Murray Smith
You’re probably reasonably aware of the dynamic of hereditary factors transferring down a family line. The way we genetically inherit traits from our parents and grandparents is understood basically because of observable evidence.
Coming into adolescence, my older brother looked strikingly like photos of our Dad at similar ages. Entering adulthood, my brother bore an uncanny physical resemblance to how our grandfather looked in photos taken of him as a younger man!
Facial resemblances, hair or eye colour and build, flow down from great-grandparents, grandparents and from parents, to their children. We’re familiar with sayings such as, ‘like father, like son,’ or, ‘he’s a chip of the old block’, referring to both physical and personality similarities that sons (and daughters) may carry from their father. Passing on of parental likenesses to children is a principle we get.
Yet how many of us connect the dots in understanding how profoundly this principle of inheritance operating biologically in a family line, operates powerfully at another- even deeper level?
We ALSO carry spiritual ‘inheritance’ from our forebears. In the depths of our soul … where deep emotions, our personality and being reside, we’ve inherited soulish traits, or spiritual characteristics that we’ll most likely, in measure, pass onto our kids. With physical inheritance (genes), we carry and pass on good attributes, but the potential is there to perpetuate not so good ones too. It’s the same with ‘spiritual heredity’- we are inheritors of both good and evil.
I have noticed over many years, how re-current ‘themes’ or specific afflictions beset families. A wide range of ‘difficulties’ (from compulsive or addictive behaviour, anger, depression, untimely deaths, grief and numerous other issues), are apparent.
A good friend in his later years, once described how he was the only one among his seven siblings who had not experienced a marriage break-up. You might argue that was just rotten luck or coincidence occurring in my friend’s family record. But one ‘survivor’ in eight is far beyond the observable incidence rate for divorces among the general populace.
Such happenings raise the question of ‘why!?’ I’ve noticed that historical calamity or trauma can ‘open doors’ activating an ‘inherited’ dynamic which a family perpetuates. I’ve seen this countless times. In my friend’s family line, a shocking case of deceptive bigamy had occurred three generations back- a great grandfather keeping two separate wives and families unknown to the other, was catastrophically exposed. From that point on, a legacy of nearly every marriage failing, featured in that family’s line.
Because evidence exists of historic family ‘disorder,’ (whose doesn’t!?), it’s not an automatic consignment of a family being doomed to living out undesirable generational traits! Identifying a family vulnerability (something like an ‘Achilles heel’), being perpetuated down a family line, is far from hopeless since those traits can be eliminated!
Salvation literally means ‘wholeness’ and freedom. A life-transforming encounter that cancels out the old and provides a brand new inheritance for us to live out of, is possible because of what Christ has accomplished for us through His death on the cross…
Don’t casually dismiss this… it warrants investigation.
