Last week in The IN SEASON Lifestyle’s COME AS A CHILD BIBLE STUDY; we began to explore the prophetic meanings of the curses for disobedience which are listed in Deuteronomy Chapter 28.
We especially want to know how they play into the events leading up to end-times.
Today we will consider the curse that says; your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed.
THE RESULTS OF DISOBEDIENCE
Of course; all of these curses are the punishments for disobedience; but what acts of disobedience mattered the most?
Idolatry seems to be the number one cause of the disobedience of God’s people.
How ironic that I type those words in a time in America as we go into the month of October; which celebrates Halloween in our nation. I hope you will read all of this blog’s posts about that holiday which seems so innocent; but may well be yet another one of the contributing factors to our nation’s acts of disobedience towards God’s ways.
YOUR BASKET AND YOUR KNEADING TROUGH WILL BE CURSED
One translation of the bible renders this verse from Deuteronomy Chapter 28 as: The grain you harvest and the bread you bake will be cursed.
That meaning is pretty straight forward. It is talking about the crops we harvest for food; and the food we manufacture from those harvests.
What would cause God to decide not to bless a harvest?
GOD RULES OVER ANY HARVEST
Perhaps the fact that the people who reaped the harvest forgot that God was the One who made it grow into such abundance for them?
There is a harvest offering required by God three times annually when all males are called to appear before Him with an offering for their family.
Three times a year, at Passover (the spring harvest); at Pentecost (the summer harvest); and at The Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah) (The fall harvest); God has set aside an appointed time to meet with His people to receive their offerings.
BRING THE FIRST AND THE BEST
Each time we are to bring our first and our best from each of our seasonal harvests and submit this as an offering to God.
These used to be actual physical offerings of grain and produce and animals, but now those are no longer required because of the sacrifice of Our Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Jesus has connected us spiritually with God. Now, all required offerings are to be of a spiritual nature. As you pray, covered in the blood of Jesus as your Savior, you will know in your spirit what God is requiring of you. That is what you are to bring as an offering.
The Passover harvest in the spring time should find us offering up our thanks and praise for the sacrifice of God’s Own Son; Jesus Christ, as our own firstfruits offering of an early earthly spiritual harvest. This is the first and most important offering of the year. Without the firstfruits of Jesus; any other offerings would be worthless and less than rags before God.
The next two harvest seasons should be all about the saved of humanity offering up their best of their best (spiritually and physically) to the service of God and The Kingdom of God.
THE NATIONS HAVE FORGOTTEN GOD’S REQUIREMENTS
Does our nation (or any other nation) even remember that these offerings are required anymore?
Jesus fulfilled the commandments; but He didn’t do away with them.
God gave The Holy Day appointments to mankind, so that He could continue to receive their offerings, year-after-year-after-year; as was established in the days of Adam and Eve and Cain and Able.
The offerings are not for the benefit of God; but for the benefit of the soul of the person doing the offering to God. They are healing and teaching and helping the individual to fulfill their God-given destiny for God’s Kingdom. These offerings are vital and important for the growing of our souls.
WHY GOD FINDS THESE OFFERINGS ACCEPTABLE
The sacrifice of Jesus as our firstfruit’s offering is what makes our own offerings acceptable to God. When God looks down at these things we offer Him; He sees the righteousness of His Only Begotten Son; and not our filthy, dirty, rotten sins.
Without the covering of Christ as Our First-Fruits offering; no other offerings would ever please God. Hence; they would be rejected; such as the offerings that Cain brought which were rejected.
Yes, it is true that Christ was offered ONCE for ALL on the day that He died for our sins; and that is very sufficient to cover ALL offerings that will ever be needed again; but what we do at Passover is a type of remembrance and a memorial of this fact.
JESUS AS FIRSTFRUITS – RISEN FROM THE DEAD
God is always expecting us (and Jesus reminded us) to always be remembering the greatest sacrifice ever made. Jesus’s words were “Do this in remembrance of me.”
He said this as they were eating the bread and drinking the wine of their spring time harvests. We think of this every time we celebrate communion today; as well as every time we come to these three festivals that God long ago appointed.
At the end of each harvest we are to remember our covering and our source, and we are to allow God to use our talents and service along with the sacrifice of Christ as blessings to The Kingdom of God.
Is there something that God has put on your heart to bring?
BRINGING SPIRITUAL OFFERINGS
Every year these spiritual offerings will be different; because every year God teaches us new and different things about life.
Your offerings from last year will multiply back to you in the form of blessings in the year to come. Each new season of offerings, you will look back and be astounded at what God did with what you offered up to Him.
But Israel forgot about these things, and they turned to idolatry instead. They received; instead of the multiplied blessings; the terrible curses for disobedience.
They had been warned at the beginning of their journey through the wilderness at Sinai and again at the end of their journey right before receiving the promises.
Their baskets that had once been full of the bounty of the land were now empty because their crops did not yield the produce they needed.
They had been disobedient and the curses had begun to come.
Perhaps there were weather problems, or drought on the land, or insects that destroyed their crops.
Maybe there were unexpected fires or even cases when their enemies swooped down and surprised them; taking by stealing the produce of their land for their own homes and leaving the kneading troughs of the ancient Israelites empty and without bread.
DESTRUCTION CAN SNEAK UP BEHIND YOU
There are so many ways that destruction can sneak up on disobedient people and rob them of life’s greatest blessings.
Freedom is usually the first blessing to go.
When people are free they are able to tend to their own needs; but when they are cursed and in slavery; they have no way of taking care of themselves because they are bound to their masters and cannot escape.
Surely there were warning signs that warned Israel that they would be snatched away and not allowed to function in freedom and care for themselves; but they were so busy being worldly. They were not paying attention to the things of God.
This is what happens and this is how people who were once godly go under the time of curses.
These people got so carried away that they even forget to keep God’s Sabbaths. When the captivity came the curses required a year in captivity for each year that the Sabbath was not observed and the land did not get it’s rest.
Hence; every kneading trough was empty, and no baskets were filled from the lack of harvest.
DISRUPTED SUPPLY
It was a lot like what we are seeing in America today; in a time when the supply chain is disrupted and the food that has poured into our country before is no longer available.
People went hungry.
Everyone was poor.
There were no happy songs heard in the land as it lay in total silence for seventy long years. The people hung their harps on the willow tree by the banks of the rivers of Babylon.
How could they continue to sing the Lord’s songs when they were captives in a strange land?