Numbers 20:14-21; 21:1-3; 21-25 | Wilderness and Warnings | Alex Culpepper

Church, I'd invite you to take your Bibles out to numbers, chapter 20. We're going to be skipping around through numbers just a little bit, but we're going to start in verse 14 of Numbers 20, verse 14 of Numbers 20. So I'd invite you to take that out if you. If you're new or visiting and you don't know me, my name is Alex Culpepper. I am the lead pastor here at Renovation Church.

It is a gift for me to be able to open up your God's word and just bring understanding as to what it says. And so every week, what we do here is we sing songs in worship, but we also go to the Bible and we kind of work our way through and try to grasp what is God, what is his desire to teach us, what does he want us to know? And so we're here to discover that this morning. And if you don't have a Bible with you, we printed the passages that we're working out, we're working through this morning out in the handout that you received on the way in. We want you to be able to follow along with us.

So I. I recently took one of those ancestry DNA tests. Maybe you've. You've taken something like that before. But I just became very interested in my own family history, you know, understanding, like, where. Where my parents came from and all of that stuff.

And one of the surprising things is the number of personal traits that they say can be linked to the things that you have inherited from your parents. So I just want to share, like, some of the things that were on my DNA readout with you. The first thing that I'd share is performing choreography. What my DNA readout said is that performing choreography would be more difficult for me. That's what they let me know.

So it's good. However, it's likely. It says it's very likely that you would still enjoy dancing. Right. So you'll enjoy dancing.

You'll just be bad at it. That's what my DNA readout told me. Another thing that it told me is I'm a sun sneezer. Do we have any sun sneezers in the room? Yeah, we've got a few.

We've got a few of us in here. So we get exposed to the light of the sun and it sets something off. Right? Okay. It says I'm more likely to try new things and I'll like.

Doesn't that just give me, like, a good dose of encouragement? Right. And this is my favorite one. And you all will enjoy this, if you know me a little bit, you might know about this habit of mine. But.

But one of the things on my readout says that I am more likely than the average person to drink a lot more caffeine than the average person. So that's one of the other things that it said to me. And so the principle here is that we inherit more from our ancestors than we realize. And I love the Bible because whether or not you recognize it, the Bible is in part telling us a story of ancestral lines of people who came from other people, of people who came from other people. And so, like, one of the things that the Bible is telling us is that we're all a people who came from a guy called Adam, right?

That's one of the stories that the Bible tells us. And another story that the Bible tells us is that the Jewish people are people who came from the line of this guy called Abraham. And the priests. So you hear about the priesthood. Well, the priests are a people who came from this guy called Levi, right?

That's the family of Levi. And then of course, when we. That the Bible is pointing us to Jesus, we understand that Jesus is the promised king in the line of David, right? So you have a story of family lines taking place in the Bible. And oftentimes the stories of Scripture are seeking to display to us how divine principles have kind of been wired into the fabric of creation and then carried out.

And so I want to give to you one of those key principles that God connects directly to his identity. So Numbers 14:18 says this, it says the Lord. Now when it says capital L, O, R D in the Old Testament, that is when it's written in the original language, in the original Hebrew, that is God's actual name. So they write Lord there to fill in for it. But that's God saying his name.

This is Yahweh. And so the Lord is, well, who is the Lord? He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving. Iniquity and transgression, those are both two different words for sin or the things that we do that disobey God. But it says he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers, on the children to the third and fourth generation.

So even here in God's identity, there's some connection, there's some line to the connections of generations and what they pass on. And this has been repeated in a different way or this actually is repeating something that was already said in Exodus 20. Exodus 20:5 says verse for I The Lord your God am a jealous God. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation. There we got that generational thing to those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

So what does this mean? This. We got to figure out kind of what God is talking about here, if we're talking about what happens in generations. So he says this visiting the iniquity to the generations, right? So this word visit, it's a really, It's a hard word because we don't talk like that.

We don't use that word in almost anything that we say. But, but when the Bible uses this word visit, it's. It's saying to ensure a particular outcome, right? God is, is making sure that a particular outcome comes about. So what is the outcome that God is ensuring?

He's ensuring the iniquity of generations passes on, right? That this is what sin does. So iniquity is the distortion that sin causes to the human soul. So I said earlier, there are a few different words that we have for the word sin. And sometimes those words are used interchangeably.

Sometimes you'll read a word like transgression. The word transgression means that you've gone outside of what God has called allowable. God has set boundaries, and you've gone outside of those boundaries. But this word iniquity speaks of something that we bear on ourselves. So the distortion that sin causes to the human soul, think of it like a stain.

