25 And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee.

26 There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy land: the number of thy days I will fulfil.

In return for the Israelite’s faithfulness, God now makes some significant promises. He assures them of the basics, bread and water, and also that He will heal them of their diseases. He says that “the number of thy days I will fulfil,” meaning they will be a people that live full lives without meeting an early demise. Thus, God is ensuring the necessities for a full life. Not only this, but nature itself will be particularly blessed for them, their livestock giving birth to healthy young and the land yielding its fruit.

Notice in these promises that God is removing from the Israelites much of the curses He pronounced to Adam and Eve. He had told Eve that “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.” Obviously the Israelite women would still face the pains of childbirth, but would not suffer the anguishes of infertility or maternal or infant death, given God’s promises that there would not be barrenness or shortened days. God had told Adam that “cursed is the ground for thy sake. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” Obviously the Israelites would still have to labor for their food, “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” but here He describes that the land would no longer be actively working against them.

What we read here is the first step in the Lord reclaiming His people from the fall. Humanity had been in an extremely dejected state, and now God’s people were half-exalted, living blessed lives. God had begun the work of taking the sting out of death and the victory out of the grave (1 Corinthians 15:55).