The unforgivable curses

or when it's not a curse; it's just (fallen) life

Sometimes at church I get asked questions that I can’t answer right away. If they are in a text, I open them and read them and then mark them unread so that I don’t forget to come back.¹ Other times, I look someone in the eye and ask them to give me a day or two. I want to reflect on people’s questions about God and the world thoughtfully and prayerfully. It doesn’t always make my responses right, but it definitely makes them less wrong.

Writing is how I think so this process usually involves me making bullet points and starting rambling paragraphs, writing 1,000 words and looking a few things up, deleting and erasing and feeling really glad that I didn’t respond with the first thing that came to mind. I’m almost always able to return to the conversation with a few guidelines and some questions.² Because the writing is already started, I’ve determined to let these questions be the basis of some longer writing. Here’s the first one. The most recent question I received is about the curse and I don’t mean avada kedavra.

If the patriarchy is part of the curse and Jesus’ death and resurrection broke the curse- why do we also still see the effects of all the other pieces of the curse?? Like childbearing? 

I’ve said for years that we should not say that women and men were cursed, not even in what we call the fall.³ The ground was cursed, yes. The serpent was cursed. But that language is not used when God speaks to man and woman and I believe that is significant.⁴ The woman and the man now find themselves living in a very different world, a world where sin and death and evil have a hold over them. Every part of life is still affected by this. This is why I wear glasses. Why there are wars across the earth. Why we gossip about our neighbors behind their backs. Why there are cemeteries. Why systems work in ways that beat people down instead of cultivating human flourishing. This is the world (minus the glasses) where God’s people found themselves when the Torah was being written.⁵ “Why on earth is the world this way?” is one of the questions being answered. 

Curse language and the people of God⁶

Curse language is used in regards to the people of God keeping the covenant they had made with God. They were promised blessing for faithful living and curses for breaking their side of the covenant.⁷ You can find these blessings and curses in Deuteronomy 27-30. Isaiah 24 highlights what happens in the land among the people when they do not remain faithful to representing YHWH in the world and they experience the curse. (This point is going to tie in later.)

While it is common language even in songs to talk about Jesus breaking the curse, we often misinterpret what that means because of our understanding of “the curse.” We often refer to the curse of sin and we usually mean separation from God and sometimes death as well (see this article from Desiring God for an example). Then when we say that Jesus has broken the curse of sin, we mean that Jesus makes it possible for us to come back to right relationship with God, and one day, even death will be reversed. And that I agree with, though “curse” seems to confuse our understanding of what we mean.

Jesus and the curse

For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, because it is written, ‘Everyone who does not do everything written in the book of the law is cursed.’ Now it is clear that no one is justified before God by the law, because the righteous will live by faith. But the law is not based on faith; instead, the one who does these things will live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, because it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” The purpose was that the blessing of Abraham would come to the Gentiles by Christ Jesus so that we could receive the promised spirit through faith.

Galatians 3:10-14 

This is the most explicit passage about Jesus and the curse and it really starts a completely different conversation. N.T. Wright insists that Paul is not arguing here that people can now be freed from the “guilt, penalty, and power of sin” though he would agree that Jesus’ death accomplished that. This passage is instead the story that Jesus becoming a curse is how the blessing of Abraham flowed into the world.⁸

The world as it is

Genesis 3 tells us about the problems of life. I don’t mean existentially about life; I mean life in particular. Life in the form of food from the ground and life in the form of creating children.⁹ Go watch this Bible Project video about childbirth. It is important to the conversation.¹⁰ We need to stay painfully close to the text as we consider “the curse.” It says “The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.” This is specifically about the curse on the ground and how difficult it will be to get food from that cursed ground. We do ourselves a disservice if we decide this means that men have to work to support the family—it doesn’t say that.¹¹ We also should not decide that it means that work is cursed—it doesn’t talk about “work” as a general category at all (though I would argue that humans suffer in their work because of the fall and that also applies to women). Particularly these questions are the questions that people struggling to survive—who knew hunger and who struggled to have children—would have been asking. The issue of patriarchy (and I would argue the issue of all oppression) would also have been very noticeable. It would have been part of daily life and it seems possible that these beginning stories of Scripture make it obvious that this was not God’s plan. We see it as an injustice because it is an injustice. We are puzzled and frustrated at how the world works because it is not how God designed it.

