The Curse Is Not the Final Word

The world is a confusing place.

We have a stubborn sense that life ought to be just. Children ought to be safe. The vulnerable ought to be protected. Truth ought to triumph over lies. Goodness ought to be rewarded, cruelty restrained, and God ought to be easier to recognize in the world He made.

Yet the world too often refuses to cooperate with these intuitions. And when it doesn’t, we are left bewildered.

In many ways the ancient world was even more bewildering than our own. Modern science and technology have not eliminated pain and suffering, but they have given us power over disease that our ancestors could scarcely have imagined: antibiotics, quality maternal care, safe and effective surgery, and the complete eradication of smallpox. These gifts have helped move death from the center of ordinary life toward the periphery of our consciousness.

But there are places and moments in which death and suffering move from the periphery and snap into focus. When they do, they feel like an intrusion into a world made for life. I remember the old cemetery, Mount Moriah, that served as a kind of boyhood playground where I grew up in Deadwood, South Dakota, United States. Like many frontier cemeteries, it bears witness to the world before modern medicine. There was an entire section devoted to children, most of them taken by smallpox. Little grave after little grave testified to the desperate grief of parents who did everything they knew to do and still watched their children slip away. How many tears must have watered the soil beneath the soaring ponderosa pines of Mount Moriah?

Those small graves speak to a world that prevailed through most of human history. A world in which death was nearer, medicine was weaker, and sorrow entered ordinary homes with horrifying regularity.

Clarity Amid Confusion

The world into which the Old Testament prophets spoke was desperately confusing. It was filled with pervasive violence, a dizzying array of disease, disability, and destruction. Empires rose and fell, ravaging God’s people and often dragging survivors into the agony of exile.

The confusion of that world was compounded by a pantheon of regional gods, each contending for attention, each offering explanations, each promising answers in a bewildering world. God sent prophets into this confusing reality because the world is not self-interpreting. Was the Flood a natural disaster? Had nature gone mad? Or was the Flood a result of the fury of an angry God who drowns the world on a whim?

Notice the precise shape of the problem. It was not that there were no explanations. It was that there were too many. Humanity was lost in a sea of explanations, and without prophetic revelation we couldn’t be confident which of those, if any, were true.

The prophets maintained that the world’s suffering was an intrusion, not God’s intention.

The Flood was just water waiting for an interpretation until the prophet revealed that humanity had become irrevocably committed to violence and that the judgment of the Flood was an expression of grief and God’s refusal to let universal cruelty have the last word over a world He had blessed (Gen. 1:22, 28; 2:3; 6:6, 11, 13).

And what the prophetic narrator did with the Flood, the prophets did with everything. Amid the chaos and confusion, they provided clarity anchored in God’s commitment to humanity. They announced that God’s creational blessings were the world’s origin and its destiny. Sin was the detour. The promise to send a Messiah was the road back. The prophets were sent to keep a forgetful people facing home—to remind them where they came from, where they were going, and how they would get there.

So the prophets reached back to creation because that was where the world became comprehensible. Humanity was welcomed into Eden, a garden of delight, filled with blessing alone. God blessed the creatures of the sea and sky with life and fruitfulness (Gen. 1:22). He blessed the man and the woman (verse 28). He blessed the seventh day and filled it with His own presence and rest (Gen. 2:1-3). This was the world as it actually was—life, fruitfulness, rest, and the nearness of God—“very good” indeed (Gen. 1:31). The prophets insisted that if you wanted to know what the world was, you first needed to know what it had been (Isa. 51:3; 65:17; Eze. 36:35).

By the third chapter of Genesis, the detour had arrived. At the prompting of the serpent’s hermeneutic of suspicion, humanity saddled the earth with a curse by distrusting the One who blessed. Natural fecundity gave way to thorns and thistles. The blessing of birth was burdened with suffering. The joy of reciprocity was twisted with blame and domination (Gen. 3:1-16).

In the chaos that followed, the prophet’s role was vital. The prophets maintained that the world’s suffering was an intrusion, not God’s intention. The curse was real, but it was a trespasser. This single conviction was what separated the prophets from every rival interpreter in the crowded marketplace of meaning. For the others, suffering was simply how the world was, the way of things, the temper of the gods. The prophets insisted it was a wound in something originally whole.

