Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 286 · October 13
The Third and Fourth
“And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.”
When God proclaims His own name on Sinai, the sentence ends with a line most of us leave off the wall: "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation." It is the hard half, and the Bible does not hide it.
Think about where it is spoken. Moses is on the mountain holding a second set of stone tablets, because he broke the first set when he came down and saw the golden calf. Later, at Kadesh, the people refuse to go into the land, and God threatens to strike them down. Moses is the first to quote these words back to God, hard half and all, and he turns the whole sentence into a reason to ask for mercy: "Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of this people according unto the greatness of thy mercy." And God answers, "I have pardoned according to thy word."
The rest of the Bible keeps drawing a boundary around that line. Deuteronomy forbids a court to punish one person for another: "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers." Jeremiah promises that the sour saying people built on it will die out: "In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape." Ezekiel spends a whole chapter on people who used that saying as an excuse, and he answers them plainly: "The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son."
So the line describes a family more than a courtroom. Three or four generations is about as many as can live under one roof or close by, and anyone raised in a hard home knows what it means. Damage travels down a family in tempers, debts, silences and the way people handle trouble. Scripture says that honestly, and it refuses to let the guilt travel with the damage. Look again at the sentence on Sinai. The trouble reaches to the fourth generation, but God is "keeping mercy for thousands." What you inherited is real, and the mercy God keeps is far bigger than anything that was handed down to you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 286 is Perfecting What Concerns You (Psalm 138:8).