-The verse Paul quotes here is a somewhat loose form of Deuteronomy 21.23. In that passage it refers specifically to those who had been executed by hanging (i.e. from a tree) - anyone who had committed capital crimes worthy of death was most certainly under the curse of God, and to allow the dead bodies of those cursed ones to remain hanging in public would defile the land. Thus the Israelites were being instructed to bury the bodies on the same day they were hanged. It is a rather obscure text, to be sure, and yet somehow Paul is inspired by the Lord to see a prefiguring of the Messiah in that text.
-Truth is, we were all under a curse, literally in bondage to being bound to evil and brokenness and death, every last one of us, including all those who are now trusting in the death of Christ, trusting in all that He did on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. He paid the ransom and provided the way for us to be set free from the curse - by becoming a curse for us. He let Himself become bound and tied and nailed to a "tree" (or that which was constructed from a felled tree), hung on a Tree of Death, where His Father laid on Him the sins of the world. My sins. He took on our curse. My curse. And paid for every last one of them, paid it all. There, on that blessed, rugged Roman cross, that cruel instrument of torture and execution, the unlikeliest tree of all. What a fascinating juxtaposition of symbols here, what sublime irony and wondrous love, that eternal life is to be found now not in the fruit of a living tree (the Tree of Life - cf Genesis 3.22) - but rather in the death of the eternal God upon a dead tree. O, such infinite wisdom, amazing love...
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