Exodus, Chapter 20 - there are many other verses like this; You shall have no other Gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or the likeness of anything in heaven above or the earth beneath, that's in the water or in the earth; you'll not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord you God am a jealous God, and I visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but show mercy to thousands who love Me and keep My commandments. Notice it says: visiting the iniquity. The iniquity is the root of sin, it's the tendency to go crooked. It's the twistedness in a person's life, so when idolatry gets into a family, or spiritism, or sexual perversions, or things like that, a legal right is established for spirits to come in, and the consequences go generationally, from one generation to another. So the sins of your parents and grandparents will create a legal ground for evil spirits to come into your own life. When did the spirits transfer? Well they may transfer while the child is in the womb, they may transfer at birth, they may transfer sometime during their early stage of their life, or they may not even manifest until teenage years, or a little later - but they will always show up. They always show up.
Once a legal ground is established, they then start to occupy generation after generation, so we are not at all responsible for what our parents did. We're responsible for our own actions, but it may well be that already, without us doing anything, we are subject to demonic oppression and pressure. Remember we said demons hold people down, and energise sin? You could be born into this world already having demonic spirits, that make you subject - that you become subject to the pressure they bring. I've had a whole heap of them. I had one couple I prayed for, their child would wake up very early in the morning - the child was two - and would become very destructive. We couldn't work out why, and they couldn't do anything. If they didn't wake up early, the child would destroy things in the house, so we checked their background, and he had a background of anger and violence and drugs, and she had a background of the occult. We prayed over the child, stood with the parents and prayed over the child. The child just sighed, spirits left, and then there was no behaviour problem. It just changed as dramatically as that, because the origins were demonic.
I had another lady I prayed for, and she said I'm a Christian, I've been a Christian almost all of my life. I've served the Lord faithfully, but I am tormented with unclean images in my mind. They just are there all the time. I come to worship, they're there. I don't understand why I have such a problem, so I asked the obvious; have you been involved in sexual sin? No, I haven't, I've kept my life. Right, I asked the next obvious one; did anyone ever sexually abuse you? No, I've never been sexually abused. Oh, okay, I'll ask another one. Have you ever had any bad sexual experience of any kind? No, I have not, I've kept myself in God - so that left it back, it could only have a generational origin. Can you tell me about your family background? When she told me about the family background I was quite amazed, because what happened was this. Her grandparents were missionaries in China, and they had two children, a boy and a girl, and they had put the boy and the girl in a boarding school, and the missionaries were in another area.
The Japanese invaded China - this was in the '30s. They invaded China, and they took over the province that the boarding school was in. They took the young boy and the girl, and they sexually abused the girl - this is another generation back see? Okay, so then eventually the children were rescued, the place was set free, the children restored to their parents, but damage had been done, and through the sexual abuse, a demonic spirit had been imparted. So the young girl grew up and eventually married, but the marriage didn't last. Because of the trauma she'd gone through she was unable to stay intimate in any relationship; the marriage broke up, but she had this daughter, and this was the daughter that we were speaking with and talking with. So we realised then, that even though she had done nothing herself, the consequence of an abuse two generations ago had opened the doorway for the demonic spirit to come in, and she was now all her life under this demonic pressure in her mind and emotions, that brought torment and guilt to her, because as a Christian she wants to please the Lord.