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.

Hating Israel

(RLR 2023)

I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises, of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came (Romans 9:2-5)

The current, yet millennia old conflict in the Middle East between Arabs and Israelites, Muslims and Jews, is troubling on many fronts. The most bizarre is the number of those claiming to be Christians yet hate the Israelite nation and people. Many of these same people shouting the loudest about “justice”, “equity”, and “white racism and supremacy” despise the Israeli people.

Let me say without hesitation: it is sin for a Christian to hate any person, group of people, or nation of people. To demand the annihilation of the people of Israel, calling for them to be wiped off the earth “from the river to the sea” – from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – goes against the God who swore to give that land perpetually to the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Deuteronomy 4:40).

“Ah,” they say, “we Christians are Israel, having displaced and replaced the Old Testament people of God by the New Covenant.” Yet that is not what Paul wrote to the church in Rome or in Ephesus (Ephesians 3:11-13). In fact, to the Corinthians he commanded to give no offense, either to the Jews or to the Greeks or to the church of God (1 Corinthians 10:32), clearly distinguishing between three distinct and separate groups of people.

The hatred of the Jewish State is nothing less than the hatred of God Himself, who called the Jewish nation to be His chosen people from among all the nations of the earth (Deuteronomy 7:6) and His very own people forever (2 Samuel 7:22). Forever is a very long time to the covenant keeping God!

We do not assume that the Jewish State is perfect nor always right in it’s decisions and actions; but beware your hatred. Hating His people in the age of Old Testament history always resulted in His swift and just judgment, even when Israel was far from Him in their hearts.

Anti-semitism is ultimately a hatred of the God of Israel.

Three Wiggly Worms

Before leading the people of Israel into their promised land, God warned of the danger of prosperity.

Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God … when you have eaten and are full, and have built beautiful houses and dwell in them; and when your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and your gold are multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied; when your heart is lifted up, and you forget the Lord your God … I spoke to you in your prosperity, but you said, “I will not hear” (Deuteronomy 8:10-14; Jeremiah 22:21).

Amazed that Jesus didn’t repeat the prayers of other men, but prayed simply and from His heart, the disciples asked Him to teach them to pray too. In what some mistakenly call The Lord’s Prayer (the Lord never prayed this Himself), Jesus taught His disciples to ask God’s provision for daily bread (Matthew 6:11).

Beware of the wiggly worms of pride, passivity, and passion eating their way through God’s daily provision for you. These worms are never satisfied with God’s gracious provision. Pride hinders us from relying fully upon God to provide because we can work harder, cheat and steal, or think we can decree and declare what we want. Passivity worries about keeping hold of is already stored up. Passion hungers for a never-ending supply of more.

The Christian learns, however, to be content and thankful with the basic provisions of God (1 Timothy 6:8).

A perceived lack of material things is contrasted to the overflow of God’s spiritual wealth. We know the unsearchable riches contained in Jesus are more than we can ever use (Ephesians 3:8). Despite this wealth untold, many would rather possess the rusting, rotting, robber-ready riches of this world.  

You may never have what others possess. You may feel a lack of sufficient supply of this world’s goods. Carefully recall that having something doesn’t make you content; it might actually make you less content. As Puritan Thomas Watson wrote, a fancy cage doesn’t make a bird sing any sweeter; and a single walking stick may help a man over a difficult path, but a great number of walking sticks will make him stumble.

Contentment learns to sing with the psalmist, My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Psalm 73:26).

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You Cannot be a Lover and a Keeper of Wrongs

Love thinks no evil (1 Corinthians 13:5).

The idea of thinking no evil means that love doesn’t keep a record of wrongs done against it. The most miserable people you’ll ever meet are those who hold onto past wrongs done against them or others … recent or ancient. They are forever tied to the hurts and negativity of yesterday. Forgiveness is in ashes in a burnished urn of resentment, and the focus is always on evil rather than good. Peace and peacemaking is dead.

Fulton Oursler was born in 1893 and became a famous author of detective stories. While on vacation to the land of Israel in 1935, this atheist was moved to write a book about the life of Jesus.

He believed the task concerning Jesus to be a quick project, but as he considered the growing threat of communism from Russia and the socialism of Nazi Germany, Oursler was convinced that the only hope for the world – and his own soul – was to be found in Jesus. Oursler was born again through faith in Christ Jesus.

When Oursler died in 1952, his son found a notebook of names next to his father’s bed. Not recognizing most of the names, the young man asked his mother about the book. Grace Oursler explained that once he became a Christian, Fulton wrote in the notebook the name of each person who crossed him, not to remember the evildoer, but to remind himself he’d forgiven that everdoer.

Forgiveness means wiping the record of past wrongs clean. Forgiveness doesn’t keep a record of wrongs, it expunges the wrongs.

Jesus tied love and forgiveness together in Luke 7. A prostitute went to worship Jesus, which set the religious crowd in a tizzy. Jesus said, I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little (7:47).

You cannot be a lover and a keeper of wrongs.

The Faith of Rahab

Soon after taking leadership of the Jewish people, Joshua sent two unnamed spies across the Jordan River into the city of Jericho. It would be the first city in God’s promised land Israel would conquer.

News of their arrival reached the king and the two spies were hid in the Jericho home of a woman named Rahab, who lived with her parents, sibblings, and their children. She was an Amorite, a tall, fierce, and wicked people who defeated the Chaldean Empire around the time of Abraham, and then colonized Canaan. Few details of Rahab’s life are known except that God saved her from, and forgave her for, all of her sins before she met the two spies. She’d been a prostitute. 

We’re reminded that men and women like Rahab are seldom prostitutes by choice, but are made slaves by force, fraud, or coercion for the use and abuse of their bodies by the evil desires of evil people. The world-wide average age of a sex slave today is 15. 

The ancient world knew God had judged Egypt, led Israel across the Red Sea, and defeated two Amorite kings. Canaanites also knew they were occupying a land God had given to Israel and Israel was there to claim it. Israel’s God was sovereign in heaven above and on earth beneath (Joshua 2:11) and the people were terrified. Yet only Rahab had faith in God. The same evidence was seen by all the people of Jericho, but only this woman believed.   

Rahab secured the promise of the spies that when God destroyed Jericho, she and her family be spared. The spies had her dangle a scarlet rope out her window to identify her home and family. When God flattened the city walls, Rahab was delivered from God’s wrath against her people and her own sins by the sign of that blood-red rope running down the wall.

The Bible says By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace (Hebrews 11:31). 

Rahab, looked forward to the shed blood of Jesus on the cross; we look backward to the same event. Like Rahab, all who trust in the deliverance of God from sin will be spared from His judgment against sin and sinner alike.