“Is there really generational sin?”

Steve Brown:
Is there really generational sin? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
Welcome to Key Life. Our host and teacher is Steve Brown. He’s nobody’s guru, but he does have honest answers to hard questions about the Bible. God’s grace changes everything, how we love, work, live, lead, marry, parent, evangelize, and worship. Now, here’s Steve and Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with street-smart Bible teaching for real life.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete. How are you doing?

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, I’m doing good. I’m doing good. How about you?

Steve Brown:
I am, too. You know, I shouldn’t. At my age, there ought to be more wrong than there is wrong. But I’m healthy and you think it’s my purity?

Pete Alwinson:
Maybe, maybe. You know, I often think.

Steve Brown:
Or maybe it’s my sin. I don’t know?

Pete Alwinson:
Here’s what it is, I think God has kept you healthy all these years. So, you continue to give to other people. I really think you’re a gift to people.

Steve Brown:
Oh, listen, can I call you occasionally and say, you remember what you said on that broadcast?

Pete Alwinson:
I will.

Steve Brown:
Would you say it again?

Pete Alwinson:
I will say it again.

Steve Brown:
That’s Pete Alwinson and you’ve got to go to ForgeTruth.com to find out something about an incredible ministry simply called Forge. One of the most effective, powerful ministries to men in the United States. Check it out. It’s great. There’s a great podcast. And if you’re not of the male gender. And if you’re confused, give us a call and we’ll tell you the difference. But if you’re not of the male gender and you want to know what they’re thinking, then I would suggest you could go to ForgeTruth.com yourself. Pete comes in every week and we answer questions and we love your questions. You can ask a question by calling 1-800-KEY-LIFE, 24 7, follow instructions, ask your question, and sometimes we put your voice on the air. You can send your question to

Key Life Network
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in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
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or you can e-mail your question to Steve@keylife.org and listen, if you can help us financially, please do. We promise to be faithful with your gift and squeeze every dime for the glory of God and the benefit of His people. So, when you give, you help out your brothers and sisters in Christ who can’t give. And if you can’t give, we understand that. Say a prayer for this ministry, and ask God to bless us, and to convict a couple of millionaires to send us large gifts. No, erase that. That’s a joke. In fact, you better pray soon, or I’m going to mess this up bad, and then we’ll answer some questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right, let’s pray together. Father, thank you for your grace and your goodness to us. As we come into your presence today, we stop just for a minute and know that it is such a powerful thing that we’re not alone. That wherever we go, your Spirit is in us because we’re your children, that you hold on to us, that you will never let us go in all of time and eternity. And so, we come to you and Lord Jesus, we thank you for all that you have done to connect us to the Father. You did everything and we only bring sin into this relationship. And so, Lord, thank you that you lived a perfect life, that you proclaimed the way to salvation through faith in you, that you went to the cross and removed the curse that was upon us. And so, we love you and Lord, you know us, you know we need you. And how often it is we play games with other people. We’re not always all right, Lord, but we need you and your power in our life. Be with our pastors and priests and teachers and leaders this week-end as they proclaim to us the unsearchable riches of Christ. Give them power and may we hear in Jesus’ Name Amen.

Steve Brown:
Amen. Pete, this is an e-mail. Does the Bible really teach generational sin?

Pete Alwinson:
Well, kind of, in a way it does. It does teach that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. If they’re not repented of, then they continue. There is that cycle that continues.

Steve Brown:
So, there’s not only generational sin in that sense, there’s generational repercussions too.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. Yeah. Generational curse, shall we say? But repercussions is a great way to put it.

Steve Brown:
You know, we have a very interesting thing in our family that illustrates that. I am a teetotaler, and I haven’t always wanted to be one, but I can’t drink any kind of adult beverage. I just can’t. And that’s before I was a Christian. And every male in my family, including my father had a booze problem. They were alcoholics. But when it came to me, God broke that. And that is no longer extant in our family because it was broken.

Pete Alwinson:
Isn’t that, and see, that’s the hope of the gospel.

Steve Brown:
It really is.

Pete Alwinson:
What the gospel can do is and there are many others of these kinds of events or situations that people need to understand, hey, just because that happened back there, just because my parents divorced doesn’t mean I have to divorce. Just because they, he was unfaithful doesn’t mean I have to be unfaithful. There’s so many of these things. The gospel breaks the cycle of sin.

Steve Brown:
It really does. And it’s amazing in the way it does. There’s also repercussions. You know, we have a tendency to say, What happened in my past, in the past of my family is irrelevant. Well, it’s really not. You need to be aware of that. You need to deal with those kinds of things. But you can’t use them as an excuse.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Because the Bible says that everybody, no matter why they sin, and later on, maybe in a future broadcast, or maybe this broadcast, we’ll talk about original sin. But you’re still responsible for your own stuff.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right. And so, how the gospel sets us free, so I have to own what happened to me as a kid. Or what my parents, the environment in which I was raised. But you raise the point about how the infinite grace of God, we get to move ahead.

