Now when you look at that you think, what a mean God that is, my! How could it be like that? What is this? Now here’s what’s going on here. God has set a law in place. The soul that sins, dies. So what’s He going to do if you do something that He says counts for death? You killed someone, you’re involved in idolatry, involved in some kind of sexual sin, and the law that God has set in place says you need to die. Now He’s got a dilemma now. He’s a just God, so you need to be held to account for your sin, but if He kills you, then you can’t produce a family and on-going generations. So what’s He going to do? This is how He deals with it. Listen to this, very simple. What He does is He takes the death penalty, and He spreads it over four generations, so it’s no longer a death penalty. It becomes bearing the iniquity. In other words He just shares the original punishment over three to four generations, so when you are involved in a sin which is worthy of death, God in His mercy doesn’t kill you, but the iniquity, the consequence, the corruption of what you’ve done now spreads over three to four generations. Think about that. Say ooh wow! That means – so how does it actually transfer? Very simply.
First of all it’s in a person’s spirit. It’s in their spiritual DNA, so if you have iniquity charged by God to you, what will happen is any of your children, it will be in them as well. Secondly, it’s imparted through the DNA, physical, genetic DNA. The DNA gets impacted and affected by iniquity. That’s why you find that certain things will pass down generation to generation. Have you looked in your family line and you’ll see there’s certain traits. There’s corruption, there’s physical sickness, there’s breakdowns, there’s various kinds of things. We can call them generational curses, but actually what they truly are, is the iniquity of the fathers having an influence or a consequence over generations. You don’t want to sin against God. You have four generations that will be affected by it.
You don’t want to break the laws of God, because not only does it affect you, but you’ve got generations after you who’ll be affected by this. We don’t want to bring from our actions a consequence on following generations. Probably the greatest example of this is found in the life of King David. You think about King David. King David was guilty of murder and adultery, first adultery, so the root, the physical thing of adultery was birthed out of lust. Is that right? Lust was the iniquity. David said in Psalm 51, he said I was shaped in iniquity. My mother carried me and birthed me in sin and iniquity. So where did that come from? Follow David’s line back, you find he comes from the tribe of Judah, and if you have a look at Judah, you find that Judah went out and slept with a woman he thought was a prostitute, and it turns out it was his daughter-in-law, had a child out of wedlock to her, and so you have a curse comes into the family because of his sin.
So what happens when you follow down that family line? You see sin after sin after sin. What is the iniquity? Lust. The sins are sexual in nature, and of course accompanied with it is a spirit of anger, that goes with being rejected, and murder. So you follow David’s line, you find he's got one son commits incest with his half sister, and he gets murdered. You’ve got another son, and he lusts after David’s wife, and he gets his life cut off. You got another son, and he just has so many women, he’s just full of lust, full of all kinds of things, and his whole kingdom is lost. You find right through the family line of David, you find this iniquity flowing through, generation after generation. You think oh my goodness, what could be done about it?