Sanam Doctrinam

We’re shutting down. Once our domain runs out, there will be no more SanamDoctrinam.org. If you would like to visit the archives, you may at sanamdoctrinam.wordpress.com

All the archived posts there are attributed to jballigood, but you know that Todd and Jeff contributed over the years. It can be a fun game of guess the authors.

If you’d like to follow Jason still you can check out his semi-blog over at jason.doogilla.com

Thanks for the memories…

The LORD is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.

Numbers 14:18

Returning to our answers to perplexing puzzles in the Pentateuch (pardon the alliteration), we’ve come to another verse that has challenged my biblical thinking time and again. I never felt that I could get a comfortable grip on its meaning. It is found in Numbers 14:18, among other places. In that verse, after God identifies Himself as slow to anger and full of lovingkindness and forgiving, it sounds as if He randomly punishes the descendents of wicked people for four generations, even though they apparently haven’t done anything wrong. That doesn’t sound consistent with who God is, but I nonetheless have had to wrestle with the meaning of the text. What can it mean?

As was the case last week, I’d like to turn out attention to a passage in proximity to today’s verse that provides insight into the meaning of Numbers 14:18. In so doing, I’d like to share with you how the meaning of this challenging verse came together for me.

At the outset of our consideration of Scripture today, I should point out that Numbers 14 tells us about a pivotal event in the life of Israel. The spies who had investigated the land of Canaan had just returned to the nation and reported what they had found. Twelve men went. Only two had faith that God could and would give the land to the people. The other ten told the nation that the task was impossible and that it was a land that devoured people (Numbers 13:32). The nation chose to believe the majority report. This national lack of faith brought a pronouncement of judgment from God Himself. Specifically, God uttered the words of Numbers 14:23. There He said that entire faithless generation could not enter the land. It is in this pronouncement of judgment upon that unbelieving generation that we discover a clue as to why God speaks of visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations.

Before we consider this enlightening text, however, I believe that Numbers 14:18 is one of the places in which we need to consider what Scripture says, and not what we assume it means. In each of the places where God makes similar statements to Numbers 14:18 (Exodus 20:5; 34:7; and Deuteronomy 5:9), God speaks not of punishing, but rather of “visiting the iniquity.”

“Visiting the iniquity” is a unique phrase. The fact that God did not use a work like “punishing” or something similar suggest that the meaning is not that God goes after evil people’s descendants, whacking them because they had the unfortunate situation of being born into a family of bad parents or grandparents or great-grandparents.

Numbers 14:33 provides assistance in understanding the significance of “visiting the iniquity.” There we read God’s words to His people Israel, “Your sons shall be shepherds for forty years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until your corpses lie in the wilderness.”

When the text says, in the active voice, that God visits iniquity on these descendants, it is to emphasize that this is something God does intentionally and purposefully. It is a reference to the consequences of sin. Numbers 14:33 makes this evident as we see the children bearing the consequences of their fathers’ sin. The fathers were unbelieving so the children had to wander aimlessly in the wilderness. Sometimes, it seems, the only way a person can understand the gravity of his or her sin is to see its effects in another person’s life. We never sin unto ourselves. We affect others with our actions. God has set things in such a way in the world that when sins are perpetrated, they have a “trickle-down” effect, bringing hardship sometimes even to those we love the most. Many of us can point to examples in our lives or in the lives of those we know where children suffered from the unfaithfulness of others. Every example of grief and suffering in our world is traceable some way to someone’s sin.

The application is for us is to watch ourselves carefully. Our unfaithfulness can bring great suffering into the lives of others. God has not promised to shield others from the effects of our sins. We can bring about the spiritual equivalent of a nuclear blast by sinning against God. Those around us are deeply affected. How important it is, then, that we live in close fellowship with our God.