NOTES for Deu 28:35-68
For the religious mind, the threat of God's punishment is one of the chief disciplining factors, often even greater than the prospect of God's rewards. Sometimes, when reading the Book of Deuteronomy, it can seem that people who think this way are right: in the one chapter that describes God's blessings and curses, the blessings take up only a little more than a quarter of the whole text, while the rest is devoted to the curses.
Meanwhile, the Old Testament prophets were already saying, like Ezekiel for example, that God does not want the death of the sinner at all; He wants the sinner to turn, repent, and remain alive. If so, then the matter is clearly not God's desire to punish apostates, making their life resemble as much as possible the hell that religious people usually imagine. The matter is something else: the very condition of the world after the fall. The main problem is that the world, in the words of the Bible, "lies in evil," and it has been in this condition precisely since the fall. In the fallen world, evil is all-powerful, at least that was so until the coming of Christ.
In our day the situation is somewhat different, since we live in the age of the coming Kingdom; but at the time when the Book of Deuteronomy was written everything was different, and nothing in the world could yet withstand the evil in which it lay. Nothing except God, but it was very difficult for a human being to maintain stable, deep, and conscious relations with God. This was all the more difficult when it concerned an entire people, for in the fallen world it is not the majority but the minority who seek relations with God, and even religiosity as such by itself still guarantees nothing.
Purposeful spiritual effort was needed in order to change the situation at least locally, and it changed radically only after the coming of Christ. Evil, destruction, and entropy in the fallen world have their own momentum. Here, as in the mountains, a single thrown stone is enough for an entire avalanche to rush downward, sweeping along everyone who had the misfortune or carelessness to be in its path. For evil to triumph in the fallen world, nothing has to be done; it is enough simply to do nothing. With good, everything is exactly the opposite: every step requires effort.
That is why God's curses prove so destructive: they are nothing other than the consequence of a rupture in relations with God, relations that can be lost very easily and without any effort, while restoring them afterward can be very difficult. This momentum of evil gives rise to everything described so vividly in the Book of Deuteronomy. It is not revenge on humanity, but a terrible truth: the truth of the reality that a person who has lost relations with God creates for himself and finds himself in.