Firstly: Let me apologise for the long gap in eDevs - Easter was a busy time and in the middle of Holy Week I got hit with a tummy bug that stayed with me for six days and left me four kilograms lighter. (Thankfully I could afford to lose the weight! :-) I was also given grace and strength to fulfill all my preaching and service duties although I was a bit "pale and interesting")
It has taken me a long time to get back into routine again...
We're continuing with "God's CV in the Ten Commandments." We're still busy with the second commandment.
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4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. Exodus20:4-5
When we dealt with the first commandment, I pointed out that God is not insecure, narcissistic or full of petty jealousies, but here in the second commandment there seems to be a contradiction.
But it comes back to the analogy I used about the Law of Gravity: If you ignore it, you will get hurt. Here in the second commandment, knowing human-nature's tendency to try to have a "designer god", we are warned that God is jealous for His own glory.
It really means He is jealous for the truth.
The truth is this: There is no true God but Him.
When we deny this, we live a lie and because He is truth, He cannot tolerate a lie.
This is not petty jealousy but holy jealousy. It is about being consistent. Consistency requires that lies are not tolerated.
How do we deal with the idea of future generations being punished for the failures of their parents? This is a complex issue and I handled it in detail when we worked through Jeremiah and Ezekiel. (I have given links and the old devs below....)
The key to understanding this is that evil is often systemic. Evil becomes greater than a person, but part of a system. Evil practices make their way into the legacies of families and nations. This was particularly true with idolatry. Children worshipped the idols their grandparents had made.
We know that our early years are formative for the development of faith. The spiritual patterns we keep in our early years stay with us for life. With this rider to the second commandment, God is warning parents of the legacy of bad spiritual patterns.
What spiritual patterns and habits are we showing our children?
God warns us that this is serious business!
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Two links for a discussion on "Generational Curses"
http://emmdev.blogspot.com/2011/01/emmdev-2011-01-25-jeremiahs-journey.html
http://emmdev.blogspot.com/2011/01/emmdev-2011-01-26-jeremiahs-journey.html
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Two eDevs on "Generational Curses"
Ezekiel 18:2-4
What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
`The Fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge`?
As surely as I live declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son - both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.
I started this devotion last week and realised that I had bitten off more than I could chew! This will now be in two parts...
These days there is a lot of talk about `generational curses.` Today many attribute physical illnesses like arthiritis, asthma and migraines to the fact that a grandparent was involved in spiritualism or something like that. Today many blame sin in their parents and grandparents for their own lack of spiritual growth or their ill physical health.
Even in `pop psychology` there has been a trend toward laying the blame for our neuroses and problems at the door of our parents who were too strict or too lax, or too protective, or too busy, or whatever.
The problem is that the Scriptures do indicate that the consequences of sin _can_ bridge generations. Part of the second commandment says: `For I the Lord Your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.` (Ex.20:5)
From this has evolved a whole theology that desperately tries to blame something or someone for the bad things that happen to us. When we can't cope with the sadness and grief that sometimes befalls us or those we love, the result is often a scapegoat theology.
There are two important balancing issues when we look at the second commandment: The first is that the particular sin that God singles out here is idolatry and the worship of other gods. The second is even more significant. Who does God say are the ones on whom the sin of the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents is poured out?? Read carefully and say it with me. `Those ... who.... hate.... God.....`
Who are the hateful ones? The folk who originally are sinful, or the third or fourth generation? Ezekiel's audience said it was their ancestors who were guilty! It was those who had gone before (and weren't there to defend themselves!) who were the ones who hated God, and the exiles were the `innocent` victims! They therefore held out the idea that they (the `faithful`) were being punished by God for the sins of the `hateful`!
Ezekiel's response is typical of the fine balance we find in Scripture where difficult issues are held in creative tension. If the 2nd commandment is one side of the tension, then Ezekiel's response to the Exiles is the other tug-of-war team... There is a balance to be kept.
We may be a composite of our genes, our history, and our upbringing, but we also exercise our own unique choices. This play has a script that allows us to ad-lib and Ezekiel points out to the Exiles that their own ad-libbing was just as, if not more serious, than their ancestral legacy.
What is Scripture's response to those who would take the 2nd commandment and the issue of `generational curses` too far???
No longer will it be said: `The Fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge`
More on this tomorrow...
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Yesterday we started looking at difficult issue of `generational curses.`
There are those who would hold that I may suffer from an ailment that doesn't want to get better because it is the consequence of something evil that my ancestors up to a fourth generation had done. In the view of extreme forms of this kind of teaching, I may suffer for things I might not even know my ancestors did! Even prayer for healing cannot help because these ailments have a `legal right` to be there and until I renounce the failings of my predecessors, I cannot experience relief.
This is a picture painted from only one of the many perspectives that the OT offers. When we were at school we did technical drawings and we had to do various kinds of drawings. One was called an Orthographic Projection. In this kind of represention you draw three views of the object and each view is in 2D: front, left, and top. If one were to draw a plain round pillar in orthographic representation then the top view is a circle and the front and left views are rectangles! The round column is not a rectangle or a circle, if we keep to only one perspective, an incomplete picture is formed!
Why do things (especially bad things) happen to us? Are we the victims of fate, or are we completely free of the past? Scripture's answer is a balanced one. We cannot ignore the legacy of brokenness that comes through our ancestry, culture, and structure, but there is also the reality of the darkness in us.
But there are _other_ perspectives too... There is the perspective of national sin: that an individual may experience the brokeness that is the result of the nation's sin. War is a good example. Pain can also be a warning and a wake-up call. Heartache can be the lifeboat that takes us to repentance and new faith. Suffering can build our faith, sharpen our focus, and refine our commitment.
I am very concerned that modern society is stuck in the `scapegoat theology` I mentioned yesterday. Today we continually blame to the legacy of the `old dispensation` in this country as the cause of all ills. I am not denying the horrors and inequalities of the apartheid legacy, but is our myopic insistence that the problem is `back there` not the very thing that is blinding us to the fact that we are going to repeat that history in another form?
Even individuals are in total denial about their own contribution to their difficulties. I met a smoker who with a shrug said that he could not give up, and that this must be a demon of nicotine that kept him bound. He simply refused to admit that he lacked the courage and discipline to do what he had to do.
Ezekiel's stance is that if our teeth are set on edge, we should not start with teeth that are furthest away when we look for traces of sour grapes. Rather than beginning with the past, let us look to the present first.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
