Episode 6: Are Generational Curses a Thing?
Season 1 · Episode 6
Are Generational Curses a Thing?
Show Notes
Amy and Justin Howard tackle one of the most frequently asked questions in their trainings: what are generational sin and curses, and how do we find freedom from them? Walking carefully through the Old and New Testaments, they distinguish the guilt of sin from its cost, wrestle with hard passages like Exodus 34, and show how Jesus both fulfilled and undid the curse. Along the way they explore the surprising science of epigenetics, the early church's practice of exorcism, and why New England can be such hard spiritual ground. It's a warm, honest conversation that ends with practical tools, a genogram exercise, and a prayer, so you can say with confidence: these patterns stop now.
In This Episode
- A curse in the Old Testament shows up two ways: a malediction (a spoken word of harm carrying spiritual weight) and the covenant-breaking judgment that God describes rather than vindictively inflicts.
- There is a crucial difference between bearing the guilt of an ancestor's sin and experiencing its cost; we are not held guilty for a great-grandparent's sin, but we can carry its consequences and are responsible for its healing.
- Scripture shows generational sin both prescriptively (David, Eli) and descriptively (three generations of deception in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), and God even repurposes Jacob's name-curse into Israel.
- Salvation changes our standing before God, but sanctification is the lifelong work of cleaning house; the early church took this so seriously that exorcism was part of baptismal preparation.
- Modern epigenetics echoes Exodus 34, showing trauma can be passed down to the third and fourth generation, reinforcing what Scripture already described.
- Deliverance is more a Spirit-led, relational art than a formula; N.T. Wright's image of writing the fifth act of a play captures how we participate with God rather than follow a rigid script.
- The episode closes with a call to action: map your family in a genogram, invite the Holy Spirit, notice the patterns, and pray the four Rs of repentance, renunciation, forgiveness, and release.
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- Amy and Justin distinguish between carrying the guilt of a sin and experiencing its cost. Where in your own family or story do you see costs you've inherited that were not your fault to bear?
- Exodus 34 begins with God's compassion and patience before mentioning punishment to the third and fourth generation. How does starting with God's character change the way you read the hard parts of Scripture?
- The hosts trace a pattern of deception through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. What patterns, good or painful, can you trace across the generations of your own family line?
- God renamed Jacob 'Israel,' turning a curse of grasping and deceiving into a blessing of tenacity. Where might God want to repurpose something spoken over you into something redemptive?
- The episode describes salvation as receiving the title deed to the house and sanctification as going room by room to clean and redecorate with Jesus. Which 'room' in your life do you sense the Spirit inviting you into next?
- Justin suggests New England can be hard ground partly because we've been taught the demonic doesn't exist. How has your background shaped what you believe about spiritual realities, and where might you need a broader framework?
- The call to action invites you to make a genogram and pray the four Rs (repent, renounce, forgive, release). What would it look like for you to take a step toward saying, 'these patterns stop now'?
Full Transcript
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0:03Introduction
Welcome to Between Heaven and Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard. And together, we lead a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We are thrilled that you've joined us. In each episode, we'll explore what it means to follow Jesus by bringing Heaven and Earth together in your family and community. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and courageously join with Jesus in his great project of healing and restoration. This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. Let's dive in.
Well friends, welcome back to another episode of Between Heaven and Earth. And today, we're going to continue to answer some commonly asked questions. Commonly asked questions. I don't know what was coming out of my mouth. I don't know what that was. About generational sin or generational curses. Yeah. This is going to be fun. It's going to be so fun. If our conversation for the last half hour trying to hammer this out is any indication. I hope this is going to be fun. Right, yeah, yeah. And a lot of it is nuance. A lot of it is like, how do you actually talk about this without it provoking or evoking bad ideas about God?
Yeah, because there are a lot of really bad formulaic ideas that surround this idea of cursing. And this is something that we are talking about just now. I mean, there are so many bad ideas about curses. And we want to make sure that we don't go down that road, or that you don't go down that road, listeners. And so we want to clearly articulate what we believe to be the biblical foundation for generational sin. We're going to look at the Old Testament. We're going to look at the New Testament. We're going to look at the fascinating topic of epigenetics and how generational sin manifests in bodies. And so what we want to do is, we want you to be confident in talking about it.
We want you to be able to identify generational sin patterns in your own life. And we want to give you the tools to get set free and to bring other people into freedom. Yeah, and if questions arise for you as you're listening, write them in. We want to hear about them and continue the conversation, because I feel like the Lord right now, for whatever reason, is bringing this conversation to the surface. This is a frequently asked question in the trainings that we do. And gosh, I was just listening to a John Mark Comer episode where he talks about his wife just being delivered from a generational curse.
I mean, I feel like for those of us who grew up maybe in a Christian, but I don't know, maybe not very charismatic world like I did. I mean, I was just more Reformed or Baptist or straight up evangelical. But this was pretty foreign to us, a vibrant conversation. It just kind of, I don't know, fell into the category of— The fantastic. The weird, yeah, just the really weird. And you're always concerned that then if you peered into it, you're going to get involved in some pretty funky stuff. Right. So we want to tackle it. We also want to say, I think there's more conversation to be had.
3:35What Is a Curse?
We're going to post that John Mark Comer episode down in the notes so that you can listen to it yourself and you can kind of continue the conversation amongst yourselves and write back to us if you like. Yes. So let's just get right down into it. What are generational curses, or what's a curse? Let's start there. Yeah, I think we do need to start with what is a curse. And so as far as the Old Testament is concerned, there are, I think, sort of two main Hebrew ideas about what a curse is, two ways that curses show up. And the first one is a malediction. So this idea that I want something bad to happen to you.
