Future blessing

28 Now if you really obey the Lord your God’s voice, by carefully keeping all his commandments that I am giving you right now, then the Lord your God will set you high above all nations on earth. ² All these blessings will come upon you and find you if you obey the Lord your God’s voice:

¹¹ The Lord will make good things abound for you—whether the fertility of your womb, your livestock’s offspring, or your fertile soil’s produce—on the very land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give to you. ¹² The Lord will open up for you his own well-stocked storehouse, the heavens, providing your land with rain at just the right time and blessing all your work. You will lend to many nations, but you won’t have any need to borrow. ¹³ The Lord will make you the head of things, not the tail; you will be at the top of things, not the bottom, as long as you obey the Lord your God’s commandments that I’m commanding you right now, by carefully doing them. ¹⁴ Don’t deviate even a bit from any of these words that I’m commanding you right now by following other gods and serving them.

Future curses

¹⁵ But if you don’t obey the Lord your God’s voice by carefully doing all his commandments and his regulations that I am commanding you right now, all these curses will come upon you and find you.

²⁰ The Lord will send calamity, confusion, and frustration on you no matter what work you are doing until you are wiped out and until you disappear—it’ll be quick!—because of the evil acts by which you have abandoned him.^{[a] 21} The Lord will make a plague stick to you until he has totally wiped you off the fertile land you are entering to possess. ²² The Lord will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation; with scorching heat and drought;^[b] with destruction and disease for your crops.^[c] These things will chase you until you are dead and gone. ²³ The sky over your head will be as hard as bronze; the earth under your feet will be like iron. ²⁴ The Lord will turn the rain on your land into dust. Only dirt will fall down on you from the sky until you are completely wiped out. ²⁵ The Lord will hand you over defeated to your enemies. You will go out against them by one direction, but you will run for your life away from them in seven different directions. All the earth’s kingdoms will be horrified by you. ²⁶ Your corpses will be food for every bird in the sky and animal on earth; no one will frighten them off.