Exodus 19 3 Then Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain and said, "This is what you are to say to the house of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: 4 'You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now
you obey me fully and keep my covenant,
out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, 6 you [1] will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.' These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites." --NIV, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED; EMPHASIS ADDED.
Footnotes
19:5,6 Or possession, for the whole earth is mine. 6 You
© Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society All rights reserved worldwide
AND IN Ex. 20:5, we find:
Exodus 20
2 "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
[HELLO, "SLAVERY" as in pretty awful 9-5 and then some! . . . that they were warned about from the beginning--particularly with Abraham and many points therefrom.]
3 "You shall have
other gods before [1] me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God
[In the NLT: I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God who will not share your affection with any other god!; CEV: I am the LORD your God, and I demand all your love.; Young's Literal Trans. nor serve them: for I, Jehovah thy God, [am] a zealous God, charging iniquity of fathers on sons, on the third [generation], and on the fourth, of those hating Me,],
punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Footnotes
EZEKIEL 18: NIV:
Ezekiel 18 :: New International Version (NIV)
The Soul Who Sins Will Die
1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 "What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
" 'The fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge'?
3 "As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD , you
quote this proverb in Israel. 4 For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son-both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.
5 "Suppose there is a righteous man who does what is just and right.
6 He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel. He does not defile his neighbor's wife or lie with a woman during her period.
7 He does not oppress anyone, but returns what he took in pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked.
8 He does not lend at usury or take excessive interest. [1] He withholds his hand from doing wrong and judges fairly between man and man.
9 He follows my decrees and faithfully keeps my laws. That man is righteous; he will surely live, declares the Sovereign LORD .
10 "Suppose he has a violent son, who sheds blood or does any of these other things [2] 11 (though the father has done none of them):
"He eats at the mountain shrines. He defiles his neighbor's wife.
12 He oppresses the poor and needy. He commits robbery.
He does not return what he took in pledge. He looks to the idols.
He does detestable things.
13 He lends at usury and takes excessive interest.
Will such a man live? He will not! Because he has done all these detestable things, he will surely be put to death and his blood will be on his own head.
14 "But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things:
15 "He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel. He does not defile his neighbor's wife.
16 He does not oppress anyone or require a pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked.
17 He withholds his hand from sin [3] and takes no usury or excessive interest. He keeps my laws and follows my decrees.
He will not die for his father's sin; he will surely live. 18 But his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother and did what was wrong among his people.
19 "Yet you ask, 'Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?' Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live.
20 The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him.
21 "But if a wicked man turns away from all the sins he has committed and keeps all my decrees and does what is just and right, he will surely live; he will not die.
22 None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him. Because of the righteous things he has done, he will live.
23 Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD . Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?
24 "But if a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked man does, will he live? None of the righteous things he has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness he is guilty of and because of the sins he has committed, he will die.
25 "Yet you say, 'The way of the Lord is not just.' Hear, O house of Israel: Is my way unjust? Is it not your ways that are unjust? 26 If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it; because of the sin he has committed he will die.
27 But
a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he will save his life.
he will not die.
29 Yet the house of Israel says, 'The way of the Lord is not just.' Are my ways unjust, O house of Israel? Is it not your ways that are unjust?
30 "Therefore, O house of Israel, I will judge you, each one according to his ways, declares the Sovereign LORD . Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall.
31 Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed, and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, O house of Israel? 32 For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Sovereign LORD. Repent and live!
Footnotes
18:8 Or take interest; similarly in verses 13 and 17 18:10 Or things to a brother 18:17 Septuagint (see also verse 8); Hebrew from the poor
I don't really think the above should require any comment from a layman or anyone else. Nevertheless--to every man an answer . . .
The Bible is a complex collection of 66 books. God speaks to a myriad of complex life situations as well as an infinite complexity of individuals and individual choices. It is relatively easy to construe at face value some contradictions here and there. Our perspective is also finite compared to God's.
Communication is an art that requires some art on the part of the listener as well as sender. It is difficult for us to put ourselves in God's place and even remotely sanely pretend to have His perspective. Nevertheless, He makes it relatively easy to understand the gist, at least, of what He's getting at.
Then there's the fact that GOD SAYS that the soul that does not know Him CANNOT understand--certainly not well--those things written from the heart of God to the hearts of those who Love and earnestly follow Him.