And, but it's not even as simple as that, because in the Hebrew mind, if there was a soul behind that malediction, then it carried the influence or the weight of that soul to then be actually powerfully applied. So there's a supernatural element. And the Bible shows sometimes agents kind of being in the middle of that, like the scroll in Zechariah going out into people's houses as a curse. You see the angel of death applying death. So there were sort of different creatures and angels and interesting ways that curses were applied.
But the idea in the Hebrew, in the Old Testament, the first idea is this idea that there's a bad thing that's gonna happen because someone wishes it or says it about someone else. And what's interesting is when that conversation has to do with the redemptive storyline of God and God's people, the first time this idea shows up is actually in Genesis three. So it was right at the beginning, the first time that cursing kind of appears is Genesis three. Yeah. You wanna? Well, yeah, sure. But you know, the angel of death that you just talked about and the scrolls that fly out in Zechariah, those weren't maledictive, right? Oh, yeah, say more about that. 'Cause that's really important.
5:47The Fall and the First Curse
Well, we're about to get into this, that a curse happens when the covenant breaking happens. Well, from God. Yes. It comes from God. So there are all sorts of curses. Humans can—humans, we are powerful, we are being— But it's not from God's maleficent heart. Right, he has no maleficent heart. There's only goodness in his heart. That's right. So let's look at Genesis chapter three. Let's look at the curse, or the fall, and what happens at the fall. Great idea. All right. So we know Adam and Eve, they surrender their nobility to rule and to reign and to be co-regents with God. They, in effect, break a covenant with God.
And because they break covenant with God, their ability to rule and reign is now broken. Yeah. Because they're separated from the life of God. We talked about this in just describing the kingdom of God. They're actually now under the dominion of Satan. Yes. So they're under his influence. They're experiencing life under the impact of his influence. Right. So who is now the God of this age? That's right. As Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter four. So they abdicated their priestly role. They didn't kick him out of the garden. They listened to him and obeyed him. That's right. And now he's king. That's right. And now, because of covenant breaking, the curse now reigns.
So God says, this is what it's like now. Yeah, this is what it's like. And it's not so much prescriptive as much as it is descriptive. He's basically describing what life is gonna be like when they are no longer in relationship with him, when they're no longer drawing on his life. Yeah, yeah. So when a human pronounces a curse, it's kind of different than when God is pronouncing a curse. God—when God—you were talking about that Romans passage, Romans one, you did such a good job. Can you say that?
Yeah, well, you know, so we're talking about the curse, or God's wrath, or God's judgment, oftentimes in the Old Testament. When the Old Testament writers talk about a curse, they're talking about the judgment of God that comes upon covenant breaking or not being faithful to covenant. There are real consequences to covenant breaking. And that's actually a really good thing, because if there were no consequences to sin, humans would destroy one another overnight. Yeah. I mean, if sin never hurt, if nothing—if sin itself only gave you the pleasure that it promises, then humans would just be operating out of their base instinct, a base instinct of survival and self-preservation.
And they wouldn't last for 30 seconds. I mean, humans are so good at breaking stuff. They are always being motivated by selfishness and survival. So then in Romans chapter one, when St. Paul talks about the wrath of God, he says, "The wrath of God is now displayed for everyone to see." And then he lists those that the wrath of God is displayed against, or revealed against.
And what we find is that the wrath of God is actually him handing people over to their own wills, basically saying, "Okay, if this is what you want, then this is what you're going to have." But even that is always redemptive, because God wants them to feel the pain of what it is to be separated from him so that they will come back. He's not going to override their agency. And so we see in Genesis chapter three that God basically says that everything is now under this curse because my partners are gone from reigning and ruling, and they have basically pledged allegiance to another ruler. And so they're going to now suffer the consequences of being under the reign of that ruler.
And it works its way deeply into the system. It does. Yeah. Okay, so this idea of a curse is both an active reality. So a bad—a malediction is a spoken-out decree, either from God or another person, that has power to bring about a bad thing. And you're saying, if I'm hearing you correctly, that God's heart in that reality is creating a pathway back to wholeness, back to him. So now, I know this feels bad. This doesn't feel good. This isn't going to preserve community. This isn't going to go well. And I'm actually experiencing the cost and the penalty, the pain of sin. Right. Does that sound like what you're trying to say? Yeah, they're now under the powers too.
They're under the power of the evil one. They now live in a place where death reigns. And as you pointed out, it's important to note that God's not cursing the humans. He's not cursing them. He's allowing them to live in a world where the consequences of their actions play out. And where they'll live a life of survival where death is always looming. Yeah, the other main way that curse is used in the Old Testament is this idea of almost like quarantining, like removing something from fellowship so that other people aren't going to get—aren't themselves going to get destroyed, like it keeps contagion from spreading.
So to curse, you know, to curse somebody—it was often a death sentence, but the idea was you're removing this reality from a community. And the ultimate place that we see that is the iteration of Deuteronomy in Jesus, when we read, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree," and he became a curse for us. So he became the sort of the moving—how would you say that the best? You do such a good job describing this. So all of the consequences of the disconnect between heaven and earth, all of the consequences of being separated from goodness, were now borne out on Jesus. Yeah, in his body. In his body. That's right. Yeah, that kind of—yeah. So we're looking at generational curses.
And this is the idea that the consequences, where sinful actions don't just hurt the individual, but they have potential to impact a whole community as well as future generations. And these consequences, per the Bible, can be brought about not just by words or genetics, but by actual spiritual forces and beings. And I think that's—we're so obsessed with individual sin. Oh my goodness, yeah. The individual sin I commit. And because I'm in Jesus, I'm only responsible for my individual sin, and I'm not affected by anyone else's sin. It's just wild. That's just so not—I mean, if you just turn your rational brain on for a second, it just doesn't make any sense at all.
