RTF 1: Sins of the Fathers and Resulting Curses

There is a saying that goes: like father like son. One of the principles that God designed is that we should inherit abilities and characteristics from our forebears. This is so that each generation doesn’t have to start from scratch, but can build on what the previous generation has done. This cuts both ways though. We inherit the blessing from the good things they have done, but we also inherit the curses from the evil they have done.

In the Old Testament the Bible talks about the consequences of people’s sins being suffered down to the fourth generation: that is, great grandchildren suffer the consequences of what their great grandparents did. Some people think this doesn’t apply in the New Testament era that we are in, and that each person only suffers the consequences of their own wrongdoing. Actually, the latter is also an Old Testament concept, and these seemingly contradictory statements appear just a few chapters apart in Ezekiel. How can both be true at the same time? If you are bitten by a venomous snake, you die, except usually people don’t. Why? Because the antidote is available in most cases. The antidote for the curses of generational sin is available to us: confession and forgiveness of ours and our ancestors’ through the cross, and the Old Testament prophets saw this coming.

Some people have a problem with the concept of confessing somebody else’s sin, and this stems from our individualistic view of the world, which has come about in the last 100 years or so. God looks upon us as groups as much as he does as individuals. We are part of our own families, and we carry the genes passed onto us by our forebears. We cannot escape that fact. So it is not me and them , but us . It is our sins that we are confessing, even if I myself have personally not done exactly those things. This concept of identification repentance is quite common in the Bible.

Indeed, it is true to say that unforgiven sin is about the greatest blocker to people receiving God’s grace and inner healing in their lives. That is, both the confessing and receiving of forgiveness and the forgiving of others. There are people who have a problem with this, saying that when they received Christ all their sins were forgiven, so what is the point of trawling up our sordid past? The Bible says, if we confess we will be forgiven, which implies that if we don’t we won’t. I didn’t write the Bible. What is secured by receiving Christ is our being saved from eternal damnation, and God’s favourable attitude towards us (and his general forgiveness of our overall state). We will have to face up to our past ultimately, so better to do it now than on the final day when the books are opened. If (like me) you carry a lot of unhealthy baggage from the past then, yes, it does all have to be unpacked if we want to be free.

When I am dealing with generational sin, I pray this prayer (or something very similar):

I confess the sin of my ancestors, my parents and my of sin of ……… . I choose to forgive and release them for the sin, the curses and the consequences in my life. In particular, I forgive ……… . I ask you to forgive me, Lord, for the sin, for yielding to it and to the resulting curses. I receive your forgiveness. On the basis of your forgiveness, Lord, I choose to forgive myself for my involvement in this sin. I renounce the sin and the curse of ……… . I break this power from my life and from the lives of my descendants, through the redemptive work of Christ on the cross. I receive God’s freedom from this sin and from the resulting curses. I receive ……… .