Auntie Remi had sewn wedding outfits in Surulere for almost thirty years. Her little shop had a hand-painted sign, two industrial machines and a wall of fabric that brides’ mothers came from as far as Ibadan to choose from. She had raised three children from that shop, and now she was paying the school fees of a grandson whose parents were struggling.
Then everything seemed to go wrong in the same season. Her biggest customer, a family who had booked outfits for a large wedding, cancelled without paying for the fabric already cut. One of the machines broke and the part had to be ordered from abroad. Her blood pressure went up and the doctor told her to rest. To keep the grandson in school, she had stopped bringing her tithe to church for four months.
One evening a well-meaning woman from her fellowship sat with her in the shop and told her what she believed was wrong. “Mummy, you know the Bible says it. If you do not pay your tithe, you are cursed with a curse.”
Auntie Remi went home and did something she had never done before. She sat at her dining table with a yellow highlighter and read Deuteronomy 28 from beginning to end. Every curse that seemed to match her life, she marked. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Yellow. Cursed shalt thou be in the city. Yellow. By the time she reached the end of the chapter, the page was glowing, and so was the fear in her chest. She came to see me after a midweek service, holding the Bible open at that page, and asked quietly, “Pastor, is God punishing me?”
That question deserves a careful and honest answer, and so do the many believers who have asked something like it. Her problem was not a lack of faith or a lack of love for God’s word. She loved the Bible enough to read it at midnight. Her problem was that she had read it without knowing which covenant she was standing in.
Every verse is true, but not every verse is addressed to you in the same way
Let me start with an example from the life of Jesus that nobody disputes. When Jesus first sent out the twelve apostles, He gave them a very specific instruction:
These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
“Go not into the way of the Gentiles.” If you lifted that sentence out of its place and applied it directly to the church today, you would have to close down every mission to every nation outside Israel. Yet after His resurrection the same Jesus told the same disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19).
Both instructions are inspired. Both are true. Neither is an embarrassment. But they belong to different stages of God’s purpose, and something enormous happened between them: the cross, the resurrection, and the authority given to the risen Christ. A faithful reader honours both by hearing each one where God placed it.
That is the whole principle of reading without covenant confusion. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable” (2 Timothy 3:16). All of it. But being profitable for me is not the same as being addressed to me in exactly the same terms as its first hearers. Paul himself says that the things written in the Old Testament “were written for our learning” (Romans 15:4) and that they were written “for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:11). We learn from them. We are warned and encouraged by them. But we read them as people who live after the cross, under a new covenant sealed in the blood of Jesus.
So whenever a passage troubles or confuses us, a few simple questions help. Who is speaking? To whom? Under which covenant? What has God done in Christ since these words were spoken? And how do the apostles, who lived on this side of the cross, apply this kind of passage to believers? These questions do not weaken the authority of the Bible. They help us hear it accurately.
The curses of Deuteronomy and the cross
Let us go back to Auntie Remi’s dining table. Here is part of what she highlighted:
But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.
These are sobering words, and they are the word of God. But who were they spoken to? Deuteronomy tells us. “These are the words of the covenant, which the LORD commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab” (Deuteronomy 29:1). Deuteronomy 28 is part of the covenant God made with the nation of Israel as they prepared to enter the promised land. The blessings were national and agricultural: rain in its season, fruitful fields, victory over enemies. The curses were national too: drought, defeat, famine and finally exile. Israel’s history in the books of Kings and the prophets is largely the story of these curses coming to pass as the nation turned away from God.
The chapter is still profitable for us. It shows that God takes covenant faithfulness seriously. It reveals that sin has consequences, and that a people cannot walk away from God without loss. We would be foolish to read it lightly.
But the New Testament tells us something decisive about the believer’s relationship to the curse of the law:
Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.” Paul is quoting Deuteronomy itself here (Deuteronomy 21:23). The curse that the law pronounced on disobedience fell on Jesus as He hung on the cross. He took the curse into Himself. And He did it “That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”
PunchlineThat means a believer in Christ cannot be under the curse of Deuteronomy 28. Jesus took that curse. To say otherwise is to suggest that His redemption was incomplete.