Your sin—you have an impact. Like, you're part of nature, you're part of community, you're part of systems, your workplace, your children, your parents—you are a part. And even if you're not lashing out and causing destruction, even your abdication, the sin of your commission—like the stuff you don't do—is mattering. Yeah. The fact that you—if you stand by while wickedness is taking place, that impacts your community. That's right. Our sin has far-reaching impact. Now, I think it's probably important to just talk about, in the context of generational sin, that we're not saying that three generations out, you necessarily carry the guilt of that person's sin.
Yeah, that's a really good distinction. So, are you experiencing the cost, or are you experiencing the guilt? That's right. And we would even say, when we're talking about original sin, that we don't bear the guilt of Adam's sin. Our sweet, sweet— We bear the cost of it. Calvinist listeners. You can write it in the comments. Right, I mean, this is why Augustine came up with—and I guess I'm saying "came up with," I love Augustine, but I do not like this part about him. He came up with this idea that babies are born under the guilt of Adam's sin. And so therefore he had to come up with the church's teaching—that a baby that was dying, that wasn't baptized, went right to hell?
That's right, they go right to hell. And baptism—the baptism removes the guilt of Adam's sin. Even if they'd never committed a sin. That's right. But the propensity to sin was woven deeply into them. We're gonna get into that today. And now science is backing this up. That's what's so interesting. So you're not held accountable for your great-great-grandfather's sin. But you're experiencing the cost of it. But you're experiencing the cost of it, and you are responsible for its healing in you and the generations that come after you. In stepping into your identity as the priesthood, and banishing the serpent from the garden. Amen. Okay. So how does generational sin appear in the Bible?
15:27Generational Curses in the Old Testament
Let's just start there, go ahead. That's very good. All right, so there are kind of two ways that we see generational sin playing out, generational curses playing out. The first way is prescriptively. So God is saying, this is the way it's going to be. And a good example of that would be like Exodus 34, starting in verse five. This is God speaking to Moses. The Lord came down in a cloud and stood there with him, proclaiming his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin."
"Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished. He punishes the children and their children for the sin of their parents to the third and the fourth generation." So it's almost like God just did like what we just did. He said, "I want you to understand my nature." And he starts off with, "This is what I'm like." Gracious, compassionate, slow to anger. Anything that I do starts with that as its framework. But then also, the stuff that happens is gonna continue to matter. It's gonna keep resonating in bodies and spirits, can even have influence up to the third and the fourth generation. Yep, you mean—you mean of unclean spirits. Yeah, the potency of that disobedience can continue to echo.
Absolutely. And God's going to let it—he's gonna participate in that. He's gonna actually let that happen. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, 'cause it matters to him that we can still feel the consequences of brokenness. Otherwise, we would never repent, we would die a thousand deaths. Like, all of life would be hell. That's right, yep. Okay, so you have prescriptive things. Another example would be like God's punishment of David when he sins with Bathsheba, right? David's son dies. And God actually also says, "The sword's never gonna leave your house." Future generations are gonna continue iterating.
There will be continued iterations of this sin that are gonna echo and ripple down your— Sexual dysfunction, familial dysfunction. Right, and God says it. It's not just happening. God's like, this is what it's gonna look like. Another example would be in second Samuel 12—remember Eli, is it second Samuel 12? No, first Samuel, first Samuel. God punished Eli for failing to discipline his sons and says that you're—this is gonna impact every single member of your household. Like, I'm gonna wipe out your whole household. Yeah, right. That's hardcore. Right, the David passage of second Samuel 12. Yeah. Okay, so that's the prescriptive way. That means like God's commanding it.
Yeah, yeah, God's like, this matters to me, and you guys are powerful and impacting large groups of people, and you're not gonna get away with it. And he's judging them. Yeah. It is a judgment. Yeah. So let's talk about descriptively. So we just talked about prescriptive. Let's talk about how God is basically, at other times, he's just describing the way things are going to be now. Yeah. Because of disobedience. Yeah, so I have sort of two favorites here. One is Abraham's line.
So Abraham goes to Egypt and he knows his wife is very beautiful, and instead of protecting his wife and telling the truth and believing that God is gonna be faithful to the promises that God made to Abraham and Sarah, Abraham instead goes to the king of Egypt and says, this isn't my wife, it's my sister. So he lies about his wife. I'm glad you're not my sister. I don't have a sister, but I'm glad that. Actually, Abraham was fairly closely related to Sarah. So maybe he thought it was like a euphemism. Yeah, maybe. So he wasn't actually lying. Kinda like a sister. My sister-spouse. She's like my—kind of like a sister. Sorry, I had to. They were closely related.
Anyway, so God then intervenes and protects the promise, and he protects Sarah. But that pattern of, I'm going to not protect—I'm not gonna care so much about the women in my life that are part of God's promises to our family line, and I am not going to exercise courage in protection, and I'm gonna lie to self-protect—that then has another iteration in Abraham's son, Isaac, right? And Rebecca. So Isaac goes back to Egypt, and at some point you gotta think, man, this poor Egyptian king. He probably didn't think— Maybe this was a different king at this point. He's got the same name. So either they named him this, you know— But now he's really, really old. Yeah, right. Well, I like it.
He's like a real man. He was like, "Well, that's true." Wow. I don't think age seemed to have been part of this conversation. Everyone was old. It was not a young group of people. So Isaac does the same thing. Yeah, he says, "This isn't my wife. She's my sister." And so the king of Egypt takes—takes Rebecca, and God then, in an act of protection over Rebecca, and she comes home safe. So then their son—they actually have two sons, Jacob and Esau. They're twins. They're born at the same time, and they actually name their son Liar. Mm-hmm.
So lying as a generational reality is so deeply ingrained in their imagination that when they see Jacob grasping at the heel of Esau, what they say—they name that. And they say, you're a deceiver. While he's coming out of the womb, they say, you're a liar. And they name them Liar. The deceiver. You're a deceiver. And he then—he lives fully into that name. I mean, he is a trickster. He's a liar. He's sneaky. Eventually he brings a lot of pain in his own family system and runs away to his uncle's house, Laban, and falls in love with yet another fairly close family member. First cousin. Yeah, Laban's daughter.
