One day, a curious young student came to his mentor and asked a question.
“The teachers tell me that God gives us generational curses,” he said. “They each teach different incantations, prayers, and rituals to break them.”
“What do you want to know?” his mentor replied.
“Two things, teacher,” the young man said. “First, why would God allow His people to be cursed when they are following Him?”
“And the second?” the mentor asked.
“If God had a special set of incantations and rituals to break them off, why is it not clearly placed in the Bible? Does God want to keep us cursed?”
The young man’s teacher leaned back a bit and let a moment pass by with only silence.
He pursed his lips then began to speak:
You’ve asked a very good question, and it’s right for you to ask these things.
Whenever a man’s teaching does not reflect the Word and nature of God, we must question the validity of these things. Now when they speak of generational curses, they refer to the Bible which says, “[The Lord] will visit the sins of the fathers on the children of those who hate [Him].”
Now this is not a curse as if some spell of witchcraft that requires another spell to remove it, as wicked and greedy teachers will tell you. Just like the witch-doctors in remote regions, they convince people that they are cursed and then charge them money for the ritual in order to break it. In those regions, the rituals are spoken to you by the doctor after you pay him. In the church, today, it’s a DVD set and workbook, but the result is the same. It is incantations for a price. In so doing, foolish people become guilty of witchcraft, equating God to one who requires performance and incantation in order to do what the Blood has already accomplished, and it becomes true what is written in scripture, “My people perish for lack of understanding.”
Therefore, to understand this verse, we need Wisdom.
What can I tell you? The visitation is like an inheritance.
There was once a man who had four sons. He was an angry and bitter old man. Life had not treated him well, and he was always complaining about his terrible luck. The farm that he owned and tended was always experiencing problems and barely made enough to feed his family. Because of all this, he was cruel and callous with his wife and four sons, and none of his neighbors enjoyed being around him.
As the sons grew in age, they all vowed not to be anything like their father.
Now it happened that as the older boys were approaching their teens and the youngest son was around 9 years old, the young man made a friend in school who invited him over to his home. His new friend had a nice home with a very loving family. The friend’s father was a successful and very caring man. It surprised the young boy at what a difference there was in this home. He had never seen the love of a father and a family like this before. When his new friend dropped his fork at the dinner table, instead of yelling harshly, the father bent down to pick it up and smiled at his son as he handed it back.
Over time, the young boy spent as much time with this new family as possible. He wanted to learn all that he could. His new friend’s father saw the interest and desire to learn and he treated the young boy as if he were his own son. Every day, he’d sit down and teach the boys about business, life, marriage, and the Bible.
Many years passed by this same way, and the three oldest boys were now grown and beginning families of their own. The youngest boy was in his early twenties and ready to start out in life for himself.
Around this time, in the same month, both the angry father and the kind father died. As the estates were getting settled, the lawyers came and met with the families.
Now it happened that the kind father who had treated the youngest son like his own did not leave him an inheritance of land or money. All that he left for him was a letter which simply read, “Remember”. Scrawled across the bottom was a signature and a short hand-written and note which said, ‘I love you, son’.
In hearing this, the three older brothers scoffed at their younger brother.
“See!” they jeered. “We told you that you were not one of their family. You are one of us, and you always will be. You get what you get.”
The younger brother remained silent and tucked the letter away into his coat.
At this time, the lawyer for the four boys’ father came in and read the letter which stated what each of the four brothers were to inherit from their father.
To my oldest son, I leave my dog.
He’s a mean son of a bitch. Every time I went to feed him, he’d snap at my hand. But he’s the family dog. Take care of him.To my second son, I leave the chicken.
His clock is broken, so he always crows three hours too early. Don’t bother caging him up. He’ll always find a way to break out and sit outside your window.To my third son, I leave the goat.
She’s a sick old thing. I’ve brought her to the vet more than all you kids and your mom combined. She’s always been that way, but she’s the family goat.Finally – to my youngest, I leave the cow.
