“Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.”

When you see people cursing another person, how do they typically feel?  Before you answer, realize that I distinguish cursing from cussing. The latter is foul speech that includes profanity, swearing, and gutter and bathroom talk.  The former is more specific. It means calling down God’s judgment. And even that calls for an example. Say someone breaks into your house and steals your flat screen TV or some other prized possession. Calling the cops and catching those responsible is important. You want justice to be administered and, if possible, your flat screen returned or replaced. That’s how it should be on earth.  But cursed?  To curse the thief is to call down God’s judgment on them, not man’s. You’re playing in the big league by cursing someone. You’re calling on a much higher authority.

When you think about it, what word better describes life on planet Earth than cursed? Consider all the natural disasters that have occurred, the diseases and illnesses that plague mankind, not to mention economic collapses and their attending hard times, disappointing test scores in school, the sales that didn’t happen, miscarried pregnancies, children who didn’t survive into adulthood, wars, crime, terrorism, friends that turn on each other, divorces, negative self-talk, suicides… Sounds like the evening news combined with People magazine, right?

We can’t say that we shouldn’t have seen it coming. Going all the way back in time as recorded in Genesis 3, we find the birth of our misery: Adam’s step into darkness. After God warned him in 2:17 about the effects of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (“you will surely die”), Adam opted to join his wife in eating that fruit with complete disregard for God’s word.  After the cover was blown off this cosmic crime, the first word out of God’s mouth in judgment was “cursed” (3:14). The serpent was cursed “above all the livestock and all the wild animals,” meaning that all the animals were cursed too, only not as bad as the serpent. Although “cursed” is not used for Eve, its conditions were. She had a similarly negative fallout: great increase in pain while birthing children. Adam didn’t escape either, because now the ground became cursed “because of” you (v. 17). Life on the most beautiful planet in the universe suddenly and completely became the most disastrous. As uninhabitable for human life on other planets is, life became unavoidably painful in a cursed universe for moral creatures made in the Creator’s image. And it stayed that way for millennia until Christ came to our infested and infected world. But God wasn’t done yet.

Beginning in Galatians 3:10, Paul explains in graphic detail the moral dilemma: “All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written [Deuteronomy 27:26]: ‘Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.’” In other words, Adam disobeyed only one command of God. Why do people today think they can keep ten? Paul continues (v. 11): “Clearly, no one is justified before God by the Law, because, ‘The righteous will live by faith’ [Habbakuk 2:4].” What does faith have to do with it?  Everything! Every relationship begins and ends with faith, or trust. Marriages don’t end when the love disappears; they break up when spouses can’t trust each other. Adam’s sin shows a breakdown in faith/trust. His disobedience shows who he trusted: himself instead of God.  That’s why obedience based on trusting one’s own capacity to obey never cuts it with God (v. 12): “The law is not based on faith: on the contrary, ‘The man who does these things will live by them.’” Complete obedience to the law, which is God’s requirement, is not only impossible, it also misses the necessary faith/trust in God.  That’s what finally brings us to verse 13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written [Deuteronomy 21:23]: ‘Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.’” The law’s purpose is to help us see that it is a totally fruitless venture to try to obey your way back to God. In this kind of directed frustration, it should show us we need to call out to him for mercy and forgiveness and compassion, things he just ‘happens’ to be full of! Without Christ coming to our cursed world, without him living a life of perfect obedience for us, without him who was free from the curse becoming the curse for us, without him receiving the full penalty for that curse by hanging on that tree (cross), we would still be one sad asterisk among billions of other sad asterisks of history, with a dark, painful, Christ-less eternity ahead of us with no escape possible or even imaginable. What other ‘god’ has done that for anyone?

Are you daily living by faith in our once-cursed Savior so others can find freedom from the curse?