And then Laban tricks him and gives him the wrong daughter first, and instead of "it's not my wife, it's my sister," it's like, "that's not my wife, it's her sister." I mean, the whole—the line of this is fascinating. But then when Jacob encounters God, God repurposes that birth moment of the grasping at the heel. And instead of saying, "I'm going to see in that, in you, a liar," I actually see in you a tenacity. I'm going to call you Israel, one who wrestles with God, one who grabs hold and won't let go. That's right. And so God completely repurposes that name curse that was over Jacob's life. Yeah, that's great. So you're saying that that story is descriptive of generational sin patterns.
Yeah. Born out in an actual name curse over Jacob. And that this is the punishment to the second and third and fourth generations that he talks about. Right. Three straight generations of lying, of deception, of brokenness in marriage in that way. Yeah. Now, the punishment—which should be clear—the punishment isn't like humans punish. And this is really important, that as we talk about curses and punishment and the things that God declares, these are not cavalier, from a heart of maleficence, from a God who just blows his top and he gets angry and throws up his hands in disgust. Yeah.
And if that's your initial heart response when you read passages like this, there's an indication that there's pain there between you and God. Yeah. So that's a really, really good place to begin, because when God talks about this dynamic, he starts with an insistence of his faithful, compassionate, long-suffering, patient love. So he wants us to think about these things through that lens. And if your heart doesn't start there right now, it's an indication that there's pain there. Right. And that's a really good opportunity for you to receive some prayer, for you to begin a conversation with the Lord. Like, God, when I think about—it just seems so unfair. I feel like you're angry and mean.
He himself has stated, I'm not angry and mean. Mm-hmm. I am gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. And that punishment that, you know, in Exodus 34—that punishment coincides with Paul's talk, as we said before, in Romans chapter one, where Paul is basically saying the wrath of God is just letting people do what they want. I mean, like, you know, the wrath of God isn't him like beating people over the head or taking them out behind the woodshed. The wrath of God—now, eventually that will, you know, there will be judgment. There will be judgment. But the wrath of God is that. Yeah. That is definitely the Romans paradigm for that.
24:35What Changes in the New Testament
I, you know, I think that when we look at the way that that's presented in the Old and the New Testament, there's definitely nuance. But the overarching thematic reality that really matters in this is that God is most concerned that we know his character, and that his character is for us and for preservation, not for destruction. Right. He is a God of justice. He really cares when things don't go well, and he will bring about justice. Right. But that his heart isn't vindictive and malicious. Okay. So what changes in the New Testament? Yeah. So there's this wonderful promise in Jeremiah 31:29. Jeremiah 31 is talking about the sort of the "in that day" reality. You said something great about "in that day" and you just ate a piece of ice. I'm sorry. Well, in that day, thanks.
In that day—what does that mean, "in that day"? All right. Maybe that should be edited out. No, I think we should keep it. It was cute. So "in that day"—whenever you see that in the Old Testament, they're talking about—it's an eschatological reality that a new age is going to be a reality. A new age is going to dawn and break in. And we know, as believers, that "in that day" means the coming of Jesus as he inaugurates the kingdom. But it is ultimately consummated at his return. But from then until then, from the time of Jesus till he returns, that is the "in that day." We are growing toward, or hurtling toward, the consummation of all things. Yeah, it's good.
So Jeremiah quotes this proverb, and the proverb is, "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." So that proverb is basically saying—it's reiterating that Exodus passage. It's describing a generational curse. It's saying dads have experienced, or parents have experienced, trauma or sin, and the kids are feeling the impact of it. It's continuing to echo in their own lives and their own experience. So they are paying the penalty for their parents' sin and trauma. It's continued to be worked out.
And Jeremiah says, in that day—in that day, like you just said, in that day, in those days—people will no longer say, "The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." So there's this promise that Jesus is going to undo this dynamic, that he has in himself the desire and the will to bring this about, and the power to bring this about—that dynamic is going to change with Jesus. Okay, so in the New Testament, we see Jesus comes on the scene and he begins to break apart all of the dominion of Satan as a hostile takeover, including—
He begins to sort of decouple the automatic association that humans have come to have, at that point, with parents' sin and that being played out in their children. He doesn't say it doesn't necessarily happen anymore, but he does say you can't make a solid assumption about this, like in John nine with the man born blind. Jesus—well, he's asked, "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" the disciples asked, right? And Jesus says, that's not the point here. This is so the glory of God is gonna be revealed. That's right. Mind your own business. That doesn't mean—he didn't say "mind your own business." I added that.
That's your paraphrase. Yeah, but he's basically decoupling it in the sense that it's not automatic. You can't just say—everything bad that, you know, you're born with, you know, with these frailties and these problems, it's definitely your parents' sin. That was a really destructive—and it's still very prevalent in some parts of the world—that if children are born with different disabilities or different pain or different issues, that it's a manifestation of hidden sin from their parents. Yeah, definitely. So he's decoupling that idea. Yeah, he's saying you just can't walk around judging the situation. Right, don't start there. Right. Yeah, start with the glory of God being revealed.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah, don't start with, you know, throwing shade at everybody who has misbehaving kids, or things aren't going well, or someone's sick, or, yeah, is born with a condition. Right. So it's okay. So this, you know, kind of inevitably—what would I think lead us to? Well, actually, first of all, I forgot that Jesus cursed. Yeah, he cursed a tree. He did—he cursed the fig tree and it died. And it died because it didn't produce fruit. Yeah. And so, actually, the apostles cursed as well. That's right. Yeah. Wow. Paul—yeah, commanded what's-his-face to go blind, and he did. Yeah?
