Generational Consequences – Understanding how and why the curses happen in real life

For over a decade I have been ministering deliverance and the breaking of curses, but this isn’t about that and I don’t want to discuss the spiritual aspects of this, because they are only part of the picture. A bigger picture understanding is required to walk in freedom from the sins of past generations and in order to pass on a clean slate to our kids.
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Neither deliverance nor the breaking of curses give us the ability to walk in absolute freedom, because too much of what is going on involves deeply trained and ingrained mindsets. I want to explain how all this happens.
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Generations ago, really going all the way back to the flood, our ancestors made a decision to hate God in whole or in part. It’s just a fact. They decided against doing things His way.
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They made a decision to do something, and because that decision was not based on God’s laws, that decision led to chaos in a situation, instead of order. And speaking of chaos, did you know that the law was designed to eliminate it as much as possible? That the elimination of chaos was the reason for the death penalty? Want to stop a murderer? Kill him. Want to eliminate adultery? Kill them both. Want to get rid of kidnapping and rape? Kill the offender. Having criminals in our midst is chaos, and no one feels safe. Torah is about order, about harmony — about how to have it and how to restore it when someone has violated it.
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But our ancestors did not cherish harmony and order, they cherished their flesh — they valued their ability to do as they desired more than they desired the good of the community. And that is a good definition of chaos, the natural result of the promotion of self above community.
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When we allow even one generation to live in that sort of chaos, saying adultery is okay, letting murderers and kidnappers and adulterers off the hook — there are serious consequences. People see that chaos is cherished above both harmony and good for the sake of the evil-doer. As a result, they are more likely not only to commit the big crimes, but also the “small” ones, which leads to chaos on a larger scale. The generation that comes next now has a norm of this chaotic behavior and will do more, and more and more wrong with each successive generation. And although most people will never commit a murder, a rape or a kidnapping — because some people do and are catered to and treated with undeserved mercy, they look at their own transgressions with a more favorable eye. It doesn’t take many generations before things are a mess, all in the name of tolerance. But tolerance isn’t the same thing as mercy, not at all. Mercy is holy, but tolerance is not.
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And so we are living with the generational consequences of evil, above and beyond any demonic intervention. In fact, getting rid of the demons is the easy part of it. Reversing the attitudes and recognizing what is good is an entirely different thing.
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Let’s take the example of someone I know personally, whose permission I have to use the example. Their grandfather was a drunk and an adulterer, for whatever reason and he married a nice lady who tolerated that behavior and thought she could change him. But he changed her, and by the time he left her with a few small kids, she was an alcoholic. Because it was the 50’s, she was really left in a situation with no child support and she spent all of her time working and trying to get remarried. Her children grew up in a house where their mother was constantly introducing them to the men she was dating. So to them, this was the norm — unstable father, functional alcoholism, but told that their church attendance and their being in Catholic school made it just fine. The son was an alcoholic in his teen years, a drunk driver, and got a girl from a good family pregnant out of wedlock. They got married, but having never had a real father, he did not know how to parent. His world view was based on his norm, not on what was right or wrong. He took his own childhood and responded to it. A good father stays with the family and makes sure they are provided for and is faithful to his wife. But he was angry, and cruel, and demanding, and disappointed, and bitter. His children grew up in a home where alcoholism was the norm, where protecting the alcoholic was expected, where they were not allowed to be sad or complain about it. In turn, they responded to their own childhood when they grew to adulthood. And now, in one way or another, their children are growing into people who are responding to all these decisions, and the consequences of these decisions, layer upon layer, generation after generation. Like a big puzzle that they didn’t start, but have chosen to add pieces to.
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And each one of those generations feels victimized by the generation before it, but I learned something sobering a couple of nights ago. The reason that generational curses and consequences stick like glue is because of our mindsets. And even when the demons are gone, and the curses are broken, if we hold on to the mindset that we are inheritors of the evil and not personally involved in it, we are going to have limited success.
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As soon as the child formulates a lifestyle based on what was wrong instead of on what is right, they own it all, all those bad choices, all those sins. And it’s because when we do it, we are focused on the evil instead of on what is right.
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To put it in other words — there is a difference between following God and reacting to the sins of our parents. If I am a certain kind of parent in response to my parent’s failings — I am not following God, I am simply still following my parents while walking in a different direction. And to escape generational consequences, we have to follow God. We have to find out what is right and do it, and forget our parents and what they did. There needs to be a wall of separation between digging to the bottom of our garbage and healing from the consequences of sin, and exploring what it right. We need to recognize the areas where we are doing good, as well as the areas where we are just overreacting to what was wrong by doing the opposite.
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Emerging from the consequences of generational sins requires the help of God, it is unavoidable. It requires knowing what is wrong and what is right and doing right because it is right, and not just because we are trying to be better than our parents. We need to be introspective yes, but we need at the same time to be God focused.
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I am not a victim. I am a person who made bad decisions because generations before me made bad decision after bad decision, committed sin after sin. I responded to those evils with my own evils. Instead of pulling my mind out of that mentality and finding out what was good and pursuing that, at a young age I started laying the blame for my decisions onto the people that made the decisions leading to the predicament I found myself in. And when I did that, I owned the situation as mine, I became a part of it instead of becoming set apart from it.

Until I realized that I am not a victim, but an accomplice to the problem, I was living as part of that system of generational consequences, in bondage to it. But I am not a victim anymore. I am an overcomer, and my husband, my children and I are learning to take ourselves out of the generational loop and to set a new course towards God. We are going to learn how to be a real family of people actually living their lives and not just continuing to live out the script written by the sins of those who went before us, not the sum of our pasts, but set apart from it.
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And we can all do it.
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As my son Andrew heard in his dream the night before last, “It’s going to be hard, but you can do it.”