The Sins of the Father

Jesus Christ is the Lord of Glory.  Hebrews 1:1-2 reads:

1  God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,

2  Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;

Jesus Christ is the center of our molecular structure.  Jesus Christ is the center of the universe.  “All things were made by him and for him and by him all things consist.”  All things revolve around Him.  Every thought and every deed revolves around Him.  It will either be anti-Christ or pro-Christ.  He is the center.  Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life.”  There is no other way.  He is truth.  Living outside of Christ is simply living a lie.  Have you made your peace with God?  Are you prepared to die and meet your maker?  Are you born-again?  Today is the day of salvation.  Today is your time to become a new creature.  Click onto “Further With Jesus” before you continue.  We will wait for you here.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Exodus 34:6-7:

6  And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,

7  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.

GOD SAID, Numbers 14:18:

The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

MAN SAID: The Bible is irrelevant.

Now THE RECORD.  Jesus said that men sit in darkness because their deeds are evil and they don’t want them to be exposed.  Men clamor for truth, which is something they cannot know in the carnal realm, simply because truth is the Spirit of God.  To know God requires a birthing—a spiritual birthing—into His house.  They shout, “Tell me the truth!”  But when it is offered they say, “That’s not the truth.”  They can’t recognize it because they are blind and sit in darkness. 

Years ago I stopped in a business to sell the owner advertising in a paper that we published.  He was a big burly guy who had no regard for his maker.  In casual conversation, I mentioned something as innocuous as “God willing,” which triggered serious angst in this fellow.  He shouted (yes, shouted), “God!  God!  Do you talk to God?”  I calmly answered that I do, and just had a conversation with Him while traveling down the road to his store. 

I continued, “You probably wonder why God doesn’t talk to you.  It’s because your heart is filled with this world.  You are spiritually deaf and unworthy to hear His voice.  He wasn’t interested in hearing God’s voice—God’s truth—because his deeds were evil.

GodSaidManSaid is a proof text.  On this site, there are presently 376 subjects, which are preserved in text and streaming audio, that prove without question the veracity of the Word of God.  Every Thursday evening, God willing, we publish a new one.  God’s marvelous secrets, miracles, instruction, historical accounts, and prophetic announcements are declared and proven over and over again.  Articles covering the 6,000-year-old earth and first people Adam and Eve, to Noah’s flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the ten plagues of Egypt, giants, dinosaurs, David and Goliath, to God’s position on bi-racial marriage, homosexuality, divorce, to a host of other marvels including dietary secrets concerning olive oil, butter, whole milk, eggs, salt, wine, and so much more, are all archived on GodSaidManSaid.  We’re so glad you’ve come to visit.

How could it be?  How could mere mortal men tell the end from the beginning?  If the Bible is an irrelevant tome written by mere mortal men, how could it declare the truth of complex, baffling issues thousands and thousands of years before scientific discovery begins to understand the reasons why?  This subject is just another proof that God is.

Exodus 34:7:

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.

The devastating effects of parental disobedience are far-reaching and just beginning to be seriously studied via the new science of epigenetics.  This new science is turning old science on its head.  Epigenetics is rewriting the rules of disease, heredity, and identity.

The sins of the mother during pregnancy, birth, and onward into the child’s development, are somewhat well-known, such as passing on to their children venereal diseases, as well as the effects of alcohol, smoking, the lack of breast-feeding, and so on.  But, the father seems to have escaped the scrutiny of the investigators.  The headline in the March 29, 2008 issue of Science News reads, “Dad’s Hidden Influence.”  The subhead reads, “A father’s legacy to a child’s health may start before conception and last generations.”  The following excerpts are from that feature article:

How a man lives, where he works, or how old he is when his children are conceived doesn't affect their long‑term health, scientists used to think.  But growing evidence suggests that a father's age and his exposure to chemicals can leave a medical legacy that lasts generations.

Animal studies demonstrate that drugs, alcohol, radiation, pesticides, solvents, and other chemicals can lead to effects that are handed from father to son.  Human studies are less clear, but some show that fathers play a role in fetal development and the health of their children.

Teenage dads face increased risk that their babies will be born prematurely, have low birth weight, or die at birth or shortly afterward, a new study in Human Reproduction shows.

Babies of firefighters, painters, woodworkers, janitors, and men exposed to solvents and other chemicals in the workplace are more likely to be miscarried, stillborn, or to develop cancer later in life, according to a review in the February Basic & Clinical Pharmacology & Toxicology.

Fathers who smoke or are exposed at work to chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons put their children at risk of developing brain tumors.