Yeah, so this is a New Testament thing, folks. Like, hmm. No wonder—it's a big conversation opening. I can't wait to get to a larger conversation that I think we're gonna continue to have. Yeah. But I can't wait to interview some of these missionaries, friends of ours, that are gonna come on soon, and I want to ask them some of these questions like, hey, have you ever seen some crazy supernatural stuff like that, where you've prayed that, like, a witch doctor would—okay?
Oh, I can't wait. I want to see, because, I mean, the real—like, I—well, I've heard—I have heard these from firsthand experiences, from people that have seen the power of God. Yeah, for the sake of that person to come to know him. Like, it's pretty wild. Hey listeners, are you ready to become fully alive? Life can feel overwhelming, and many of us struggle to feel fully alive. Perhaps you feel stuck in your marriage or career. You might be struggling with anxiety or depression, or you really want to take your relationship with God to the next level. The good news is that you don't have to go through it alone. OneLife Group is a distinctly Christian approach to professional individual and couples counseling, as well as certified coaching for life, leadership, business, health and wellness.
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31:27Can Curses Affect the Saved?
Check out OneLife Group today. Okay, so I want to go to this next thing, which is: can you still be affected by a generational curse after you are saved? Now, this is where I think—I mean, we get some pushback from folks here. Yeah. And actually, if you do a quick Google search, I think that there's some poor scholarship out there. Basically, I think for myself, I'll say, I grew up in an environment where the general sense was, you make a profession of faith, and then any impact that the demonic could have on your life is immediately broken and gone, and it's never the cause of your problems from there on out.
So, so you just can't be impacted by the demonic. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. Not "nothing bad is going to happen to you." But the stuff from now on has nothing to do with Satan. If there are, if there are even demons, right? Right. But the early church certainly thought that you could believe that Jesus was Lord, and you could desire to follow him, you could give your allegiance to him, and still have a lot of cleaning up to do. Right. So that's why they had two years, two to three years of preparation before people were even baptized, which included being assigned exorcism. Yeah, you were assigned an exorcism. Multiple exorcisms. Like, written right into the catechism.
I mean, you are going to—you are going to experience exorcism. The assumption was, you want to follow Jesus, you're bringing stuff in, and we just do things in a very different order now, and it's not necessarily good, bad, or otherwise. I'm not—I'm not saying you shouldn't ever receive baptism as soon as you make a profession of faith. I think there are plenty of groups that do that and it's very effective. I just feel like it's like cutting the corner in spring cleaning, you know, or when you're cleaning your house, you don't really sweep under the, you know, under the rug. I think it means there's a little more surprise at the end. Yeah. Or you don't clean, like, in between the couch cushions.
Yeah. I mean, the church has a name for the ongoing healing and the ongoing being set free. It's called sanctification. Yeah. And you don't get entirely sanctified at the point of your conversion. Right. And the enemy continues to impact you. That's right. And you can carry old stuff into your now relationship with God. Now, so—what would you say changes when you make a profession of faith? I think—oh, when we make a profession of faith and we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, I think that what changes is our standing before God. I think that we're actually made righteous, that we're declared not guilty. Yeah. And we're justified by grace through faith.
So that means that the gift of the Spirit is given to us to begin cleaning out all this stuff and making us more into the likeness of Jesus. Yeah. The image I love is, like, salvation is like giving God the title deed to your house, and sanctification is then, like, going the rest of your life through the different rooms and cleaning them out with Jesus and redecorating. Yes. Knocking down a wall or two. That's a little close to home right now. I'm not sure I'm ready. We're sitting in a room with walls knocked down and it is upsetting. Somebody sat in here during the month of March. I had nothing else to do. I got—I got stir crazy. You did get stir crazy. So the wall is now gone.
All right. So, so the early church thought that this was important. Yeah. They thought that breaking curses, that cleansing from demonic influence and impact, was really, really important, even for people who already thought, yeah, no, I definitely believe Jesus is God and that he came to save me and I give my life to him. Right. And that is the journey—the journey of sanctification. It's becoming more and more like him and breaking the power of the evil one and his influence in your life. And he has influence and access through open doors. Yeah. Through lies that we believe, unforgiveness, generational trauma. So, are curses just bad ideas, or are they inflicted by demons? Yeah.
I mean, we've already kind of had a little bit of a back and forth. Like, some of curses are the allowing of things to happen the way they happen, by God. And some are God intentionally interacting and pronouncing them. Yeah. If spirits have been—well, so demonic spirits—if demonic spirits, and I know some of the people who are going to be listening to this are good, solid New Englanders, and this idea is just going to blow your mind. So if it's really wild for you, kind of put a pin in it, come to an Encounter, come to ministry training, and invite the Holy Spirit to come and teach you new things. But some of us didn't grow up in New England.
New England is brimming with people from other parts of the world who have much broader categories and much more experiential knowledge. And I love how C.S. Lewis talks about the demonic. He said it benefits the demonic in some places to stay covert. Yeah. To stay sort of not attention-grabbing, so that you can pronounce curses over your family while you're taking Masonic vows and not think they matter at all. Right. Or you can play with a Ouija board and just not think it matters. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, and levitate people or whatever. And you don't think it matters. And maybe that's why New England is, to a lot of missiologists, such hard ground. Right.
Because there's a lot of demonic influence, but we've actually been told that doesn't exist. Yeah. So you're being impacted by it on a regular basis, but we don't even just get told it doesn't exist by academicians or the academics. You're told by your deacon or by your Sunday school teacher. That's right. Because we're so scholastic in our theology. It's like it's just this rigid rational religion. Yeah. And this begins a conversation that I'm excited to have in the weeks and months to come. This is something that we talk a lot about—learning from other parts of the world. And this is something that we need to learn. Yeah.
