The Long-Term Impact of Family Mess
by Joey Johnson July 26, 2010
Click here to read previous articles by Joey Johnson
The longer I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I know there is to learn. The more I see that there is to learn, the more I realize how little time I have to learn what God wants me to learn and apply.
One of the truths that concerns me greatly is the long-term impact of families upon their members. This impact can be good or bad, but the negative impact is particularly devastating. This is poignantly pointed out in the Bible. As a matter of fact, one of the Scriptures that I am thinking about is repeated four times in God's Word.
"You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me" (Exodus 20:4-5, emphasis mine).
Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations" (Exodus 34:6-7, emphasis mine).
"The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations" (Numbers 14:18, emphasis mine).
"You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me" (Deuteronomy 5:8-9, emphasis mine).
As you can see, the operative phrase is "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations." This is the phrase I want to concentrate on in this book.
First, we need to determine what God is not saying. He is not saying that He punishes the children for the sin of their parents. He clearly says so in Deuteronomy 24:16:"Fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin."
So, what is God saying?
Well, let's look at the meaning of the words and see if we can begin to understand what God is saying. First, the Hebrew word for visiting is paqad, which means to visit, either with friendly or hostile intent. Second, the Hebrew word for iniquity is avon, which means perversity, moral evil, fault, iniquity, mischief, punishment of iniquity, or sin.
So, God is saying that He is going to visit, or bring about, punishment for the sinfulness of a father to the third and fourth generation of that man's family. The word punishment in this context does not mean the inflicting of a penalty upon one for a crime or sin, but the suffering, pain, or loss that serves as retribution.1 God is not discussing the punishment of a penalty, but the consequences of sin. Let's see if we can understand this more deeply.
God must, because of His nature, deal retribution to every human being. The word retribution means "just punishment for evil done or just reward for good done." So retribution can be either positive or negative depending upon the context. At the end of time, when God wraps everything up, He will give to every person his or her retribution. God must do this because of His immutable, unchanging, stable nature.
God is a holy God. He is a just God. He is a righteous God. Therefore, every sin must receive a just payment of reward, recompense, or retribution. Like the word retribution, the meaning of the words recompense and reward, when they are used in the Bible, must be determined by their usage.
Since we are all sinners, and our self-righteousness is nothing more than filthy rags, to pay for our sins we must be sentenced to hell. This is tragic indeed, but praise God that the Cross takes care of all the sins--past, present, and future with respect to salvation--of those who place their trust in Jesus Christ. Jesus' death upon the Cross takes care of the penalty of sin for those who place their faith in Him.
However, in the four passages of Scripture quoted above, God is not discussing personal sin, but familial sin. God is discussing the impact of sin upon succeeding generations. God is discussing the consequences of sin, both forgiven and unforgiven, upon the children who will come later.
The wonderful gift of God's forgiveness takes care of all sin--past, present, and future, with respect to salvation; but it does not wipe out the consequences of sin in this life. One day God will right every wrong and wipe away every tear from our eyes, but for now the consequences of sin are still with us. Therefore, God must, because of His nature, visit the consequences of the father's sin upon the children to the third and fourth generation.
There is another reason why God must visit the consequences of the sins of fathers upon their children: God's nature is expressed in the laws of the earth that He has created.
For instance, Newton's Third Law of Motion is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the same way, there are consequences for righteousness and sin, and these consequences must be visited upon future generations. The Scriptures we are considering deal with the consequences for sin. It is not so much God personally visiting the consequences of sin upon succeeding generations, as it is the nature of the way that God has created things to operate--which is in keeping with His own nature.
Salvation takes care of the punishment for sin, but it does not take care of the specific impact of sin. Consequences are the normal, logical, natural, systematic results of an action. We are basically discussing cause and effect. For every cause there is some effect:
- If a fertile man and woman have sex, the effect is often a baby.
- If someone chooses to drink heavily for a long period of time, the effect is often cirrhosis of the liver.
