“His wife said to him: ‘Why do you still hold fast to your integrity?

Curse God and die.’” (Job 2:9) (R.E.B)

When we are down on our luck — when the situation in which we find ourselves is not only uncomfortable and disappointing, humiliating and frustrating, but shattering to our religious faith as well, what do we do?

Do we react in anger with hostility? Do we curse our luck — blame somebody else for our trouble and disappointment: our spouse, or our children, or our business associates, or the President, or Congress, or — (heaven forbid) our God? When our world is going to pieces and everything seems to be against us, and nothing goes to suit us, what do we do?

This is the old familiar pattern of lots of people in trouble or pain, hurting, or mad. Our scripture lesson this morning dramatically pictures how Job’s wife felt when she and her husband had lost their seven sons and three daughters and all their property, and she watched her wonderful husband writhe with pain from the putrefying sores that covered his body. In angry exasperation she urged Job, saying: “Curse God and die.  Blame it all on the all powerful One who controls all things.”

But Job is filled with a different mood and will. He answers his wife saying: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.” Rather than meeting life’s adversities with hostility and cursing, even if the situation is filled with sorrow and loss and pain, Job chooses not cursing but blessing. “Curse God and die?” No, not Job. Rather, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

The Bible is filled with these two antinomies, or opposites: “Blessings” and “Cursings” — and we shall not travel very far through the scriptures’ wonderful revelations, nor move very wisely along our own spiritual pilgrimage with our God, our Eternal Contemporary, until we enter into a clear understanding of both “blessing” and “cursing”.

A “curse” in the Bible is the expression of a wish that evil may befall another — a malediction. A curse is a pointed vocal expression of hostility and ill-will. In the primitive society of early Israel, “curses” had two principle usages: First, “curses” were used as punitive or retributive measures against murderers, thieves, and any who broke the social agreements upon which the communal life was built. Second, “curses” were used as a protective device to safeguard a contractual agreement or covenant. As men might shake their hands over a trade and say: “Cursed be he who breaks this agreement”, or each in his turn would say: “May I be “accursed”, if I go back on my word”, or “May the lightning strike me dead, if I ever break this promise to you.”

Then, over against “curses” in the primitive Biblical society, there was set the opposite — “blessings”. The root meaning of the Hebrew word to “bless”, is “to bend the knee”, hence to “reverence, worship, or adore.” So, “blessing” is properly used only of God. And the Hebrew liturgy of the Psalms reverberates with the sound: “Blessed by the name of the Lord . . .Bless the Lord, O my soul.”

However, strange though it may seem, the Bible often speaks of this person, or that person as being “blessed”, when there is evidence of God’s favor resting upon that one.  “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly . . . Blessed is the man whose God is the Lord.”

So, in the Bible, when “blessed” is used of God it means: “God is worthy to be adored and worshiped for His goodness to His human children.” When “blessing” is used of people, the meaning is very different: they are reckoned “blessed”, fortunate, or happy, not because they are good, but because God has bestowed favor on them.

The basic Scripture for an understanding of the “blessings and cursings” of Israel’s cultic life is found in the book of Deuteronomy, Chapters 27 through 30. Here we find the setting for that dramatic event of Israel’s march into her promised land. On one side is Mount Ebal and on the other side, Mount Gerizim, and in between, a valley where flows the River Jordan, across which the people must go.

The paraphernalia for this outdoor religious and worship experience is clearly set forth in the Deuteronomy account. A stone altar is built at God’s command on Mount Ebal. On it are engraved all the words of the moral law God has given to Israel by his servant, Moses, revealing the moral character of Israel’s God.

The pageantry of the liturgy for this outdoor service is also set forth in the Deuteronomy narrative. On Mount Gerizim a Choir of priests are placed chanting the “blessings” of God upon an obedient people who keep His moral law and remain in close companionship with their covenanting God. And over against them on Mount Ebal, another priestly choir is pronouncing the “curse” of God upon a disobedient and rebellious people.

Then through the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, and across the Jordan, march the people of the Covenant, listening to the antiphonal voices of blessing and of cursing:

“Cursed be the man that maketh a graven image.”

“Cursed be he that removeth his neighbor’s land mark.”

“Cursed be he that perverteth the judgement of the stranger, the fatherless, the widow – ”

“Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbor secretly.”

But also resounding from Mount Gerizim antiphonally boom the blessings:

            “Blessed be the man that keepeth the words of this law.”

            “Blessed in the city and blessed in the field.”

“Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.”

