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.

Circumcise Your Heart

And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live (Deuteronomy 30:6).

The Bible says God created humanity in His moral image (Genesis 5:1), but sin totally distorted that likeness. Soon after, Adam begot sons and daughters in his own image and likeness, sinners just like himself (Genesis 5:3; Romans 5:12).

Physically we reproduce what we are, each of the two parents adding from their own genetic pool all the necessary bits and pieces to create a new life. We do the same spiritually; sinners produce more sinners. Nothing better symbolizes our sin nature than procreation.

Many ancient cultures practiced circumcision, but God gave the act of removing the male foreskin to Abraham and his descendants as a sign of the covenant between Me and you (Genesis 17:11). That part of a man that enables the creation of babies in his own image was to be cut away because nothing good comes from the flesh.

Abraham was saved by God through faith (Genesis 15:6) many years before God gave circumcision as a sign of the covenant to save (Romans 4:1-12). But over time the Jewish people lost sight of what circumcision meant, turning it into a symbol of national superiority. It became an emblem of man’s prideful works to be right with God rather than an image of sinful shame. Uncircumcised men, called Gentiles, were believed to be outside the circle of God’s love and plan.

The Jewish prophets explained circumcision as a symbol of a pure heart and a readiness to hear and obey God (Deuteronomy 10:16). It pictured the need for the heart to be cleansed from sin, an internal “cutting away” of what was inherited from Adam and separated him from God. While people can circumcise their flesh, only God can cut away the heart. Salvation is wholly an act of God.

Much of the Old Testament is a record of Israel’s continual rebellion against God, and the root cause of this rebellion was an “uncircumcised heart,” a heart that had never been changed by the Lord and one which refused to bow and to be humbled before Him.

In Christ you were also circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the sins of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ (Colossians 2:11).