Many people want God’s blessings, but don’t realize that blessings always come through obedience. We want our lives, families, and churches to be blessed, but that blessing comes from what we sow: if we sow obedience, blessing is the fruit. If we sow disobedience, we not only miss the blessings, but we invite curses and problems. Leviticus 26 reminds us that God is not indifferent to sin among His covenant people. He blesses obedience, but He also chastens disobedience—and He does so not because He is cruel, but because He is holy and merciful.
We often speak of the “power of three.” In many areas of life, if you solve three core things, everything else falls into place. What are the top three problems? God addresses this in Leviticus 26:1–3, showing that if you align these three things, everything else will follow:
- Priority of God: Giving first place to God and having no idols in life or heart. This is the foundation of all blessings.
- Protecting the Sabbath: How that priority reveals itself in daily life.
- Piety in Church: Reverencing God’s house.
Where there is carelessness about the Sabbath and a lack of reverence for His house, it shows that people are idolaters at heart. God is not first in their lives. They hold onto idols that they refuse to give up for even one day a week for God. That wrong priority makes them treat God’s house and church lightly, coming and going as they please.
However, when our priority is right, when we protect the Sabbath and show piety in His house, all things in life fall into place. If you obey, God groups all blessings into three “P” words: Plenty, Peace, and Presence. There will be plenty in how Jehovah deals with us in His providence, there will be peace in our lives, and there will be His wonderful, joyful presence.
The Curses of Disobedience
The covenant does not only promise blessings for obedience; it also promises covenant curses for disobedience in verses 14 through 39. Here, Jehovah painstakingly works to make them realize the consequences of their disobedience. These curses can be divided nicely into five subsections.
Notice that five times in this text, there is a recurring clause: if you do not obey Me, a curse will follow (found in verses 14, 18, 21, 23, and 27). There are five divisions and five sets of curses, representing an ascending scale of increasing severity. They get more terrifying as we go, because further neck-stiffening on the part of God’s people results in a harder rod striking from the living God. Yet, we must note that all of these curses are ultimately designed to bring them to repentance, except for the final curse, which leads to ultimate destruction.
(Disclaimer: We do not always know why bad things happen in providence. Sometimes trials come through no fault of our own, like in Job’s time, for God to test and grow our faith. Not everything that happens is due to sin, but most times, whenever we face adversity, we should view it as a time for self-examination and repentance. Keep this important disclaimer in mind as we explore this chapter.)
Curse Number One: Calamity (Verses 14–18)
In these four verses, we find the general warning that disobedience leads to failure in every sphere of life—a striking contrast to the previous 13 success-filled verses.
Verse 14 states: “But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments…” and verse 15 continues with despising His statutes and breaking His covenant.
Understand that this is not speaking of minor, occasional omissions or sins of ignorance that are quickly repented of. This describes repeatedly and arrogantly sinning against God—knowing full well that it is wrong, yet rebelling against His Word. It happens when you persistently get your priorities wrong, continually prioritize everything else above God as idols, fail to protect the Sabbath, and instead treat the Lord’s day as an opportunity to work, trade, and chase after entertainment, worldly pleasures, and sports. It happens when you show no reverence for the Lord’s house, attending only when convenient, harboring no commitment or piety, and robbing God of His tithes—which ultimately reflects in breaking the second table of the law through hatred, adultery, lust, anger, murder, lying, and cheating toward your neighbors.
It starts with taking God’s word lightly, moves to hating His commands until your soul abhors them, and culminates in breaking His covenant because you have infected your mind with false teachings and a disbelief in God’s providence. When this kind of disobedience becomes a lifestyle despite repeated warnings, what will God do?
In the New Covenant, the unchanging God reminds us that He will not be mocked: whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap. The Lord warns that these curses will come. Do not think God is blind, impotent, or unable to act. Look at verse 16: “I will even appoint terror over you, wasting disease and fever which shall consume the eyes and cause sorrow of heart.”