Sin stains the soul. And so when this is saying that iniquity goes to the third and fourth generation, it's saying that those stains on our soul, they kind of get passed down, which essentially means no generation starts with a clean slate. Now, you have to. I mean, even if you don't necessarily agree with this principle, you have to at the very least acknowledge that reality. You did not start with a clean slate.

The stuff that was going on with your parents when you were born, it informed the person that you became. And the stuff that was going on with their parents when they were born, that also informed the person that you became, right? So that principle stands out and clear. I like to think of it like this. Every time that you open a door.

Open a door, let's call it. Let's imagine that sin. Engaging in sin is like opening a door. Every time you open a door, you open it to more deeply in your own life, more deeply engaging in that sin again. And then you open your life up to the destruction that.

That Particular sin or transgression would cause, right? So you open that door for yourself. But God is saying, when people don't align with my nature and character, those doors stay open to the third and the fourth generation, right? Or like we've said already, we inherit more from our ancestors than we realize. Now you may say, and I understand as you say this, you may say, that's not fair.

Why should I be hindered by my parents sin? And I just want to let you know, like, I understand that response, I understand that feeling. And I'd simply tell you three things. The first thing I tell you is that this is the nature of a world that is broken by sin, right? We are constantly hindered by the sins of others.

We're hindered by our own sin too, but we also face hindrance from the sins of others, others as well, right? We're all the time having to fight through the things that other people are doing and sometimes having to deal with the things that other people have messed up and we had nothing to do with, right? So that's just the nature of this world. The second thing I tell you is that it is God's justice to allow the stain of sin, the open door, to pass down through generations. Because as that, that open door gets passed down to generations and some people engage in opening that door further and opening that door further, our eyes open up to how serious and detrimental sin actually is.

Like when you understand the extreme degree of things that can happen when it keeps getting passed down and keeps getting passed down and people keep opening up, it helps us see and kind of like get sick to our stomach about how bad sin can actually get. And the third thing I would tell you is that every generation has the opportunity to make a decision with what we will do with the open doors that are given to us. We all have responsibility for how we handle the open doors that are handed down to us. And so that's, I just want to give that to you to frame what we're doing this morning. And so we are in a series called Wanderings and Warnings.

And it's, we're kind of tracking the history of God's people, Israel, as they went through the wilderness, through the desert. God is using the wilderness to form and shape his people, to teach them about his character and to prepare them to live in the land that he has promised to them under his blessing. And so the passages that we find ourselves today, we find God's people, Israel, going through the wilderness, preparing to enter the land. And as they do so, they encounter other nations along the way. And at this point, nearly all you remember a few weeks ago, we talked about an unbelieving generation who wouldn't take God at his promises to go into the land.

And so if you don't remember that that happened with the parents of the current generation that we're talking about, those parents have now died off. This is like 38 years later. And these are the kids, and they're preparing to go into the land that God has promised. And so he's leading that generation into this place. And surrounding the land that God has promised are many other nations, which means that for them to get into the land that God has promised, they're going to have to come up against or come through the lands of these other nations, right?

So the people of Israel are like 600,000 strong wandering through the desert. They need to be able to pass through those places. And what's really interesting is that the lands of the people where they need to pass through are all lands of the descendants of people who we read about in the book of Genesis. Right? We actually get the story of family lines, and for the first time, we get kind of linked back to people who are mentioned in Genesis.

We get to see what has become of the generations that have come from those people in the book of Genesis. So God prepares them to enter the promised land, and he's going to kind of give them a real time illustration of this reality of how sin can impact generations. And so the first family line that we get to look at is the family line of edom. And Numbers 2014 says, Moses sent messengers from Kadesh. That's where the camp of Israel is to the king of Edom says, thus says your brother Israel, you know, all the hardship that we have met, we were in Egypt and we were in slavery and we came through through the wilderness.

And it has been a hard time, you know, everything that we've met. So who is Edom? Edom is the nation that is descended from a man called Esau. And Esau is the brother of Jacob. So I could be saying a bunch of names up here and you're like, who are all these people?

And how do I figure this out? The reason I'm giving you this is because earlier in the book of Genesis, there is a story where Jacob, one of the brothers, tricked his brother Esau into giving up his inheritance for a bowl of soup. Which sounds kind of ridiculous, but that is nonetheless the story that took place. Esau was very hungry. He had had nothing to eat for many days.

