Leviticus 26:21-29
‘If you walk contrary to Me…, I will bring seven times more plagues upon you…. I will send wild beast among you, which shall rob you of your children and destroy your cattle…. I will bring a sword upon you…. I will send the pestilence among you…. You shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy…. And you shall eat the flesh of your sons…and daughters!’ Leviticus 26:21-29.
Calvin states in his Institutes I:17:8 & III:20:44 that when His wayward children need correcting, “God arms the devil as well as all the wicked for conflict…. If the disasters and miseries which press us happen without the agency of men, let us call to mind the doctrine of the Law…, that all…adversity is His curse….
“Let us tremble at the dreadful denunciation ‘And if you will not be reformed by these things but will walk contrary to Me, then will I also walk contrary to you!’ (Leviticus 16:23-24). These words condemn our torpor, when, according to our carnal sense, deeming that whatever happens in any way is fortuitous — we are not animated…by His scourge…, to repentance!…
“Howsoever great our abundance many be; however well-filled our cellars and granaries — we must still always ask for daily bread. For we must feel assured that all substance, is nothing — unless insofar as the Lord, by pouring out His blessing, make ist fruitful…. Whenever it so pleases, He gives us a proof of an opposite description — by breaking the strength…of bread (Leviticus 26:26) and leaving us even while eating to pine with hunger and while drinking to be parched with thirst.”
First, God would withhold rain and harvests from His disobedient people. Second, He would send wild beasts to devour their children and their cattle. Third, He would send the sword of their enemies. Fourth, He would send disease or pestilence. Fifth, He would send famine. And sixth, if that did not move them to repent, He would cause them as cannibals to eat even their own children.
‘If you walk contrary to Me’ — means going counter to God. ‘I will bring…plagues’ or pestilence ‘upon you’ — includes the very worst, and implying the cutting off by death of man and beast. When God threatens to ‘deliver…bread…by weight’ – it means people would be severely rationed even in their basic necessities of bread and water. Compare Ezekiel 4:16-17: ‘They shall eat bread by weight and with care, and they shall drink water by measure and with astonishment — so that they may lack bread and water and be astonished with one another and consume away, because of their iniquity.’
Worst of all, God threatens: ‘You shall eat the flesh of your sons!’ This was fulfilled literally, at the siege of Samaria in Second Kings 6:29 in the days of Jehoram. Jeremiah later bemoaned at the siege of Jerusalem in Lamentations 4:10: “The hands of the pitiful women had sodden their own children; they were their meat, in the destruction of…My people!” And also in the siege of Jerusalem under Titus, Josephus in his Jewish Wars VII:2 describes how a woman at the height of the famine killed her own infant child, roasted it, and ate part of it.
Make no mistake, children suffer because of the sins of their parents! So, parents — repent!
