What is a Curse and the Nature of Curses
What are curses?
The simplest way to define a curse is to say it is the opposite of a blessing. But this is so simple and would easily make some to easily label anything bad a curse.
It is scripturally true that the whole creation is under a curse or bondage from God having fallen through the Original Sin of Adam and Eve. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned,” Romans 5:12.
“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God,” Romans 8:20-21.
Yet the context that we'd define such a type of a curse or bondage is only in the context of the Original Sin that God brought on all creation. Outside the context of the Original Sin we'd end up labeling everything bad thing in our lives a curse. Even persecution, trials of faith, every sickness, every failure, every accident, every type of poverty, carrying the spiritual cross, and so on would be labeled curses.
Now we can define a curse in the context outside the Original Sin or outside the fallen nature. A curse, from a biblical perspective, is any undesirable matter that emerges from an utterance, statement, pronouncement, invocation, oral or written vocabulary that expresses ill will or misfortune to an individual, animal or object. This is a definition based on biblical analysis. It won't be found in a dictionary because secular dictionaries do not use the bible for definitions.
Thus what distinguishes a curse from other unpleasant matters is in its expressive nature. It needs to be uttered whether verbally or in writing. It's not just a bad thought, feelings of anger or hatred towards someone. Curses are not telepathic or psychical. My other book on breaking spells deals with overcoming matters on telepathy, the psychic and tapping into the spirit world. It's titled, Breaking Occult Spells: Protection from Witchcraft and Occult Influences .
Neither can curses be received through a dream, vision, apparition, or any spiritual phenomena. They can only be expressed in the physical or earthly realm, not spiritual realm. Until such mental or any spiritual phenomena are physically uttered whether verbally or in writing they cannot result in a curse.
The expressed words, whether spoken or written, do not constitute curses on their own. They're cursing words but they are not curses in the real sense. In general language we say someone spoke cursing words to another. However, in reality the words themselves are not curses. It's what emerges or results from the words that constitutes curses.
The spoken or written words have to pass tough conditions that God has established before they can have any power of resulting in misfortune. This is the best part in guarding against curses. God has insured that cursing words do not automatically result into curses.
The nature and characteristics of curses
The nature and effects of a curse can be any type of unpleasant matter. This does not mean any type of unpleasant matter is a curse. It only implies that a curse can come in any form or characteristic that is undesirable.
It can be characterized by any one or more of the following: affliction, nuisance, hardship, pain, grief, despair, misfortune, punishment, condemnation, sentence, scourge, torment, torture, terror, toil, bondage, deformity, abnormality, payback, hindrance, difficulty, stumbling block, interference, holdup, predicament, confusion, chaos, and so on – anything unpleasant.
This is why some people define curses as simply the opposite of blessings – the fact that curses are characterized by matters that are opposite to blessings. But as said earlier, not all unpleasant or undesirable matters are a result of a curse. A curse is only a subset of various categories of unpleasant and undesirable matters.
These other categories of unpleasant and undesirable matters have their own descriptions. They include trials of faith, thorn in the flesh, the cross, persecution, storms, the fallen nature, and so on.