Day 19: Jesus exhausted on your behalf the poverty curse

“Because you did not serve the LORD your God with joy and a glad heart, for the abundance of all things, therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD shall send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in the lack of all things; and He will put an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you.” (Deuteronomy 28: 48, NAS)

Deuteronomy 28 calls poverty a curse and shows abundance to share with others is a blessing of God. This understanding of the material blessings due to obedience to God, and the material curses that result from disobedience was, brought home to me personally in a very vivid way, a way I shall never forget.

I was preaching in the country of New Zealand and I was teaching on God's financial provision for His people. I had my note outline prepared and I was following through with it, but while I was speaking from my note outline, inwardly in my mind I was seeing something I'd never seen before.

I was seeing a mental picture of Jesus as He hung there on the cross atoning for our sins. And as I unfolded the full extent of the poverty curse: hunger, thirst, nakedness and the lack of all things, it was as if the Holy Spirit was pointing to Jesus on the cross as He hung there, and showing me that every one of those four conditions that make up total poverty was fulfilled in the person of Jesus as He hung on the cross.

He was hungry, he hadn't eaten for nearly 24 hours.

He was thirsty. One of His last utterances on the cross was "I thirst."

He was naked, and let no pretty religious pictures ever deceive you about that. The Scripture states that the soldiers that carried out the execution stripped Him of all of His clothes and then divided them between them. He was naked.

He was in lack of all things. He had nothing. He was buried in a borrowed burial robe and in a borrowed tomb. He literally had absolutely nothing.

As I was preaching there to that congregation in New Zealand, I was still going through my note outline, but the Holy Spirit was simultaneously showing me something in my own spirit and mind, something that's remained with me ever since. I can never totally forget that picture of Jesus hanging there on the cross.

The Holy Spirit showed me why Jesus was hungry, why He was thirsty, why He was naked, why He was in want of all things. The reason: it had to be so because he exhausted on our behalf the poverty curse. He took the complete curse away once and for all that you and I, redeemed believers through the blood of Jesus, might not have to endure that yoke of iron, that poverty curse. That is not the result of blessing and of obedience, but is the result of disobedience.

Thank God, though all of us have been disobedient, Jesus took upon Himself the iniquity of us all. Our rebellion and all its evil consequences, including poverty, were visited upon Jesus as He hung there on the cross.