Strengthen your faith in God's word

God says He is “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:5). The law says, “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16).

Deuteronomy is a law for Israel’s judges: no court was to put a man to death for his father’s crime, and Amaziah kept it when he slew his father’s murderers but not their children, “according unto that which is written in the book of the law of Moses” (2 Kings 14:6). Exodus is what God Himself does, and it names on whom: “of them that hate me,” the children who go on in their fathers’ sin. The son who “seeth all his father’s sins which he hath done, and considereth, and doeth not such like … shall not die for the iniquity of his father” (Ezekiel 18:14–17). Gill: “that respects what God himself would do, this what Israel, or the civil magistrates in it should do.”