Heredity and individual responsibility.
The passage before us is interesting as indicating a great advance in freedom and justice of thought from the old orthodoxy that was satisfied with the punishment of children together with their parents to a new and wiser doctrine of individual responsibility. But it is important to observe that it is more than a sign of advancing thought. It is a prophecy concerning facts, a prediction of a higher justice of the future. The old notion here condemned is not condemned because it is false; nay, it is treated as true for the present. The new idea is not substituted as a better interpretation of the facts of experience; it is a description of a higher order of facts not yet realized. The old doctrine applies with a considerable measure of truth to Judaism; the new is part of the larger justice of Christianity. For the Jewish religion was essentially a family religion; its advantages came to the individual through the nation, the tribe, the family; the first condition for receiving them was descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But Christianity is fundamentally individualistic. It elevates the family, it creates the Church—one grand family of Christian brethren; but it begins with individual faith and ends with individual responsibility. Nevertheless, we have not yet perfect justice. Jeremiah's prophecy is still a prophecy to us. Let us examine the two conditions of life that are brought before us by the contrast of prediction with the present order of affairs.
I. THE PRESENT CONDITION OF HEREDITY. It is true now that if "the fathers have eaten some grapes the children's teeth are set on edge." Hereditary punishment and hereditary moral corruption are among the darkest mysteries of "all this unintelligible world." But they are facts that follow necessary social and physiological laws.
1. Children suffer the punishment of their parents' sins. Poverty, dishonour, disease, pass from parent to child. The child of a spendthrift becomes a beggar, the son of a thief is ostracized, the drunkard's child diseased, perhaps insane.
2. Children inherit moral corruption from their parents. Where this is the case it may be thought to lighten the mystery of hereditary punishment. However that may be, it is itself a deeper mystery, a more horrible injustice. It is remarked that if God visits "the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation," it is to generations of "them that hate" him. But if the wickedness that seems to justify the long lived punishment is also hereditary, is not the case the more hard? Now, Jeremiah teaches us that we are not to be satisfied with this as a final and equitable arrangement. It belongs to these present times that are out of joint, and it will be superseded by a better order.
II. THE FUTURE CONDITION OF INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. (Verse 30.) This was to come with the Messianic era. We have seen it beginning in the revelation of Christianity. It can only be perfected when Christ's work is perfected by his second advent for judgment. A right social order may do something in this direction. Jeremiah anticipated a wiser, more discriminating exercise of justice in the restored nation after the Captivity. But the full realization must be left for a future dispensation of Divine justice. At the last every man will be called upon alone to answer for his own sins, and judgment will be swift and appropriate. Present inequalities will then be rectified. Meanwhile the injustice of hereditary punishment can be compensated, not only by future alleviations but by turning the punishment into a wholesome discipline, while the injustice of moral corruption will be corrected ultimately by judging a man according to the free choice of his will—how he behaved when he was free to act, how far he took new steps downwards, with all due allowance for natural weakness and hereditary tendencies.