Is God Safe?
“But it shall come about, if you do not obey the Lord your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:” Deuteronomy 28:15 NASB
Curses – You’re cursed. Maybe you didn’t know it, but that doesn’t matter. If you have disobeyed God, then you are subject to the curses He proclaims. If you haven’t keep all the Torah, then bad things are on your horizon or have already arrived. “Wait,” you exclaim. “I’ve been forgiven. God has removed the punishment. That’s why Yeshua died, so I could be free from this horror.” Yes, sacrifice does provide forgiveness. But does that mean you are exempt from any future retribution if you break the commandments again? Or do you “start over,” inheriting a new verdict?
The Hebrew word translated “curses” is qelalot. Its root, qalal, means “be slight, swift, trifling, of little account.” In other words, behind the idea of curse is the thought of insignificance and behind that is the idea of being treated with apathy. The opposite of love is not hate. It is apathy—not caring. We certainly recognize the difference in our relationships. We would rather have the intensity of love or hate rather than the disinterest of apathy. The worst thing that can happen to us is to realize that no one cares about us. What if we read this verse a little differently. What if we read it like this:
“But it shall come about, if you do not obey the Lord your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, then the results of divine apathy will come upon you and overtake you:” In other words, God will stop caring about you. Or so it might appear.
This is the ultimate form of trauma. Feeling like God doesn’t care reshapes our entire world. “Our maps of the world are encoded in the emotional brain, and changing them means having to reorganize that part of the central nervous system, . . .”[1] If, as a result of disobedience, we find ourselves emotionally abandoned, we will experience life’s curses, but they won’t be poverty and pestilence, sorrow and sacrifice. They will be the consequences of believing that no one, particularly God, cares about us anymore. And we will feel afraid. “Love informs our identity while trustworthiness forms our sense of safety.” But lack of love destroys our identity and untrustworthiness shoves us toward unhealthy risk. We don’t follow God’s instructions in order to avoid His punishment. We follow God’s instructions in order to find meaning and safety in the world, that is, in order to discover who we really are.
Amazingly, God cares. Only in the rarest of all human circumstances does God appear to withdraw His care, and even then He goes on caring despite the horrible consequences. But that isn’t the issue, is it? The real issue is whether or not we feel that God cares. Sin is not violating God’s rules. It is disruption of our awareness of His care. Sin harms us by removing our sense of safety in the world!
Topical Index: curse, sin, disobedience, trauma, Deuteronomy 28:15
[1] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, p. 131.
I really like how you are bringing out the concept of trust as being the bedrock of the experience of love (connection). The curses are like brakes that are designed to keep us from hurtling over our cliffs. The instant I sin, the curses kick in, like an automatic safety system, keeping me from dying. Yep, chronic fatigue and panic attacks and a schitzoid reaction to life – not to mention disaster after disaster – kept me from dying while I was separated (sensory perception, anyway) from God. That is how I read Deuteronomy 28 now. All sin breaks trust. All sense of that trust fracture causes us to go into the automatic braking system designed to keep us from actually dying instantly from that sense of separation. The curses threw me into survival mode, which meant that I had to step up my own efforts to stay alive.
Stress is what we go into when we are fractured in any way, but the stress response (to those curses) is the flesh struggling to stay alive. When I struggle to stay alive, I am struggling AGAINST sin (death) instead of agreeing with it! The curses are designed to teach me to fall out of agreement with death by throwing me into survival mode. Stress is my biological attempt to stay alive. Stress kicks in whenever some sort of sin somewhere starts trying to kill me. I can choose death by sinning all day long, but the curses keep me from liking the results of those choices; they fight AGAINST those choices, and I am truly “kicking against the pricks”.
So many studies now are bringing out the concept that stress lowers natural immunity, leaving us vulnerable to illness. Stress is how we experience a breach of trust, in fact. Stress is where life is left up to us, because there was a choice made somewhere that cut our lifeline with God. Stress, fear, pain, shame, even anger. all these so-called ‘negative emotions’ are designed to let us know danger is present; death is not far away. These are the places, in fact, that we are supposed to stop, drop and roll; to yelp for help; to call cosmic 911 and refuse to move until we are rescued, but how often do we instead give in to the temptation to believe that we must act abandoned because we FEEL abandoned, and strike out across our deserts with the temporary energy derived from further sin? I do mean the sinful responses to that trust crisis like rage and bitterness, guilt and shame, fear and panic, and, most of all, all the unloving ‘self’ stuff: we know the list – self pity, self focus, self hatred, etc. We go into “it’s all up to me” as soon as we drink the Koolaid of sin, in fact.
The curses are designed to yank us back out of that agreement with our own death and throw us back up against reality and even bounce us off the bottom of our pits where we find we have “nothing left to lose” (trade goods for even MORE trouble), thus giving us a new way, perchance, that we would “haply seek God while we are able to find Him”. Amen.