And so Jacob says, well, hey, if you give me your inheritance, I'll give you this bowl of soup. And so Esau really, in this moment of impulsive desperation, agreed to giving up that inheritance. And from that point forward, a feud sparked between these two brothers. Now, Jacob, who does Jacob become? Jacob becomes.

He becomes Israel, right? So he goes into his own wilderness with God. God brings him through that, and God changes his name from Jacob to Israel. And. And then he gets to know, like, he is the receiver of the inheritance.

All the promises are coming through his line. And then one day, like, Jacob's heart gets heavy for what he has done to his brother. And so he goes back to his brother. He goes through his brother's land, and he's really concerned about what his brother's gonna do to him. And when he finds his brother Esau, Esau loves his brother, and he's ready to forgive.

They reconcile with each other over this terrible thing that has happened in their relationship. And so that's the story of Jacob and Esau. Well, the line of Israel is descended from Jacob, and the line of Edom is descended from Esau, right? So you have two brother nations that are encountering each other in this story. And so this is what happened.

Jacob stole Esau's inheritance. Jacob stole Esau's blessing from his father, and then Jacob abandoned his inheritance when famine hit. See, what happens later on in the story is that famine hits the land that Jacob was supposed to inherit, and Jacob abandons that land and goes to the land of Egypt. Right? Esau stays, or Edom stays in their place.

But they watch the people of Israel go away from the land that they were supposed to inherit. And now the brother has come back. Israel has returned to reclaim their inheritance. And Moses, when he's. He's now writing to Edom, the descendants of Esau, he starts with a plea for mercy.

And so verse 17 of Numbers 20 says, Please let us pass through your land. We will not pass through field or vineyard or drink water from a well. We're going to go along the king's highway, and we'll not turn aside to the right hand or the left hand until we've passed through your territory. So the king's highway. It was the most direct route to get where they had to go to get into the land that God had promised them.

If they. They didn't go through Edom, it would mean that they would have to travel all. They're at the south of the land right now. This is where they are. They're at the south of the land.

Here's Edom. They can either go through Edom or they will be forced to go all the way up north around the Dead Sea so that they can come down into their land from the north, right? So that's what they're going to be forced to do. So they really want to take this direct route. This is very important to them.

And so he says, well, you just let us come through. We're not going to touch any of your stuff, we're not going to drink any of your water. We're just going to go through on this highway. And verse 18, Edom said to him, you shall not pass through. Least I come out with the sword against you.

This is an incredibly strong response. Do you sense the. That maybe there might be some unresolved conflict from the past? Verse 19 and the people of Israel said to him, we will go up by the highway, and if we drink of your water, I and my livestock, then I'll pay for it. Let me only pass through on foot, nothing more.

And verse 20. But he said, you shall not pass through. And Edom, Edom came out against them when with a large army and with a strong force. And thus Edom refused to give Israel passage. Two things to note here.

The first thing is that even though Esau forgave Jacob, Esau's kids did not share the same generous spirit that Esau did. So that principle of forgiveness, Esau did not ensure that that was passed on to generation to generation to generation. So that's the first thing to notice. And the second thing to notice is more of a question like why didn't Israel just fight them? They could have done that, right?

Well, the issue is that they couldn't have done that because in Deuteronomy 2. 5, God told them that they could not. God said, do not contend with them, for I will not give you any of their land. No, not so much as the soul of the foot to tread on. Because I have given Mount Seir, that is the land that.

That Edom inhabits. I've given Mount Seir to Esau as a possession. So God was committed to honoring Esau as one of the sons of Isaac and one of the grandchildren of Abraham. And Abraham was the one who received the promise of becoming a great nation. And so God's going to honor Edom's right to this land, even though Edom's heart is given to this grudge.

And the grudge, y' all is 400 years old, right? It's. It's a long lasting grudge. And even though Edom's heart is given to that grudge, God's going to bless Edom or allow Edom to stay in that land. And so Edom is ready to fight Israel and kill them over this.

There's no trust, there's no goodwill, there's no looking forward to a positive future between these two nations. And so the principle that I want you to see for Edom is simply this, that today's bitterness is the next generation's bloodshed. Today's bitterness is the next generation's bloodshed. This is a real time illustration of what God has been telling them about sin. And it is staring them in the face, right?

This is, I mean, for what it's worth, just this principle here. Today's bitterness is the next generation's bloodshed. This is the fruit of what we are yielding today in our country.

Well, it may not necessarily always be along familial lines. What do we do? We justify ourselves in turning people who disagree with us politically into enemies of us. And so instead of seeing people who might represent competing ideas, what you get instead is you turn people into their ideology. And as you turn people into their ideology, then you make those people objects of their ideology.