We know these were not God’s plan because as soon as the people enter a covenantal relationship with God these specific items are addressed. The covenantal blessings include blessings on the crops and the children. The rights of women are protected, though we struggle to read the law that way. God is already inviting His people into a new way of being human, before Jesus, simply because that reflects who God is. God ties how we treat other people—including women because women are people—to whether or not we love God. It is at the center of the law (Lev 18). The law addresses these big questions of life that we often (mistakenly) refer to as “the curse.”

None of that invitation into covenant, into a new way of being human, even into the redemption of the world means that we no long live with the effects of a fallen world. It’s still hard to grow food and find enough food to survive, though we are very shielded from that reality in middle and upper class America. There are substantial issues with conceiving. Please, again, go watch the Bible Project video. We still die. We need glasses. We get cancer.  We oppress other people because of class or gender or race. Patriarchy is the dominant social reality even today. That doesn’t make any of those things God’s plan. Part of entering into covenant with God means learning new ways to live. We treat women with the same dignity we offer men. We share our resources so that we aren’t accumulating more and more while our neighbors suffer.¹² We use our knowledge and progress to make glasses, to treat cancer, to keep people from dying as soon, to perform c-sections, to grow more food and preserve the food for winter. 

This paradoxical place is our exile until we live forever with God, beyond death and beyond evil. And while we can be made right with God—praise the name of Jesus!—and while we should live in new ways as the people of God, we still inhabit a world that is broken and we ourselves experience brokenness. 

For the creation was subjected to futility—not willingly, but because of him who subjected it—in the hope that the creation itself will also be set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now. Not only that, but we ourselves who have the Spirit as the first fruits—we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

Romans 8:20-23

We are waiting.¹³ Waiting for the world to be made new. Waiting to be completely new ourselves.¹⁴ All shall be well. One day.

Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing fro the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s Main Street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for healing the nations, and there will no longer by any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on his foreheads. Night will be no more; people will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, because the Lord God will give them light, and they will begin forever and ever.¹⁵

Revelation 22:1-5

1. If I’m going to linger more than a day, I’ll let them know I need more time. But I actively work to not set the expectation that I answer texts immediately. (Obviously, not for important work issues or with my family and close friends.)

2. I give people advice and ultimatums less and less. (It does happen with my job. Sometimes we just cannot do something.) Instead, I want to pull out consistent threads I hear in people’s stories. I want to ask thoughtful questions and leave room for the Spirit to work. I want to offer alternative ways of looking at things.

3. This language is ALL OVER THE PLACE.

4. It also seems like a best practice to not take what’s not there and build doctrines from it.

5. Actually it was way worse. They didn’t have antibiotics or c-sections or freezers or emergency rooms. You get the point.

6. Curse language could be a whole book. I am only pulling forward a few highlights.

7. The covenant and the law came after God had brought the people out of slavery. Their part of the covenant was supposed to be kept from gratitude that God loved them and rescued them, not so that God would love and accept them.

8. He went on to say that it was the torah that stood in the way of Israel conveying the blessing to the world. The torah was a curse to those who did not obey it. (See much of Israel’s story.) N.T. Wright, Galatians, Eerdmans, 2021.

9. One day, I would love to write my Ph.D. dissertation specifically on this.

10. Really go watch it. I’m not going to attempt to break this part down. This post is already so long.

11. I have so much more to say specifically about this and I am trying not to clutter the conversation.

12. Or we should be doing this if we’re not.

13. Not “waiting” in the sense that we sit and twiddle our thumbs. We already talked about how our faith in Jesus should change how we live.

14. See 1 John 3:2.

15. This makes me consider that God created light before God created the sun. See Genesis 1.