A continuation of Part One and Part Two…
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Exodus 20:4–6 ESV
This passage in the ESV is misleading. The word “generation” is nowhere in the text. All it says if that God visits “the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth of those who hate me…” Third and fourth what? The context of fathers and sons implies it is talking about generations. So the ESV puts the word in there. That is appropriate. But what about the “thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Suddenly, the context drops away in the ESV. Thousands of what?
Thousands of generations of those who love God and keep his commands. We see this explicitly in the Hebrew in Deuteronomy:
Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations and repays to their face those who hate him by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face.
Deuteronomy 7:9–10 ESV
The emphasis in Deuteronomy is on immediate judgment compared to ongoing blessing over time. The Second Commandment has a similar contrast, but God gives a further detail. Punishment is often delayed. A couple of generations may be allowed to pass before God judges a group for sin.
This is both mercy and a test.
It is merciful because God gives people time to repent rather than continuing in image-worship. Even a second generation (and maybe more) is permitted to repent of the image-worship that they were raised in.
It is a test because, when a person begins perverse worship, God doesn’t immediately intervene. If He did, others would not be tempted to join him in his practices. Since God is patient and slow to anger, others might flatter themselves that the behavior is inconsequential or even claim that God approves of it.
These two results of God’s patience are mentioned by Paul:
We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who practice such things. Do you suppose, O man—you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself—that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.
Romans 2:2–5 ESV
The Second Commandment reveals that God’s patience may allow wrath to be stored up for three or four generations. But it also sets out a distinction that God will make in history. The contrast between the two groups is that one will be blessed and will flourish while the other will be cut off after, at most, four generations.
But does this show that God is punishing the third and fourth generations for their grandparent’s or great-grandparent’s sin and not their own?
No. It shows that God publicly expresses condemnation on the earlier sins by judging those who insist on perpetuating those sins. Those that won’t be “ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18) will be judged when God’s patience runs out. Likewise, the promise for God’s favor to “thousands of generations” cannot be claimed by those who have broken the tradition of their godly ancestors and no longer love God.
We need to distinguish between descendants being affected by the sins of their ancestors and their being guilty of those sins. Obviously, for example, if a father goes into debt (whether or not he had reason to do so) so that his estate goes to his creditors rather than his children, they experience the results of that decision. That is true if that father kept them alive by borrowing the money or if he wasted it. The only alternative to children feeling the effects of their parents’ decisions would be for God to have not established families in creation. But he made people to rule and to multiply, which means their decisions have consequences. Life would be meaningless if that were not true.
So yes, sometimes God’s public justice destroys people who didn’t personally commit the injustice. The young and marginal in Sodom and Gomorrah got burned up with the rest. Achan’s family (along with the warriors who first attacked Ai) got destroyed for his sin that some may not have had a part in. Those deaths are punishments of the sinner (Achan and whoever was an accessory) but their personal deaths are justified in Genesis 3, not in what Achan did. Their deaths are, on a personal level, no different than the deaths of Job’s children who were killed because he was righteous.
But those attachments don’t make Job’s children personally righteous or Achan’s hypothetical innocent children personally guilty for a sin they knew nothing about.