Steve Brown:
That’s true. And it is so good. I mean, it frees you up. Well, since I brought up the subject, what about original sin? That is an e-mail, too.

Pete Alwinson:
So, original sin, technically put forward right, is the sin that we carry as Adam’s descendants.

Steve Brown:
Kind of a disease.

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. We don’t sin and become sinners, we sin because we are sinners.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. And because we like to sin, too.

Pete Alwinson:
Boy, I tell you, it comes naturally and we like it.

Steve Brown:
Oh, yeah, we really do. You know, people say, why do I do that? Because you like it. If you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t do it.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
But there is, something really bad happened with Adam, didn’t it?

Pete Alwinson:
Boy, I tell you, he, you know, he made a volitional choice to rebel against God. Do not eat of the tree. And he made that choice. I’m going to. And he and Eve did that together. They were in it together. And so, it was a horrible thing.

Steve Brown:
And he’s called the first Adam. Who’s the second one?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah. Isn’t that a great thing?

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is.

Pete Alwinson:
Of course it’s Jesus, but you can miss that if you read it too quickly in the New Testament.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, that’s true.

Pete Alwinson:
Jesus is the second Adam.

Steve Brown:
In Romans, it’s very clear. And just as the first Adam brought darkness and sin and death into the world, the second Adam brings life and faithfulness and light and truth into the world.

Pete Alwinson:

For as in Adam all die, so is in Christ also being made alive those who receive Christ.

Steve Brown:
That’s right. And original sin, you get unbelievers that often say, you don’t mean to say that that little cute baby has original sin. Generally, people who say that are young people who haven’t had children yet.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
You begin to see a total wad of selfishness there and they’re cute and they’re wonderful and we love them, but they are not without being self absorbed.

Pete Alwinson:
Boy, I tell you, self assertiveness, self absorption. It’s amazing.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is. Okay. I don’t think I’ve ever had this question. Who did Noah’s grandchildren marry? Now, we get it about, Cain and Abel and about the Genesis 1 through 3, but where did they find their wives? You’re not supposed to marry your sisters and brothers. But now we’re moving into, Noah. What about his grandchildren?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, it’s a very similar situation, isn’t it?

Steve Brown:
Yeah, it really is.

Pete Alwinson:
For his family because they found that their genetic, their opportunities to marry were very limited. They were within the family. And now, it wasn’t until later when the Law of Moses was given that the kinship regulations concerning marriage came into play. But early on, at this point God must have superintended people’s genetics. So that they had to marry within family line.

Steve Brown:
You know, incest is not something that God says don’t do because it just is dirty. You shouldn’t do that. He does it because there’s a genetic reason for that,

Pete Alwinson:
that’s right

Steve Brown:
that’s really scary. And you don’t want to go there. But with Adam and Eve, that was fairly clear. By the time you get to Noah, it wasn’t, but God superintended. And that works.

Pete Alwinson:
It was obviously his plan to cleanse the planet and to replenish the planet. So, he had to make sure that it was replenishable.

Steve Brown:
That works. Does God still give us dreams and visions?

Pete Alwinson:
You know, I think so. I think he does. And I think we have to make sure that they square with Scripture. What do you think on that?

Steve Brown:
No, I do. Now, I don’t, the great thing about my wife is that she has a, I don’t have any dreams, but she dreams a lot. And sometimes she dreams really bad things happening to our family. And never once, and we’ve been married a whole lot of years. Never once, have any of those dreams come true. And so, we laugh when she has bad dreams about the future and nothing happens. That’s a good, comforting thing to know that it’s not going to happen.

Pete Alwinson:
You don’t dream at all, Steve? You don’t ever dream?

Steve Brown:
Well, not much. I guess I do. Freud has an answer to that.

Pete Alwinson:
What’s the answer?

Steve Brown:
Well, I don’t have time to give you a lecture on it. I’m going to tell you everything.

Pete Alwinson:
I’m not lying on a couch.

Steve Brown:
It’s because of the super ego.

Pete Alwinson:
Ah.

Steve Brown:
That’s a guy with a ball bat that says you can’t even think that and whacks it back down. So, I don’t remember it.

Pete Alwinson:
Okay. All right. There it is.

Steve Brown:
There you go. Now, you understand.

Pete Alwinson:
I do. It’s clear as mud, man.

Steve Brown:
But yes, God sometimes, I believe, does give dreams.

Pete Alwinson:
But clear it with Scripture, clear it with godly brothers and sisters, if you’re having a new direction that you, it might be an idea, but it has to be checked, double checked.

Steve Brown:
It really does, because we have this proclivity to do really weird things. Well, not me, but you. We’ve got to go. Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.