A Good & Short Series on Guidance and the Voice of God

Instead of writing some long and substantial new post (which is slowly happening), I was going through my dozens of drafts and found a few things that I’ll put up over the next little while; articles that I’ve saved, brief thoughts, etc.  For now, I ran across a series of articles on the topic of Divine Guidance, by Philip Jensen.

For those of you who don’t know who that is, he’s a great Anglican from Australia who was previously the Dean of Sydney at St Andrew’s Cathedral and Director of the Sydney Diocesan Ministry Training and Development, but now has retired from those positions to simply work with Two Ways Ministries , which is named after the gospel presentation he wrote; Two Ways To Live. Philip Jensen devised Two Ways To Live in 1978 and also wrote a series of Bible Studies/Discipleship tools called Just For Starters.  Definitely tools you should check out.  In fact, if you or your church is looking for curriculum or discipleship resources on anything and haven’t checked out Matthias Media (Philip’s Australian publishing house), you really need to.  They have a wealth of solid resources that far too many people in North America are unaware of.

But enough of me promoting Matthias Media.

Here’s the articles from Philip Jensen on divine guidance:

Generational Curses Part 6: The Finale

In the previous post, we looked at some of the secondary supporting texts for the idea of Generational Curses from categories 2 & 3.  Those texts are utilized to argue that Children indirectly suffer for the sins of their fathers and Generational Curses are broken by “calling out” to the Lord.  We worked through each text in the list and showed how they don’t teach Generational Curse theology at all.  Now, it’s time to finish off the list of secondary text with the three remaining categories of texts.

For those of you who have endured this series, I applaud your persistence.  This series is not meant to be a “read through to the end” sort of series, but rather a “resource you can use in the future” that will deal with a bunch of texts that cover all the main beliefs that make up generational curse theology.  So even if someone tosses a bunch of verses at you that I haven’t dealt with specifically, I’ll have dealt with the concept and will hopefully provide you with a bit of help in sorting through the concept.

The whole concept of Generational Curses is a theology that is the sort of “doctrines of demons” that Paul warned Timothy about in 1 Timothy 4:1.  So, let’s tear down what remains of this paper house and close off this series.

Generational Curses Part 5: An Exegetical Response to Category 2 and 3 Texts

In our last post, we looked at the main supporting texts for the idea of Generational Curses from category 1: texts that are argued to teach that God directly visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children.  That list covered the main and most typical biblical texts used to promote the idea of Generational Curses, so that post will be the largest and most in depth of this series.  Still, there are several secondary supporting texts that need to be dealt with.

Generational Curse theology is a false theology that needs to be replaced with proper biblical theology, and that doesn’t involve a single text or an unexplained list of texts.

Generational Curses Part 4: An Exegetical Response to Category 1 Texts

Welcome back, ye brave souls!

In the last post, I scared many people by laying out a large swath of biblical texts used to (supposedly) support the idea of generational curses.  I arranged those texts in six distinct categories, with each category being texts marshaled around a specific point of generational curse theology. Today, I’m only going to deal with the texts in Category 1.  Seeing that these are the most widely used texts to establish generational curse theology, I’m going to spend the most amount of time here.

This will be a bit of an undertaking, but I’m confident you can stomach it!

Generational Curses Part 3: The Textual Support

In the first post in this series, I gave a general overview of the idea of generational curses and took a quick look at some of the proponents of the teaching.  In the second post, I gave a quick look at one specific example of the teaching and gave a large list of texts used to attempt to make a biblical case for the existence of generational curses.  In this post, I’ll start what will become a multi-post response and refutation of the whole idea of generational curses.

Why do I feel like I need to make a multi-post response?

Haven’t others done that already?

Well, surprisingly few have taken the subject on with any sort of serious response.

Interestingly, the Assemblies of God actually have a shockingly good, albeit short, response to the problem of generational curses…but that only breeds some serious questions.  One has to wonder why is appears that many AOG pastors don’t care much about what the AOG theologians have to say.  In fact, I’d dare say that the AOG could go as far as requiring official & honest theological *fine print* disclaimers for every “revival”  and people would still flock by the thousands to every new revival, outpouring, or other assorted “move of the Spirit.”