Who Is Our Worst Enemy?

In this week's Torah Portion, Ki Tavo כִּי־תָבוֹא (When You Come), based on Deuteronomy 26:01-29:08, we are reminded to serve Adonai with gladness in times of abundance. We are instructed not to forget His blessings so that we do not begin to ignore His laws and succumb to disasters. The first few sentences tell us about bringing forth our first fruits and presenting them before Elohim in a ritualistic way, so that we remember that we were slaves in Egypt (for Christians, we remember that we were slaves to the world and to sin). When we don't do this, we begin to think that all these blessings came to us because of our own hard work and effort. We forget Adonai, our God, and turn the blessings into curses. By neglecting where we came from, who delivered us, and why we are blessed, we endanger ourselves and become cursed. The practice of bringing Him our first fruits is there to keep us from thinking we are invincible without Him. That line of thinking brings these verses to my mind:

"What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?" Romans 8:31-35

The answer to all these questions is singular: our worst enemy. Only our worst enemy can separate us from the love of God. Only our worst enemy can be against us. Only our worst enemy can condemn us. Who might this worst enemy be? It isn't Satan or anyone in the world. Our worst enemies are ourselves. Yes, that's right. Only you can be your worst enemy when God is for you. That is because God gave us a gift called free will. He gave us a choice, and with that gift, we run the danger of cursing ourselves. In this Torah Portion, we are given a vivid image of what that danger and its consequences look like. It is not a pretty picture, and that is why people often avoid this portion of the Bible. Indeed, it is hard to read and even imagine. Here is the apex of these chapters' tragic illustration:

"Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of all your cities. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you—so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot—will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For in her dire need, she intends to eat them secretly because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of your cities. If you do not carefully follow all the words of this law, which are written in this book, and do not revere this glorious and awesome name—the Lord your God" Deuteronomy 28:53-58

Torah disobedience, something we take so lightly today, will bring times of such suffering that "the most gentle" among us will become cannibals, eat their young, and hide it from their loved ones, not because of shame, but because they don't want to share. Surely this is an allegory and the LORD doesn't mean it, right? It is hard to even imagine such a time on earth, but consider what Yeshua (Jesus) said about the end times that are still coming upon the earth:

"Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved." Matthew 10:21-22

"For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened." Matthew 24:21-22

When Jesus says, "there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now," you can begin to imagine times worse than have ever been on earth. Considering the misery we have seen and recorded in history, such as the bubonic plague in 1346, where 75-200 million people died, the war and Spanish flu in 1918, where 16 million died in the war and a subsequent 50-100 million died afterwards because of the flu, the horrors of World War II that included so much abomination of human abuse and experiments including the holocaust, and even the Great Depression on 1929 that led to countless lives loss because of violence and starvation. Can we imagine times worse than these? Well, the Torah helps us with vivid details of times that will come that will be so much worse than all these put together. Times described in this Torah Portion, in Matthew 24, and the book of Revelation, where we casually read, "a third of mankind was killed" (as in Revelation 9:18), without realizing that this is equivalent to a bit over 2 billion people as of today's estimated world population. We seldom read these books or squirm over them without thought because we don't want to open our eyes, or because we think we won't be here. But I say that we'd better open our eyes and prepare ourselves and be obedient so that we are spared from God's wrath because it isn't a matter of if they will come, but when they will come.

Which brings me to what is perhaps the most troubling revelation of these chapters: God is the one who will bring about this suffering on the earth. During the curses section of this Torah Portion, we see that the author of all this calamity is Adonai Himself:

"The Lord will send fearful plagues on you and your descendants, harsh and prolonged disasters, and severe and lingering illnesses. He will bring on you all the diseases of Egypt that you dreaded, and they will cling to you. The Lord will also bring on you every kind of sickness and disaster not recorded in this Book of the Law, until you are destroyed." Deuteronomy 28:59-61

Wrath is righteous indignation. When God's mercy comes to an end, the scales are balanced.

By choosing the curses, we turn ourselves into our worst enemy because we turn ourselves into God's enemy. If God is against you, who will deliver you from His wrath? When we face a formidable enemy, we can turn to our God, who is the Mightiest of all "gods," and He will deliver us. But who can we turn to when God is our enemy (or when we become His enemies by choice)? There is no salvation for those who rebel against the Almighty:

"But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed. God 'will repay each person according to what they have done.' To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism." Romans 2:5-11

Remember, the word wrath means "righteous anger," and God is judging righteously when He finally pours out His wrath upon the earth. So I conclude this with the same words of affirmation we were given by Moses at the end of this section:

"This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Free will is a gift, but choice comes with consequences. I pray you choose wisdom and choose to live according to His teachings, so the blessing will flow and you will be spared from His wrath that is set to come upon the earth. Shalom Ve'Shavuah Tov! I love you all.