But most of these straw dogs those hostile to God like to brandy about are as substantive as a morning fog--or less so.
Comparing Exodous and Ezekiel above, we CAN see--IF--we wish to see--that initially, GOD IS MAKING A VERY BIG POINT THAT HE IS SUPREME, ULTIMATE ETC.
He goes to GREAT LENGTHS to impress on an essentially illiterate people that they need to live with that focus, value, perspective--engrained on their psyche's, souls, hearts, minds--their whole being--OTHERWISE, they'll get into ALL KINDS OF TROUBLES.
Interestingly, He chose a people who, as He describes them--are rather obstinate, rebellious, etc. at least as much as any other people and often quite a bit more so. In a sense, they are a vivid set of object lessons for the rest of creation--both in what NOT to do and in what to do vis a vis in relationship to God and life and each other.
Right after giving Moses the Exodous exhortation, Moses goes down to find them in all manner of debauchery as well as worshipping a golden calf.
Now in our own era we can observe the following which I've taken the libertay to use as an illustration from PHILIP YANCEY'S WHAT'S SO AMAZING ABOUT GRACE? [Zondervan ISBN 0-310-21862-4]
p75
"In 1898 Daisy was born into a working-class Chicago family, the eighth child of ten. The father barely earned enough to feed them all, and after he took up drinking, money got much scarcer. Daisy, closing in on her hundredth birthday as I write this, shudders when she talks about those days. Her father was a 'mean drunk,' she says. Daisy used to cower in the corner, sobbing, as he kicked her baby brother and sister across the linoleum floor. She hated him with all her heart."
"One day the father declared that he wanted his wife out of the house by noon. All ten kids crowded around their mother, clinging to her skirt and crying, 'No, don't go!' But their father did not back down. Holding on to her brothers and sisters for support, Daisy watched through the bay window as her mother walked down the sidewalk, shoulders adroop, a suitcase in each hand, growing smaller and smaller until finally she disappeared from view."
"Some of the children eventually rejoined their mother, and some went to live with other relatives. It fell to Daisy to stay with her father. She grew up with a hard knot of bitterness inside her, a tumor of hatred over what he had done to the family. All the kids dropped out of school early in order to take jobs or join the Army, and then one by one they moved away to other towns. They got married, started families, and tried to put the past behind them. The father vanished--no one knew where and no one cared."
"Many years later, to everyone's surprise, the father resurfaced. He had guttered out, he said. Drunk and cold, he had wandered into a Salvation Army rescue mission one night. To earn a meal ticket he first had to attend a worship service. When the speaker asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus, he thought it only polite to go forward along with some of the other drunks. He was more surprised than anybody when the 'sinner's prayer' actually worked. The demons inside him quieted down. He sobered up. He began studying the Bible and praying. For the first time in his life he felt loved and accepted. He felt clean."
"And now, he told his children, he was looking them up one by one to ask for forgiveness. He couldn't defend anything that had happened. He couldn't make it right. But he was sorry, more sorry than they could possibly imagine."
"The children, now middle-aged and with families of their own, were initially skeptical. Some doubted his sincerity, expecting him to fall off the wagon at any moment. Others figured he would soon ask for money. Neither happened, and in time the father won them over, all except Daisy."
"Long ago Daisy had vowed never to speak to her father--'that man' she called him--again. Her father's reappearance rattled her badly, and old memories of his drunken rages came flooding back as she lay in bed at night. 'He can't undo all that just by saying'I'm sorry,'' Daisy insisted. She wanted no part of him."
The father may have given up drinking, but alcohol had damaged his liver beyond repair. He got very sick, and for the last five years of his life he lived with one of his daughters, Daisy's sister. They lived, in fact, eight houses down the street from Daisy on the very same row-house block. Keeping her vow, Daisy never once stopped in to visit her dying father, even though she passed by his house whenever she went grocery shopping or caught a bus."
"Daisy did consent to let her own children visit their grandfather. Nearing the end, the father saw a little girl come to his door and step inside. 'Oh, Daisy, Daisy, you've come to me at last,' he cried, gathering her in his arms. The adults in the room didn't have the heart to tell him the girl was not Daisy, but her daughter Margaret. He was hallucinating grace."