And it doesn't matter what area of the political spectrum you find yourself on, whatever group you listen to, the training that you get is that whoever believes that ideology is an object of that ideology rather than a person made in the image of God. And so if they become an idea object of that ideology, we should not be surprised when we go about destroying the objects that we don't like. And that's what we're yielding. That's what we're dealing with. Today's bitterness is the next generation's bloodshed.

And so as a result of this, they, Israel is now set to come across other nations, right? They're being forced up north. And so they have to go through the land of other nations. Let's look at some of those other nations. First, family line number two, the Canaanites, Sihon and Og.

So verse 21 of Numbers 21. Then Israel sent messengers to Sihon, king of the Amorites, and then they turned and went up the way to Bashan and Og. Unfortunately, we don't have time to go through every piece of the detail of these battles. But the two kings and their nations, I just want to kind of give you some background on them. So these are both descended from Canaanites.

Canaanites are those who dwell in the land of Canaan, which happens to be the Land that God has promised Israel. And so we have two categories of these Canaanites. You have these people who live in this place called Bashan, and you have the Amorites. And the Amorites are, they are a people that God has actually given a word of prophecy about earlier. So, so if you were to go to Genesis 15:16, it says this about the Amorites, God is talking to his chosen person, Abraham, right?

And he's saying to Abraham, hey, your generation is going to come back here or your lineage is going to come back here in the fourth generation. He said it's not yet time. And the reason it's not yet time is because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete, right? So what he's saying is that there is iniquity that is being passed down through this generation and passed down and passed down and passed down. And for what it's saying, the generation that comes from Canaan, they had no interaction with the one true God.

They had no understanding of who the one true God was. And that lack of understanding led to them pursuing all sorts of egregious things in their worship and that piled on top of each other time and time again. So this familial line of the Canaanites, you have the Amorites, but I just want to also let you know, in the same familial line you have Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom and Gomorrah came from this line as well. And so with the Amorites, I just tell you that I would really like to not have to mention the evil that these people engaged in as they worshiped their false gods.

But it was incredibly sensuous. And the drums beat and the fires blazed and what they would do in their worship is they would actively engage in the sacrifice of children for the worship of their gods. And they invited their false gods to bless them as they sacrificed their children to these gods. That's who the Amorites were, that's who Bashan is. And so they are full blown worshipers of false gods that are actually demons.

That's who these people are. They're inspired by these demonic gods into the deepest, most vile, violent forms of human sin imaginable. So in other places, what we discover is actually that Og is one of these giants that the Israelites are afraid of, right? That they think is going to crush them. And the place where he lives, Bashan, is a mountain where.

And it's a very high mountain and a place where all of the people around believed that the gods had specially the gods that dwelled in heaven that they. They had specially blessed this mountain, they all believed that. They all recognized that. So it was viewed Bashan as a place of significant spiritual power for the whole land all the way around. And so Yahweh rolls into this.

These places with his people. And when these people step out to challenge God's people, they make really short work of them, right? Really short work. So. So verse 34 of Numbers 21.

But the Lord said to Moses about Og the giant, do not fear him, for I have given him into your hand and all his people and his land, and you shall do to him as you did to Sihon. They already defeated Sihon, king of the Amorites who lived at Heshbon. And so verse 35. So they defeated him and his sons and all his people until he had no survivor left and they possessed his land. So God was serious when he said this whole thing about the wickedness of the Amorites.

There was a time coming when they would become so wicked that God would decide that generation needs to be cut off no more. So what do we get for family line number two? We get that violent, bloody, false worship yields utter destruction. Right? That's the next thing that displayed.

Now, these are the lessons that Israel is learning as they're walking through and discovering these various nations. They're coming to understand this. The reason God is showing them this is because they are going to be tempted to do the very same thing that all of these other nations did. And he wants them to get the message ahead of time. Family line number three, MOAB.

Numbers 2213 says, Then the people of Israel set out encamped in the plains of Moab. And Moab was in great dread. They knew what Yahweh had done for his people, and they were afraid of what would happen to them. So we're going to look at this story in greater detail in a few weeks because it's very interesting. There's, like, blessing and cursing, and there's this whole interaction where a guy talks to a donkey, and it's just so, so weird.

I can't wait to talk about it. But we're not talking about that part today.

