The Horror! The Horror!
Deuteronomy 28:28-29
“The LORD will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind, and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways. …”
Consider that Moses didn’t write the Torah in the way a novelist like J.K. Rowling wrote her Harry Potter series. Moses didn’t publish Genesis first and wait a year or so to market it, then publish Exodus to gain more momentum, then publish Leviticus a year later, till, by the time Deuteronomy hit the press, readers were hooked. No, Moses wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy effectively as one book—the Law—with each new chapter proceeding from the former, each revelatory movement of the Spirit’s movement over the chaotic surface of the deep a progression from the first. That’s why assemblies in the time of David and Josiah will spend an entire day or even a few days reading the Torah from start to finish, not beginning in Leviticus 10 or Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 28 but in Genesis 1, where God’s first words, ‘Let there be light,’ set the tone for every word thereafter.
Why is that important here? Because Moses is consistently pointing us backwards to former chapters, re-using vivid allusions and metaphors from previous events to add greater weight to the current moment, sometimes even copying word-for-word from earlier instructions because he understands how forgetful these people are. So did you catch the article of previous reference in Deuteronomy 28:28-29, friend? We can’t miss it. Moses re-uses his graphic imagery from Genesis 19, where angels visiting Lot struck those sadistic men of Sodom and Gomorrah with blindness and left them groping around along the city walls. But that’s the irony, friend: the men were blind already. Sin had already driven these men mad. Unbridled lust had sent them groping blindly down the corridors of life long before angels put out their eyes.
That warning remains in effect still today, friend. The underlying pulse of this discomforting Deuteronomy 28 promise continues to reverberate. God isn’t so much threatening to blot out our eyes as He is warning us that sin will corrupt our vision: that if we choose to rebel against Him through unconfessed sin—for a day, for a week, for a month—we’ll become just like those fools of Sodom. Blind, crazed, and failures where it matters most.