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.

Slavery Today

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes (Romans 1:16).

This year marks the 212^th anniversary of the beginning of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, which wasn’t fully realized until 1833.

John Newton was a slave trader, buying African men and women taken as slaves by other African tribes. He later wrote that if half the slaves survived the journey from Africa to England to be sold, it was considered a prosperous trip.

Newton sank so low in his evil venture that he ended up a slave to another slave trader himself before escaping and giving his life over to Jesus Christ. After becoming a pastor, he wrote the most famous hymn in the Western world, “Amazing Grace.” Some historians believe the tune was probably a common west African melody Newton heard his cargo singing.

A year after being elected to the British parliament, William Wilberforce was born again. His faith in Christ and study of the Bible led him to oppose slavery for the rest of his adult life. He worked tirelessly on the merits of Scripture alone, depleting his social standing and his finances.

Over the years, Wilberforce and Newton became close friends and allies. During a time of many political defeats and a bout of depression, Wilberforce visited his old, blind, and physically ailing friend. Ready to give up the fight to outlaw slavery, Newton took Wilberforce’s hand and said, “Only two things I know for sure: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Saviour.” Wilberforce was recharged for the political battle and went on to fulfill his God-ordained destiny.

Slavery still exists. The United Nations estimated in 2018 that more than 30 million people were slaves across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Many of them are Christians.

Be certain, slavery is evil, but the slavery of sin is the greatest evil. Sin opposes the very nature of God. It damns the sinner to Hell for an eternity separated from God. Few of us will rise as politicians like Wilberforce or preachers like Newton, but let us each desire, seek, and proclaim freedom from sin through faith in Jesus Christ for ourselves and to our neighbors.

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Genesis 1: The Only God Worthy of Worship

Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also (Genesis 1:3; 16).

The Egyptians were a powerful and advanced nation of people. Their pyramids, temples, and statues have remained after more than 4,000 years and are a testament to their abilities. Even today, we can’t reproduce their architecture and don’t know how they built those great structures.

Like all ancient peoples, the people of Egypt worshiped a wide variety of deities, each represented by something visible in creation; they worshiped nature. Their chief god, Amun-Ra, for example, was the sun traveling through the sky in his boat. Apis was manifested in the bull. And the great goddess Isis was the moon, ruling over the night sky.

The God of all things was jealous for the Jews. As the One true God, He had a right to demand the whole devotion of the people whom He loved and freed from more than 350 years of slavery in Africa.

Moses wrote the Book of Genesis by divine revelation during the 40 years the descendants of Israel wandered in the Sinai Peninsula. Genesis chapter 1 was an important text for His people to know. It not only described the Creator’s character and how all things came to be, the opening passage of the Bible revealed His superiority over His creation.

If the sun was Amun-Ra and the moon was Isis, Jehovah was their Creator! All of creation and every creature man falsely worshiped was the work of God’s hands. God’s handiworks were worshiped as gods, but they were nothing more than mistaken identities.

The first chapter of Genesis proved to Israel that Jehovah, the unseen God of creation, was alone worthy of worship.

We live in an age where the temptation to worship the things of creation is no less than it was 4,000 years ago in Egypt. What Genesis 1 said to the Jews wandering in the Wilderness is relevant to us today. The God of Genesis 1 is the only God worthy of worship.

Chief of the Kamba, Kivoi Mwendwa (1780s – 1852)

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us (Acts 17:26-27).

Today the Kamba people are one of the largest of the 43 tribal nations in Kenya. Once part of the great Bantu empire, they began migrating from western Africa around 1000 AD. The fierce Kamba warriors and their families moved eastward, taking the wealth of those they conquered and keeping and selling other Africans as slaves to Arab traders. Invading the rich pasture lands of modern Kenya and northern Tanzania, the Kamba warriors shifted from fighting and hunting to farming.

It’s easy for us to fall into the politics of division, forgetting that the history of every people on earth, including the Kamba, is one of conquering and being conquered, fulfilling God’s eternal plan.

The first Kamba chief in recorded history was Kivoi Mwendwa (1780s – 1852). Kivoi rose to prominence, power, and wealth by trading elephant tusks, minerals, and slaves to the Arab, Indian, and Chinese colonizers on the African coastline. Contemporary Kamba language and culture are highly borrowed from these interactions nearly a millennia ago.

Although Roman Catholic monks from Portugal arrived on the coast of Kenya in the 1400’s, they were largely rejected by the overwhelmingly Muslim population. It was Chief Kivoi who guided the first Christian missionaries, Johann Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, into the heart of Kenya in 1849.

The traditional religion of the Kamba centered on an invisible, all-powerful sky-god called Ngai or Mulungu who was far removed from the daily cares of his creation. The Jesus of the missionaries was different. He was a visible God who lived, loved, and gave His life for the Kamba; yet the evangelistic efforts of the two missionaries were considered unsuccessful.

Feeling defeated, Krapf left Kenya in 1853, counting only a dying cripple and a social outcast as converts. Within 35 years, however, Kambas not only embraced the saving gospel of Jesus Christ, but were sending out their own evangelists deeper into Africa.

Click here to read about the Kamba living in Paraguay and how the arrived in South America 200 years ago.

• An oldie from 2019

Out of Kambaland

Kamba women in Kamba Cua, Paraguay.

Strong African tribes regularly raided and conquered their neighbors, keeping the defeated neighbors as slaves. Beginning in about 1000 AD, Muslim traders were buying African slaves sold by other African peoples from west and east Africa. It is estimated that Arabs sold more than 7 million African slaves in the Middle East and China by the year 1600. African slaves were not introduced into Europe until 1463.

Spanish soldiers called conquistadors invaded the South American continent, either enslaving or killing most of the natives. In 1556, the Spanish brought the first African slaves into South America. Many of these men and women were from the Kamba tribe in modern Kenya.

Spanish slaves were not bound to their masters for life, but could earn their freedom by serving in the military. As these slaves gained their freedom, they intermarried with the Spanish and established their own cities and prospered in the New World. When Paraguay declared it’s independence from Spain in 1811, nearly half of all the people in Paraguay were former Kamba slaves!

The Kamba in Paraguay flourished until the 1940s when socialists took control of the government and confiscated the Kamba lands and the people expelled. Today the 807 Kamba living in Paraguay are left with only 7.5 acres (3 hectares) of land in the villages of Kamba Cua and Kamba Kokue. 

Like the Kamba in Paraguay, the common human experience is one of sorrow, injustice, and loss no matter where or when you live. Placing your hopes and dreams in this world will bring you to the end of your life with utter disappointment and eternal destruction. This is why God draws the attention of His people Heavenward. Believer … keep looking up! When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory (Colossians 3:4).

Click here for more Kamba history.

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