“If the father has truly lived the Way in Christ, it is easy for a son to do the same; if the father has not, our Lord will first have to overcome and bring to death in the son what the father was.” John and Paula Sanford from Restoring the Christian Family p. 99
In my last few posts about fathering we have been focusing on the reality that disobedience and rebellion among fathers inevitably and negatively impacts future generations. This is true both of an individual father and the consequences of his sins on his children, grandchildren and beyond. It is also true of a multitude of fathers who collectively impact a clan, a congregation, the church in a region and even a city or nation (as was the case so often with Israel).
We as children and young people are highly impacted by our own fathers. We are also impacted and influenced by fathers of influence in our neighborhoods, extended families, congregations, schools, nations, etc.
Fathers were meant to impact and influence their children and grandchildren and beyond in powerful and unforgettable ways – both individually and collectively. But that can only happen when the said fathers walk with God in humility and daily obedience to His will and way. When they refuse to do this, the enemy of our souls and families pounces on the disappointments, bitterness, confusion, soul wounds, etc., that children and young people experience as a result of their father’s sins. And unless our Savior intervenes - angry and frustrated and often depressed young men and women are the result.
God made this reality known to His prophets and leaders of old and commanded them to make it known to the people they were ministering to. Here’s one I noticed in my daily readings in Numbers a couple of weeks ago. The context is God is speaking through Moses and Aaron to His people regarding their grievous disobedience, rebellion and unbelief and its consequences. God said, “But as for you, your corpses will fall in this wilderness. Your sons shall be shepherds for forty years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until your corpses lies in the wilderness.” Numbers 14:32,33 God told the older generation they would all die in the wilderness. And He added that their sons would experience the consequences of their unfaithfulness.
Let’s listen in on how God instructs Ezekiel in this regard in chapter 20:4, “Will you judge them, will you judge them, son of man? Make them know the abominations of their fathers;”. Then again in vs. 18 God tells Ezekiel how He Himself spoke to the children of Israel in their wilderness wanderings after His deliverance of them from Egypt, “I said to their children in the wilderness, ‘Do not walk in the statutes of your fathers or keep their ordinances or defile yourselves with their idols.”. Sadly the younger generation ignored God’s warnings as can be seen in vs. 24, “because they had not observed My ordinances, but had rejected My statutes and had profaned My sabbaths, and their eyes were on the idols of their fathers.” God again exhorts Ezekiel to bring this sorrowful pattern to the attention of those he was ministering to and responsible for in vs. 30, “Therefore, say to the house of Israel, ‘thus says the Lord God, “Will you defile yourselves after the manner of your fathers and play the harlot after their detestable things?”
God could have instructed His prophet Ezekiel to just focus on the sins of the people he was ministering to. They were obvious enough. And they were going to give an account to God for them regardless of how they were parented or regardless of the general spiritual climate of the older generation. But God in His sovereign wisdom saw the intricate connection between the sins of the fathers and the sins of the present generation. Sadly many of us do not yet see this connection.
The people of God today (just as in that day) will never break free of the sins of the fathers until we by the leading of the Holy Spirit identify those sins and see them as God sees them.
God has always sought to make this reality known to His people – always offering a way out of these sad generational cycles of sin. Here’s an example of that from Leviticus 26:38-40, 42 “But you will perish among the nations, and your enemies’ land will consume you. So those of you who may be left will rot away because of their iniquity in the lands of your enemies; and also because of the iniquities of their forefathers they will rot away with them. If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, and also in their acting with hostility against Me – …..then I will remember My covenant with Jacob…”. First there is the warning of judgment. Then the declaration of the consequences of the sins or iniquities of the fathers on the subsequent generations. Then the plea to confess and repent of these long time sin patterns with the promise in the last verse of God’s faithfulness to His promises.
Have you ever noticed how often God reminded His people of their failures and of their not breaking away from the sins of their fathers? Here’s a reminder from Asaph in Psalm 78, “Yet they tempted and rebelled against the Most High God And did not keep His testimonies, But turned back and acted treacherously like their fathers;’ They turned aside like a treacherous bow.” Psalm 78: 56,57
Asaph is so aware of how he and his generation have walked in these same sin patterns that he prayed for God to deliver them from them in the next Psalm “Do not remember the iniquities of our forefathers against us; Let Your compassion come quickly to meet us,…” Psalm 79:8 You can add this one to the prayers I listed in the previous post on fathering.
Ever noticed these sobering words from God to His prophet Hosea? “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.” Hosea 4:6 God’s will and desire is to bless the future generations in greater ways than He blessed their parents’ generation. But this is not automatic and is in many ways dependent upon the older generations’ repentance and pursuit of godliness and holiness.
Here's more of the same from Hosea 9: vs. 11“As for Ephraim, their glory will fly away like a bird- No birth, no pregnancy and no conception!" Vs. 12 "Though they bring up their children, Yet I will bereave them until not a man is left. Yes, woe to them indeed when I depart from them!” vs. 14 “Give them, O Lord – what will You give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.” (a prayer of Hosea’s). vs. 16, 17 “Ephraim is stricken, their root is dried up, They will bear no fruit. Even though they bear children, I will slay the precious ones of their womb. My God will cast them away Because they have not listened to Him; And they will be wanderers among the nations.” God’s blessing on a family or spiritual family for its obedience and devotion is a wonderful sight to behold. But His judgment on or departure from a family or spiritual family or community because of their disobedience, idolatry and rebellion is a very grievous and sobering thing to behold.
The prophet Amos felt it necessary to note that the sins of the people he was ministering to were the sins of their fathers, “….Their lies also have led them astray, Those after which their fathers walked.” Amos 2:4 Note in vs. 7 the sexual perversion shared by father and son, “…a man and his father resort to the same girls…”.
I’m going to devote at least one more article to this sobering reality of the effect the fathers’ sins have on the next generations until and unless we own up to them, identify them and repent and turn from them.
But I want to say a word to any leaders of God’s people reading these articles. In my experience many people in the church are not overly eager to deal with this for a variety of reasons. First, we fathers already tend to feel a bit of a failure when it comes to our fathering of our children, so we would rather not have to think about this any more than we have to. Second, until we have an Isaiah 6 experience or two, many believers or church attenders aren’t that focused on “putting off the old and putting on the new”. Only when we see God in His holiness and ourselves in our lack of holiness and the clear call to holiness will we have the motivation to allow the Holy Spirit to take us anywhere He needs to take us to “..destroy speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and ….take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” II Corinthians 10:5 Third, most believers or church attenders rarely read the Old Testament (except for maybe the Psalms and Proverbs) so they are not going to be aware of these themes or at least their prevalence. Fourth, many of them wrongly believe these themes in the Old Testament have no relevance to those of us in the New Covenant age. And fifth, often our desire to honor our parents keeps us from taking an honest look at how their behavior lined up with Scripture. So my encouragement to you is to devote yourself to prayer for the people under your care until God gets them to the place where they are ready to allow the Holy Spirit to help them revisit their growing up years and the community and culture they were raised in. He is more than able to complete that which He has begun in all of us. But His timetable and way with each of us is never the same. In the meantime let’s allow Him to continue to take us wherever He needs to take us in the pursuit of godliness and holiness and conformity to Christ.
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