And we're going to bring in some fantastic guest speakers that are not from New England. Yeah. That are—we're hoping—going to just begin to teach us as New Englanders, as Westerners, and anyone else who's listening, kind of how to begin to shift our framework to one that maybe is more in line with the Bible's cosmology than our Western one. Yeah. Well, it was just—I'm really excited about that, because I feel like, you know, in evangelical circles, we're like, oh, we need to learn from a global church, you know, we're like, you know, clapping. But we're not going after them about the things that they actually know that we don't know. Right.
But we want them to teach us about justice issues and these things, which is great. Like, yes, please do that. But also teach us how to drive demons out of people and find the root—the root cause. Yeah. We have a lot to learn from one another. That's the beauty of the kingdom. Okay. So, are curses just bad ideas? If spirits have been welcomed into your family line through giving children to false gods or to deceased relatives, then certainly there are demonic agents that need to be renounced and told to go. That's just reality. Vows need to be repented of and broken.
So, you know, if you've made covenantal oaths or vows over your family, over your children, if you've dedicated them to occult practices, those are things that really do actually need to be broken. And the enemy just—he doesn't take a pass. He's not like, oh, you're inviting me to assert my dominion, my lordship over this new little life—he's not like, oh no, that's not playing fair. He's not about fair. He's mean. So, but sometimes the difference between, you know, is there something demonic here, or is there power because of a curse that's been spoken? So, I think that's the difference. Maybe it doesn't matter so much.
If your dad cursed you by telling you you'd never amount to anything, or your mom called you fat and ugly, their impact on how you think and see is very great—the impact is very, very great. They operate as a curse, and it has power. That actually does have power. That's that Hebrew mindset about the authority that we have. And as a parent, you have a lot of authority over your children to pronounce realities. And so the potential for you to be bullied by demonic spirits that want to reinforce those bad things that were said over you—that potential is very high, unless you renounce those lies and those curses out loud.
So if your family has experienced trauma that's being passed down through the generations, both epigenetically and through behavior, like parenting behavior, it may be safe to assume that there are demonic elements helping to facilitate that transmission. But diagnosing it doesn't always matter. You can renounce. You can bring those things to the Holy Spirit, who is really concerned with you being set free. You don't have to be paranoid. Whether or not a demonic agent is actively applying a curse, sinful patterns and vows and curses function as an open door to demonic influence, because they belong to the kingdom of Satan.
It's not the blessing of God over your kids to say, "you'll never amount to anything." That opens their mind to the possibility that they'll never amount to anything. And that functions as an open door. It's like putting out the welcome mat for demonic oppression. So, yeah, Satan's going to tell me who I am in that. I'm going to let that voice continue to echo through my whole life, and I'm either going to prove myself my whole life, or I'm going to give in to it and never become anything. So we need to close the door through repentance, renunciation, forgiveness. But then we need to fill the house with truth. And so you then are responsible to replace that lie. Yeah, that's right.
41:49Science, Epigenetics, and Scripture
So, okay, so outside of the spirit of discernment, which is a New Testament gift, right—is there any evidence for generational curses that we can back up scientifically? So did, like, did people of Jesus's time think that all sicknesses and curses, generational or otherwise, had to do with demons? So there's this bad idea—I don't know if you were exposed to this ever, but the idea is something like, people of Bible times believed everything was a demon. So all sickness was caused by a demon. And we know better now. Full stop. Yeah. But there is room for a lot of complexity of belief in the New Testament. Like, the Sadducees didn't believe in demons at all. Right.
Yeah, the first-century teaching class—in the, yeah—so the educated elite of Bible times did not believe in demons or angels or the resurrection of the dead. Wait, that sounds familiar today. Yeah, it's always been around. It's always been around. Jesus didn't attribute all sicknesses to demons. Right. Sometimes he just healed stuff, and sometimes he drove out demons. And sometimes those demons were clearly afflicting demons that caused sickness. And you can read lots of accounts that support all three of those. There was room for complexity. Luke, the physician—Luke, the author of the gospel of Luke, was a doctor. He was a physician.
And of all of the gospel writers—this is fascinating—Luke was the most likely to attribute illnesses to the demonic. Right. And he was also the one that actually referenced the Holy Spirit the most, too. Fascinating. That's fascinating. So what causes a generational curse and sickness and pain—it's been up for grabs over the centuries. So the Sadducees thought one thing, the Pharisees thought another. Jesus acted in a way that made room for all those realities. So sometimes there are demons there. Sometimes people are just sick. There's a guy recently—this has become a little more set in stone.
So there's a guy named Charles Edward Winslow. He was an epidemiologist in the 1940s. And he wrote, "If disease is postulated as caused by gods or demons, then scientific progress is impossible. If it is attributed to a hypothetical humor or a scientific cause, the theory can be tested and improved." So he agreed with the Sadducees. Yeah. Yeah, so it's going to shut down scientific inquiry if we hold open the possibility that there is a curse or a demonic agent involved in sin or sickness. Right. But now it looks like science, through epigenetics, is reinforcing Exodus. Reinforcing Exodus, reinforcing the second, third, fourth generation—generational sin, and it causes the penalty of it.
There are some really fascinating studies that are coming out right now. It's really fresh. We'll attach a few of them to the bottom of this podcast, if you're a super geek and want to look at a few of them. But one really fascinating, fairly recent study studied the impact of—so children up to age seven, so who were still being formed, so you couldn't just blame nurture on the problems that they were experiencing. They were tracing the impact of the abuse that their mom had experienced at the hands of her dad. So they did a study on women whose dads had abused them early in life.
And then they later on went on to have children, and the studies examined the impact of the abuse that she'd experienced on the physical well-being, the emotional well-being of those developing children. I think it was age seven in the study. And what they're finding consistently is there's an impact—that this stuff tracks. And the study of epigenetics is fascinating. It's this idea that there are strands of information that attach themselves to your RNA because of trauma, among other things, and impact you. So they don't change your DNA, but they impact you. They impact how you feel and how you are and how you interact with the world. That's fascinating. And guess what?
