Generational Sin: Who says I'm guilty?

God stores up misery for [the wicked man's] children?
Let him repay [the man himself] so he will experience it!

                                                - Job 21:19

Job is a man who knew God.  Throughout his long, often angry lament in a book many Christians tend to avoid for its dismal tone, we see a deeply hurt man, abandoned by the God whose relationship he valued above all else, progressing through the stages of grief in a way most all of us can relate to.  Struggling to understand how the Godly wisdom he's always embraced has failed him, he has to deal with the fact that everything he's ever known could be wrong… except that he knows God, and he knows that he has lived a life in intimate relationship with Him.

One of the things Job questions is what we tend to refer to as "generational sin" - the idea that children are punished for the sins of their parents.  This is not a new concept nor, to be clear, is it an old and outdated concept.  It's still widely taught and/or accepted as a basic truth that generations after us will suffer for our treatment of the Earth.  A man who gambles away his inheritance is making a decision for his children - albeit often not consciously - about what kind of economic status they will grow up in.  In the Hebrew mindset, where there are no coincidences and every experience revolved around one's relationship with God, these two examples would both be seen as God's just judgment on the children of the "sinful" parents.  Still, it makes us grind our teeth to think that there's nothing we can do to get out from under the "curse" put upon us by previous generations.  And every so often, perhaps not so rarely as we might think, someone will "beat the odds" and rise above the predispositions (social, economic, intellectual, or spiritual) set on them by their parents.

What is God's role in all of this?  For Job, quoting the well known concept, it's a source of frustration that God won't "face him like a man" and prove that his sin was worthy of his punishment.  Certainly, it shouldn't have been put upon his children!  From the start, all he's wanted to know is "Why is God doing this to me?"  And instead of telling him, God has instead stored up misery for his children?  This well-known principle is just one more aspect of "wisdom" that Job disagrees strongly with, but is it valid throughout the rest of the Bible?  We see it in Exodus 20:5 ("… For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.") and again in Exodus 34:6-7 (…“The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”)  Achan's entire household was put to death for his sin (Joshua 7:24-25).  Jeremiah prophesies that in the coming days (but noticeably, not in the "here and now" of his original audience), "they shall say no more: ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But every one shall die for his own iniquity; every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge."  The concept isn't absent from the New Testament, either.  In John 9:1-3 the disciples ask whether a man was blind because of his own sin or because of his parents'.  Furthermore, it's still the thought in the minds of the mob calling for Jesus' crucifixion, when they cry "Let his blood be on us and on our children!" (Matt 27:25).

Against all of this (and not surprisingly, if you know the history of frustration regarding the relationship between the book of Ezekiel and the Torah), you have Ezekiel 18, an entire chapter devoted to Yahweh's explicit order to stop quoting the proverb Jeremiah references.  A man and his son will be judged SEPARATELY on the basis of their own actions (and relationship with God).  Through Ezekiel, God angrily confronts the proverb-makers, the people we would see today scribbling on subway walls, saying God is judging us for our father's sins.  In context, it's not hard to see why they would believe that.

When you look at the Book of Kings, you see that Manasseh, the horrible Southern king who sets up Assyrian idols in the temple and (it is traditionally believed) butchers Yahweh's prophets, is the final straw for God.  The Babylonian captivity happens because of him.  But it doesn't happen during his reign.  In fact, this wicked king reigns longer than any other in the Southern Kingdom and dies peacefully!  Two generations later, King Josiah hears about this judgment and panics.  Desperate to reconcile the nation to Yahweh, he initiates a major repentance - undoing the traditions and practices associated not only with the idolatry of Manasseh, but all the way back to Solomon, and Jeroboam (influences from the northern, now dispersed, kingdom of Israel).  But no matter how sincere, he cannot get the judgment revoked. 

The generation after him goes into Babylonian captivity, saying "Yeah, we're sinful - we admit it - but we're nowhere near as bad as Manasseh.  Yet we're bearing Manasseh's judgments."  It's in that context that "Ralph" was writing (1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings), and his account shows the pattern of how God has always worked.  Act bad and bad things will happen - if not to you, then to your children.  This is the principle of how the world works (Except, of course, when it doesn't… like in Job's case).  If everything in your world is influenced, even caused, by your relationship with God, then God causes bad things to happen.

In Ezekiel 18:2, God says, "No! Absolutely not."  There is no other way to read this; it's not ambiguous at all.  God will NOT punish children for the sins of their fathers.  There are four ways the Jewish commentators deal with this apparent conflict.

1.         Rationalistic view: The Torah is negated because UNTIL NOW it has been this way, but from this point on, it won't be.  In other words, Ezekiel is writing in a different age, to a different people.  No longer are they a unified "country", they are now dispersed in exile and so the rules have changed.  This explanation is well and good, but given that the idea continued into the New Testament period, it has its problems.  Not only that, but what kind of age and people are we now?  What parts of the Bible are relevant to us today?  This view puts the entire Bible on shaky ground.

2.         Mystic view: Ezekiel, with God's approval, changed the theology presented in Torah.  This view says that Ezekiel looked around and said, "We'll never get out from under all the sins that got us here.  If I tell the people to repent, they'll say, 'Why bother?'"  So instead, he says "Let's start from scratch!" and God backs him up in order to preserve the integrity of the Israelites. This means that man decided he had a better idea than God, and God said, "Okay, we'll change my plan because yours is better."  I'm not fond of this interpretation.

