Someone asked a friend of mine if they believed in "generational curses." She said, "No," and this led to the question, "Is it true that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children?"

This has always been a subject of passing interest for me. I think that the sins of the fathers being visited upon their children, in a way, may be an Old Testament Biblical principle, but for Christians it should just be a learning curve. I mean, for example, Isaac appears to have learned a particular type of deception from his dad, Abraham. Isaac tells the lie that his wife is actually his sister, the same way Abraham did. Take a look at what Abraham did in Genesis 12:10 and Genesis 20:1, and then check out 26:7.

I've heard some people in theorizing on one thing or another in Genesis 6 say that the term, "sons of God" (bene elohim in the original language) refers to the "godly line of Seth." There just isn't any solid Biblical evidence, either stated or implied, that Seth's line was any more "godly" than Cain's line. When you break it down, there was just one antediluvian personality that was translated before the coming judgment, and that was Enoch. Only Noah, Mrs. Noah and their sons and their wives were saved in the Ark. Everybody else was thinking only evil thoughts continually, and there is not one shred of Biblical evidence that the wives of Noah's boys were Sethites.

What's more, is that if the line of Seth was so faithful, why did they perish with the rest in the flood? Was it because Seth's sins were visited upon his offspring? Somehow I don't think so, and when you look at the kings of Judah, it doesn't take very much reading to determine that some of the godly kings had ungodly sons, and that some of the ungodly kings had godly sons. The former shows that there can be a tendency to sin in the same way that our fathers did, but the latter shows that it isn't at all of a certainty. We have free will. We can learn and repent and choose.

If you disagree with me on this, you may take encouragement from a passage in Jeremiah 31. Chapter 31 speaks of the "new covenant. Take a look at verses 29 through 34. In that passage, God gives assurance to children that under the New Covenant the sins of their fathers will no longer be visited upon them. For this, as in everything else, He deserves our praise.