The Generational Curse

[Soma-Sight]

What happened to you? A year ago you would have agreed with me 100%. Step off that bed of quicksand my friend before it swallows you up whole.

You are right that the reason these kids starve and die such terrible deaths first comes from corrupt politicians and unfair tariffs.

It is just hard to stomach that God allows it.....

I need to give more for the God for these people....

This gernerational curse thing just is so hard hard to comprehend.[/quote]

 

[Lewis]

But guess what ? Gernerational curses can be broken, by Yeshua. But it is a big mistake to think that people don't suffer from them. Because they do.

 

[Lewis]

. Exodus 20:5 says, "You shall not bow down to [idols] or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me."

The word punishing in this verse proves a stumbling block for some people. The King James Version translates this as visiting, which is more reflective of the original Hebrew word paqadh, meaning to inspect, review, number, deposit, or visit in the sense of making a call. It's also used for taking a census.


We must face generational strongholds head-on. If we don't, they can remain almost unrecognizableâ€â€but they don't remain benign.

Ezekiel 18 assures us God doesn't punish children for their parents' sins. God clearly says, "I will judge you, each one according to his ways" (v. 30). I believe God is numbering or reviewing those who have been adversely affected by the sins of their parents and grandparents. For instance, if a pollster took a census of the number of alcoholics in three generations of an alcoholic patriarch's family, the head count likely would be very high. Why? Because alcoholism was deposited in the family line. It came calling, and an unfortunate number of children and grandchildren answered the door.

Can you think of any negative traits or habits in your life that have been in your family line for generations? Perhaps you can identify negative patterns such as alcoholism, verbal or physical abuse, pornography, racism, bitterness, or fear. These areas of bondage are anything you may have learned environmentally, anything to which you may be genetically predisposed, or any binding influence passed down through other means. Whatever the bondage may be, the Lord wants to rebuild, restore, and renew these areas of devastation.

We must face generational strongholds head-on. If we don't, they can remain almost unrecognizableâ€â€but they don't remain benign. Family strongholds continue to be the seedbed for all sorts of destruction. Oftentimes we've grown up with these chains and they feel completely natural. We consider them part of our personality rather than a strangling yoke.

Thankfully, Christians aren't doomed to live with our families' sins. The Cross of Calvary is enough to set us free from every yoke; God's Word is enough to make liberty a practical reality, no matter what those before us left as an "inheritance."

Before we parents die of fright, let's remember God is the only perfect parent. He's not cursing three or four generations over a little parental irritability. In fact, I don't believe he's calling a curse down on anyone. As believers under the New Covenant who have been cleansed by Christ's blood, I think the concept of generational sin applies to us through its powerful repercussions instead. I believe God is referring to a natural phenomenon described poignantly in Hosea 8:7, "They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind." Parents and grandparents must be very careful what they sow because it may reap the wind in their own lives and a whirlwind in the lives that follow.

Never underestimate, however, God's power to redirect and bless an entire family line for generations to come when we humble ourselves before him, confess our sins, and petition him for full redemption.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/tcw/2004/003/4.16.html

 

[ArtGuy]

1.) God is infinitely just and infinitely good.

2.) A child has no control over actions his father committed, perhaps even before the child was born.

3.) Being punished for crimes you did not commit is neither just nor good.

4.) As per 1, God would not punish someone for the actions of his father.

5.) Thus, the generational curse is bunk.

QED

It makes no more sense to curse a child for what his father did than it does to send him to Hell because his father was not saved. Laying down sentences upon the extended families of wrongdoers is the realm of the mafia, not the Lord.

 

[Lewis]

1.) God is infinitely just and infinitely good.

2.) A child has no control over actions his father committed, perhaps even before the child was born.

3.) Being punished for crimes you did not commit is neither just nor good.

4.) As per 1, God would not punish someone for the actions of his father.

5.) Thus, the generational curse is bunk.

QED

It makes no more sense to curse a child for what his father did than it does to send him to Hell because his father was not saved. Laying down sentences upon the extended families of wrongdoers is the realm of the mafia, not the Lord.

Are you saying that God's Word is a lie ? Wait I can answer that, yes you are.

 

[Drew]

1.) God is infinitely just and infinitely good.

2.) A child has no control over actions his father committed, perhaps even before the child was born.

3.) Being punished for crimes you did not commit is neither just nor good.

4.) As per 1, God would not punish someone for the actions of his father.

5.) Thus, the generational curse is bunk.

QED

It makes no more sense to curse a child for what his father did than it does to send him to Hell because his father was not saved. Laying down sentences upon the extended families of wrongdoers is the realm of the mafia, not the Lord.

This reasoning sounds good to me. I do not know what the strictly Biblical case is here, but I do think that we need to be more "global" and sophisticated in our thinking than simply looking at individual texts in isolation. Let's say that there is some text "T" whose most obvious "it means what it say" reading suggests the existence of the generational curse. However, if it is at all possible to reasonably interpret this text in a manner that does not support the idea of the generational curse, then we might be wise to do so.

Why? Well, because of other, higher level things that we know to be true. We have lots of reasons to believe that God "treats us as individuals when it comes to matters like salvation - what matters is whether the individual has accepted Christ, not what his mother has done. Besides, as ArtGuy implicitly suggests, our sense of "justice" is deeply imbued with a sense that "one should not be punished for something you didn't do". Presumably, this is also a general principle that we can extract from the Bible, the occasional specific text to the contrary notwithstanding. Everything is connected.

 

[ArtGuy]

Thank you, Drew, for more eloquently stating my case.

 

[Drew]

An afterthought. The relevant text is:

"Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."

Let's say that we agree that there is no wiggle room here - there certainly seems to be a cause and effect relationship expressed here - the children are "punished" for the acts of their parents.

In keeping with the principle that I have just provided (previous post), I think we need to take a look at possible ways to interpret this without doing violence to our (presumably God-given) sense of justice.

I think someone else has effectively argued that this "punishment" is really just a slightly poetic way of saying that, indeed, we do tend to suffer for the mis-deeds of our parents. If Dad was a booze-hound, we probably were negatively affected. If Mom played the slots to excess, we were similarly hurt.

My point? There is an important distinction with such a "common sense" interpretation and a more sinister one that suggests "spirits" and "curses" hound the descendents. Perhaps the Exodus text is simply telling us that we are influenced by the actions of our parents. This is not surprising or particularly controversial.

In fact, the interpretation that I am proposing (and I'll bet others have already said this) involves us re-thinking the sense of "punish". There is a huge and important distinction between the following 2 interpretations:

1. The child is held morally accountable for the actions of the parents and is punished accordingly;

2. The child is not morally accountable for the suffering - it is just an unfortunate consequence of the way that the world works. God is no more "punishing this child" than he is punishing a child who dies in earthquake.

I prefer interpretation 2.

 

[Lewis]

First of all, God does a lot of things that just don't make sense to us mortals. Like sending people in a village to kill everyone in there. Even the newborn babies. Do you understand that ? I don't, but He has done it more than once. A mans family was considered his property then, so everybody had to go to their deaths, can you understand that ? I don't. Do you think that a generational curse is something that God won't do ? If He said it, He will do it. It don't matter what you and I say. It matters what His Word says.
Generational curses are still going on. The thing is we can go to Christ and have them broken.

 

[Kefka]

I'm pretty positive that generational curses exist, take a look at addictions such as smoking and alcoholism? Especially alcoholism though.