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Parents are well aware of the fact that on any given day they are passing along more than just peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to their kids.
Children are seemingly equipped with spiritual and emotional Velcro.
They pick up our attitudes, our opinions, our biases, our hopes, and our fears.
And according to some particularly daunting verses of Scripture, it’s clear they’re picking up far more than that:
“I, the Lord, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:5-6).
What are we to make of this?
Everyone agrees that our kids are stuck with our DNA when it comes to height and hairline. But does God really punish grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the spiritual performance of those who have come before them, with no hope in sight?
If we look a little more closely, we discover something fascinating about these verses.
Many psalms, proverbs, and poetic statements in the Jewish Scriptures are expressed in something called Hebrew parallelism.
A thought is presented in two lines. We’ll call them A and B. Sometimes the two lines say the same thing, but in different ways. Sometimes they compare and contrast opposite perspectives. What happens when numbers come into play? Line A will state a number, and line B will make it bigger.
Check out Proverbs 30:18: “There are three things that are too amazing for me, four that I do not understand.” From A to B we add one.
Let’s try I Samuel 18:7: “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” The difference here is a factor of ten. If we go back to the fourth chapter of Genesis, we find this dark threat by a man named Lamech (4:24): “If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.” The difference here is a factor of eleven.
Now that we’re getting the hang of this, we can even make a poetic statement about how long it’s been since certain sports franchises have won championships: “The New York Knicks haven’t won a championship since, well, last Saturday, while the Indiana Pacers have been also-rans for 53 years.”
So, let’s go back to Exodus 20. Look at the difference between lines A and B. Punishment for sin extends to the third and fourth generations. But to how many generations will God show love?
One thousand.
The real message here is this amazing contrast. There is nothing else like this in the Bible, where line B is multiplied by a four-digit factor.
Yes, God punishes sin. But God overwhelmingly longs to show love.
Sins and frailties cling to the branches of every family tree on earth. Generation to generation, we can see what happens when anger is mismanaged; when bitterness goes unaddressed; when sexual abuse, deceitfulness, and addictions are hidden in the shadows. Children do indeed suffer for the sins of their parents.
But that is far from the whole picture.
On the pages of Scripture, hope always wins out for those who turn to the Lord. We may suffer because of the mistakes of others, but that doesn’t mean we are predetermined to repeat them.
“If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation. The old has disappeared; the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
We can’t rewrite the stories of those who came before us. But we can choose – beginning this Father’s Day weekend – to join our own stories to the Story of the God who longs to show his love to us.
For when you change your story, you change your life.