"All her life Daisy determined to be unlike her father, and indeed she never touched a drop of alcohol. Yet she ruled her own family with amilder form of the tyranny she had grown up under. She would lie on a couch with a rubber ice pack on her head and scream at the kids to 'Shut up!'"
"'Why did I every have you stupid kids anyway?' she would yell. 'You've ruined my life!' The Great Depression had hit, and each child was one more mouth to feed. She had six in all, rearing them in the two bedroom row house she lives in to this day. In such close quarters, they seemed always underfoot. Some nights she gave them all whippings just to make a point: she knew they'd done wrong even if she hadn't caught them.
"Hard as steel, DAisy never apologized and never forgave. Her daughter Margaret remembers as a child coming in tears to apologize for something she'd done. Daisy responded with a parental Catch-22: 'You can't possibly be sorry! If you were really sorry, you wouldn't have done it in the first place.'"
"I have heard many such stories of ungrace from Margaret, whom I know well. All her life she determined to be different from her mother, Daisy. But Margaret's life had its own tragedies, some large and some small, and as her four children entered their teenage years she felt she was losing control of them. She too wanted to lie on the couch with an ice pack and scream, 'Shut up!' She too wanted to whip them just to make a point or maybe to release some of the tension coiled inside her."
"Her son Michael, who turned sixteen in the 1960s, especially got under her skin. He listened to rock and roll, wore 'granny glasses,' let his hair grow long. Margaret kicked him out of the house when she caught him smoking pot, and he moved into a hippie commune. She continued to threaten and scold him. She reported him to a judge. She wrote him out ofher will. She tried everything she could think of, and nothing got through to Michael. The words she flung up against him fell back, useless until finally one day in a fit of anger she said, 'I never want to see you again as long as I live.' That was twenty-six years ago and she has not seen him since."
"Michael is also my close friend. Several times during those twenty-six years I have attempted some sort of reconciliation between the two, and each time I confront again the terrible power of ungrace. When I asked Margaret if she regretted anything she had said to her son, if she'd like to take anything back, she turned on me in a flash of hot rage as if I were Michael himself, 'I don't know why God didn't take him long ago, for all the things he's done!' she said, with a wild, scary look in her eye."
"Her brazen fury caught me off guard. I stared at her for a minute: her hands clenched, her face florid, tiny muscles twitching around her eyes. 'Do you mean you wish your own son was dead?' I asked at last. She never answered."
"Michael emerged from the sixties mellower, his mind dulled by LSD. He moved to Hawaii, lived with a woman, left her, tried another, left her, and then got married. 'Sue is the real thing,' he told me when I visited him once. 'This one will last.'"
"It did not last. I remember a phone conversation with Michael, interrupted by the annoying technological feature known as 'call waiting.' The line clicked and Michael said, 'Excuse me a secong,' then left me holding a silent phone receiver for at least four minutes. He apologized when he came back on. His mood had darkened. 'It was Sue,' he said. 'We're settling some of the last financial issues of the divorce.'"
"'I didn't know you still had contact with Sue,' I said, making conversation."
"'I don't!' he cut in, using almost the same tone I had heard from his mother, Margaret. 'I hope I never see her again as long as I live!'"
"We both stayed silent for a long time. We had just been talking about Margaret, and although I said nothing it seemed to me that Michael had recognized in his own voice the tone of his mother, which was actually the tone of her mother, tracing all the way back to what happened in a Chicago row house nearly a century ago."
"Like a spiritual defect encoded in the family DNA, ungrace gets passed on in an unbroken chain."
"Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation."
[emphases added by Q]
"Margaret is a devout Christian who studies the Bible every day, and once I spoke to her about the parable of the Prodigal Son. 'What do you do with that parable?' I asked. 'Do you hear it's message of forgiveness?'"
"She had obviously thought about the matter for without hesitation she replied that the parable appears in Luke 15 as the third in a series of three: lost coin, lost sheep, lost son. She said the whole point of the Prodigal Son is to demonstrate how human beings differ from inanimate objects (coins) and from animals (sheep). 'People have free will,' she said. 'They have to be morally responsible. That boy had to come crawling back on his knees. He had to repent. That was Jesus' point.'"