3.         Limited theology view: Never read the prophets as a systematic theology.  They are books about what is said to a real person at a real time in history.  They are historical and reveal God's character, but they're not for the development of theology.  Like the first option, this is also a problem if you have a high view of scripture.  Essentially it says that anything we can learn from the prophetic books is not applicable to us today.

4.         Cohesion view: There is no intergenerational punishment permitted in human courts, even in Torah, but God himself does punish intergenerationally.  God alone is equipped to judge whether the next generation will follow/is following the sins of the previous.  Ezekiel is giving an example where the later generations are righteous.  This is the dominant view and it makes the contradictions coincide, but accepting this brings us right back to the problem Job has - What about when wisdom doesn't work?  What sins did Job's sons die for, when Job himself was righteous and there's no reason to believe his sons weren't righteous as well?

So if none of these interpretations of Ezekiel really work, how do we deal with the question of why God says in one place that he punishes children for their parents' sins, and in another place that it is absolutely not okay to say that, and yet in another place that children are punished along with their father even when no sin has been committed! For this, we need to go back to those places that seem to say that God does this, because they are certainly more ambiguous than Ezekiel 18, which clearly and vehemently states that he does not.

"… For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me." (Exodus 20:5) and "The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6-7) 

If you sin together, you're guilty together.  If you are part of an organization/group (like a family), then you are a representative of that group.  When they sin or stand for something sinful, even if you were not there or actively participating, it is YOUR sin.  Unless you cut yourself off from that group, you as a representative bear both the blessings and curses of that group.  Also note that "those who hate me" and "the guilty" do not, by grammatical structure or otherwise, exclude the future generations.  In fact, Exodus 34:6 begins with the statement that these are the very people God will forgive!  But removing themselves from the sinful organization (in this case, family) is a precursor to seeking that forgiveness.  This is seen all throughout the Old Testament when foreigners become Yahweh worshippers, enter into (circumcision) covenant with Yahweh, and leave their old lives and gods and traditions behind.*

God held individual Israelites responsible for the national sin of Israel.  Everyone who was a part of that unit was sent into Babylon, including the righteous.  Daniel is a perfect example.  But note that even while in captivity, Daniel enjoyed God's blessings in the midst of experiencing the penalty for corporate sin.  This is important when dealing with the matter of corporate repentance.  The church (always) has some repenting to do.  We ALL bear the responsibility for that repentance, even those of us who weren't part of or even opposed the actions of our own generation or those before.  This doesn't mean we have to forever live under the guilt and shame of something our ancestors did.  It means simply what it says: we repent, and we move on.  When we screw up again, as we will do, we repent again.  And God is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 

With this understanding, the other scriptures mentioned above only need to be addressed briefly: The death of Achan was an overzealous response to a command by Yahweh that the man (NOT the household! God was explicit in v. 14 that it was not the tribe, not the clan, not the household, but the individual person) and his possessions would take the place of the "burnt offering" God had demanded from Ai.  Whether or not God would have included the man's wife and children as part of his possessions is a matter up for debate; it's clear how they understood it at the time but that doesn't make it truth.  Jeremiah's prophecy is in the midst of Babylonian conquest where, yes, the Israelites are experiencing the ramifications of political decisions made generations ago.  It's the natural order of things; consequences often don't come to fruition in a single lifetime, as anybody concerned about climate change will tell you.  The blind man in John 9 was born that way, not because of his own sin or the sins of his parents (although I'm sure that he, like Job, had countless "friends" to offer their opinions on why he couldn't see!) but "that the works of God should be revealed in him." (John 9:3)  Job himself, the picture of righteous suffering, endured his trials to progress to a level of understanding about God and how He views suffering that he could've never achieved while he thought, like his friends, that the whole world was governed by retributive justice ("Act good, good things happen; act bad, bad things happen").  As for Job's children, I am still not entirely convinced that the messenger wasn't mistaken when he said they were all dead, but if they did die, who am I to speculate on how God restored them?  The text simply doesn't say, beyond the fact that Job started with 7 sons and 3 daughters and a whole bunch of stuff, and ended with twice as much stuff, 7 sons, and 3 daughters.  (Job 42:13)  God could've resurrected them from the dead for all I know.  The point is, they were restored.

Lastly, then, is the cry at the crucifixion: "Let his blood be on us and on our children!" (Matt 27:25).  I thank God daily that we are able to be forgiven for the horrific miscarriage of justice not only in Jesus' death, as well as all the other martyrs throughout the centuries we have executed in the name of God.  We, I boldly state, because I am part of the family unit known as the church and in the generations before the Reformation, there was only one name we went by: Catholicism.  I, as an individual, belong to the family unit of humanity that crucified Jesus, and forever bears the ramifications.  I, as an individual, repent for the execution of William Tyndale, Joan of Arc, John Huss (and his wife), and countless thousands of others, and wonder what more we could know about God had they been allowed to live full lives, contributing more and more to our understanding until they died of old age.  I, as an individual, acknowledge the complacency of the church during the Holocaust, and mourn for its victims still.  And I, as an individual, stand boldly before the throne of grace and say, "God please have mercy."  Because in spite of all these things I/we have done, for which we bear the guilt and consequence, there is no other family I would rather be in than the one that seeks God even in the midst of our massive screw-ups.

*Note: Lest I give the wrong impression, this has nothing to do with whether or not you should divorce your unsaved spouse when you become a Christian.  God values families, especially marriage covenants, and I've seen more people come to Christ through their partner than by any other method.  The dynamics and difficulties of a saved/unsaved couple is a completely separate issue which will be discussed in a later entry.