Sin is not violating God’s rules it is the disruption our awareness of his care.sin harms us by removing our sense of safety in the world. A real thought to ponder it is all about our actions and the consequences that follow, faith for obedience , a sense of being alone for sin. Causes me to think. Yeshua’s words on the cross father Please Don’t turn your face from me Psalm 27 9 also 69. 17. As I read the scriptures when this added insight sounds like….. Shalom or lack of shalom
Skip, as I read this today, the Lord led me to Matthew 7:21. I was looking back at what you wrote about these, specifically from, Volunteer Joy:
“To do the thelema of the Father is not simply to wish it were the case or to have a fervent desire for God’s purposes. Thelema means to bring these desires into being, to cause what pleases and delights God to become a reality. Thelema erases all good intentions. It even erases doing what is good without the motivation and inspiration of the Spirit. After all, preaching, healing and doing mighty works are all good things. But Jesus tells us that unless they are acts of obedience directly in line with the will of the Father, they are useless for Kingdom purposes.”
I was thinking about curses. It made me think one of the hardest things about doing thelema is not that I don’t believe in thelema or try to live it out. What is difficult is my whole way of thinking and training in our Western world is more in boulema. The healing I need is inernal/emotional. As I learn His “shalom” way, it contradicts every way in my early training. It resists the patterns that were laid in my early DNA – the way we’ve been taught in the West, then add on any early life trauma. What is considered “successful” in the Church today is a detriment to me – because we have a tendency as survivors of trauma to want to “please”. That being said, when I act in “thelema” ways, it feels wrong inside – especially when we get attacked or wounded from doing things thelema that we know are right. It’s learning to adjust our thinking/emotions to a new way. That really requires me to depend on the Lord day by day – which may mean, to keep me dependent, He may need to allow things to be unfinished and unsuccessful?
Lord, help to heal us and “transform the way we think and feel.” Am I thinking this correctly Skip? Let me know if not.
Thank you. You’re brave enough to say it. It is part of our Western DNA, a product of institutionalized trauma in the Church. How we need a different way!
WOW…. “The opposite of love is not hate. It is apathy—not caring.” They will be the consequences of believing that no one, particularly God, cares about us anymore. And we will feel afraid. “Love informs our identity while trustworthiness forms our sense of safety.”…. “This is the ultimate form of trauma. Feeling like God doesn’t care reshapes our entire world”
I have noticed in my life that I “survived” many ordeals. And I did not lose hope, I may have bordered that thought. I found G-d was close to me all that time and as stated below, when I was not well. I cried out for help and G-d heard me.
In the past 5 years I reached out for help for the trauma. Instead of care and compassion, the “therapy” provided by the gov. was to relive it… RE-TRAUMATIZING. I do not suggest that to a soul. I began to re-experience the trauma at a deeper level through their “treatments”.
It is true over a period of time, I noted becoming apathetic. I was flattened in my reactions, unless pushed then I because angry or fearful. I could not seem to fight back as I once did concerning the wrong. I began to believe the lie from the hurt in my heart and soul, in asking for help was the wrong thing to do, (actually the wrong place to go for help). And I began believing (just underneath) that no one, particularly G-d, still cared about me anymore, although intellectually I knew better… And I felt more afraid. I have good days and bad days. I’m being honest. I am thankful for this forum and your input Skip.
I appreciate your prayers. For 5 years I have endured facing this trauma & case. The remarks to the court were made on April 27th, I have heard nothing about it since. I need closure.
Sincerely,
Flint.
To experience apathy from G-d–could there be a better description of hell?
“To day I set be for you life and death, blessings or curses..choose life” Moses instructs us. It seems to me that the condition of being in blessings or of being in curses is simply the result of the nature of the created world. Based on a choice of being in God or outside of Him. “God will not be mocked…we will reap what we sow”. Obviously our choices define and determine our realities. I concur so many of the promises are conditional, yet are not those conditions simply the net results of disobedience or obedience to the way will and purposes of YHWH . It seems to me there is a way things work, work with them it will go well with you, ignore them and it will not. No amount of redefining, rationalizing or denying the truth will change the composition of the structure of the Cosmos.
I’m really struggling today with this, in the sense that I know it’s necessary for me to respond to my children with the same Chesed that has been shown to me. I have a son who is repeatedly falling into sin. He is sorry – he is always contrite and asks forgiveness, but insists he “has no control over it”. I want to trust him. I want to have respect for him. But the more he disobeys, the less “love/care” I feel toward him. Is this how my Father feels toward me when I repeatedly fall into sin? And how do I “thelema” a heart response of love toward him in these situations? I *do* love him — very much. But am heartbroken at his continued *willingness* to make bad choices. I am really having a hard time knowing how to process all of this.
In both of my novels, one of the protagonists says “you know what’s worse than knowing someone hates you? Knowing that some one doesn’t care.”
And likewise, the opposite of grace is not law, the opposite of grace is disgrace.
I know a couple of people who really need this blog right now. If you’ll pardon me a moment, I’ll just go share the link…
Have a great weekend!