Deuteronomy 11.26-28 offers, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing if you take to heart the commandments of the LORD your God that I am giving you today, and the curse if you pay no attention to his commandments and turn from the way I am setting before you today to pursue other gods you have not known.

God gets blamed for most of the bad things that happen in the world but if we thought about it very long we would recognize that most of the evil occurs because one human chooses to harm another human.

Every one of us resists being controlled by someone else yet we demand God control everyone else to keep them from harming us or those we love. God gives all of us a choice. We all have the freedom and the responsibility to choose our words and actions.

God’s perspective is that He is our owner and creator, as such we should choose to live in harmony with His design for us. He has provided an ‘owner’s manual,’ the Bible, so that we could live in sync with our design.

Failure to follow the manual leads to brokenness, misuse and eventually destruction. We see the truth of this everyday all around. Yet we continue to ignore and refuse to follow God’s good commands and curse Him for the trouble we experience.

What has He commanded us after all that is so terrible for us to obey? That we love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength which is practiced by loving our neighbor as our self. Think about these commands? Were everyone to follow them would the evil we read about daily occur in our world?

Yet we demand these commands not be taught in our schools, not acknowledged in the public square nor discussed in the marketplace. Instead we promote that which is against our nature, men becoming women and women becoming men to our own detriment. We murder the unwanted for our convenience and reap the guilt and pain. We sleep with whomever whenever and we experience disease and more pain. The list goes on.

The blessings and curses of God are so much and so often found in the simple consequences of our actions. Work hard in an honest manner for the welfare of others and receive promotion after promotion. Steal time and material from the employer and find yourself unemployed again and again.

God is good and His ways are best. His commands are simple yet they require us to deny ourselves by placing Him and others above our self.

If we live this way we will indeed find life good, full and happy but if we continue to live life according to our own selfish ends we will continue to find life hard, shallow and lonely.