So Moab is afraid. And because they are afraid, their king actually realizes we don't have the military force to be able to conquer this people. We don't have what is necessary. And so what the king does instead is he hires a person to speak curses over the people of Israel, right? To function essentially as a sorcerer who will curse the people of Israel.

And because of the blessings of Israel, right? God told Abraham, whoever blesses your people, I will bless. And whoever curses your people, I will curse. And so because of the blessing that Israel has, they're able to make it into Moab. And they don't suffer anything because of the curse that they try to put on them.

So I want to ask this question. Who is Moab? The Moabites are the descendants of a guy named Lot. But they're not just descendants of Lot. They're descendants from a relationship that Lot had with one of his daughters.

That's where the Moabites came from. That's the line of the Moabites. So Lot was Abraham's cousin who God rescued because of his mercy out of Sodom and Gomorrah. And because Abraham interceded for God. God, if there is any righteous person, person in that place, would you just save them or would you relent from your destruction?

And God said, if I can find 10 people, I'll relent. And God couldn't find 10 righteous people in that place. There was only Lot. And so God sent angels to encourage Lot. Hey, it's time to leave.

You have to get out of this place. And so Lot's daughters, they seduced Lot into intimate relations, and each bore their father's children. And the Moabites are descendants of those children. And you don't have to read about the Moabites for long to realize that these people, though they seem to have some awareness of who the one true God is, they are consumed with perversion and sorcery, like it is just full in this land. And instead of digging any more deeply into that, I could go into, like, just all the explanations.

I don't want to do all of that, because I think we're getting the point, right? Here's what I want us to get.

Be attentive to what you hand off to your kids. Pay attention to what you hand off to your kids. In this particular point in history, God wants his people to observe what he has been telling them consistently about his character. When generations are separated from loving me, it always yields various kinds of destruction every time. Right?

Look, I mean, just look at what happens to each of these nations. And in their own unique way, they have gone down this route of destruction. When iniquity goes unattended, it builds and builds and builds. And so if they've been paying attention, if his people, Israel, have been paying attention to his character, and if they're listening, they have this other amazing lesson to learn about their God. Because, yes, this lesson is a warning about the bad thing that you can become if you let it go on and go on and go on.

Sin opens the door in this generation, and later generations keep opening the door wider. But this lesson is not just a warning about the bad thing that can they can become. It is a calling to them into the good that the Lord has for them. Because remember this part of God's identity as well. Numbers 14:18, Exodus 20, verse 6.

The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That word, steadfast love. It is like he is just so committed to us, understanding and receiving and grasping the depths of how he loves us. He's abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression. That whole thing about forgiving iniquity, that's telling us that he wants to take away those things that we've allowed to pass on to other generations.

Verse 6 of Exodus 20 says that he is showing steadfast love. So guess what? Iniquity goes to the third and fourth generation. How far does steadfast love go? To thousands, thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments iniquity, it only goes this far.

But my steadfast love, do you know how far it goes? God is saying, in me is the power to break generational cycles, right? Loving me gives the pathway to mercy, to overcome the iniquity and the open doors of past generations. Following my word gives you a place of safety from the destruction that is occurring around you. And so he's essentially saying, look at these nations.

This is for Israel. Look at these nations and look at you, right? What's the difference? Do you see the difference? What is happening to them and what is happening to you?

You're experiencing my grace and my favor, and I'm bringing you through and I'm taking care of you and I'm providing for you, and I'm shutting down the idolatry that happens in this place. And I'm shutting down the false worship and I'm shutting down the lying and the cheating and, and the stealing that takes place here. Look at what is happening to you because I love you. And look at what is happening to them because they have not loved me.

And he's saying that this should be a calling into mission for Israel, because he's saying, you have an opportunity to reveal to these nations what it looks like for me to rewrite the stories of generations with my forgiveness and my love.

So what? I asked this question every week. I asked the question Because I realize I've been up here talking for a little bit and I want you to know, what do I walk away with? What am I supposed to take away from with this? The first thing that I would tell you is I would tell you to understand the doors that have been locked opened, right?

So sometimes people get concerned, like, I don't want to dishonor my family. I don't want to dishonor my mothers and my fathers and my previous generations. And I understand that. I get where you're coming from. But it is valuable for you to know the patterns that existed in the generations before you, because those are the same patterns that you are going to be fighting against in your own life.

And so for myself, I'll just share with you. And this is something that I've only recently come to understand on one side. Like the combination of pride and anger and the way those two things reinforce each other and light each other up in my family is just incredible. You just look at the way that it works through various generations and various people. And so that's one thing that I am very aware of, that I have to be on guard against, right?