This needs a careful guard-rail, because some people take it too far. Being redeemed from the curse does not mean a believer will never face hardship. Christians lose jobs, fall ill, grieve and struggle. Jesus told His disciples plainly, “In the world ye shall have tribulation” (John 16:33). Nor does it mean that our choices have no consequences. Paul warns believers, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). A man who mismanages his business will often see it struggle. A woman who ignores her doctor’s advice may become ill. Those are the ordinary consequences of living in a fallen world, and wisdom teaches us to address them.
But hardship and consequence are not the same as covenant curse. When trouble comes, a believer may need to ask honest questions. Is there wisdom I have ignored? Is there sin I need to confess? Is there practical help I need? But he does not need to conclude that God has placed him under the curse from which Christ redeemed him. The cross settled that question.
Malachi, the storehouse and the cheerful giver
Auntie Remi’s specific fear came from a passage that is probably preached in Nigerian churches more often than almost any other Old Testament text:
Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it .
We must handle this passage with both faithfulness and fairness, because sincere believers hold different views on the tithe, and many godly people find it a helpful pattern for their giving. Some point out that Abraham gave a tenth to Melchizedek long before the law was given: “And he gave him tithes of all” (Genesis 14:20). Others note that the New Testament never commands a tithe for the church. I am not writing to tell anyone to stop giving, and I am certainly not writing to discourage support for the local church. My concern here is the curse.
Look at the setting. Malachi prophesied to Judah after the exile, when the temple had been rebuilt and the nation was again living under the covenant of Moses. The priests were offering blind and sick animals on the altar (Malachi 1:8). The Levites, who depended on the tithe for their food under the law, had been abandoned. Nehemiah, writing about the same period, says, “And I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been given them” (Nehemiah 13:10). The storehouse was a literal storeroom in the temple, where grain and produce were kept to feed the Levites, the poor and the stranger. And the curse in Malachi 3:9 is addressed to “this whole nation,” a people under the covenant blessings and curses of Deuteronomy.
In other words, Malachi 3 is a covenant passage about a covenant nation, and the curse it speaks of is the curse of the law, which Christ bore on the cross. To tell a believer that God has cursed her for missing her tithe while paying a child’s school fees is to place her back under a curse from which Jesus redeemed her.
So how does the New Testament teach giving? Generously, joyfully and from the heart:
But this I say , He which soweth sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully. Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give ; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things , may abound to every good work.
“Not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.” Paul is not lowering the standard here. Many believers who give from grace give far more than ten percent. The early Christians in Jerusalem sold property to care for one another. The Macedonians gave “beyond their power” out of deep poverty (2 Corinthians 8:3). Grace produces radical generosity. But it produces it as the response of a heart that has received, and not as a payment to avoid a curse.
Notice the last verse of that passage too. “And God is able to make all grace abound toward you.” The motive for giving and the confidence in God’s provision both rest on grace. A cheerful giver is someone who trusts that the Father will supply.
“Take not thy holy spirit from me”
A different kind of covenant confusion can trouble a believer in prayer. Many of us have sung or prayed David’s words after his sin with Bathsheba:
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
This is one of the most beautiful prayers of repentance ever written, and the church has prayed it for three thousand years. David’s honesty, his longing for a clean heart and his desire for restored joy are a model for every believer who has sinned.
But consider what David was afraid of when he prayed, “take not thy holy spirit from me.” He had seen it happen. When Saul was rejected as king, Scripture says, “But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul” (1 Samuel 16:14). Under the old covenant, the Spirit came upon particular people, usually kings, prophets and judges, to equip them for a task. That anointing could be withdrawn. David had watched Saul lose it and descend into torment, and he was terrified that the same would happen to him.
Now listen to what Jesus promised His disciples on the night before He died: “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever” (John 14:16). For ever. Under the new covenant the Spirit dwells within every believer, permanently, and not only for a task. Paul says believers were “sealed with that holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:13), and he describes the Spirit as the One “whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30).