Earlier, God promised that you would lie down happily in the fields like Eden, sleeping without fear, where only your children would giggle. But now, under the curse, it will be the blood-curdling screams of your wife running toward you, crying out in anguish. There she holds in her hands your fevered, dying child, burning with high heat.
She screams and lays the child down in your lap as the fever peaks, and you see pus oozing from infected eyes. Your eyes consume with unbearable sorrow as you witness the last breath and gasp of that little child dying right in your lap as you just awoke from your nap on the threshing floor. Verse 16 reiterates that consumption and fever will be upon you.
It speaks of wasting diseases—conditions like dysentery, cholera, typhoid, or malaria that completely drain a person’s flesh and strength—alongside blinding parasites and infections striking the eyes as a pestilence.
Not just sickness—verse 16 adds that your enemies shall eat your sowing; your planted seeds will be wasted, and adversaries will consume the harvest. Picture that man out on the threshing floor with the dead child in his arms. He looks up and sees his barley field in the distance—a field he worked six months for with sweat and toil. Emotional sorrow has taken his child, and now financial crisis begins as he watches Philistines take the wheat from his barn and slay his servants right outside. He is plundered of his wealth.
Verse 16 says your soul will pine away, causing mental and physical collapse due to trial upon trial taking place with no rest or relief.
This poor man has lost his child and all his harvest to enemies, and now his wife goes mad with a nervous breakdown, screaming, hitting, and cursing him. The man is plunged into mental torture; he cannot sleep at night, and when he does, he wakes up drenched in trembling sweat, wondering what horror will strike next as the curses of God fall due to disobedience. It is an ugly scene.
Look at verse 17: “I will set My face against you.” What a fearful thing, brethren! What a conscience nightmare to have God’s face against us—to be deliberately sinning in the face of an angry God. Yet why does God bring these cursings, punishments, and chastisements? In order to bring about repentance. That is the design and purpose.
Ancient Israelites knew this, and we need to know it too: when calamity is set right next to known disobedience, that is a certain sign that the frown of God is staring you right in the face. When calamity is juxtaposed to known disobedience, you’re looking eye to eye with a frowning God.
Let this penetrate the walls of your home. Consider it in our own lives rather than just a threshing floor in Palestine 3,000 years ago. You pillowed your head tonight in known sin, having ignored God’s warnings while your conscience screamed, continuing to harden your heart and thinking nothing would happen.
You slept deeply for a while, but hours later, the darkness is pierced by a thud and a shriek. The lights turn on, and you discover that in a distant room your son or daughter has fallen from bed, their head split wide open on the corner of the dresser with blood everywhere, or struck down by a horrible disease, howling in terror. You, sir, who pillowed your head that night in known sin, have been awakened face to face with a frowning God calling you to repent. Then you hear a phone call from your boss announcing a recession and the firing of a thousand people, causing you to lose your job as well. What will you do? Known sin juxtaposed with calamity.
Again, remember I am not saying every fever, sickness, or calamity is exclusively because of sin. God’s dealings with men are unfathomable, and we cannot completely comprehend His mind and purposes. But when such a thing takes place—when you are in known disobedience and calamity visits—one of the reasons, I assure you, is a call to repentance upon your soul. So that is curse number one: calamity.
Curse Number Two: Drought and Famine (Verses 18–20)
Come with me then to curse number two: drought and famine, spanning verses 18 through 20.
This passage begins in verse 18: “And also, after these things, you do not obey Me, I will punish you seven times more.” What? Still not obeying after these kinds of chastisements and strikings from the rod of the living God?
We are warned by this defiant arrogance, much like Pharaoh’s—thinking trials are not from God or sin. Man becomes so hardened in sin that he tries to endure it and still continue in his rebellion, showing how much fallen man loves sin. Willful inattention and indifference to the known will of God turns a thunderstorm into a howling tornado.
The phrase “seven times more” is used in verses 21, 24, and 28. It shows how a stubborn, stiff-necked pride that does not repent when God chastises will be met with unrelenting discipline. Just as a gracious father takes an unrepentant child back to the woodshed until that stiff neck becomes soft and pliable, God continues to bring down discipline.
