Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32 - by Don Neuendorf
"It's not my fault!" Those are the immortal words of Han Solo in the first of the Star Wars movies. But they're certainly not new. The Israelites were saying the same thing in their proverb, "the fathers eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge."
It is my parents' fault that my life is messed up. It was the sins of an earlier generation that put us in this predicament. We're inheriting the national debt that came from someone else's spending. The economy was wrecked by other people's poor choices and now I'm suffering the effects of it. My father's alcoholism, my mother's bad food choices, my uncle's anger management issues, my sister's drug use, my family history of you-name-it...
we hear these excuses all the time to explain our own problems. It's exactly the same as the Israelites.
It's not my fault. Someone else sinned, and I experienced the consequences. But God says that we will not be able to use that excuse. The soul that sins shall be the soul held accountable for sin, and the Israelites would be held accountable, each of them, for their own rebellion against God.
And yet, God also says that if we turn away from our rebellion our sins can be forgiven. The cycle of sadness that is handed on from generation to generation is NOT inevitable. Repentance can break the chain and set us free at last.