Does God punish people for the sins of their ancestors?

Is God here really saying, “I’m going to place a curse on a person’s children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren”? No. The Lord is explaining a life principle. Parents tend to reproduce their negative behaviors in their children. And you can usually trace this effect for three or four generations.

The Lord does not arbitrarily impose your sin on your children. The Bible says clearly, “The son is not accountable for the sins of the father, and the father is not accountable for the sins of the son. The righteousness of the righteous will be upon them. The wickedness of the wicked will be upon them” (Ezekiel 18:20). In another place, the Bible says, “ ‘Even though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live,’ says the Lord God, ‘they would deliver neither son nor daughter; they would deliver only themselves by their righteousness’ ” (Ezekiel 14:20). God does not reward or punish offspring because of what the parents do. What He’s saying in this passage is that there’s a strong probability that the children are going to follow the example of their parents. And when this happens, they will receive similar consequences.

A tragic example of this is when the kingdom of Israel split. Jeroboam and the children of Israel in the north stopped worshiping at the temple of God. By his example, his children started to pray to idols, and then his grandchildren started to pray to idols, and so on—they lasted four generations, then they were destroyed. The same sort of thing happened again and again in Israel. Not because God cursed them, but because it’s important for us as parents to be good examples. That’s what God is impressing here in Exodus 20.

Key Bible Texts

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; (Exodus 20:5 KJV)