The Sins of Your Ancestors

We blame the gun after I pulled the trigger, the cigarette company because I smoked, or the prostitute because I get a disease. Fans blame the coach for losing the match.

Mormons have a great plan for your dead ancestors. You get baptized in their place, their sins are forgiven, and they enter the kingdom of God.

Others have another take on the sins of your ancestors. You’re guilty of their sins 300 years ago and must pay the price through social justice. It’s Mormonism without the water!

Should you be held responsible for the sins of your ancestors? How would you know those sins? How many generations back will you go?

No one today, nor of the past, has clean hands. No tongue, tribe, nation, skin color, or individual – past or present – is innocent of horrible things.

Africans enslaved Africans over thousands of years. In the 1400s, the Inca in South America murdered their neighbors in violent religious rituals. Pacific islanders stole from one another and then ate each other. Five hundred years ago, Roman Catholics killed Protestants and Lutherans killed Anabaptists. My great-grandfather defrauded his neighbors with rotten potatoes. The whole world is a guilty mess!

What do you mean when you use this proverb concerning the land of Israel: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge?”

“As I live,” says the Lord God, “you shall no longer use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine; the soul who sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:2-4).

In the days of the Jewish prophet Ezekiel, people blamed each other for the sins of their ancestors, even creating a proverb about it. God told Israel to stop repeating the proverb because it wasn’t true. God holds each sinner personally responsible for his own sins and not the sins of others.

When Adam sinned, he blamed God and Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. The serpent was the only one in the Garden who didn’t pass the buck (Genesis 3:8-13). Blaming someone else (or their ancestors) is always easier than looking in the mirror to see where I miss the mark.

God saves and forgives individuals one-by-one by grace through faith in Christ. God’s Saviour meets the sinner where he is, not where his great-great-great-grandmother was.

I Say There Are Many Genders

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible (Hebrews 11:3).

It is the testimony of God Himself in the pages of the Bible, that He is the Creator of the heavens and the earth. The stars of space are His design, the flowers of the field His handiwork, the weather patterns swirl the face of the earth by His power, and the body you have is the gift of God.

The Bible says that all these things were made by God’s spoken word. Honestly, I don’t know all that means, but I believe it because the only One there in the beginning, is the One who tells us what happened.

Man’s desire from early after being created, was to be like God. In fact, that is the idea which Satan used to tempt Eve into disobeying God. First, the devil questioned God’s command and the consequence of defiance. Then he offered this tantalizing tidbit to the first woman: “You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4-5). Satan claimed knowing what God meant more than God, and the woman tried grabbing that same pseudo-knowledge by her rebellion.

You know the rest of the story. She shared her revolution with her husband who fell for her woman charms. God cursed everything corrupted by sin: the ground, the plants, the animals, the weather, and Adam and Eve and the children they bore following in their fallen footsteps.

Since the fall from innocence of the first couple, humanity has actively attempted to re-create itself by the power of our words. Rather than being short we’re “vertically challenged.” We no longer sin but have “alternate lifestyles“. Now, sinful people believe they can change their gender simply by speaking it as so. “Yes!“, the degenerate world announces, “There are many genders. Biologically, scientifically, I am a male, but by the words of my mouth I declare myself to be a female!” Simply by the words of our mouths altering our pronouns, we believe we can re-create humanity.

We claim to do what the Bible says only God did.

The World We’ve Created

This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God … and Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image … and he begot sons and daughters (Genesis 5:1, 3, 5).

The story of the Bible begins with God’s creation of the universe. Everything the Godhead created and did was good and He called it very good (Genesis 1:31). God’s creation included man and woman, placing the pair in a garden He called Eden, which means delight or fruitful.

The fruitful life of humanity came to an abrupt end when Adam and his wife sinned by disobeying God. God pronounced a curse on the whole of His creation and drove the first couple from Eden. Life outside Eden was immediately difficult, painful, and toilsome.

In more than 900 years of life, Adam and Eve had many sons and daughters. Their children had an even harder existence. They established cities, their own religion, and invented many modern conveniences. Despite their progressive mindset, they were spiritually separated from God. Everyone in Adam’s race experienced the pain of spiritual death as well as physical death … sometimes at the hand of their own kin.

Pain. Suffering. Lack. Shame. Guilt. Fear. Jealousy. Hatred. Oppression. Theft. Murder. Lies. Sexual immorality. Think of the worst of mankind and it’s found in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. God’s creation was good and very good, like God Himself; Man created everything evil and wicked you can imagine.

Humanity wasn’t climbing out of the primordial slime and up the tree of evolution. We dug ourselves to the lowest pit of moral and spiritual filth. Worse yet … we’re still digging. The sin is the same, we’re just finding more sophisticated, dastardly, and clever ways of committing the same old sins at which angels hide their eyes and demons dance in delight.

Sin distorted and destroyed the beauty and perfection of what God made and gifted to humanity. We’ve done everything possible to thumb our noses at Him and reject His love and goodness. Poking God in the proverbial eye isn’t enough, so we delight in hurting one another. What a world, what a world!

You need a Saviour! And He’s been provided in Jesus.

God’s Promised Lamb

Satan’s failed war against God and His people is introduced to us in the first pages of the Bible. The Devil’s first attack was launched against Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and through his deception of Eve, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned (Romans 5:12).

God responded to man’s disobedience – not by giving up on His creation – but by promising a Saviour to destroy the enemy and his works (Genesis 3:15; 1 John 3:8). God the Father sent His Son, foreordained before the foundation of the world to die in the place of sinners as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (1 Peter 1:20; John 1:29).

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You Have a Divine Appointment

Custer National Cemetery, Crow Agency, Montana, USA

And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment … (Hebrews 9:27) 

The Bible describes Adam as the first man … of the earth, made of dust (1 Cor 15:45-49). When he sinned, Adam (1) immediately died spiritually and then died physically 930 years later; (2) was cast from the Garden of Eden and cursed by God; (3) brought death into the universe; (4) passed sin and death to each of his descendants.

Every descendant of Adam not only inherits his sin nature, but also receives the death penalty for sin. None of Adam’s sinful race can escape that penalty; each is appointed to die once (Heb 9:27).

The word appointed means to lay aside in reserve, to store away for later use, destined. As a descendant of Adam you have an appointment with death determined and awaiting you from God because like Adam, you have sinned. Both life and death – and everything in between – is according to God’s schedule and plan. The writer to the Hebrews says that God’s divine judgment awaits every son of Adam (Heb 9:27).

Since you can’t pay for your own sin, you must either be judged by God or receive refuge in a substitute willing to take your punishment and satisfy the wrath of Father God.

In First Corinthians 15:45-49, Paul describes Jesus as the last Adam, the spiritual, the heavenly Man, the second Man. He says that as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man (1 Cor 15:49).

In salvation, we take on the image of Jesus, the last Adam. The One who knew no sin became sin for us (2 Cor 5:21). He was judged, condemned as guilty, and died for your sins – in your place – so you could have fellowship with God the Father.

When you are born again, you are made spiritually new (2 Cor 5:17). You become a son of God (Jn 1:12) and a descendant of Jesus, the last Adam. As a child of God through faith in what Jesus accomplished at the cross, you begin taking on the qualities of Christ by the Spirit working through the Word. His death on the cross of judgment, and His resurrected life become your “hope of eternal salvation.”