Breaking Family Curses

www.jonasclark.com

Some say what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That sounds like an invitation for sin. Sin, however, affects you, your family and your family descendants. Sin, no matter the location, opens the door for family curses. Family curses are reoccurring problems that steal, kill, and destroy.

There are many family curses that plague from repeated sicknesses, marital problems, to financial failures. If you go to a medical doctor for an examination they will ask you for your family’s medical history. They do that because they know certain diseases reoccur within family lines. It’s the same for generational curses.

The honest person must ask himself how a Christian can suffer from a curse. The short answer is ignorance. For example, most Christians believe that healing belongs to them through the atoning blood of Christ. Scripture confirms this belief declaring, “By His stripes ye are healed” (1 Peter 2:24). There are thousands of examples of Christians receiving healing in their bodies after salvation. It is evident however that other Christians are sick. If healing belongs to them then why are they suffering sickness? The answer is that healing has already been provided but they have yet to experience it. Another scripture says “Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word” (Romans 10:17).

To appropriate anything from the Lord one must know what belongs to them and receive it by faith. The same goes for deliverance from family curses.

The word salvation is the Greek word sozo. “For by grace are ye saved (sozo) through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). Sozo can also translate as deliverance. Jesus spoke of deliverance. He said the Spirit of the Lord was on Him because he was anointed to preach deliverance to the captives. Deliverance is the children’s bread (Matthew 15:22-28). It belongs to you thorough the will of Christ. He is the one that “went about doing good and healing all that were sick and oppressed of the devil for God was with him” (Acts 10:38). It is not until a believer knows what belongs to him or her can faith for that promise be received.

It is comforting to know that deliverance from family curses belongs to you. Freedom has already been promised. Scripture declares, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13). Redeemed means the recompense for sin and iniquities has already been paid for by the atoning blood of the only begotten Son of God. So as we discuss freedom from family curses in this essay read it with the assurance that deliverance has already been provided to those that receive Christ’ redemption by faith.

INIQUITY OF THE FATHERS

Scripture is clear that God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. These are oftentimes referred as generational curses. I want to use the term family curses to explain. Here is one of our foundational verses toward understanding the source of family curses.

Notice it is iniquity that God visits upon the family tree of the disobedient. Iniquity is unjust acts, wickedness, amoral behavior, idolatry, sexual sins, rebellion, witchcraft, evil, and mischief. All of us have parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents. That’s a total of thirty two relatives in our family tree. Could it be possible a family curse was passed down the family line because of one of them?

THE KENNEDY CURSE

The Kennedy family curse has been well documented. Wikipedia writes:

The Kennedy tragedies, colloquially called the Kennedy Curse, is a term sometimes used to describe a series of tragedies involving members of the Kennedy family. Some have called the continual misfortune of the Kennedy family a curse. Several members of the family have died from unnatural causes, most notably brothers John and Robert, who were assassinated by gunshots in 1963 and 1968, and John, Jr., who was killed in an airplane crash along with his wife and sister-in-law in 1999.

The existence of such a curse has been disputed by others who have claimed that many of the tragedies have been caused by preventable reckless choices like driving drunk or flying an airplane in unsafe conditions, that others are the natural result of events likely to occur in such a large family like cancer or pregnancy miscarriage, and that the notion of a curse is superstitious and created and fostered by the media.

The last Kennedy family member to suffer was John F. Kennedy, Jr. John was the oldest and only surviving son of President Kennedy and was killed in a plane crash along with his wife and sister-in-law off the coast of Martha's Vineyard July 16, 1999. This was a national tragedy bringing back more discussion of the possibility of a Kennedy family curse.

THE LEE FAMILY CURSE

Many remember the martial arts master known as Bruce Lee. Lee was born Lee Jun-fan. He is considered one of the most influential martial artists of the 20th century, and a cultural icon. Lee was born in San Francisco, California in the United States, to parents of Hong Kong heritage but raised in Hong Kong until his late teens. Upon reaching the age of 18, Lee emigrated to the United States to claim his U.S. Citizenship and receive a higher education. It was during this time he began teaching martial arts, which soon led to film and television roles.

One night he took some medication for a simple headache. Sometime later he suffered a serious allergic reaction causing a cerebral edema. He died at the early age of 32. A month later his classic kung fu move “Enter the Dragon” was released.

Twenty years later his only son Brandon Lee was working on a movie called “The Crow” about a rock musician revived from the dead to avenge his own murder. During the final days of filming his character was to be shot. The day before a props team member mistook a "squib load", a real bullet in the barrel. The next day another props team loaded the gun with blanks but when the gun was fired it had enough gunpowder to fire the squib load killing the 28-year-old Lee. Like his father, Brandon Lee died young. This was also reported in the media as a family curse.

THE BRANDO FAMILY CURSE

Marlon Brando, Jr. was named the fourth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute, and part of Time magazine's Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century. He was perhaps best known for his roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and his Academy Award-winning performance as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954), both directed by Elia Kazan, and his Academy Award-winning performance as Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972). In middle age he also played Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979), also directed by Coppola, and delivered an Academy Award-nominated performance as Paul in Last Tango in Paris (1972).