That last verse is worth reading in full, because it holds two truths together: “And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.” The Spirit can be grieved. Sin matters to Him, and a believer who persists in sin will lose the joy and closeness of fellowship. David’s prayer, “Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation,” is entirely appropriate for a Christian who has sinned. But the same verse says the believer is sealed until the day of redemption. The Spirit is grieved. He does not leave.
So you may pray Psalm 51 with all your heart. Ask God to create a clean heart in you. Ask Him to restore your joy. But you do not need to pray it with David’s terror, as though the Spirit might pack His bags and walk out. Jesus said He would abide with you for ever. Some believers who love this psalm will continue to pray its words just as they are, as an expression of longing for God’s presence, and that is between them and the Lord. What matters is that the prayer is offered from confidence in His promise rather than from fear that He will break it.
Fire from heaven and the Saviour’s rebuke
NuggetThere is another area where covenant confusion does real damage, and it is in how we pray about people who have wronged us.
A young man I will call Deji came to see me after a difficult year at work. A senior colleague had taken credit for his project, spoken against him to management and blocked his promotion. Deji was hurt and angry, and he had joined a group that met every Friday night to pray what they called “fire prayers.” They quoted the psalms against their enemies and commanded fire to fall on anyone working against them. Deji told me that some nights he went home feeling powerful. Other nights he went home feeling sick.
The disciples once wanted to pray that kind of prayer. Luke tells us what happened:
And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this , they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them . And they went to another village.
James and John were not inventing the idea. They had a biblical precedent. Elijah had called down fire on soldiers sent by a wicked king: “And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty” (2 Kings 1:10). The disciples knew their Bible. They simply asked whether Jesus would like them to do what Elijah did.
And Jesus “turned, and rebuked them.” Some ancient manuscripts do not include the full wording of what He said next, but every manuscript records the rebuke. In the King James text, His words are piercing: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:55-56). Then they quietly went to another village.
What about the psalms that call down judgement on enemies? They are part of inspired Scripture, and we should not tear them out. A psalm like Psalm 109, with its prayer “Let his days be few; and let another take his office” (Psalm 109:8), teaches us that we can bring our rage and our experience of injustice honestly to God. It also shows the psalmist handing vengeance to the Lord instead of taking it himself. Believers across the history of the church have read these psalms in different ways, some praying them as cries for God’s justice against evil itself, others reading them as honest records of anguish to be brought to the cross. Those are serious views held by serious people.
But the apostles tell believers how to treat those who wrong them personally: “Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not” (Romans 12:14). And Jesus said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” (Matthew 5:44). We may still pray for justice. We may still take wise action, report wrongdoing at work, involve the authorities when someone is in danger, and protect ourselves and others from harm. The New Testament never asks a victim to stay silent. But the believer leaves vengeance with God: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19).
Deji stopped going to the Friday group. He started praying for his colleague by name, often through gritted teeth. He also wrote a careful, factual account of his work and took it to the head of his department. The promotion came eighteen months later, in a different department. He told me the bigger change was that he could sleep again.
Peter on the rooftop
If you have read this far and felt uncomfortable, you are in good company. One of the apostles needed God’s direct intervention before he could read his own Bible in the light of what Christ had done.
In Acts 10, Peter was praying on a rooftop in Joppa when he saw a vision of a great sheet let down from heaven, full of animals the law of Moses called unclean. A voice told him to kill and eat. Peter refused, because he had never eaten anything unclean in his life. The voice answered, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common” (Acts 10:15). It happened three times.
Peter did not understand the vision at once. Then men arrived from the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion, asking him to come. Peter went, and when he walked into that Gentile home he explained what God had taught him: “Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean” (Acts 10:28). While he was still preaching, the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles who were listening.
Peter was sincere, devout and loyal to Scripture. Yet he was reading through a covenant distinction that God had now fulfilled in Christ, and it took a vision, a visit and an outpouring of the Spirit to adjust his reading.
That should make every one of us humble. It is easy to admire Peter’s lesson while assuming that our own familiar readings need no examination. A church may hold onto a particular use of a passage simply because it has always done so. Familiarity deserves respect, and we should never treat those who taught us with contempt. Many of them loved God deeply and gave their lives to His service. But familiarity cannot take the place of careful reading. The God who corrected Peter was bringing him more fully into the truth of the gospel, and nothing good was lost in the process.
