Jeremiah 31:29-30 -- On Bitterness and Shadows

"In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge."
Jeremiah 31:29-30


This chapter is talking about the last days and this part is interesting to me because to me it seems like there is going to come a time where we aren't paying for the sins of our fathers anymore. Fathers overall, symbolically, but thinking about problems that have stretched on generation after generation, doesn't it seem amazing and miraculous that someday those things just won't be there anymore to haunt any of us? The idea that we could really not have all of that history hanging over our heads, and bad situations woouldn't be passed on to the next generation--I love that idea.

Not, of course, that all of history is bad, or that I am anti-ancestor ... I feel sure that most of them were much wiser than I. I do like the idea that we don't have to pass our mistakes on, but that we can bear the consequences ourselves. We definitely won't always like that, but pulling the consequences back to the individual more will certainly present us with some direct, honest learning opportunities and we'll lose some of the actually kind of creepy power of making other people suffer for our mistakes. Perhaps (hopefully) that will help us make fewer of them.

Honestly, the idea also freaks me out a little bit, because looking back over my life I realize how often I skated out of consequences, and not being able to do that ever again is super scary... but significantly, it doesn't say here that God will never forgive us or tell us to go and sin no more. I think it's talking about larger and deeper pervasive and unrepented sins that just last and last, casting a shadow on everything around. The bitterness passed down from the experiences of others. Things like racism perhaps, and other biases, and abuse certainly, and other ways of seeing others as objects rather than people, of twisting things that should be good into evil, and teaching others so. Praise God for lifting those burdens from us all. Today, let's work to live as if this were so already, and pray to be able to cast off and live without those shadows, and never to pass them on.