Today’s exhortation – generational sins
God loves mercy and what He requires of us, He provides for us. God requires justice and payment for our sins and the sins of our forefathers(generational sins) in His mercy, He sent His only Begotten Son Jesus to pay for it by dying on the cross. Similarly, the resulting curses had to be dealt with so Jesus He took care of that too. The bible says, “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (Galatians 3:13-14). Our part in this is to put our faith in Jesus, to confess our sins and turn from it (repentance), so that they can be forgiven and guilt and curses removed.
In relation to generational sins, in Leviticus 20:40-42, God gives us a pattern and a promise of freedom if we confess our sins and our forefathers’ and we humble ourselves. This is called “identification repentance” and e.gs can be found in Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9 or Ezra’s in Ezra 9. The question is why do we have to suffer for what our forefathers did? We don’t, if we deal with the sin in God’s way. We’ll only suffer if we enter into the same sins and make their sins our own and do not take advantage of God’s provision for freedom in Jesus. We can apply the power of the cross to nullify all the pressures of generational sins and to break the power of the resulting curses which we’ll look at next.
Francis Hans-Jorie