- If a father commits sin, the effect is that some consequences of that sin will show up in his children in some way.
This is a law of heredity. Because of the disobedience of Adam, the stream of humanity is polluted and we all inherit the sin nature. All men are born in the sin that has been passed on to them from their parents, grandparents, etc. But how? Well, I'm no scientist, but I do know that man has come far enough in scientific study to know that genes control inheritance by transmitting one or more traits to one's offspring. The genes of the father are passed on to his offspring. In those genes is the genetic code of the father, which may actually include specific sinful impact.
You know that. You've sampled it scientifically. You have seen children who have not grown up with their father or even known their father, but they act just like their father. How could that be? How could that boy act so much like his father having never known his father? It's because it has been genetically passed on to him.
This brings us to the age-old question: What causes people to sin--their heredity (that which is inborn) or their environment (that which they experience)? Well, we shall see in the chapters to come that the answer is both. Children are impacted by the consequences of the father's sin--through both heredity and environmental influences. The percentage of impact depends upon many variables, but one thing is sure: The consequences of a father's sin are going to impact his offspring. Therefore, we see what God means when the Bible says He visits the iniquity (i.e. the consequences of sin) of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this truth is the fact that sin has such far-reaching, long-term effects. Keep in mind these three familial impacts of sin:
1. Sin always effects present devastation and bondage. The sins of the father and the mother bring fairly immediate devastation and bondage both to the perpetrators and to the victims.
2. Sin always reaches back to the past. Present sin is somehow connected to sin that has been committed in the past. It is connected in heredity or environmental influence to someone or something in the past. Sin is never a single act disconnected from the larger continuum of human sin. Whatever sinful act we commit is connected to past generations, all the way back to Adam. This whole sequence of events got started in the Garden of Eden.
3. Sin never stops with one generation. Sin always reaches forward and touches our future posterity, our children. Somehow it always impacts the generations to come.
There is an excellent Minirth/Meier book entitled Kids Who Carry Our Pain.2 The gist of it is that our children deal with and finish the pain in our lives that we didn't work through. But I would take it one step further: Kids not only carry our pain, they also carry the consequences of our sin. A lot of that pain exists as a result of the consequences of our sin.
That is easy to understand with devastating sins like abuse, alcoholism, or drug abuse. It is still true but much harder to see and understand with sins such as gluttony, selfishness, and pride.
Let me state this in terms that are easier for us to understand: Family sin leads to family mess!
When we say something is a mess, we mean that the situation is disorderly, confusing, muddled, troubling, difficult, untidy, dirty, and thus embarrassing. Disorder means a lack of normal order. This suggests the upset of the normal functions or health of something. Consequently, the word is strongly related to the concept of dysfunctionality. Therefore, family sin leads to family dysfunctionality--a family that is not functioning as it ought to function. It's a family mess!
Families in a mess have three patterns that members tend to follow:
1. Don't talk. Don't ever talk to anyone about the sin, abuse, or neglect that is going on in your family. Keep the family secrets. Generally, the sicker the family the more secrets there are that must be kept. I am not discussing the normal privacy of a healthy family, but the sick privacy of abuse.
2. Don't feel. Do whatever you have to do to keep from facing the pain of your situation. Use whatever substance, pattern, person, thing, or idea you need to stay out of the pain. Don't face the real pain because it will undo you. Everybody wants to just go on. But you can't go on over family mess! It needs to be dealt with. When Nehemiah came to Jerusalem, not only were the walls broken down and the gates burned with fire, but there was also debris in the street. You can't build a city on debris--you need to clean up first. You can't just go on. Family mess needs to be dealt with.
3. Don't trust. You have been so devastated in your life that you cannot afford to trust anyone no matter how trustworthy a person might seem or how he might prove himself. This includes God! If people are untrustworthy, God must be, too.
As I stated earlier, our operative phrase occurs four times in God's Word. Some have said that four is the number of the earth. Family mess happens, even "As the World Turns!" It is not something you can avoid, but it is something that you can heal from.