And, older fathers are more likely to have children with autism, schizophrenia, and Down syndrome and to have daughters who go on to develop breast cancer.

Though some of these observations are decades old, attitudes lag even further behind, says Cynthia Daniels, a political scientist at Rutgers University–New Brunswick in New Jersey.  Dads aren’t held accountable if something goes wrong during fetal development.

The author goes on to explain why dads haven’t been held accountable:

Since men make new sperm every 74 days, people used to reason, the genetic slate is wiped clean every couple of months.  And even if a man makes defective sperm, the “all‑or‑nothing” view of reproduction holds that damaged sperm don't fertilize eggs.  No harm.  No foul.

So no one bothers to remind men to protect themselves against environmental toxins.  There are no images of “crack dads” and “crack babies” in the media like those of women who harm developing fetuses with drug and alcohol use, Daniels said in February at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Boston.

When someone does study fathers‑to‑be, the focus is usually on fertility, not on the consequences for children's health, she says.

The article continues:

Some animal studies showing paternal effects emerged years ago but were roundly dismissed, says Gladys Friedler, professor emeritus at Boston University.

Four decades ago, Friedler was studying tolerance to narcotics, one of the first steps of addiction.  To find out if a mother rat could pass tolerance on to her offspring along with antibodies and other immune factors, as some scientists theorized, Friedler exposed female rats to morphine before pregnancy.  Babies of exposed mothers were born much smaller than average.  And those babies also went on to give birth to tiny babies, even though the offspring had never encountered the drug.

Friedler also gave male rats morphine before they bred.  “To my total disbelief and bewilderment, paternal exposure also affected progeny,” Friedler said at the AAAS meeting.

Her adviser dismissed the result.  Morphine doesn't cause mutations, so the idea that males could hand down a trait without passing along a mutation seemed preposterous.  The whole thing smacked of Lamarckism, the long‑rejected idea that environmental influences can change an animal or plant's structure and offspring can inherit that change.

But in recent decades, scientists have discovered that chemical modifications to DNA and proteins can change the way genes are packaged and regulated without changing the genes themselves.  Such modifications are known as epigenetic changes.

“What was Lamarckian is now epigenetic,” Friedler says.

Epigenetic modifications act as a molecular scrapbook, preserving memories of events in parents’ lives and handing them down to the next generation and beyond.

“There’s a chromosomal memory,” says Anne Ferguson‑Smith, a developmental geneticist at Cambridge University in England.  “The chromosomes remember whether they came from the mother or the father.”

That memory is established in the form of a chemical mark called methylation.  Methylation usually turns a gene off.  At least 100 genes in humans are turned off only on the chromosome contributed by the mother or only on the chromosome that came from the father.  Such genes are called imprinted genes because of the indelible impression parents leave on their offspring’s DNA.

Male mice exposed to cocaine, for example, pass memory problems on to their pups, a 2006 study in Neurotoxicology and Teratology shows.  The male mice inhaled cocaine in long daily sessions akin to crack binges.  When they mated with females never given coke, they had pups that had trouble learning and remembering where to find food in simple mazes.  The problem was especially severe for female offspring.  The researchers couldn’t find any obvious DNA damage in coke‑smoking males’ sperm, but did find altered levels of two enzymes involved in the methylation of DNA in sperm‑producing tissue in the father mice.  The result suggests that epigenetic changes may be responsible for the offspring’s behavior problems.

He can prove that male rats exposed to a fungicide in the womb can pass tumors and diseases of the prostate and kidney down for at least three generations.  The rats could provide the first model for how prostate disease is inherited, he says.

Male babies born to mothers that had been injected with fungicide had prostate problems that mimic those seen during human aging.  The second‑generation rats also had more tumors, kidney defects, and higher rates of abscesses, cysts, and other infections than unexposed control rats.  Germ cells in the testes of exposed rats also died more quickly than those in the control rats.

Subsequent generations of male rats also had the prostate and testes defects, and both male and female offspring developed kidney problems and tumors.

But only male rats could pass along the defects.  The exposed rats bequeathed their fungicide legacy to their sons, grandsons, and great‑grandsons even though none of the later generations were exposed to the chemical.  [End of quote]

The iniquity of the father being passed on to generations, yet not via mutations as once believed, but by the newly discovered process of mismarked DNA has knocked old science on its ear.  But, of course the Creator, the God of the Bible, knew it all the time.

GOD SAID, Exodus 34:6-7:

6  And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth,

7  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.

GOD SAID, Numbers 14:18:

The LORD is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.

MAN SAID: The Bible is irrelevant.

Now you have THE RECORD.