'Do I suffer for the sins of my family before me?' is a question people sometimes ask particularly when things go wrong in life. After all 'does bible say that God 'punishes' the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation? (Num 14: 18) Surely, there is no hope for me that I must pay for my forefathers' sins.
The truth is the fathers' sins are being 'visited' on the children and this is not divine arithmetic but divine observation. What God is saying is that those who break his law inevitably pass on those ways to their families, and so they end up living the same way, often for generation to come.
But the prophet Jeremiah saw that life wouldn't always be like that, but that a time would come when 'people will no longer say, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. ' Instead, everyone will die for his own sins;whoever eats sour grapes- his own teeth will be set on edge' Jeremiah 31:29-30
When Jesus came, He broke this inexorable chain.....Indeed the first thing He said he has come to do is ' to proclaim freedom for the prisoners....to release the oppressed Luke 4:18
No longer would sin..our own or our forefathers- be able to continue to imprison us in its terrifying grip. At the cross, He broke this chain and set us free. Paul has this confidence and say ' if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come' 2 Cor 5:17
We do not have to live under the shadow and influence of our forefathers and their ways. Declare that you believe he died to break the chains of the past, and claim the power of the cross that sets you absolutely free....
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