Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we finished our fourth book of the Bible. We're 15% of the way through. And the even better

news is that you guys are pressing through on the days that are tough. You know there's still something to learn on those days and that even if you hit a dry patch,

tomorrow is a new day with new chapters. I'm really proud of you. We are many days into God's

conversation with Moses on Mount Sinai during Visit 2.0, and today we wrap up this book and this

conversation. Some of you are very excited to move into a new book, and others of you know that our next book is Numbers, and that does not make you excited. But I'm here to tell you that Numbers is one of my favorite books of the Bible. We're about to enter some of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. We do have to go through a few census details

before we get to those parts, but it will all be worth it, I promise. As God wraps up this covenant

conversation with Moses, he does something that's pretty standard for a covenant agreement. He sets

out the expectations for blessings and curses based on whether the covenant is kept or broken.

This was how most covenants

in that day were written, giving all these footnotes at the end. In God's words here, we see that

faithfulness to him is a big deal. If Israel remains faithful to his laws and keeps his Sabbath,

he will bless them in obvious ways, peace and abundance and security. And even though they'll still

have enemies, they'll have victory

over them. But if they don't stay faithful to him, he outlines five phases of curses that will

follow their rebellion. If at any point they repent, he won't execute the next phase. These phases

increase in intensity as they progress with the final phase being exile and scattering

from the land he promised to give them. There are a lot of other terrible things that come along with

this, too. Hearts full of fear and paranoia, defeat at the hands of foreign armies, a lack of food

so pronounced that it leads to cannibalism. And God says he will make their heavens like iron and their earth like

bronze, which is to say, the sky won't rain and the ground will be too hard to plant or grow food.

And it's in that setting that most of them would die, never returning from exile. And as a result

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