Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 106
TRANSCRIPT
What if something had happened in your family line or was currently happening that gave the enemy entrance to continue hounding you? You would want to do something about that wouldn’t you? Generational curses are affecting you whether you like it or not. But because of the blood of Jesus, there is something you can do about it.
I’m Lee Whitman from Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you into this Hope Healing and Freedom Podcast. Generational curses are real yet many in the body of Christ want to ignore them or believe that they do not exist or believe that they ended at the end of the Old Testament. The result has been that Christians are living under the effects of generational curses and either think it is normal or feel powerless to get free from them and so they simply live with them. In this podcast I am taking many of these ideas from Charles Martin’s wonderful book What If It’s True. I highly recommend this book to you.
What are we talking about when we talk about generational curses and where did they come from. Let’s start with where they came from. There are four places in the bible where it talks about generational curses. When God says something once it is important, but when He says something four different times it must be something that He wants us to pay special attention to. Here are the four times God warns us about generational curses.
Exodus 20:5 “you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me”
Exodus 34:7 “keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
Deuteronomy 5:9 “you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me”
Numbers 14:18 “The Lord is longsuffering and abundant in mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He by no means clears the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation.”
God is serious about sin and the consequences of that sin. He is serious about it because sin does not just affect the person who sins, but that sin opens the door for curses to be passed on to the third and fourth generations of those who commit the sin. Deuteronomy 28 is a chapter that is full of the blessings for obedience and the curses if you do not obey.
What does living under a curse look like? Quoting Charles Martin, “Living under a curse feels like a giant cloud that follows you. If you’ve ever said, “It runs in the family,” that family might be living under a curse.” This is a partial list of the curses found in Deuteronomy 28:
- Mental or emotional breakdown, which can include mental illness.
- Barrenness – unable to have children, miscarriages, female problems, male problems.
- Sickness of all kinds, disease, infirmities in the family.
- Poverty or continued insufficiency, even when income should be sufficient.
- Defeat, never feeling like you can succeed at anything.
- Helplessness
- Weakness, constantly feeling beneath your circumstances.
- Breakdown of marriage or family, divorce.
- Accident proneness
- Suicide or unnatural death.
Charles Martin says “Despite years of repentance many Christians are still suffering chronic, relentless, illogical events in their lives. It’s as if no matter what they do, how many times they repent, or how sincerely they might come back before the throne, they can’t seem to come out from underneath whatever is hounding them.” “An analogy might be that we live every day drinking from living waters. The enemy uses our ancestors’ sin – through the legal loophole of God’s spoken law – to poison the waters upstream. So, in order to make the water clean again, we must remove the source of that poison.” “As believers we often act like people who have picked up the Sunday paper with all its coupons, but have never gone to the store to redeem those coupons.”
What must happen to break these generational curses is to repent on behalf of your family line.
Leviticus 26:40-42 says, ‘But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers, with their unfaithfulness in which they were unfaithful to Me, and that they also have walked contrary to Me,…..if their uncircumcised hearts are humbled, and they accept their guilt— then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and My covenant with Isaac and My covenant with Abraham I will remember; I will remember the land.
You are not taking on the responsibility for your ancestors’ sins, but you are confessing the guilt for the sin that is in your blood line. There are several examples of Godly men taking on the sins of their ancestors and their nation and confessing them as their own in order to bring repentance and forgiveness. For example, Nehemiah 1:6 says “please let Your ear be attentive and Your eyes open, that You may hear the prayer of Your servant which I pray before You now, day and night, for the children of Israel Your servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel which we have sinned against You. Both my father’s house and I have sinned.”
Daniel does the something similar with the sin in the nation of Israel. Daniel 9:5-20 is the entire passage but here are some of the relevant verses: “we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments.” All through this passage Daniel is confessing the sins of all the people, and the sins of their fathers in order for the curse to be turned away.