Guess how long this effect lasts? Let me guess—the third and fourth generation. Yes. How did you know? We've talked about this a lot. No, I know—when I read that, I thought, how—science is backing up the Scripture. The scroll. Again and again and again. Yeah. I mean, so that's epigenetics. But also, I mean, if you grew up in an alcoholic household—yeah, even if your parents were dry, if their parents were alcoholics, you're still experiencing the amount. Absolutely. I can't tell you how many times I've seen that. How many times I've seen the dysfunction of a grandparent, or even a great-grandparent's alcoholism, down through the family. It's not just learned behavior.
There's stuff that you just can't reach. There's stuff that you just can't get at with a good self-help book. That's right. There are mysterious forces that make it harder than it should be. Absolutely. And then we see this now emerging also in the social sciences. We're saying, man, there are some things, some cultural sicknesses that feel like they get passed down—that's just bigger than educating people out of it. That's right. Like misogyny. Woman-hating. That's woman-hating. Yeah, racism and power struggles and oppression and generational poverty, that just seem to have sticking power longer than really makes sense.
47:43Finding Freedom Through Exorcism
It seems like a bigger problem than we can sort of figure out in a classroom. In certain regions. Yeah, certain areas that seem to have a higher amount of contagion of certain things, like suicide, or, yeah, generational issues. So, yeah, so that's all really horrible. Now that I'm thoroughly depressed—I guess what I'd love to do is just pivot to what does the Bible say about freedom, though? Because how do you get delivered from generational curses or generational bondage? And we're talking about, well, how do you get free from all this stuff that we're just talking about, believers? Yeah.
So, let's just—if we may, can we just put this under the large heading of exorcism, just like the big heading of, we want to clean stuff off and out of somewhere or somebody. Yeah. Like, we want to enact that priestly cleansing and get rid of demonic agents, of curses, of anything else. So maybe if we could put that under the big category of exorcism. We want to expel. Yeah, we want to clean it. We want to get it out of here. So if generational curses—if the healing of generational curses fits under that category fairly tightly—so it's not healing, it's cleaning. That's right. It's under the category of cleaning. The New Testament is kind of interesting.
So Jesus did a lot of that, right? He cleaned a lot of stuff. He exorcised very frequently. But in the way of teaching about demonic affliction—so diagnosing every demon, or exactly what you should do in different circumstances—the Bible is actually a little bit quiet. What is recorded of Jesus's exorcisms is kind of tantalizingly vague. He just drove out demons. The closest we get to a teaching moment is when the disciples come to Jesus with the little boy that they're unable to deliver, and Jesus says, "This one only comes out by prayer and fasting." Yeah. So the Bible itself—I mean, the reality is there. The curses are clearly laid out.
The fact that they exist and are passed down through the generations are articulated. But exorcism itself looks like it's more of a faith-based art form than a science. In the early church, there are lots of accounts of exorcism, but there's not a lot of continuity. There are accounts. There's just one really sweet account of a community where someone got delivered of their demon just while the community was worshiping and saying declarative, worshipful Psalms, or singing praises to Jesus, and the demons flew out of people. Right. People just got set free from things.
There are times where, you know, holy water was applied, or people were intentionally commanding demons to go, and it—it doesn't seem like things were narrowed down to a very prescriptive, "this is what you do," in fact, and tidy. In fact, that actually is a little more like the pagan world. Yeah. The pagan world—and we can maybe talk about this sometime—but the pagan world in Jesus's time was much more about the power of the individual performing the exorcism and saying the right words or performing the right rituals. That's actually a much more pagan, non-Christian, non-Jewish concept than the Christian one.
The Christian one has a lot more to do with, you are now a priest in the line of Melchizedek, and you're here to clean things up, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, you can tell stuff to go. Yeah. Amen. That's really good. I love what N.T. Wright writes. Do you want to? Yeah. Well, I think—yeah. So, to those of you who are still like, I don't know about all this, you know, this just seems kind of fantastic—and I understand that, you know, I've been in New England for a long time, you know, I'm an educated person, and it can seem that way. What N.T. Wright says—he talks about living the Christian life as though it's the fifth act of a play that hasn't been written yet.
Yeah, he's like, so if you're called to be a Christian, are you going to approach the scriptures in such a way that you're looking for the formula—like, this is exactly how I'm going to live my life because the formula is here? And he says that's kind of a silly way to live your life, because your life hasn't been written yet. Your life has all sorts of variables, and there's a creative, exciting dynamic of relational life with God. So he says that life in the Spirit is more like, if you had been given a five-act play written by Shakespeare and the last act was missing—the last act hadn't been written yet, and you were told, you need to write the last act.
You couldn't just reproduce the first, second, third, and fourth act, because that would be ridiculous. You wouldn't have written anything. What you would need to do is study the first four acts in such a way that you learned what the author was like and how they thought, and their style of writing, and what they cared about and what they didn't care about. So as you then compose the fifth act, you're, like, partners with the one who wrote the first four. So exorcism is like that. We are welcoming the Holy Spirit, we're learning, studying the scriptures, living life in God, practicing the disciplines, learning, as disciples of Jesus, what God is like.
And then when we move into healing and deliverance ministry, we're participating with him, writing that fifth act. So, all that to say, there's not a Luke chapter blah, blah, blah, that says this is exactly how to deal with generational curses. And I think that there was—about 10 or 12 years ago, when we were first doing Encounter weekends, I took a pastor out to lunch because he had some reservations about the Encounter weekends and the whole idea of generational sin. "I just don't see it in scripture." I was like, really? Wow, okay. And as we dug a little deeper, I realized that he had a different hermeneutic—that his ability to find that—
Yeah, so hermeneutic is just, what's your interpretive lens? What are the tools you use to interpret scripture? And he approached scripture—and this is sort of the fundamentalist way of interpreting scripture. They want to be faithful to the Bible, and I commend them for that. I think it's wonderful. We want to be faithful to the Bible. It is the word of God. But he approached scripture by collapsing all of God's revelation into the 66 books of the Bible. So, if I don't see this word or this activity happening here, then I'm not going to do it. Right. And it has no credence and it doesn't need to happen. Right. So I thought that was really interesting.
