We are continuing to plow our way through Deuteronomy Chapter 29.
This chapter is all about Moses summarizing the curses and the blessings of the Law in front of all of Israel including those foreigners who left with the Hebrews during the exodus.
One of the main points Moses communicates is that…
…the very horrors the Lord visited upon the Egyptians and Pharaoh prior to their exodus from slavery…
are the VERY SAME horrors that will visit them if they fail to keep the terms of the Mosaic Covenant.
And not only that but that God would send Israel back to Egypt if they broke His covenant.
“Egypt” here is being used metaphorically to refer to any foreign land where Israel would end up and be treated as second class citizens.
Yesterday, I also pointed out that not only the people of God but the land of God would also become cursed.
The land would become as Sodom and Gomorrah.
In other words, dead and infertile with the agent for this infertility being the deadly combination of salt and sulphur.
The land of Canaan would be as if an enemy had spread sulfur and salt all upon the land of Israel.
An interesting fact of history is that the only time the land of Israel was ever fertile was when the Israelites lived there.
Without exception, every time Israel was exiled from the land, the land went dead.
This is divine evidence that the land of Israel minus the people of Israel is incomplete.
The beautiful Israel that I visited two years ago with its many farms and greenhouses that dot the landscape today were non-existent before the early 1900’s.
The early 1900’s was when the Jews began to seek refuge from the anti-Semitism they were experiencing in Europe.
During this time, as more and more Jewish settlers came back to their land, the ground became more and more fruitful.
The hillsides began producing olive and pistachio trees and even rich bananas and mangos.
What was a bleak desert landscape transformed into an oasis in this part of the Middle East!
That’s right.
I’m saying there is a direct correlation between the land’s fruitfulness and the Jews living there.
Even the Gaza Strip was known as Israel’s Greenhouse that produced a whopping 50% of all kosher food products for the whole land of Israel until Israel succumbed to international pressure and handed the land back over to the Palestinians.
Big mistake.
Afterwards, in a very short time, the production of food dropped to the point where they can’t even feed the small Palestinian population living there now.
The takeaway here is simple.
When you do things God’s way, blessings result.
When you don’t do things God’s way, curses result.
a small population in gaza? 2.5 Millions over just 300km2, that is misrepresenation.