"That was not Jesus' point, Margaret. All three stories emphasize the finder's joy. True, the prodigal returned home of his own free will, but clearly the central focus of the story is the father's outrageous love: 'But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.' When the son tries to repent, the father interrupts his prepared speech in order to get the celebration under way." [emphasis w blue added].
"A missionary in Lebanon once read this parable to a group of villagers who lived in a culture very similar to the one Jesus described and who had never heard the story. 'What do you notice?' he asked."
"Two details of the story stood out to the villagers. First, by claiming his inheritance early, the son was saying to his father, 'I wish you were dead!' The villagers could not imagine a patriarch taking such an insult or agreeing to the son's demand. Second, they noticed that the father ran to greet his long-lost son. In the Middle East, a man of stature walks with slow and stately dignity; never does he run. In Jesus' story the father runs, and Jesus' audience no doubt gasped at this detail."
"Grace is unfair, which is one of the hardest things about it. It is unreasonable to expect a woman to forgive the terrible things her father did to her just because he apologizes many years later, and totally unfair to ask that a mother overlook the many offenses her teenage son committed. Grace, however, is not about fairness."
"What is true of families is true also of tribes, races, and nations."
[Q: The book is wonderful and a great blessing to me at this point in my life. I encourage all hurting people and those who know hurting people to read it. He touches with many quoted great thinkers on serious crux issues of grace from our modern history. And, of course, he writes with his solidly practical, candid and yet searing prose.]
Most of us know ample stories similar to the one Yancy shares. Exodous describes a kind of universal law. We reap what we sow. And whether it is by genetics; a kind of spiritual genetics; a kind of emotional genetics and/or a kind of emotional/psychological genetics and/or conditioning--our offspring will reap what we sow as well. And the reaping can extend horrible distances down the line.
I believe that in Ezekiel, God is describing more a focus on the issue of eternal life. He is saying that IF WE WILL LISTEN, COME TO HIM; REPENT, HUMBLE OURSELVES BEFORE HIM; PUT HIM FIRST--THERE IS ANOTHER WAY. When it comes to eternal life and the age of Grace--a later era in the sequence of spiritual eras--EACH MAN WILL BEAR HIS OWN ETERNAL WEIGHT.
Yes, if we choose to live on the plane of the fruit of the tree of knowledge--then we reap what we sow and set our children and progeny up to reap what we have sown.
But if we choose God's grace and to live according to His mercy and will, then we can AT LEAST have eternal life. Each individual will bear their own burden or choose their own destiny by their choices and actions vis a vis God's Salvation--choose death or choose life.
IF you insist on stubborn rebellion--then horrible results will accrue to you and those who follow in your line. IF you choose God's Grace at least in this life there is some respite--a different inheritance through Christ's Blood and mercy even here--but more crucially--you need not suffer eternal death. You will bear the result of your own choice when it comes to eternal life. None of this tumbling your eternal choice on your descendants.
So, the two passages deal basically with two different contingencies. (A) The individual chooses stubborn rebellion and the generations after him bear the fruit of those choices in their daily lives in this time/space dimension. (B) With respect to eternal life--each person is responsible for their own choice.
It is perhaps possible also to say, God may be describing a transition in His major way of dealing with man in terms of God's focus. He is describing more of the style of relationship Christ died that we might be returned, reconciled to God through His Grace--that we might return to God and authentically have access at least at some eternal point to the walking-in-the-garden-face-to-face sort of relationship with God. Exodous is THE LAW based relationship. Ezekiel at least is pointing toward the Grace provided potential relationship.
Ezekiel writes many things particularly for our era. Christ affords in our era MUCH provision for turning our lives around. His Blood can slice right across the generational sins; the personal sins; the destinies demonic forces through the ages have tried to deposit to our accounts and daily lives. Christ with our cooperation is eager to take The Sword of The Spirit to such horrid destinies . . . and to offer us a NEW ONE secure in Him, in His cleansing Blood by the power of HIS SPIRIT. But the choice is ours. We can choose under the law--with it's rather strict reaping and sowing. Or, we can, as Ezekiel says--NO LONGER--live slaves to such reaping--we can choose eternal life and reap better results now AND in eternity--ETERNAL LIFE--ruling and reigning with Christ. What a deal!
I think you might have arrived at such conclusions had you studied the chapters out more thoroughly on your own.
GRACE TO YOU AND YOURS.