And one thing that I recognize in myself, that I have to find, fight against, that I have to do battle against, right? We all have to do battle against sin. But this in particular is a thing that the Lord has shown me I have to pay attention to on another side.

You know, I'll just let you bring you into the fact that there's like a. I only recently became aware of this. There's just a line of extreme life altering decisions made with gambling, right? So I become aware of that and I go, oh, okay Lord, I need to pay attention to how that might work itself out in me and potentially even in my kids, right? I need to be intentional to not engage that, right? So I just, it's valuable to understand the doors that have been opened by previous generations.

The second thing I would tell you then, once you understand to repent and pursue healing from generational cycles. To repent is to turn away, right? To change your thinking, to recognize that this thing is unhealthy for me. This thing is a risk to me, this thing is a danger to me. And so I'm going to change my thinking so that I don't go down that path and I don't open that door.

But I open only the doors that the Lord wants, right? So repent and then pursue healing. Now why do I say pursue healing? Because as you understand what has come to you from previous Generations, Your inclination in your soul is going to be to rebel against the things that happened to you in previous generations. Now, why do I point that out?

So let's take the pride and anger thing for me. Because if you looked at me in the way that I grew up through my life, you would not look at me and say, he was a prideful, angry person. In fact, you would say that I was a compliant, peaceful person. The reason for that is I was so deathly afraid of anger. Anger was such a problem for me that I don't have a healthy view of what anger looks like and how it should work out.

And so I just like, rejected anger at every point and I made myself the most peaceful person. And what does that mean? Well, I just stuffed it. I stuffed my anger down as anger doesn't exist. It's not a real thing.

I'm not going to deal with it until, you know, occasionally, especially when I became a dad, it started bursting out of me, right? And so the value here is to call us into healing of the cycles that have gone before us and not rebelling against those cycles, right? That we would have healthy understandings of the mistakes that were made by our generations that came before us. And what heals, what brings healing, what forgives? Iniquity, the steadfast love of the Lord.

We ground ourselves in God's love above everything else. When we deal with that anger, when we deal with that sin pattern, when we deal with that place of discontent, we say, no, the Lord is going to give me what I need. I'm not going to get it from that. Open door. Number three.

The gift of the cross. The cross of Jesus is the gift of a new bloodline.

Romans chapter five talks to us about this idea that we are all children of this guy called Adam. Adam sinned and his sin got passed on to us. We bear his iniquity. And while various families or groups of generations might have their own particular sin issues we all share, one universal issue is that we are born with the very inclination and engage that inclination to resist our Creator who loves us. And our Father Adam, he sinned and his iniquity came to all of us.

And we all have participated in opening that door further in whatever way we have. But Jesus comes to us and he says, hey, I tell you, unless you are born again or from above, but the idea is, born into a new family, you will not inherit the kingdom of God, right? The pathway that he gives is a way to be born into a new family, to be a part of a new bloodline and so how does this happen? Well, he goes and he suffers and he dies. And through his suffering and his death, he takes on his body the weight of the wrath of God for sin, the weight of God's punishment against iniquity.

He takes it on himself. Isaiah 53 says that he was pierced for our transgressions. Now remember back to what I said earlier. Transgressions are the things that, that we do that go beyond the boundaries that God sets. He was pierced for our transgressions, but it's not just our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities, the things that stain our soul because of the sin that we engage in and the things that are passed down to us. The point of all of this is that through the cross of Jesus, through Jesus blood, there is a pathway for every person into healing and into forgiveness. And it starts with receiving the free gift of forgiveness that is in Jesus and receiving him as the Lord of your life. Right? If you want to know what it is to walk in nearness to the Lord, you can know that when you just receive him and say, jesus, I want you to be my Lord.

I accept what you've done for me, and I receive the free gift of forgiveness. And the Bible says that what you do when you make that decision is that he adopts you, he takes you out of that previous family, and he puts you in a new heavenly family where healing and life can flow into what was previously consumed by darkness. So, Church, would you pray with me, please? Jesus, I thank you for the promise, the gift that you give to us about the power of your blood to overcome generational cycles, to lead us in pathways of healing. So, Lord, I pray that you would give each of us in this room the understanding that we need, Lord, the clarity on the steps that we ought to take in order to repent.

Lord, would we look to your Word and let your word renew our minds in relation to these things, Lord, but also would you enable every person in this room to experience the power of coming to you and bending the knee to you and saying, jesus, I want you to be my Lord because I want the newness of life that you have to give. I ask this in Jesus name, Amen.