Hereditary Curses and Bloodlines: Recognizing and Removing Demonic Oppression in Your Life

In ministering deliverance to people, I inevitably come to the same conclusion—messed-up adults are the result of messed-up childhoods.

Whenever I sit down to listen to a person’s story, I will always ask them to talk about their childhood as far back as they can remember. This is because for many people, going back is the only way for them to go forward. Family trauma, generational habits, or inherited genes can be responsible for the situation a person can find themselves in. If you go back far enough, there will always be a strategic moment in a person’s past or family history that opened the door that set off a chain reaction of behavioral traits or destructive patterns in a family line. I call it a seed, and it’s a seed of destruction planted by Satan which is responsible for mapping out a dysfunctional future of a family or generation without them even knowing it.

You will often find a pattern of behavior in a family’s history that began way before the person you are ministering to was ever born. Certainly not all, but many of those who have received deliverance ministry have come from a family line where dysfunction has been at the core. I find it so interesting that very few people are aware of this type of strategy that Satan uses to manipulate and destroy people. It’s not new to our generation; Satan has used this form of warfare on mankind from the beginning, and he has watched his handiwork play out throughout the history of the world.

We know that Satan is the great deceiver, but he is also the original manipulator! To manipulate is to cause a person to change the way they think in order to fit into a narrative that is against their own personal belief system, and it always has a detrimental effect on the person. Satan is the biggest manipulator on planet Earth, and it all started in the garden.

When we look in the book of Genesis, we can see that the first thing Satan did in the form of the serpent was to use deception and manipulation to trick Eve. He initially deceived her into thinking he was a serpent—why didn’t he come as himself? Eve probably didn’t realize she was talking to Satan, and had she realized it was the deceiver himself, there may never have been a conversation. Satan hid his true identity so that Eve would listen to what he had to say. He was also able to deceive and manipulate Eve into thinking God said something other than what He did say (wait for the manipulation!), in order to benefit his own wicked scheme. He twisted the truth of what God said in such a way that it sounded plausible to Eve—it actually sounded like God’s voice. Let me just add this here—if you say you know God yet fail to recognize His voice, you will always be in danger of being deceived by the enemy!

The dictionary definition of manipulate/manipulation is “control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly or unscrupulously; to exploit, control, influence, maneuver, engineer, steer, direct; to alter or present (data) to mislead to falsify, rig, distort, change.”

Satan did all the above and more! Every descriptive word for the definition of manipulate describes a personality trait that he has. In today’s terminology, we may call it gaslighting, which means manipulating a person so that they question their own judgment or believe a lie they have continually been convinced is the truth. More significantly, Satan sowed a negative seed into Eve’s mind about her heavenly Father, the Creator. It wasn’t a good seed! He distorted the initial command God gave Adam to not eat from the tree of life, knowing that this would exploit, control, and influence Eve. The seed was sown at the commencement of his wicked plan to sever God’s relationship with man. It started with a seed of destruction! A half-truth, a manipulation, a deception, yet a seed that would produce after its kind for generations to come. The seed was sown into the mind of Eve, and eventually Adam, but more crucially into both their hearts! The seed sown was “Did God say?” and the seed it produced was trust in oneself and pride in the heart (skepticism, suspicion, doubt, distrust concerning God). It was not just sown into the hearts of Adam and Eve but their family line and in the heart of the whole of creation from that moment until now.

When you look at a seed in the natural, let’s say a flower seed, it is generally very small, but you know given the right environment and through the course of time, as you water it, something will eventually happen. The outer shell will crack and the life that is on the inside of the seed will start to expand and grow; it will stretch out and embed itself into the surroundings it is planted in. When a seed is sown, good or bad, it always produces a multiplied amount of what it contained; it has the ability to produce and increase itself on an exponential level.

Let’s go back to the dictionary and look at the definition for the word destruction: “the action or process of causing so much damage to something that it no longer exists or cannot be repaired.”

I believe from the beginning of time Satan’s number-one plan was to destroy and eradicate mankind from planet earth. He was incensed that God had made another creation greater than him and was probably jealous of Adam and Eve’s status and the relationship that they had with God. He didn’t quite manage to eradicate man, but he ended up destroying man’s relationship with his Creator, which was far worse than death itself! Sowing seeds of destruction into the lives of God’s creation to distort, alter, and change what God originally intended for man was a strategic plan of the enemy, the consequences of which have continued to this present day! That initial seed that had Eve questioning God’s intention toward her is still operating in the heart of man. Many people are doubtful that a God who loves them unconditionally could even exist, let alone that He would have a plan or a purpose for them. This is all from a seed sown concerning God’s motive by questioning, “Did God say?”

I discovered something recently which gave me that “aha” moment. Before I go into detail and explain, let’s just establish a couple of facts—Satan cannot create anything. The only thing he can do is distort, pervert, and try to destroy what God has created. When God created man, He created him in His image and then out of him He created her! Male and female, the only two genders that are possible biologically and scientifically. The way He created them was from the earth, first with Adam and then Eve from Adam’s rib, so both came from the substance of the earth, and both were made in His image.

God is the greatest scientist to ever exist. We may think of incredible scientists in our history books, but they don’t even compare to the knowledge and know-how that God has. The only reason we marvel at scientists today is because God chose to allow them to partake of His knowledge. Everything we are and have as humans comes from God. We are the image of Him. When God said to Jesus and the Holy Spirit in the beginning, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26 NKJV), He wasn’t only referring to physical appearance! God chose to pour everything He was and is into Adam and Eve. All His knowledge, all His know-how, all His love, all His ability, all His breath!