The word blessing brings to mind a variety of images for all of us. We say “God bless you” after a sneeze. “You’re so blessed” when life is good,
Blessed is a religious-sounding word that we use a lot. But what does it actually mean?
The Bible refers to blessing as flourishing and the multiplication of life. But it doesn’t always look like these things, and for many of us, life often looks and feels like the opposite.
We look around us and find a broken world filled with suffering, corruption, poverty, and war. We experience chronic illness, family dissension, and addiction. Our minds and bodies endure abuse.
For some, it feels more real to say life is about suffering than life is about blessing. And perhaps there’s a feeling within all of us that something has gone wrong.
The Bible has a name for this kind of and of dysfunction -the curse. In the Bible, the curse is when God hands people over to the consequences of seizing blessings on their own terms. It is a curse because, instead of abundance and life, we end up with scarcity, isolation, and death.
But where did this curse come from?
And is there hope for reversing it?
Origins of the curse
The account of the Bible begins with God bringing life out of darkness, ordering our beautiful earth, and blessing all it’s creatures.
The first blessing is when God creates animals. God blesses the animals, saying to them “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the land.” (Genesis 1:22). God’s blessing is about flourishing and multiplication of life. God shares His life-producing ability with others and invites us to participate with Him in extending the blessings throughout all of creation.
God gives us as humans an additional blessing that sets us apart from the animals. Humans are appointed as God’s representatives to rule over the sea and the entire flourishing world on God’s behalf. (Genesis 1:27-28).
The blessing is conditional, however. We are told that this gift of life and abundance is contingent upon the human’s trusting and following the one divine command: not to eat of the tree of knowing good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). This does not mean God only offers blessings to people who behave well; it simply means that choosing to trust God’s way of life and love is also a choice to enter into the blessing of real life.
This tree represents a decision for humans to trust God’s will or to trust their own. To trust God’s description of good and evil rather than trusting their own. Almost as soon as they face this decision, Adam and Eve encounter a deceptive slithering creature who says they can trust their own instincts more than God’s instruction. In fact, this slithering creature says they should. So they go for it and immediately experience the curse.
The effects of the curse
God grieves as He reminds them about the consequences of their choice. He had already told them that rejection of Him would end in rejection of a spiritual life, which means spiritual death. So He curses the serpent (Genesis 3:14-15), and He curses the ground (Genesis 3:17). Adam and Eve chose the curse of spiritual death instead of the blessing of a spiritual life. Notice that God does not curse Adam and Eve.
Instead, they experience the effects of the curse. Instead of fruitfulness in the land, there will be famine. When to comes to having children, the circumstances with come with pain, and complicated relationships that cause emotional and physical pain. Being fruitful and multiplying will now be filled with suffering such as infertility, jealousy, and sexual abuse. The ability to flourish, multiply, and share God’s life-producing ability with others will not disappear but will be disfigured and marred.
The curse affects the ability to experience the fullness of life and as we choose to distrust God’s direction, we leave life giving blessings in the garden and enter into the realm of curse. And death becomes
But even so, God gives us a promise as He did Adam and Eve. When God curses the deceptive creature who fooled Adam and Eve He declares that His would send someone who will ultimately destroy the creature and the curse. (Genesis 3:15). Death may be inevitable but this promise says it will not be permanent.
Reversing the curse
The curse spreads
Humans are fruitful and do multiply, but they end up multiplying grief, hardship, and violence instead of life. They spread so much death that they soak the ground with the blood of the innocent. (Genesis 4:10, 4:23-24, 6:1-4).
God continues the plan to reverse the curse and restore the blessing to humanity by blessing one family of a man named Abraham (Genesis 12). And Abraham would one day reverse the curse. That human is going to come through Abraham’d family.
Abraham and his family spread blessings to the nations (Genesis 13:1-3), but like Adam and Eve in the Garden, they are also deceived by false blessings. They seize and grab blessings on their own terms (Genesis 16:1-4). Years later, Abraham’s family, now the Israelites, grab a blessing by choosing a man to be king so they can be like all the other nations ( 1 Samuel 8:9). And the king’s reign leads them to destruction. Later King David tries to seize blessing by taking another man’s wife (2 Samuel 11), which leafs to his destroying family and destroying each other.
Each grab for a blessing leads to more curses. And God’s chosen family becomes a conduit of the curse instead of the blessing. Their accounts are filled with tales of deception and violent grabs for power resulting in the ultimate curse: exile from their land and slavery to foreign nations.
Yet, Israel’s prophets, who live through all of this, still trust in God’s promise to Abraham. They hold tight to the promise of the future Israelite who will reverse the curse again and restore God’s blessing for Israel and ALL the nations.
Jesus reverses the curse
Years later, a man named Jesus arrives. He claims that the blessing is coming in a new way -through Him. He says He is living in the way humanity was meant to live. It is 100% true and is the essence of real life. “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6). The original blessing language.
Jesus comes to show us that He trusts in God’s wisdom. He chooses blessing, not curse.
The curse put to death
Jesus faced the ultimate human choice. He trusts God’s will and not His own. They Bible says that Jesus sweated blood from the pressure inside His body when He asked God to remove this cup from Him. To avoid being murdered.
Ignoring God’s will in the Garden of Eden made sense to Adam and Eve, but they trusted that sense over and above God’s will. And Jesus in His human “sense,” but He trusted God’s divine will the most. “Not my will, but your will be done.” Mark 14:36. By doing so He confronts and reverses the curse.
God reverses death by raising Jesus from the dead, the firstborn of a new creation. The curse is put to death, so that the blessing of God’s life could spread once more.
Life in the in-between
How does this kind of life spread in a world where children get cancer diagnoses? In a world where marriages fall apart, where our friendships struggle, and our environment suffers? In this world, our minds deteriorate under crippling disease and anxiety. Our world is filled with power grabs, greed, and abuse at every turn.
Believers in God will not escape the effects of the curse in this life any more than Jesus did. So how do we live in this in-between before the curse is entirely eradicated?
After Jesus’s resurrection, He blessed His followers and said His presence would be with them as they learned to trust in God’s blessings and to share with others (Matthew 28:18-20). In a sense, each time people choose to listen and trust God, they enter into blessing and reverse the curse.
God’s Spirit empowers followers of Jesus to live lives of blessing. By His Spirit, we become conduits of blessing to others by taking part in the curse reversal that Jesus began.
While death and the curse still have a hold on our world, Jesus’s followers trust that the power of God’s blessing is stronger. We do not live as those without hope, is does not make light of our pain and suffering. Our hope is not a trite “everything happens for a reason.”
We do not grieve as those without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18), because God promises the blessing will eventually eradicate all remaining traces of the curse and completely heal all that’s been harmed.
We will fully and finally, experience God’s blessing and there will be no more curse.
“There will be no charge any more. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His servants will serve Him” – Revelation 22:3
From Pity to Praise 