Can Christians Receive Curses?
When some adversity comes your way, do you ever wonder if you are being cursed? Some Christians would not consider that possibility because they believe Christians cannot be cursed. However, I don’t see this in the Word and my experience indicates that without a doubt Christians certainly can be cursed. Regarding curses, Proverbs 26:2 states, “As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come.” Another translation says, “Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse will not land on its intended victim,” (NLT). Just as there is no way these birds would ever land on a human being, even so we are absolutely impervious to curses so long as there is no corresponding sin in us that opens the door to them.
My husband and I were cursed just last week on our vacation. First, I’d like to tell you this bizarre story and then reveal the cause—something in me that permitted the curse to come against us. It is a common type of sin that we often don’t realize is actually sin.
Rather than drive all day as we usually do for the 584-mile trip to visit our daughter and her family, we decided to drive it in two days and stay overnight in a motel. Before the trip, my husband vacuumed out our car, washed it, and filled it with gas so it was clean and ready for the trip. When we reached the motel, we unloaded everything out of the car and took it into the motel—everything being two small suitcases and several small tote bags.
The next morning we loaded everything back in the car and then stopped for breakfast at the Bob Evans restaurant that was nearby. After breakfast while getting in the car, I saw a black carpenter ant crawling across the threshold of the frame when I opened the door. I wondered how that ant could have gotten in our car, but flicked it out and thought nothing more about it. I also noticed that across the parking lot from our motel was an enormous adult video warehouse. In front of the warehouse (as if it weren’t big enough to hold everything they could possibly sell) was parked a large trailer with a flashing sign advertizing “sex toys.” I thought about the fact that the highway we were traveling was the main Interstate leading from Cleveland through Columbus to Cincinnati and other large cities south. I was certain that a lot of evil traffics through that area so they probably do a booming business at the warehouse.
Six hours later we arrived at the motel in Indianapolis where we would be staying that week. (Our daughter has no extra room in her house.) When we started unloading the back of the car, the first tote bag my husband lifted out had underneath it a solid black swarm of carpenter ants. As we lifted more bags out of the car, ants were everywhere, and they were carrying eggs in their mouths! There were hundreds of them.
So there we were in front of our motel in plain sight before many people, beating on ants in the hatchback with our hands, slapping them off our luggage and stomping on them as they fell to the ground. They were absolutely everywhere. It took several minutes to find all the ants and kill them. We even found their nest on the outside of one of the tote bags we had taken into the motel the previous night. That small tote bag had been sitting out in plain sight on my kitchen counter for two days before the trip so I could periodically toss in little items I thought I might need for the trip. There had not been anything on it then nor when we placed it in the car at the other motel that morning. We had not seen a single carpenter ant nor any other insect in the motel of the previous night. This all seemed supernatural and like a curse. All I could think of was that something must have come at us from that adult video warehouse near the motel. It seemed we had killed all the ants but my husband applied ant spray in the car our first few nights there just in case.
For our trip home we had reservations to stay at the same motel. It was clean, comfortable, quiet and priced lower than most of the motels around it. Since we were again taking two days to make the trip, we took our time and stopped at places along the way. Before reaching the motel, we stopped at an Amish store that was full of beautiful quilts and many gift items that were enjoyable to look at. It only took fifteen minutes to get from the Amish place to the motel. As soon as I opened my car door at the motel, hundreds of carpenter ants started pouring out of the door jamb and crawling all over the threshold, up on the door and dropping off on the ground. There were literally hundreds of them. It took us a long time to get them all killed. Fortunately we still had the ant spray on hand which we also used. It was incredibly unnerving. I was wondering if perhaps we should stay somewhere else. However the reservation was made, it was a nice motel and so we decided to stay.
The next morning we went on our way and saw no more ants. I had a lot to think about though. This was obviously supernatural. The ants just appeared like out of nowhere. They didn’t just gradually build up. They went from nothing to hundreds seemingly in an instant. This was obviously a curse but why did it come? I was well aware of the Proverbs scripture that an undeserved curse cannot come against anyone, so why did this land on us?
A couple of days after we returned home, the Lord revealed what had been in my heart that permitted the curse to land on us. The curse may or may not have come from the pornography warehouse. Whatever the source was is probably not that important. What is important is to know why it was permitted. The Lord revealed that I had fear in my heart…specifically fear of bedbugs. It had frequently been on the news a year or so ago that American motels were plagued with bedbugs. Even one newscaster said she and her husband had recently stayed at a motel with bedbugs. A family in our church had contracted bedbugs. It was an absolute nightmare trying to get rid of them.
Before our trip when my husband made the reservation, he chose this particular motel because it was cheap. We were just going to grab a quick night’s sleep before heading down the road. We didn’t need anything special to be comfortable for just one night. It was priced at least $70 lower than another place down the road where we had stayed a few years previously. My concerns were that because it was cheap it might not be clean. It might have bedbugs. So I suggested to my husband that we not set anything on the floor. I had heard that if you keep your luggage off the floor, the chance of taking bedbugs home with you was greatly reduced. So we didn’t set anything on the floor. God in His infinite mercy and grace did not permit us to get bedbugs, but we got ants instead. It was my fear that opened the door for the ants to manifest. I know for certain that had I not had this fear, the ants would not have been there. God used the whole event to teach me about something in my heart that needed to go. He wanted to set me free from this fear.
Had I trusted the Lord, I would have believed that He would not permit us to get bedbugs. He could have made sure that if there were bedbugs there my husband would have chosen a different motel. He hears from God and God leads him and works through him. I had even agreed that we should stay at this particular motel. If there had been a problem, we would have felt checked by the Lord not to go there.
I wonder how many of the adversities that come against us in life are caused by our own fears even as Job said, “…the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me.” For years the Lord has been working with me regarding my lack of trust in Him in several areas of my life. A few years ago the issue was my fear that if I did not wear a hat on a cold day I would catch a cold. And I did. Time and time again I got a horrible cold because I didn’t wear a hat on a chilly day. This happened particularly in the spring when the days were sunny but the breezes were cold. My dear mother used to say, “Be sure you wear a hat so you don’t catch cold!” I had read that doctors say there is no truth to the belief that going without a hat can cause a cold, but I knew better. I knew they were wrong because it happened to me every time.
The Lord began to challenge this belief through a dear, prophetic friend of mine. Through her he began to teach me that it is my fear of not wearing a hat that causes the sickness to come on me not the actual coldness. With all the faith I could muster, I began to go out on chilly days with no hat and keep repeating scriptures in my mind. I didn’t catch a cold.
It is my prayer that my little article about the ant curse will challenge some of you to begin seeking the Lord regarding anything that might be in your own heart that could be the root cause of some adversity. If you seek the Lord regarding this, He will be faithful to show you and help you overcome in order to have greater freedom and walk more closely with Him by faith.