PunchlineCovenant clarity does not close any part of your Bible. It opens the whole of it, so that you can read every page as someone redeemed by Christ.
Keep the whole Bible open
There is a danger on the other side, and I want to name it clearly. Some believers, once they discover the difference between the covenants, close most of the Old Testament altogether. They treat it as a historical curiosity with nothing to say to Christians. That is a serious mistake, and it is not what the apostles did.
The New Testament writers quoted the Old Testament constantly. Paul took the command to honour parents straight from the Ten Commandments and applied it to children in the church at Ephesus: “Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;)” (Ephesians 6:2). Hebrews took a promise God made to Joshua and gave it to every believer: “for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). The Psalms still teach us to pray. The Proverbs still teach us wisdom about work, money, speech and marriage. The prophets still reveal God’s heart for justice and His anger at the oppression of the poor. The stories of Abraham, Joseph, Ruth and David still show us what faith looks like in real lives.
So covenant clarity does not ask, “Can I throw this passage away?” It asks, “How does this passage speak to me now that Christ has come?” Here are some habits that help:
- Read the whole passage, not just the verse. Notice the speaker, the hearers and the situation.
- Ask which covenant the passage belongs to, and what God was doing at that stage of the story.
- Ask what the passage reveals about God’s character, about human sin and need, and about the coming Saviour.
- Look at how the New Testament handles similar passages, and let the apostles guide your application.
- Where a promise or warning was given to a nation under the law, ask how it has been fulfilled in Christ before applying it to your situation.
With those habits, you can read a warning without assuming your place in Christ has vanished. You can read a promise without forcing it to guarantee an unrelated desire. You can honour the earlier witness with gratitude while living in the access the Son has opened.
Auntie Remi and I sat in the church office for a long time that evening. We read Deuteronomy 28 together, and I showed her the words of the covenant in chapter 29. Then we turned to Galatians 3:13 and read it three times. The third time, she read it aloud herself, slowly, with her finger under each word. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.”
She took out her highlighter, looked at it for a moment, and then highlighted that verse instead.
Her business did not recover overnight. The broken machine took two more months to fix, and she had to sell some of her fabric at a loss. Her doctor still had to manage her blood pressure. But she stopped reading every setback as a sentence from heaven. When things improved, she began giving again, and she told me with a laugh that she now gives more than before, “because nobody is frightening me into it.”
A few months later I visited the shop. On the wall above her machines, beside the fabric, was a small card in her handwriting. It said: Galatians 3:13. I am not cursed. I am redeemed.
Read your Bible the way she now reads hers. Read all of it, from Genesis to Revelation. Let every page teach you, warn you and strengthen you. But read it as someone who stands on the far side of the cross, where the curse has been carried and the blessing has been given.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Is there a passage of Scripture that has troubled you because you were not sure whether it applied to you? What questions from this teaching might help you read it more clearly?
- How does Galatians 3:13-14 change the way you interpret hardship in your life? What questions would still be wise to ask when difficulty comes?
- What motivates your giving at present: fear, habit, obligation, or a cheerful response to grace?
- Have you prayed Psalm 51:11 in fear? How does John 14:16 speak to that fear?
- How do you pray about people who have wronged you? What would it look like to seek justice without seeking vengeance?
This Week
This week, choose one Old Testament passage that has caused you confusion or fear. Read the whole chapter and write down who is speaking, who is being addressed and under which covenant. Then look up how the New Testament speaks about the same theme. Finally, write one sentence describing how the passage speaks to you as a believer in Christ, and thank God for what it reveals about Him.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for every page of Your word. Forgive me for the times I have read it in fear, placing myself under curses Your Son has already carried. Thank You that Christ redeemed me from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for me. Thank You that Your Spirit will abide with me for ever. Teach me to read the whole Bible with understanding, as Peter learned to read it on the rooftop. Make me a cheerful giver and a blessing to those who have wronged me. Keep the cross at the centre of my reading. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.