Brando’s mother suffered from alcoholism, and his first wife, Anna Kashfi, developed drug and alcohol problems after giving birth to their son Christian. Along with his own drug problems, Christian shot the boyfriend of his half-sister Cheyenne. Dag Drollet, the Tahitian lover of Brando's daughter Cheyenne, died of a gunshot wound after a confrontation with Cheyenne's half-brother Christian at the family's hilltop home above Beverly Hills. Christian, then 31 years old, claimed he was drunk and the shooting was accidental. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and served six years of his ten-year sentence.

In an effort to prevent Cheyenne from testifying at Christian’s trial, Marlon Brando sent her to Tahiti so she couldn’t be subpoenaed by U.S. authorities. A year before Christian was released, she committed suicide. Christian Brando died of pneumonia at age 49.

These are three examples of family curses discussed in American newspapers. There have been many more including the Hemingway, Barrymore, and Redgrave families. Some would say this is just plain superstition and think nothing of it. Others, however, might want to think a little more about it especially when they see signs of family curses within their families. If anything these stories make us question the possibility of real family curses and ask if there is a way of escape. Even though these accounts are saddening the good news is that family curses do not have to continue, they can be stopped.

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THE RECOMPENSE FOR INIQUITY

Curses come on families because of sin and disobedience to the Word of God. They are the effect of broken sanctions. Our God is a God of covenant. Every covenant has sanctions. Without sanctions there is no covenant. Sanctions are penalties or other means of enforcement used to provide incentives for obedience with the law, or with rules and regulations. Just as the Bible is full of blessings for obedience there are also penalties when sanctions are broken. These penalties we call family curses.

A curse is a payment or “recompense for iniquity.”

“Render unto them a recompense, O LORD, according to the work of their hands. Give them sorrow of heart, thy curse unto them. Persecute and destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the LORD.” (Lamentations 3:64-66)

Sin has consequences. Scripture declares “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). Recompense can come as failure, premature death, sickness, diseases, destruction, tragedy, marriage problems, mental illness, suicide, torment, depression, sorrow, grief, lack, hopelessness, confusion, guilt, shame, setbacks, accidents, addictions, reprobate minds, sexual perversions, whoredoms, vagabondism, barrenness, lack, female problems, and fear.

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

Las Vegas is known as Sin City. Perhaps you have heard the official Las Vegas tourism slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Not so when it comes to the repercussions of sin and iniquities flowing down the family line. Scripture says, “Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee” (Deuteronomy 28:45). One may sin in Vegas but the results of those sins never stay in Vegas.

You can run but you can’t hide. That’s because curses pursue and overtake. As we have already discovered disobedience opens the door for family curses, and the recompense for iniquities. These curses can enter through generational curses, sin, fantasy, pornography, unforgiveness, rape, drugs, witchcraft, sexual perversion, serving others gods, and rebellion.

Sociologist Richard L. Dugdale wrote “The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity” in 1877. He was a member of the executive committee of the Prison Association of New York that was delegated to visit jails in upstate New York. In a jail in Ulster County he found six members of the same family and recorded their family history. According to his research he claimed to have traced the family’s Hudson Valley roots back seven generations to a colonial frontiersman named Max, whom he described as having been born between 1720 and 1740, a descendant of early Dutch settlers, who lived in the backwoods as a “hunter and fisher, a hard drinker, jolly and companionable, averse to steady toil.” He traced the branch that had produced so many criminals back to a woman he called “Margaret, the Mother of Criminals,” who had married one of Max’s sons.

Max Juke and his wife are examples of a family curse. They were godless atheists. They had 560 descendants. 310 died in poverty, 150 were criminals, 100 alcoholics, 7 murders, and more than half the women were prostitutes.

Contrast that family tree to the Edwards’ family. Jonathan Edwards played a critical role in shaping the First Great Awakening, and oversaw some of the first fires of revival in 1733-1735 at his church in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is considered a classic of early American literature, which he delivered during another wave of revival in 1741, following George Whitefield's tour of the Thirteen Colonies.

Jonathan Edwards and wife were committed Christians. Of their 1394 descendants, 294 were college graduates, 13 college presidents, 30 judges, 65 college professors, 75 military officers, 100 missionaries, 100 lawyers, 80 held public office, 3 were U. S. Senators, 3 State Governors, 3 Mayors, 1 Comptroller of the U. S. Treasury and 1 Vice-president of the United States.

The differences between the Juke and Edwards’ family trees are eye opening. God’s word is clear, “The wicked are overthrown and are not but the house of the righteous shall stand” (Proverbs 12:7). The bottom line is that the wages of sin is death. What happens in Vegas, does not stay in Vegas, it follows down the family linage.

Jonas Clark is first a Christian. He has authored over 29 books, written hundreds of articles and recorded thousands of audios. Jonas Clark Ministries is an international organization reaching the world with the exciting gospel of Jesus Christ. Jonas is founder of Spirit of Life Ministries church, Hallandale Beach, Florida, the Apostolic Equipping Institute, publisher of The Voice magazine, president of the Global Cause Network and has preached in over 26 nations. He believes that all God's people are gifted to establish and advance Christ's Kingdom on earth. He is an advocate of private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.