The Bible is a real book that gives the real story of real people and their real interaction with the real God! Therefore, the Bible is full of family mess. God does not hide the truth; He deals with reality. There can be no healing or freedom from family mess until we face the reality of what has happened.
Take slavery, for instance. It is interesting to me that very few people seem to understand the ongoing impact of slavery upon the African-American community. If we go back three or four generations in our history, we come face-to-face with the ravages of slavery, and the American brand of slavery was one of the most dehumanizing forms of slavery known to humanity.
The family mess that was caused by slavery is still impacting us today. The three patterns of dysfunctional families apply to us: We still don't talk very freely; we still have difficulty feeling our real feelings; and we still have difficulty trusting one another, not to mention other ethnic groups.
But praise God, because He wants to deliver us from family mess. And He has experience in delivering people from the family mess of slavery. He delivered His chosen people, the Israelites, who had been in bondage in Egypt for 400 years.
God took the children of Israel out of Egypt in one night, but it took God forty years to get the immediate impact of slavery out of the children of Israel. And even after all the adults of that generation had died, the people were still suffering the long-term impact of their previous enslavement. I am not bringing this up to make excuses for African-American people. I am bringing this up so that we may understand the reality of the damage that has occurred and realistically seek God for deliverance and healing.
In His deliverance, God used both the crisis and the process of deliverance.
- Deliverance from Egypt was a crisis. It happened miraculously, in one night, at once, and once and for all. God closed the Red Sea behind them so they couldn't go back.
- Deliverance from the effects of slavery was a process. It took at least forty years in the wilderness, but probably additional time in the Promised Land.
God delivered African-Americans from slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, though the Emancipation Proclamation has never been fully realized. Therefore, we are still struggling with the effects of slavery.
God took us out of the slavery of sin in the crisis of salvation. Jesus said that "if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36), but we are still struggling with the effects of sin. God is still taking slavery out of us in the process of progressive sanctification.
"As the World Turns" there is sin, family mess, and generational bondage. But there is also a God Who wants to bring hope, deliverance, and restoration! Can you believe that family mess can also be a divine messenger with a divine message?
- God wants to use the suffering of our ethnicity to give a divine message of hope, deliverance, and restoration to the world. When the world looks at African-American people and sees the hope, deliverance, and restoration that God has worked in us after the suffering of slavery, it will be a testimony to the power of Almighty God.
- God wants to use the suffering of our ethnicity to give a divine message of compassion, deep feeling, devotion, and piety to this world. God wants the world to look on black people and see our suffering and understand what compassion is all about.
- God wants to use the suffering of our ethnicity to create "transethnic" communities to model love and reconciliation. He wants to show the world what a true microcosm of Heaven would look like--red and yellow, black and white, worshiping God here on earth, right now, through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Let me summarize this chapter with five important truths:
1. Family mess is the tip-off that there is something seriously wrong with your family. Don't ignore it or say, "Well, you know, that's just the way we are." Pay attention to it.
2. Family mess is the tip-off that there is something beyond natural circumstances impacting your family: generational bondage. When you remember that your great-granddaddy was an alcoholic and you remember your grandfather was an alcoholic and you remember your father was an alcoholic, you need to pay attention to that pattern.
3. Family mess is the tip-off that you need someone or something greater than you if you are going to be healed. Counseling is great, but only Jesus Christ can truly straighten out family mess.
4. Family mess can alert you to areas of struggle or sin that you should be aware of. This is like number two. If you're a woman and your great-grandmother always had three or four men hanging around, and your grandmother did too, and your mother did too, guess what sin you're going to have to watch out for in your own life?
5. Family mess can alert you to areas of struggle or sin where God wants to work. He wants to move right in at the deepest, most difficult part of your life to bring healing and transformation.
In the next chapter, we are going to follow the family mess in the family of God's chosen people, beginning with the patriarch, Abraham. We are going to see the impact of family mess as well as how God works to establish His chosen people in spite of it.
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