Look at verse 19: “I will break the pride of your power…” How? By making your sky above like iron and your earth beneath like bronze.
In agricultural times, everything depended on the land and harvest. A dry sky becomes merciless and unyielding as iron, withholding every drop of rain, while the soil turns hard as bronze, impenetrable to the plow. Your plow blade bends and breaks; there is no sowing and no fruit.
How does God break the pride of our power? By making us beg. When you have fattened yourself and become arrogant, sinning against me, I will close all providential means to sustain you. Food disappears, money vanishes, and your strength is spent uselessly as your land turns into a barren desert.
Can God punish us financially for our sins? Why not? As Haggai 1:6 and 10 state: “You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough… You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it… ‘Why?’ says the Lord of hosts. ‘Because of My house that is in ruins, while every one of you runs to his own house. Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops.'”
Wealth breeds the illusion of self-sufficiency. When a person has a high financial status, they can buy their way out of earthly problems—purchasing top-tier healthcare when sick or hiring lawyers when they make mistakes. This creates a dangerous spiritual delusion: “I am the master of my own life. I don’t need God.” When wealth feeds arrogance, sin ceases to look like sin and becomes a lifestyle. God looks at a person heading down this path of pride—which leads to absolute destruction (Proverbs 16:18)—and out of sheer mercy, He puts a ceiling on their financial success.
If God sees that lifting you higher financially will only cause you to sin more arrogantly, He answers Agur’s prayer in Proverbs 30:8–9 (NLT): “Give me neither poverty nor riches! Give me just enough to satisfy my needs. For if I grow rich, I may deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ And if I am too poor, I may steal and thus insult God’s holy name.”
Think of it as a guardrail on a dangerous mountain cliff. When we are arrogant, we drive fast toward the edge. If He keeps you poor or financially constrained in a season where you are battling pride, it is because your current spiritual maturity cannot handle the weight of more money. If a person is arrogant with a little, they will be a tyrant with a lot. God forces us into a place of financial dependency so that we learn to say, “Give us this day our daily bread,” shattering our pride and forcing us to look upward.
Furthermore, think of spiritual poverty. Consider the spiritually callous man dabbling in some kind of sexual sin. Because of this dabbling, he stops praying and reading his Bible, because the heavens are as bronze to his prayers and his heart is hard as iron. No word of Scripture touches his feelings; there doesn’t seem to be anything in the soil of the Word for him, and his church attendance becomes erratic.
He avoids church and refuses to open his Bible because he is dodging eye contact with the living God, knowing that God is frowning upon him. He spends his strength uselessly. Maybe this man is a salesman whose accounts have dried up. He exerts his strength through a flurry of advertising gimmicks, but lo and behold, they produce no business interest whatsoever.
He feels on his back the rod of God, fulfilling verse 19 where God breaks down the pride of our power. God may bring problems in your job—stunting your growth, denying promotions, reducing income, or even causing job loss—all as part of His humbling process calling you to repentance.
So we see two categories of sin and chastisement: calamity and drought and famine. Before you faint and go into a coma, let me stop here. We will look at three more categories of curses next time. With the time remaining, let me conclude with one application.
First of all, God-sent calamities are designed to work repentance. God-sent calamities are designed to work repentance. Look at verses 40 and 41: If they confess their iniquity and their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humble so that they make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant. See, God is merely disciplining so that they will be restored, so that they would be made humble and contrite and know again the blessings of God.
Israel, profoundly, is a type, a picture of the child of God. And notice the way God deals with Israel. And profoundly, you will find the way God deals with the child of God, the Christian. Just like God saved Israel from Egypt, He saves the Christian from sin. He brought you into the liberty of being a child of God. And you, child of God, have become the apple of God’s eye. That’s what we are. You think of a little child—what are they to their new mom and daddy? Are they not the apple of their eye? When they hold them, don’t you see the reflection of affection?
Profoundly, child of God, that is the kind of affection that the Heavenly Father has for you. You are secure in the arms of your Father. You have all His love and grace.