Mapping the Promise

But the prophets not only looked back. Once the curse entered the story, they also looked forward to the promised descendant who would break the curse and renew creation. Eve would have a descendant who would crush the head of the serpent, the source of all this suffering (Gen. 3:15).

As Eve’s descendants multiplied, the promise and the question it raised became more specific: Through which family would this promised descendant come? The answer began with Abraham.

God promised to restore the blessing through Abram’s descendants: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3). God was not exempting Abram from the pain of the Fall, nor was He blessing one family to the exclusion of all others. He was choosing Abram’s family as His vehicle for healing the world. The blessing given to Abram would overflow to all families of the earth through Abram’s promised seed.

The prophets mapped that promise from generation to generation. They spoke from within a particular moment and, with their own unique voice, traced the same messianic hope. The journey progressed through Isaac and Jacob, narrowed to Judah, from whom the scepter would not depart, and then to David, to whom God promised a son whose throne would be established forever (Gen. 49:10; 2 Sam. 7:12-16).

The God the prophets revealed has been radically committed to blessing and healing the world from the beginning.

Even when the monarchy collapsed, the temple crumbled, and the unrelenting agony of exile seemed to last forever, the prophets kept the promise alive. Isaiah saw a child born, a son given, seated on David’s throne, and a shoot from the stump of Jesse whose Spirit-filled reign was so suffused with justice that creation itself was restored and overflowed with its original blessing (Isa. 9:6, 7; 11:1-9). Jeremiah announced a righteous Branch who would reign wisely and do justice in the land (Jer. 23:5, 6). Ezekiel, peering past the rubble of Jerusalem, heard God promise one shepherd, “My servant David,” who would feed the flock forever (Eze. 34:23, 24; 37:24, 25). And Micah pointed to little Bethlehem and a ruler whose “goings forth are from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2-4).

The prophets were unflinching in their denunciation of the violence, injustice, and idolatry that saturated the world in suffering. Yet they could tell the truth about evil without surrendering to despair. Under the power of the Spirit, they taught God’s people how to see the world truthfully. They unveiled the source of suffering and evil. More than that, they celebrated and hoped in the merciful and gracious, slow-to-anger God who abounds in steadfast love and faithfulness, who would never abandon His unwavering creational commitment to bless humanity.

The God the prophets revealed has been radically committed to blessing and healing the world from the beginning.

Hope Converging

All of God’s faithfulness and all of the prophets’ hopes converged in one man—Jesus Christ. He was the promised descendant. He was the Son of Abraham and the Son of David (Matt. 1:1). He was the seed through whom the blessing comes to the nations (Gal. 3:16).

When the promised descendant finally arrived, all the prophets’ promises found their yes in Him (2 Cor. 1:20). Jesus was the goal toward which the Torah was always moving (Rom. 10:4). After the resurrection, Jesus opened the Scriptures to His disciples and taught them that “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44, ESV). The prophets were doing more than predicting isolated events. They were keeping God’s people oriented toward the One in whom creation’s blessing would return, the curse would be broken, evil would be judged, and the nations would be healed.

This is why we still need the prophets.

Our world is different from theirs, but not less confusing. We have better medicine, but we still bury children; more information, but not necessarily more wisdom. We have extraordinary technology, but the old sins remain: violence, greed, exploitation, idolatry, oppression, deception, and despair. The gods have changed names, but they still offer rival interpretations of the world. Power says history belongs to the strong. Consumerism says blessing is accumulation. Cynicism says hope is naive. Despair says nothing will ever be healed.

The prophets answer all of them.

They reveal what God sees. They tell the truth about good and evil. They keep hope alive by reminding us that the world began in blessing and will end in blessing. The curse is real, but it is not ultimate. Evil is terrible, but it is not eternal. The serpent wounds, but his head will be crushed. The nations rage, but the Son of David reigns. The graves are real, but resurrection is more real still.

One day the tears that watered the soil at Mount Moriah Cemetery and cemeteries the world over will finally be dried. The confusion the prophets so earnestly sought to clarify will be forever banished. The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea, and He will bring about the restoration of all things promised through the prophets (Hab. 2:14; Acts 3:21). This is the prophetic trajectory. This is our hope.