So, are you saying that I need to repent for sins I have not committed? Yes. If you know they are in your family line, then they belong to you. We need to understand that God sees us in families. It says that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Those are three generations of Abrahams family, yet that’s the way God sees them. God looks at you through that same lens. When you go to a new doctor, the first thing the doctor will do is to have you fill out a medical history on your family. Why? Because doctors know that certain medical conditions run in families. They are resident in your blood line which makes you more susceptible to those same conditions. In 2018 I had a heart attack. At the time of the heart attack Cindi and I had been on a five- or six-year journey to improve our health by eating right and getting plenty of exercise. We had eliminated almost all sugars from our diet which is pretty painful for a guy who likes ice cream like I do, as well as cut down on our consumption of red meat and carbohydrates. We were going to the gym at least four days a week. So, this heart attack was a total surprise. When I went to the cardiologist for a follow-up visit, he looked at the history I had given for my family as well as our current diet and exercise regime and he said, “You inherited this heart attack.” He explained that our family medical history has a very strong impact on our health, even sometimes it has more impact than our lifestyle. Being an RTF minister, I understood exactly what he was talking about, knowing how the sins of the fathers both physically and spiritually are passed down to the third and fourth generations.
But Lee, those are Old Testament verses about generational curses. The New Testament doesn’t talk about generational curses, does it? The answer is Yes and No. There are many things that are not specifically addressed by chapter and verse. It is a mistake to assume that since the verses about generational curses are Old Testament verses then they no longer apply to us.
Malachi 3:6 says, “For I am the Lord, I do not change”. It is a mistake to disregard the admonition of the Lord found in the Old Testament because you don’t see it mentioned in the New Testament. God said in four places that there are generational curses passed down for three or four generations because it is something He wants us to know. His statutes do not change. So, if it is something that is not specifically addressed in the New Testament that has obviously changed, then we should continue to believe that it is in effect for us today.
In regard to generational curses the bible does not say that they ended when Christ died on the cross. In fact, there is a story of Jesus healing the blind man in John 9:1-2. It says “Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth. 2 And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”It was a normal part of the culture of that day to understand about generational curses. It was not something that Jesus needed to explain because everyone knew that curses are passed from one generation to the next. Notice that Jesus did not say that generational curses no longer existed, He pointed out that this man was blind so that the works of God could be revealed. By not dealing with generational curses, we are leaving the body of Christ in bondage. Charles Martin says it is as if we are saying to people who are in a prison cell “You are free. “Isn’t freedom wonderful” without giving them the keys to actually open the prison door. Consequently, many in the body of Christ are looking out through the prison bars and are trying to believe that they are free. RTF has the keys to their freedom. We know how to apply what Jesus has done on the cross to their lives and cut off the curses coming down their family line.
Again, quoting Charles Martin, “Too many Christians have limited the cross to a single-use tool. We are quick to say that the cross is the guarantor of our salvation in the next life. And it is. Period. But it has more than one use. What does it do in this life? Not only do we hold the cross before us as a guarantor of our salvation, but we can also drive it like a stake into the ground behind us to cut ourselves free from the stuff in our past that plagues us.” That’s awesome. We not only look forward to our salvation and new birth into Christ, but we can apply the cross of Christ to our generational lines to cut off the curses. It is the blood of Jesus and the Cross of Christ that puts an end to the generational curses. What we must do is apply the cross of Christ to those curses. To use Martins analogy, we have the Sunday paper with all of the coupons, but we have to go to the store and apply or use the coupons. Every Christian has the ability to apply the blood of Jesus to these generational curses, however many don’t know that they need to do this because they have never been taught about generational curses. I was raised in a church that did not believe in generational curses, so we were not taught about them.
Mark 7:13 says, “Do you really think God will honor your traditions passed down to others, making up rules that nullify God’s Word?” I think often times men are taking the Word of God and nullifying its effect because it does not fit in with their traditions instead of taking every word of the bible as truth. God said four times that the sins of the fathers are passed down for three or four generations. Yet people believe these verses are now null and void because they don’t fit into our man-made theology leaving people in prison cells while the church is telling them they are free.
Jesus came to set the captives free. Period.
Prayer
Father God, you have given us the keys to unlock the prison cell instead of looking between the bars and saying we are free. If anyone listening today is in any way locked in a prison cell, would you reveal it to them so they can apply what Jesus has done on the cross to their lives and really becoming free. In Jesus Name.
If God is showing you that you are still in bondage to these generational curses, please go to our website and click on the Get Ministry tab at the top to find a highly trained RTF minister in your area. Freedom is available. Reach out to a ministry team today. om. Would you help us recognize if we have any Ungodly Soul Ties or attachments that are restricting our freedom.
