requirement here is total compliance and obedience.  There is no room for partial obedience.  They most love and adhere to and obey all of the Law to receive His blessings.  Breaking the smallest part of the Law was breaking covenant with God and would mean that the whole nation would be guilty if any one person broke covenant and it would open everyone to the curses that were promised instead of the blessings.  No one other than Jesus (and originally Adam before the Fall) could possibly keep the entire Law, so then was it God's plan to always be judging His people?  That is the idea that some people have of God--that He's always angry at them and out to get them.  The answer is "No," God desires everyone to be saved and to be under the grace that He provides, but for those who choose to try earn God's favor by their own merit, they will always come up short--we must instead rely on God's unmerited favor.  That doesn't mean that God is a push-over though.  He will eventually judge both the living and the dead and He is a good Father that gives just the right amount of correction.

God knows exactly how stubborn, stiff-necked, and rebellious these people will be, and He tells them exactly what He's going to have to do to correct them.  Just like a good professor lays out all the consequences in his or her syllabus so that the students can't say "no one ever told me," God lays out all the consequences of sin in the Law.  Pestilence, famine, losses in battle, being conquered by those who hate them and hate God, and punishment so severe that it can only be described as "sevenfold" (remember that seven is the number of God's perfection and holiness and a number of completeness as there are seven days in a week).  He will utterly and completely bring them to their knees, but will not destroy them on account of the covenant that He made with Abraham and His plan to bring forth a Messiah from these people, Jesus Christ, who would save them from their greatest enemy--sin.

God says that even nature will be against them if they sin and live in rebellion as their crops will not be safe from the animals and the animals will have a bloodlust and will attack them and their livestock and even their children in the open field and will have no fear of them.  God meant for animals to be subject to man as the natural order of creation, but as men sin more and more, the order of things gets messed up more and more and the animals no longer fear man because man no longer looks like Creator God to them.

God promises that as the rebellion gets worse, the sin of the people will get worse and it will be a downward cycle as God would become their enemy and withhold even more blessings hoping for them to repent while at the same time giving them over to a depraved mind as we see in Romans 1.  For in this passage, God says they will get to a point where the famine that God sense becomes so bad that ten families will have to make bread together in one oven and split the bread between them to ration it and no one will be filled, yet the rebellion of people will be so great that the people will turn to cannibalism and child sacrifice to fill their stomachs rather than to repent before a holy God and ask for His blessing to be restored after atonement was made for their sins.  Notice how their child sacrifice goes hand-in-hand with their idolatry as God mentions that part of what God will do when they get to this point is that He will destroy their high places, their sanctuaries of worship to their false gods and idols and I think worst of all, once they get to this point God promises to no longer accept their sacrifices.  Maybe part of that is they are making sacrifices to false gods or they are making sacrifices on the altar of the LORD but no longer know the God they pretend to be worshiping and instead worship a god that they have invented who winks at their sin or is as corrupt as they are.  In any sense, this is tantamount to God saying that there is a place they can go where they have crossed the line and there will be no forgiveness offered to them--that's a scary place to be and it is words like these that probably inspired the sermon titled "Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God."  Again, this is the way that many people think of God all the time, but that is because so many people hate God and love their sin to the point where they have completely rejected God and would rather believe wild fairy tales (like evolution) just so that they do not have to acknowledge God as Creator which would therefore also make Him King and mean that there is a Law that is His that they are to live by.  When you live in darkness, the light is scary to you, but those who live in the light have no need to fear for they can see clearly--the evil person lives in darkness because he neither wants to see nor be seen and imagines that the darkness will hide him or her from God's all-seeing, all-penetrating light.  Light will always overcome darkness!

Notice in the downward spiral of things that worst thing that God lists is for them to forget to keep His Holy Sabbaths (not just the Sabbath Day, but all the other holy days that point towards the work that God has done, is doing, and is going to continue to do---specifically through Jesus and through the Church until Christ returns and there is a New Heaven and a New Earth when all these things will ultimately be fulfilled).  This is how bad it got during the time of the Divided Kingdom (which we are about to study in our Gospel Foundations lessons--in fact, this whole downward spiral exactly maps the future history of Israel--God knew EVERYTHING they were going to do and everything He was going to do in response) so that we see that the people would go into exile--the Northern tribes would be "lost" and never return as far as we know and the two southern tribes along with most of the tribe of Levi would go into exile in Babylon.  God's reason for the 70 years of exile in Babylon?  It was because the people failed to keep the Sabbath Year for 490 years, so God gave rest to the land (as promised here) for the 70 years that they had failed to let the land rest.  God would cause all of their walled cities that they trusted in for security to be torn down, for the Temple that they believed to keep them safe to be ransacked and plundered, and torn down and for their children to be taken by these pagan kings who would try to reeducate them, give them new identities, and force them into worship of themselves (the pagan kings) and their gods, even to the point of trying to train them to be magicians and sorcerers--two of the areas of the law that we know God hates and demanded the death penalty for.  The people at this point in their lives will lose all hope and all joy--they will hang up their harps on the willow trees and will weep and no longer desire to sing any of their songs of deliverance and redemption, because they no longer believe in a God who is Redeemer and Savior, or they believe themselves to be so bad that God would never want to redeem or save them and that they deserve the punishment they are getting--yet even at this point, many of the people will still rebel and not repent.

This is not just talking about the exile to Babylon, but also all the other nations that conquered the Jews during the 400 years of silence in the intertestamental period--the Greeks and the Romans are the two biggest kingdoms to rule the people at this time.  Both have their purposes in God's plan to make a common language for the known world and to make the system of roads and safe passage from nation to nation so that the gospel could easily go forth "in the fullness of time," but these pagan and wicked nations also did much to try to make the people of God as pagan and secular as they were--to worship knowledge, philosophy and material possessions.  By the time that Jesus comes on the scene the people have been so messed up, they have forgotten who they are and the beginning of His ministry has to be The Sermon on the Mount to remind people of the Law and the high standards that God demands for His people if they want to experience the blessings of the coming kingdom, and the judgment that is coming for all those who live in opposition to the King and His Kingdom (they just didn't understand that they were listening to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords).

With all that bad news, we're probably feeling like there's no good news to be heard, but God finishes by reminding His people that all they need to do to avoid these punishments or to obtain deliverance and redemption once again when things get bad--even so bad as the last group of punishments where it seems as if God is going to let their enemies destroy them and take their land from them--is to cry out to the LORD in repentance.  We probably all know the verse "If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land."  (2 Chronicles 7:14).  That promise to the Jewish people ties in directly to this promise here in Leviticus.  If they confess and are humbled and make amends for their iniquity and sin, God will remember His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  But the people will still have to wait out the punishment of letting the land rest for failure to keep the Sabbaths.  There is no short-circuiting those consequences.  God promises them that no matter what, He will still be their God and they will still be His people even when they are in exile, and that He will not utterly destroy them (even though they probably deserved it from time to time) for God had bigger plans than those people in that place at that time and He would preserve these people for the sake of the gospel.  For He had chosen His Son to be born through these people so that through these children of Abraham the Abrahamic covenant would be filled that "Through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed."  This was ultimately fulfilled by Christ's penal substitutionary atonement on the cross.  God's plan will never be thwarted!  Even if He has to do His work by working around us instead of through us, His will is going to be accomplished, and He will never break His covenant because His covenant is consistent with His nature and His character.  God can only break His covenant if God can stop being who and what God is.  Since He cannot change His nature or identity, then His covenant is unbreakable.  This is why to love God is to love and obey His commandments.