Healing the Family Tree

Why I minister in Healing the Family Tree

Ps Maurice Chapman

 Our God is a God of love. We have the right, bought by Jesus Christ and given freely to me, to bring to Him in prayer anyone, living or dead, any situation or any circumstance that I so choose, petitioning our heavenly Father God in Jesus Christ’s name. 

 My faith assures me, and my experience convinces me that His healing can be effective beyond “all that I can ask or desire”. I do not and cannot understand how this happens but this in no way alters the fact that it does happen. Our Christian ministry does not rest upon interpretation of what happens, but upon the evident healing results, the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

 In the past I have felt that we could not pray for the dead since judgement came immediately after death. Hebrews 9.27 says ‘ Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgement, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and He will appear a second time…’ These words do not specify when judgement will occur- it could be taken as happening parallel to the second coming of Christ.

 The Old Testament prohibits consulting the dead and being led by them as in spiritualism (Deut. 18:11) but does not prohibit praying for the dead.

The Old Testament is largely as silent on this question as on the first thirty years of Jesus’ life or how his earthly parents Joseph and Mary were laid to rest and mourned. The apostle John noted that there still are many parts of Jesus’ life that are not recorded (John 21:25), but this does not mean that we have license to add, subtract and divide the Word of God to suit our means, intents and purposes.

 Our loving Father in heaven wants to save us so much that He sent His only beloved Son to die for us in propitiation of our sins and He tells us that not even death can separate us from His love(Rom. 8:38,39). Even if we turn our back on Him, His love and mercy endure forever (1 Cor:13). 

We can help one another because through baptism in the Holy Spirit and full immersion, we are all members of Christ’s body. Our baptism is so powerful, that it wipes away distinctions between Jew and Greek, male and female, servant and master until we are all equal before Christ. Baptism also empowers us to continue in the Great Commission. The early Christians realized that this unity lasted beyond death and bound the living and the dead into the ‘communion of saints’. Since both the living and the dead are members of Christ’s body (1 Cor. 15:29), we can ask Christ to help the dead to receive His love and forgiveness as He offers it to us through Holy Communion. Through God’s grace we bring our bloodline (which of course includes our ancestral bloodline) into a covenantal relationship with the blood of Jesus Christ and receive cleansing and healing of our DNA and deliverance from generational curses. Thank you, Lord Jesus for Your precious Blood.

Precisely how Jesus touches the dead we bring to Him is a mystery we shall understand only when we are with Him in heaven. We know that as we pray for the living and the dead to Jesus Christ and surrender our lives and to living out His Will, living people are healed. There is a choice between being like the Pharisees who doubted until they could explain everything logically, or walking in faith as the blind man who, although he did not fully understand, nevertheless confessed ” One thing I do know; I was blind but know I see” (John 9:25). 

There is a long Christian tradition of praying for the dead. The importance of loving and forgiving the dead through prayer was taught by many of the early saints such as Tertullian, Origen, Ephraem, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory the Great and Martin Luther., and this is where it became very catholic. But there are plenty of first century church precedents. The translations of the Bible which follows the Hebrew rather than the Greek old Testament (Septuagint) do not always contain the following passage from 2 Maccabeus. 12:42-46. about how he (Judas Maccabeus) made atonement for the dead that they might be freed from their sins. The early church of St. Paul, however, was a Greek-speaking church, which believed that the Septuagint, with this passage, was the word of God. St. Paul’s Corinthian church followed a mysterious practice of using prayers of Baptism to help the dead (1 Cor. 15:29) which Paul does not condemn as heresy, even in this letter in which he is prepared to condemn so many things. He mentions almost casually, and thus gives tacit approval to the Corinthian church’s practice of drawing the dead into the light of Christ through prayer. St. Paul (or the author of 2 Tim. 1:1) even prays for the dead Onesiphorus to find mercy.

Finally, one of the most obvious indications that praying for the dead is acceptable comes from Daniel, who asked for God’s forgiveness for present sin and for the sin of his forebears:’… I was… praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel…’ (Dan. 9.20). The Lord was so pleased with Daniel’s prayer that He sent Gabriel with an answer of forgiveness for the present and the past sins that had been confessed: ‘Seventy  “sevens” are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness.. (Dan, 9:24).

Today, we have many traditional older established denominations as well as emerging churches which are largely evangelical and charismatic providing recourses for Healing the Family Tree from ancestral ‘disturbances’. 

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