And I was like, well, actually, the way I approach scripture is what we would call more Wesleyan, or in the Anglican tradition, which is that we see the scripture as a paradigm or a lens by which we view reality. So when we look at reality through the scripture, it is our norming norm. And we see all God's truth through that. And if it's not true, then we will see it through that lens. And so, you know, there are some traditions that, you know, they won't celebrate Easter because they don't see it in the Bible. Right—you know, that you need to worship on Easter. So they don't even, like, have an Easter celebration.
And they call it the regulative principle, you know, that, like, if it's not in the Bible, then we're not going to do it. And I would say, no, no, no. We're saying—even weddings, how to do a wedding. How to do a wedding. Yeah. But we do it anyway. You know, there are plenty of things not in the Bible that Christians do regularly and are very protective about. This sounds like another really great question. I feel like we need to, like, really do this later. What I'm saying is that when you look at when deliverance ministry began to really emerge in South America, they were preaching the Word of God and people were coming to faith.
But they were recognizing—and this is what we've heard from our friends who came out of South America in deliverance ministry—what they were seeing is that people were not being set free. They were still stuck in the same old sin patterns and the generational dysfunction. You can read a Pew Research survey to find out, too—why do the statistics— They came to the faith. They're studying the Bible. They're being discipled on some level. They're going to church, but they're not getting set free. So they're like, well, let's try this. And they began to take the principles of scripture and what it looks like to be sanctified, and what they saw in the Old and New Testament. So, well, let's do this.
And it began to work. It worked. And people were becoming more like Jesus. It's not a formula. It's all rooted in relationship and community with the Trinity. And that's what makes it so tenuous at times, because it's all about relationship with him and the spirit of discernment and seeing what God is doing and joining him in that work. And so there are different ways of approaching scripture. And I think what we're saying is that it might not be completely laid out in scripture, but it certainly isn't anti-biblical. Yeah, that's well said. Yeah. It's actually very biblical. We see exorcism in scripture. We see lots and lots of deliverance. And God described and portrayed as a deliverer.
57:21Your Call to Action: The Genogram
So that the lens of—he wants to set us free from the powers—is all through the scriptures. How that plays out on a day-to-day basis, it has a lot to do with relationship with him. It sounds like what you're saying. Yeah, that's right. Relationship with him. You know what he's like and what he desires. And loving those around you. So what's our call to action? Yeah, that said, we have some tools. We have some tools for you. And we really want you to go hard after this, because today is a day of salvation. If stuff's coming up for you, you're like, ooh, wow, I can see where grandma's sin has affected our family. Or there are these patterns, as I'm thinking about it. Huh?
Every male in my family died young. Or everybody has struggled with faithfulness in marriage. So, the call to action. We're going to post in the chat a link to forming what we call a genogram. And this is just like a family tree. So you're going to start maybe with a circle in the middle of your paper that has your name on it. And then you're just going to draw a map of your family. And next to each member of your family—so next to you are your siblings, and above you are your parents, and then above them are their parents. And you can include aunts and uncles. And maybe go to the third and fourth generation. And then you're just going to take a little while, invite the Holy Spirit.
And notice where there are patterns. Notice where they're— Or even just kind of write down: these guys got a divorce, these guys died young, there was a suicide, this was drug addiction, there was— Workaholism. Workaholism. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be exhaustive at first. But it does give you a beginning, to kind of begin to just look at, huh, some of my pain isn't just me. Some of it looks like it started before me. And then, once you have kind of done this genogram, take it to one of these priesthood friends that we've been talking about—so your pastor or another person that is on this journey—that's like, yeah, I want to pray through this with you.
And you can pray the four Rs with each of those items over your family, over yourself, your kids. So: God, I repent for my participation in this. I repent on behalf of my family, Lord. Cleanse my family. I renounce every spirit that is associated with this. I command it to go to the feet of Jesus. I forgive everyone that has done these things, or that has neglected these things. I release them to you, Jesus. I hand all of the sin and its consequences and every spirit that's connected to it to the cross, in Jesus's name. I leave it there. And then I receive forgiveness and cleansing from Jesus. Yeah. So that's our call to action. Look at the genogram. And, like I said, today is a day of salvation.
If things are coming up in your heart, trust that that's the Holy Spirit inside of you, that he is inside of you and he's drawing you. If you're like, wow, I know I need this, I need more, or I'm just curious—come to an Encounter. Go to encounterculturene.com, sign up for an Encounter, register for an Encounter, or register for a pre-monastery training course. And if you want to continue the journey of healing and go really deep into this and get set free, so that you can say, you know, these curses stop now—the generational sin pattern stops now, I refuse to let it go to my children and my grandchildren and their children. Yeah.
And I want to begin to grow muscles and strategies and things that maybe have been prevented from growing all this time. Absolutely. Because of this generational sin and curse. So go on our website, take a look at the upcoming events. And we also have EncounterLife. Oh man, those groups are awesome. We'll talk more about that later. But the genogram, and also some other great tools that we're going to put in the notes below. Have a great day. We'll see you next time. Peace. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven and Earth. We hope that you are stirred to curiosity and courage as we explore bringing heaven and earth together right where you are.
Remember, you're not alone on this journey. We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life and responding in obedience to his good leadership. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and questions with us on our Facebook page or by email—thepodcast@encounterculturene.com. Your support helps us reach more people who are eager to join Jesus in his great project of restoration. Also, check out our website, encounterculturene.com, for upcoming events and equipping opportunities for you and your church. Until next time, may you find joy living in between heaven and earth, and the courage to bring them together wherever you go.