The Sins of our Fathers

You show love to thousands but bring the punishment for the fathers' sins into the laps of their children after them.

Jeremiah 32:18

This isn’t fair. Children do not choose their parents; why should they be punished for the actions of their parents? In the Law of Moses God told Moses that children must not be punished for the crimes of their parents. Why this discrepancy in Jeremiah?

I think the best way to read this verse is not as a God imposed curse, but rather as a prophecy or an astute observation.

I recently started working at a district attorney’s office. In my short time there I have found this statement to be all too true.

Kids who grow up with lazy, selfish, alcoholic, infidelities or abusive parents suffer for the sins of their parents.

Children with lazy and selfish parents lack the opportunities of other children. They are passed on from their parents to grandparents, aunts and uncles, and friends. Often they lack the discipline necessary to help break them of bad habits. Frequently they become delinquents and criminals themselves.

The same could be said about children with alcoholic parents or those involved with drugs and other minor crimes.

Children that are abused are more like to be violent and engage in perverted or abusive behavior towards others.

What is to be done? All too often we are slow to punish a man for abusing his spouse or kids because he was abused by his parents before him. Repeatedly we excuse a young man’s petty crime and refusal to work because he lacked opportunity growing up because his dad would not work, but rather engaged in petty crime himself.

In Catch-22 Joseph Heller wrote:

It was a man’s world, and she and everyone younger had every right to blame him and everyone older for every unnatural tragedy that befell them; just as she, even in her grief, was to blame for every man-made misery that landed on her kid sister and on all other children behind her. Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.

We need to make a break. We need to give our children a chance and protect them from the consequences of the sins of their parents. But how do we do this? If the state interferes too deeply in an attempt to create better environments for children it could harm the structure of the family too deeply and become the defacto parent of children. This has already happened to a large degree. Our children learn not only arithmetic and grammar at our schools, but their values and morality. This has no worked thus far and there is no indication that if the state took more authority away from parents it could do a better job than them. And besides this has and would continue to take children away from good parents.

The first thing we can and should do is attach greater penalties on crime. Too often kids grow up without discipline or consequences for their action and think they can get away with it as an adult. They get a couple of theft violations here, a few battery violations there and maybe a couple of drug offenses on the side. The state, wanting to give them a second chance allows them to go to anger and drug counseling. Too often they are not given one chance, but dozens. Their belief that they can do whatever they want without consequence is not changed. It is not uncommon to see a convicted murderer or rapist have 25 or 30 prior convictions. They were given all the chances in the world to change and they used every one of those chances to bring further harm.

If the individual will not voluntarily bind his conscience and teach it to do what is good and right, the state must bind it for him. The state must show him, very clearly, that actions have serious consequences. If they do this with more minor crimes maybe they can help him learn this before he commits a more serious crime.

If we were to do this would things change? I believe to some degree they would. We can socialize people to a large degree to make good decisions. But we must not kid ourselves and pretend that the state can make a perfect society. If have learned anything from my new job it is that there are some people who are beyond hope and redemption. They are so messed up that no human institution could ever save themselves from the hell they’ve created in their lives.

Ultimately, all our hope of redemption lies in God alone. It is as true of us as it is for them; we simply see it more clearly in some than in others. Should we try to help the hopeless? Of course. God tells us to love because He loves, not because it will reap any particular result. But we must not pretend that we can save them. Salvation lies in God alone.