Responsibility and repentance.
v 20. The person who sins is the one who will die. The child will not be punished for the parent’s sins, and the parent will not be punished for the child’s sins. Righteous people will be rewarded for their own righteous behaviour, and wicked people will be punished for their own wickedness.
The blame-game is nothing new! Can you recall a child saying something like ‘It’s not my fault – he made me do it!’ Well, the Israelites tried that one on a grand scale. They blamed their forefathers for the mess they were in. It was ‘they’ who sinned so badly and as a result we are in exile.’ Doubtless there was a grain of truth in that in one sense, but the people had to learn the lesson of personal responsibility for choices and consequences. We cannot blame our parents for the bad choices we make; they may have helped to shape our character but we can never blame them for the sinful choices we eventually make for ourselves.
This is the point at which real repentance begins. If we go on blaming others for our mistakes or failures then we are trying to shift the blame and
evade responsibility; repentance involves accepting personal responsibility for sin and acknowledging that to God. When Jesus announced the Good News of the Gospel (Mark 1:15) “Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!” it was this kind of repentance to which he was calling people. It is repentance in the heart when we tell God ‘I’m responsible – I did it. Sorry.’
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