She won’t produce any milk, and she’ll kick if you get close. She also eats four times what any other barnyard animal does, so it’ll cost you.
Each boy received his inheritance and went his own way.
Now because the older brothers were busy starting their families and the youngest was beginning his life, the brothers fell out of touch and lost contact.
Ten years later, when they learned that their mother was ill, they all came together to visit her. As the boys all sat around in the living room after visiting with their mother, they began to catch up and tell each other their stories.
“Remember that old dog?” the eldest brother asked. “I fed him every day, and just like dad said, he snapped at me. I got bit so many times that my hands got mangled and my legs got weak. Now I can’t walk without crutches, and I need help to even pick up a spoon to eat my soup.”
“You think that’s bad?” the second son scoffed. “I spent a year trying to cage that damn chicken. He broke out and woke me up at 2am every night. I got so angry, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Night after night this happened, and I started getting short with the wife and kids. I snapped at them so bad that after a few years, my wife took the kids and left. I lost my whole family.”
The third son sat back in his chair and said, “Yeah? Well everything was going great for me. I had a successful business, and the kids were happy, but that goat got sicker and sicker. We went to vet after vet and saw all kinds of specialists. All the trips and the medicine cost me so much money that I eventually went broke. We lost everything and are living in a shelter.”
The three brothers had solemn looks on their faces. Each looked to their younger brother waiting to hear his story, but he said nothing.
Finally, the oldest said, “Well don’t just sit there! Tell us about the cow dad left you.”
“I’ll bet you wish your fake dad with your fake family really did leave you something!” the second brother snorted.
The young man took a breath and spoke, “He did.”
There was a pause in the room as the other brothers looked at him in shock, waiting to hear what it could have been.
“I took that old cow to the barn,” he began. “She kicked all the way there, just like dad said she would. I even tried to milk her and nothing came out.”
The other brothers sighed and snickered a bit.
“So I took her down to the butcher on the corner,” the youngest continued.
“When that butcher saw the cow coming down the road, he shouted, ‘My oh my, if that isn’t the biggest cow I’ve ever seen in my life!’”
“I told him, ‘I don’t have any money, but I’ll make you a deal. You slice this up for me and package it. While you work, I’m going around to the whole town to sell the cuts. When you’re done, I’ll pay you for your work, and anything I don’t sell, I’ll let you sell in the shop and keep half the profit.’”
“The butcher quickly agreed,” the youngest brother continued. “He and I both made a healthy sum of money, and the people I sold to wanted to keep buying. We ended up going into business together. Ten years later, I now own three businesses and the wife and kids are very happy!”
The young student, who had been listening closely to his mentor and friend paused for a moment to think about the story the teacher had just told him.
“Teacher,” he said, breaking the silence, “I understand that the inheritance was the ‘visitation’, or in other words, it is what the world calls a generational curse.”
The teacher nodded.
“But I don’t understand why the young man took the cow to begin with, if he didn’t already know it would profit him.”
“After all,” the young student reasoned, “it was a curse and a burden his father had to bear.”
The teacher smiled and said, “The young man remembered something that his adopted father had taught Him from the Bible.”
“It was a lesson that God spoke to His chosen people, in which He said, ‘I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. So choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.’”
“You see,” his mentor continued, “the youngest brother understood that the cow was not the curse. It was rather his choice that made it a curse or a blessing.”
In the same way, the sins of our fathers visit us in the form of choices.
We can either learn from them, which makes them a blessing, or we can repeat them, which makes them a curse.
“The inheritance that his adopted father left him was the knowledge of how to be rid of generational curses and live in generational blessing, which can be summed up in two words — choose life.”
“To choose life is to have reverence for the Lord and to obey to His commands and precepts. There is no string of words which can break what you define by your choices. To put it another way, God cannot bless what does not honour His divine order, and He cannot allow a curse or death to reside where life is.”