But when you use all that love and grace and abuse it to live sinful lives, in continued disobedience, without repenting, getting tangled in sin—when He has bought such access to the Father with the precious price of His Son and sent His Holy Spirit into your hearts—there are times when we’re not fellowshipping with God as we ought, but we’re kind of lurking in the shadows of a sin that we may find ourselves dabbling with.
He warns us repeatedly in His word, but we don’t hear. Our conscience speaks, but we harden ourselves. He has staked His eternal glory in you. There is great blessing and also great danger if you continue to sin. Why? When you continue on a path of destruction as His child, God brings calamity upon you. That calamity does not come as judicial retribution upon you, but paternal chastisement—as a fatherly correction.
Now think with me on this theme of being chastised by our Heavenly Father.
You are a child of God. God has chosen you eternally, redeemed you in time, and has great eternal purposes to display His glory. His glory is staked in you for His great purpose. Your Father is committed to conforming you to your elder brother, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is perfect in His obedience to the Father. And one child-rearing method that your Father uses is the rod of calamity to make you and to make me smart for our sins. We see it in this passage.
Think of Psalm 119:67. David says, “Before I was afflicted, I went astray, but now I keep your word.” I was taken to the woodshed by You with affliction, but now I keep your word. Or Psalm 119:71: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes, O Lord.”
Turn with me to Psalm 38. I want you to see how the way God dealt with Israel corporately as His spiritual child is how He deals with people individually as His spiritual children.
Look at Psalm 38. David cries out: “O Lord, rebuke me not in your wrath, nor chasten me in your hot displeasure! For your arrows sink deep into me, and your hand presses me down. There is no soundness in my flesh because of your anger, nor any health in my bones because of my sin.” You think of the fever that Israel was promised because of His indignation. “For my iniquities have gone over my head; like a heavy burden they are too heavy for me.” God deals with His dear children in such a way, by bringing affliction and calamity.
Brethren, let us then, as the children of God, develop a spiritual sensitivity to the rod of God when it is upon us. Let us develop a spiritual sensitivity.
Yes, we learn truths, verses, and systematic theology. That is knowledge of His word, but we also need to have knowledge of His rod—practically, to the experiential way in which God is dealing with us at a given season in our lives. We need to have a knowledge of His rod upon our back, as well as a knowledge of His word in our minds.
What I mean by that is we need to be carefully evaluating events in our lives.
Such as, “Lord, why did You make me so ill for those two days when I was on that wonderful vacation? I felt like dying. I felt such sickness, as if I were going to die over a minor case… Why did You do that to me?” We will never be able to fathom all the depths of it. But could it be that it was during that season that you began to become very attached to the things of the world? And God was teaching you, “My son, these things of the world are of little significance.” And that deep, painful, fevered nausea was something that made you see yourself hanging as if by a thread. That’s the one thing, people: do not allow yourself to be intoxicated by all these things of the world.
Or, “Lord, Father, why did that back glass of my vehicle get crushed after 20 years of driving?” Could it be that, God, You are teaching me that I have been moving a bit too fast and being a little bit short and impatient with my children, because it happened right at that moment when I yelled, “Come on, get in the car, we’re late!”?
I always notice a pattern. If I do something wrong, there will be some rod either at work or in the family. I see and realize, “Lord, why that insulting situation in the workplace? Oh, is it Your rod?”
Do you see the rod of God? The way that He is dealing with us? Or do you pass that by and just think it is all part of life—that you don’t have to change, just keep reading the Bible and not consider how God has experientially visited you with His sovereign hand?
Asking the question: “Lord, why am I experiencing this drought of soul? Why has my Bible reading been like bronze earth beneath my feet? I can’t seem to get any fruit out of my Bible. Why is my prayer life iron-like? The sky, when I pray, just rings back my own words to me.” Begin to assess. Why?
Yes, why? Could it be that there has been some kind of immoral fantasizing that you have been allowing in your mind? Is that the reason why there has become this iron-like sky and this bronze-like earth?
