The Son Shall Not Bear the Iniquity of the Father

A young man in my community confessed the same thing to God every week for eleven years and it was not his.

I want to be careful how I say that, because I am not going to dishonor anybody's family and neither should you. He loved his father. He still does. His father was a man with a serious fault, and it cost that household a great deal, and everybody knew and nobody said.

And the son grew up inside it, and somewhere along the way he took the whole thing onto himself.

Not in words. Nobody sat him down and assigned it to him. He absorbed it the way a young person absorbs anything that fills the house, and by the time he was old enough to examine it he was already carrying it, and it had his name on it as far as he could tell.

So he confessed it. For eleven years. And it never cleared, and it was never going to, because the account he was trying to settle was not open in his name.

God answers a proverb

The eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel opens with God quoting something people were saying, and then telling them to stop saying it.

The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. (Ezekiel 18:2)

That was a proverb in circulation. It meant what it sounds like it means: the previous generation did something and the next one is paying.

And God does not treat it as poetry. He treats it as a claim about His justice, and He answers it directly.

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son. (Ezekiel 18:20, King James Version)

Both directions. The son does not carry the father's account and the father does not carry the son's. God draws a line between two people who lived in the same house, and He draws it Himself, and He draws it in a chapter about His own fairness.

You have a line drawn between your account and somebody else's, and it was drawn by God rather than by anybody's therapy (Ezekiel 18:20), and it is the Spirit who shows a person where that line actually runs.

What is yours and what is not

Now let me be exact, because this teaching can be misused in both directions and I have seen both.

It does not mean a person is unaffected by what happened in their house. Ezekiel is talking about guilt, not about consequences. Consequences travel. Patterns travel. A household's habits arrive in a child without permission, and Scripture never pretends otherwise.

And it does not mean that whatever a person now does with those patterns is somebody else's fault. That is the other misuse and it is just as damaging. What is done with an inheritance is a person's own.

So there are two things and they need separating.

What was handed to you is not on your account. What you have done with it is.

You are responsible for one of those and never for the other, and Ezekiel puts the division in the plainest possible terms (Ezekiel 18:20), and the Spirit is the one who does the separating in somebody who has never been able to see a seam.

Peter says something about this that is worth having, and the word he uses is a family word.

Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers. (1 Peter 1:18)

Received by tradition from your fathers. He names the mechanism without any embarrassment, and then he says a person has been redeemed out of it.

Redeemed out of, which is a buying word and a rescue word at once. Not improved, and not helped to manage it better. Bought out of a way of living that arrived without anybody choosing it.

You were bought out of an inheritance rather than left to manage one, and 1 Peter 1:18 uses the language of a ransom rather than of self improvement. The Spirit is the one who applies a completed rescue to something a person absorbed before they could speak.

Honor and honesty in the same room

I want to say something about family, because in my culture and in a great many others this is the hardest part.

Naming what happened in a house is not dishonoring the people in it. Scripture names the faults of almost every family it describes, at length, including the families of its heroes, and it does so without a hint of contempt.

The commandment to honor a father and a mother is not a commandment to keep an account in their name.

And there is a real cost to not naming it, because a person who cannot say whose it was will keep saying it was theirs, and will keep confessing something that no confession can ever settle.

You are able to honor somebody and still say plainly what was theirs, and Scripture does both of those on the same page repeatedly (1 Peter 1:18), and it is His Spirit who makes that possible in a person who has been told they must choose.

And I will say this here, because a load like this one gets heavy. If what you are carrying has taken you somewhere darker, where being here at all has come into question, that is not for an article to hold. Tell somebody tonight: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or call the 988 crisis line, in the United States. Going is strength.