BLESSING AND CURSE
[p. 336] BLESSING AND CURSE
The relation in which these principles stand to one another, and to man, in Scripture, is a point of deep interest, and may profitably occupy attention for a moment.
When in the thought of building a city and a tower man had shown his purpose to make for himself a centre and name on earth and thus to pursue his own glory, and not God’s, then the God of glory called Abraham out of country, kindred and father’s house, that is, every association in which a man is naturally, and made known to him His own purpose to bless. Man’s purpose was for the time frustrated in the confusion of tongues and the scattering abroad, and God had revealed His own purpose of blessing in the man that answered to His call. The principle of calling became important as showing that God was not in the things out of which He called Abram, or He would not have called him out of them.
The promise made to Abraham was of blessing and inheritance, but the point on which I dwell now is the blessing, which is described in Galatians as “the blessing of Abraham”.
Now before inquiring as to what the blessing consisted in, I remark that blessing stands in Scripture as the antithesis to curse, and it is of vital importance to see that God anticipated curse by blessing.
To return to Abraham. The nature of the blessing does not appear to me to come to light until Genesis 15, where we find the statement that Abraham “believed in the Lord; and he counted it to him for righteousness”. In respect of God and of the world to come Abraham was held or estimated for righteous; he was cleared in the eye of God of all reproach that had attached to him in connection with this world. This [p. 337] I judge from Romans 4 and Galatians 3 to be clearly the nature of the blessing. Blessing and not curse was in the purpose of God.
We pass on now over a period of four hundred years or more, to the time when the seed of Abraham in the flesh, after having proved the delivering power of God, was tested by law. This was a retrograde movement, and had the children of Israel understood the meaning and effect of it they would have deprecated the testing and claimed the blessing of Abraham. But they had no faith, they knew neither God nor themselves.
The effect of law on fallen man could only be to put him in a worse position than he was in before. He was already under death, now he came under curse, and so far as he himself was concerned hopelessly so.
The next great point in the history of Israel is, I judge, the brazen serpent, when the experience of the wilderness had shown the perverseness and contrariety of the flesh, even in Abraham’s seed, as tested under law, and we find here how in divine wisdom the matter is met. Reading it in the light of the New Testament, we see, in the lifting up of the Son of man, the condemnation of sin in the flesh — the sin is put away with the life to which it attached. The man that was under condemnation went in the condemnation, nothing of the flesh remains in the eye of God’s purpose; but God was glorified in the Son of man, and in resurrection another Man brought in — the last Adam, a life-giving Spirit. What now takes the place of flesh here is the springing well in the believer, the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, thus the curse which the law brought in is gone in the condemnation of the state that was under it, and in the place where it was another man now lives in the power and liberty of the Spirit. “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death”.
Now, we find very soon after the brazen serpent and the springing well, that God allowed the question of [p. 338] the blessing and the curse to be again raised, but this time by the enemy. Balak, king of Moab, proposed to Balaam to curse Israel; and God takes occasion of that to give us a view of His people as in the vision of the Almighty. If the brazen serpent, and the springing well, be borne in mind, it will be apprehended that Balaam saw Israel not as after the flesh, but as in the light of divine purpose, in connection with Christ and the Spirit; and he is unwillingly compelled, to the irritation of Balak, to announce that there is no curse, but that the blessing of Abraham is there. God has not beheld iniquity in Jacob nor perverseness in Israel. Jehovah his God is with him, and the shout of a king is among them. The application of this to our souls is sufficiently simple.
How blessed for saints when they can take account of themselves as no longer in the flesh, dead to sin, but alive to God in the risen Man — free from curse and condemnation, because no longer in the man that was under it; but enjoying the stability of God’s purpose of blessing first made known to Abraham, and then confirmed in his son raised in figure from the dead. It is then that we apprehend the truth of justification, not simply in its application to us as guilty sinners, but as the called according to God’s purpose: “whom he called, them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified”. And again, “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us”. The man under curse has disappeared, and Christ intercedes for those blessed in Him.