Tell them that the
Lord, the God of Israel, says, “Anyone who does not keep the terms of the
covenant will be under a curse.” – Jeremiah 11:3 (NET)
So it was for the
people of the Creator God, Israel (specifically those of the southern kingdom
of Judah in the time of Jeremiah). The curses under which they would find
themselves are presented with utmost clarity in the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy
(expounding on the Levitical curses). Because Jeremiah is speaking on the
coming destruction of Jerusalem and subjugation of Judah by the Babylonians,
and because such subjugation and oppression can be located within the extensive
list of curses that Israel’s God had promised to bring upon His covenant people
if they did not keep the terms of the covenant, it can be reliably affirmed
that the Creator God’s people had not kept to the terms of the covenant.
More specifically, the
covenant people had not lived up to their responsibility to properly bear the
divine image, as set forth in the laws that were understood to have been
provided to them by their God, through Moses. To Judah in Jeremiah’s day,
in reference to the terms of the covenant and its curses, the Creator God said,
“Those are the terms that I charged your ancestors to keep when I brought them
out of Egypt, that place which was like an iron-smelting furnace” (11:4a).
However, it would
behoove later observers not to look down upon them or speak poorly of them
because of this. The covenant people were unable to keep the terms of the
covenant because they were human, and therefore, as the story of Scripture
seems to be supposed to be understood, subject to the same failings to be found
in the head of the entire race, that being Adam. The covenant that Israel
violated was not the first covenant to be violated. They were not the
first to find failure when it came to the Creator God’s expectations. To
find that occurrence, one must look to the book of Genesis, remembering that
the Genesis narrative is crucial for the self-identification and
self-understanding of the people of Israel.
There one is able to read
that “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the orchard in Eden to care
for it and to maintain it” (Genesis 2:15). This care and maintenance was
a portion of the Creator God’s covenant with the being that had been created in
His image. Reading on, one also finds
it said that “You may freely eat fruit from every tree of the orchard, but you
must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat
from it you will surely die” (2:16-17). Of course, owing to the knowledge
of pain and suffering, information about which provides a daily bombardment of
the sense, all are quite aware that the terms of this covenant were violated.
Again, as the
Scriptural narrative seems to insist, owing to that violation, because the
Creator God is faithful to His covenants, all of humanity and creation came
under a curse, as death is said to have made its entry into the world.
The curse came upon the good creation of the covenant God for the same reason
that the curse came upon that same God’s people, Israel. Terms of the
covenant were not kept.
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