For those of you who weren’t able to attend last Sunday’s service at ORCNI, the full transcript of my sermon is now available online.
What these texts practically teach is that God, through lineages, appropriates sin and its effects, just like He appropriates goods and blessings through lineages in his covenant. We have now seen that this is not the same as that children are somehow guilty for the deeds of their fathers. No, the practical outworking of this doctrine is twofold: Firstly, children generally inherit the tendency to the sinfulness of their fathers through the depravity transmitted through generations. No-one is born as a clean sheet before God, but we are all born with certain natural dispositions and inclinations. What these texts mean, therefore, is that children of godless parents tend to be born with a more utterly depraved tendency to repeat the sins of their parents. This transfusion of sinful nature can be understood in a similar way that a pregnant heroine addict’s child is already born with an addiction to heroine. Unless God intervenes by his exceptional grace, sinfulness continues uninterrupted and depravity grows even stronger with each generation. Similarly, when God’s loving covenant blessings is promised to thousands of generations of those who love him, it does not mean that God merely loves and blesses someone because of their parents’ obedience, but that God, under normal circumstances has chosen to use lineage as a covenantal means to communicate his love and graces. Through covenant obedience, God blesses believing parents with believing children, who are in turn blessed for their own obedience. This is a form of sanctification through the generations.
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