Divine Heredity

"I am the living bread which came down from heaven.
If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever." John 6:51

"Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me." Exodus 20: 5, 6.

       The idea is that where there is personal virtue evil need not be transmitted. "Showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me "means" showing mercy to thousands of those who would naturally be the victims of heredity. "It is no use for a man to say, "I am bound to be a drunkard; my father was a drunkard." Every man is heir to two streams - a heredity of sin and a heredity of grace. But the stream of grace is the older. You may prove to me that my father had a weak will, that my grandfather had a weak will, that my great-grandfather had a weak will. But I have an ancestry farther back than that - an ancestry which connects me with unconquerable power; I have come from a Father in heaven. The stream which came to me through impure soil was once a mountain torrent -stainless, impetuous, free, limpid in its purity and sparkling in the sun. Does this count for nothing! Is the corruption of the stream alone to be propagated! Is there to be no tendency to return to an earlier heredity - to the day when my ancestral life lept among the hills of God! There was no inebriety then, no avarice then, no licentiousness then; the stream was pure from the fountain. Does this count for nothing! Is every intermediate hour to have its effect, and the first hour to have none! Are all later impurities to be powerful, and the original purity to be powerless! Is the shell to catch only the dust of the ground, and retain no murmur of the parent sea!

       My brother, why sayest thou that the hope in Christ is not the creed of science? Why sayest thou that it is refuted by the law of heredity! Its greatest lever is that law. It is because I believe in heredity that I believe in Jesus. It is because I see Him with qualities not derived from the common soil that I know there must be a higher Father. And that, my brother, is my hope for thee. Thou art bemoaning thine ancestral corruption; thou art lamenting the taint in thy blood. God offers thee a transfusion of new blood - the blood of the Lamb. Hast thou not read "There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God"! The streams of the river are the heredity of the river. Wouldst thou have the river of thy life made glad; look up to the streams. Why is thine eye fixed only on its lower reaches where the mud and mire began to gather! The streams were limpid, the streams were pure, the streams were fresh from God. Return to thy source; rise to thy beginnings; mount to the uplands where the fountain fell! Yield to no passion of the hour even though it came from thy fathers; thou hast another Father, a higher Father, an earlier Father. Thy heart and thy flesh may have fainted and failed through ten generations; but the strength of thy heart lies behind all generations, and will conquer in the end. The river may have come from thy fathers; but the fountain of thy life was with God.