Brethren, this passage, very interestingly, when it speaks in verse 19 of breaking down your pride of power and making your sky like iron and your earth like bronze—
In Grand Rapids, a number of years ago, there was a woman who sent a letter to her pastors and quoted this passage. She said to her pastors, “The sky is like iron to my prayers and my Bible reading is like bronze. I get nothing out of them.” Counseling and discussion went on. One and a half years later, this woman was caught in an adulterous relationship. She was excommunicated from the church.
My suggestion to you is that there was the harboring of sin, and that experience of the iron-like heaven and the bronze-like earth beneath her feet was an initial chastisement that she should have turned away from. But now, because she did not turn away, God visited her seven times, and as a result, she is off into a far country. She is eating pig slop, and there has been no sighting of her anywhere near the kingdom of God in recent months and even recent years.
We need to be sensitive. We need to be sensitive. It experientially touches us as children. One commentator says this: “The wreck is not instantaneous. It does not all happen at once. The castle falls not to a ruin by one stroke. It wastes by the process of dilapidation, stone by stone, crumbling to decay. This decline from God is not allowed to proceed without gracious efforts to arrest its course.”
And that is why you and I need to develop a holy sensitivity in our conscience concerning the rod of God. “Lord, why has this happened? Is there a sin?” I am not saying that we will ever be able to fathom all the reasons why something has happened. Not at all.
But again, if there is no sin juxtaposed right next to divine calamity, we know part of the purpose of that is a call for us to repent. But holy examination ought to take place. Now consider this.
God-sent calamities are designed to work repentance not just on an individual level, but on a church level. Brethren, sometimes churches can go through seasons of calamity too. Now, to qualify: simply because a church is encountering calamity does not mean it is because of sin. Smyrna encountered much testing and persecution, but Smyrna in Revelation chapter 2 had no sin for which they were rebuked. And that could be the case of any church encountering calamity.
Yet in Corinth, many died due to sin at the Lord’s table. Now, I don’t want to engage in any witch hunts here at all, brethren. But we need to consider carefully our own lives when calamity might visit the people of God.
Think of Achan. Achan hid sin in the floor of his tent. And as a result, there were body bags that came back from Ai. And Achan himself, no doubt, was torn in conscience when he knew that there was known sin as a result of his own life, which partly contributed to this calamity.
And so too in a church, brethren. Could it be that in a certain church—in our church, maybe—God is withholding certain victories from us because of sin in the camp?
Maybe God is visiting us with calamity because of sin in the camp. You know, it may be true that certain body bags of calamity come again and again in a given church, and it is found out later on that someone has been adulterous, that a long-term sexual affair has been going on.
Dear brethren, I say to you, you and I do not live as islands unto ourselves. We are part of a body, one with another. And I plead with you and I beg you for the sake of the kingdom of God and for the prosperity of your brethren in this place: clean up your life. Repent of your sin. For God does not play games. God is a serious God. So, God-sent calamities are designed to work repentance.
- Is there any area of known disobedience that you are excusing because judgment has not fallen yet?
- Have you mistaken God’s patience for God’s approval?
- When hardship entered your life, did you humble yourself before God, or did you only look for relief?
- Is your spiritual dryness merely tiredness—or is it God’s loving rod calling you back?
- Are you asking only, “How do I escape this pain?” instead of, “Lord, what are You showing me?”
- Could there be a hidden idol behind your carelessness in worship, Sabbath, prayer, or holiness?
Option 1: Personal examination
“This week, set apart 20–30 quiet minutes before God and ask: ‘Lord, is there any known sin I am tolerating? Is there any area where You have been opposing me in order to humble me?’ Write it down, confess it plainly, and turn from it.”
Option 2: Prayerful response to hardship
“The next time you experience a trial, before you ask God to remove it, first ask Him, ‘Father, what are You teaching me through this? Is there any sin I need to repent of?’”
Option 3: Family application
“As a family, discuss one area where your home may be becoming spiritually careless—worship, reverence, Lord’s Day priorities, prayer, or obedience—and ask God for repentance and reformation.”
Option 4: Church-level response
“Pray this week not only for yourself, but for the church: ‘Lord, keep us from hidden sin in the camp. Make us a holy people who welcome Your searching light.’”