While above all these sounds boom the voices of Moses, speaking for the Lord, and saying: “See, I have set before thee this day: life and death, good and evil; in that I have commanded thee to love the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways, and keep his commandments, that thou mayest live; and the Lord thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to possess it . . but if thy heart turn away so that thou wilt not hear, . . I denounce unto this day that ye shall surely perish. I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”  (Deuteronomy 30:15-19)

Israel’s experience at Mounts Ebal and Gerizim remain practically true for every nation of people moving on to possess their promised land. For in the physical universe there are so many ways to curse, so many ways to bless our life. In our time, scientists who are just beginning to explore the secrets of the mysterious atmosphere surrounding the earth, tell us that there is a filmy layer of ozone, many miles up, composed of 3 atom oxygen molecules. This filmy gaseous layer sheathing our spinning planet like a smoke ring, performs an invaluable role, they say, of straining out the powerful ultra violet rays of the sun — and that but for this smokey sheath of ozone, all life — of men and animals and plants — all life on earth, would be burned to a cinder.

So, all we human inhabitants of planet earth, can either in daily thankfulness praise God for his great mercy in providing the ozone’s blessed protection, or we can in our God-given freedom, strike out in hostile frustration with each other and with our God, exploding atomic bombs into the stratosphere and letting loose other ozone destroying gases, and obliterate earth’s sheath of ozone. Man can either curse God and die, or bless God and live.

So, also, in the concourse of nations, in our sociological and cultural structures of human society, the same can be said of that invisible, but real — that unsubstantial, filmy substance called the Moral Law of God. If preserved by a reverent and obedient humanity, it can hold together the harassed races and tribes of earth, but if rebelled against and blown to smithereens through disobedience, the vial of the outraged forces of this moral universe will be turned loose.

There is no situation, absolutely none, which the antinomy of “blessing and cursing” does not invade, whether it be our physical universe, or the moral environment of our human society, or our personal kingdoms.

“In the memoirs of Dr. John Brown there appears this entry: ‘We (children) were all three awakened by a cry of pain — sharp, insufferable, as if one were stung . . . We (children) found our father standing before us, erect, his hands clenched in his black hair, his eyes full of misery and amazement, his face white as that of the dead. He frightened us. He saw this (our fear), or else his intense will had mastered his agony, for taking his hands from his head, he said slowly and gently: “Let us give thanks,” and turned to a little sofa in the room; there lay our mother, dead. (So we knelt in prayer to give thanks for the blessed life of a beloved wife and mother.’” (The Interpreters Bible — Paul Scherer — Vol. 3 p. 918)

A mother once said to me: “I always prayed for my children every day, and I called them by name in the Lord’s presence as I offered my petitions for God’s blessing on each one. Then came the time,” she said, “when my oldest son died. I was given the strength to go through the funeral and the ordeal of those first few hours. But when I knelt to pray and came to the place in my prayers where I was accustomed to mention his name, I thought my heart would break with the desolation that overwhelmed me. But suddenly one day there came to me in my prayers, as if by inspiration, the words of the Psalmist: ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His Holy Name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.’ And so in my daily prayers since then, I have kept this practice and when I come to the place to pray for him among the others I say this verse. I can’t tell you what a comfort it has been.”

“There is a faith that stands. Stands in the (calm) peace of remembered good, in the confidence that back of all life’s riddles there is meaning, that over all its evil, there is God.” (Paul Scherer, Ibid.)

But how to meet life with “blessing” rather than “cursing”? How to automate the mood of natural man from angry hostility to grateful benediction? Will it take experiencing a little of the wrath of God for sins committed? Must we taste retribution before we will turn from “cursing” to “blessing”? No, I think not.

Pope John 23rd, that great, good man who has taught our sophisticated scientific age so much by his straight-forward, Christ-like simplicity, points us the way. From news releases after the Pope’s death, we learned that when he was Cardinal of Northern Italy and known as Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, he was having trouble with an alcoholic priest in his diocese.

Late one night the Cardinal tracked his errant priest to a dive where the irresponsible fellow was drinking and gambling. Ashamed and chagrined to be found out, the priest was mortified to hear his cardinal say that he had sought him out to ask him to hear the cardinal’s confession.

“Your Eminence,” stammered the priest, “I’m sorry, but I’ve been drinking. I can’t hear a confession in this condition.”

“Never mind,” said the cardinal. “Let me take that responsibility.”

So, before the drunken priest his cardinal knelt as a humble penitent to confess his sins. Then, before rising, the cardinal kissed the priest’s stole.

“There now,” said the cardinal, “You understand better who you are?”

And that priest, according to his cardinal, Angelo Roncalli, never drank again.

What the cardinal did for his wayward priest to turn him from a life of cursing to blessing, that, God the Father has done for us each one as he seeks us in the dark alleys and murky, smoke-filled dives of our perverted selfishness. In Christ, sacrificed for our sins, He comes to us to help us better understand who we are, by reminding us whose we are.

What is the way we are walking — past our Mounts Gerizim and Ebal? What is the mood in which we are encountering our life situations — with “blessing” or “cursing”?

Our mood is dependent on something that goes much deeper than the circumstances of the moment. Only if we are Christ’s and have His Spirit as our own permanent possession can we obey Christ’s word: “Bless them that persecute you, bless and curse not. Bless the Lord, O my soul!”