Christ Redeemed Us From the Curse · A Reading of Galatians 3:13

The verse I am asked about more than any other is Galatians 3:13. The argument, when it is made against the work I do, goes like this: “If Christ has already redeemed us from the curse of the law, then there is no generational curse for a Christian to break. The work is already done. Nothing further is required of the descendant. To talk about generational chains is, at best, redundant — at worst, a denial of the cross.”

I want to take this argument seriously, because it is made by serious Christians who love scripture. I want to answer it with scripture. Then I want to say what I believe — what my grandmother believed, what Derek Prince believes, what Larry Huch believes, what Marilyn Hickey and John Eckhardt and the Christian church across two thousand years has wrestled with — about what the redemption in Galatians 3:13 actually means for the descendant who is reading these words today.

This will be a longer piece. I beg the reader’s patience.

The verse in full

“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, KJV

Paul is writing to a Galatian church that had been seduced by the teaching that gentile believers needed to keep the Mosaic law in order to be saved. His argument, across the whole letter, is that the law cannot save — that righteousness comes through faith in Christ, not through observance — and that Christ, by hanging on the cross (which the law itself called cursed), has absorbed the curse the law pronounced and freed those who trust in him from being subject to it.

This is good news of the most consequential kind. The redemption is real. The redemption is legal. The redemption is finished — tetelestai, Christ said from the cross, it is finished.

I do not deny any of this. My grandmother did not deny it. The four Christian teachers I cite throughout this site — Derek Prince, Larry Huch, Marilyn Hickey, John Eckhardt — none of them deny it. Anyone who would deny it has stepped outside the Christian faith.

The question is not whether the redemption is real. The question is what the redemption does, and how it lands in the actual life of the actual descendant who is sitting at my reading table at fifty years old, having prayed faithfully for thirty of those years, with one chamber of her life still locked shut.

The thing scripture also says

The same Bible that gives us Galatians 3:13 also gives us Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Deuteronomy 5:9, Numbers 14:18, and Lamentations 5:7 — five distinct passages, four different authors, written across centuries, all naming the inheritance of consequence across generations.

“Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.” — Exodus 20:5, KJV

Lamentations 5:7 is the most striking of the five, because it is not a warning given by God in the law. It is a testimony spoken by the descendant himself, generations later, in the rubble of Jerusalem:

“Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.” — Lamentations 5:7, KJV

The descendant, looking at his life, says: I am carrying what I did not put here. I am bearing what my fathers did not bear. The fathers are gone, and I am still paying.

Now: the same canon contains both Exodus 20:5 and Galatians 3:13. The same Bible. Inerrant for the Protestant who believes in inerrancy, authoritative for the Catholic, in either case the same canon. Both verses are there. Neither was deleted by the cross. Lamentations was not removed from the Bible at Pentecost. Exodus 34:7 still appears in every printed King James edition produced in the last four hundred years.

The Christian’s task is not to choose between Galatians 3:13 and Exodus 20:5. The Christian’s task is to understand how they both stand together.

What the four Christian teachers say

Derek Prince, in Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose, addresses this directly. His position — and I am summarizing, not quoting at length — is that the legal curse of the law was nailed to the cross with Christ. That is the de jure situation. But descendants who do not consciously step into that legal redemption can still experience the functional effects of the chain. He uses the analogy of a slave who has been legally freed but has not yet walked out of the master’s house. The freedom is real. Walking out of the house is the descendant’s work.

Larry Huch, in Free Yourself From the Spirit of Generational Curses, frames it slightly differently. The curse, he writes, has no legal claim on the believer — but it has habits. Patterns. Voices in the head. The work of the Christian descendant is to dismantle those habits and patterns in the name of Christ, not because Christ has not done his part but because the habit does not always know that Christ has done his part.

Marilyn Hickey speaks of “appropriating” what Christ has won. The redemption is real. The descendant has to lay hold of it specifically — naming the inherited pattern, refusing it, walking forward in the freedom that was bought.

John Eckhardt frames it in the language of deliverance. The chain has occupied territory. The deliverance is the conscious eviction of what no longer has legal right to be there.

Different vocabularies. Same shape. The redemption is real. The redemption is not automatic. The descendant has work to do — not to earn the redemption, which would deny the cross, but to enter into it consciously and specifically, particularly when generations of inherited pattern have gone unaddressed.

My grandmother’s way of saying this

She would have used none of the theological vocabulary above. She would have said something like this:

“Cristo nos compró la libertad. Pero la cadena todavía sabe el camino a la puerta. Hay que cerrarla por dentro, mijo, con su nombre.”

Christ purchased our freedom. But the chain still knows the way to the door. We have to close it from inside, my boy, in his name.

That sentence, more than any treatise I have read since, captures what I believe to be the truth of the matter. The legal transaction is finished. The cross is complete. And there is also a chamber the descendant has to walk into and, by the authority of the redemption already won, close from the inside — because if she does not, the chain will keep walking through the open door, in habit, in voice, in pattern.

My grandmother believed this. The four Christian teachers above believe this. The Christian church, across most of its traditions, believes this in some version. The disagreement is mostly about how — about the form the closing takes, about the role of formal deliverance prayer, about the place of confession, about whether sealing is one event or a process. The disagreement is not about whether such a closing is required.

Why this matters for the descendant reading right now

If you are a Christian who has come this far in this article, I want to speak to you directly. There is a possibility I am wrong. There is a possibility your tradition reads Galatians 3:13 as exhaustive — as having ended every generational claim the moment Christ said it is finished. You may believe that the right response to your sealed chamber is more prayer, more faith, more waiting. You may, with full integrity, conclude that nothing in this article applies to you and you may close the tab.

I will not argue with you. I will say only: if you have prayed for thirty years and the chamber is still sealed, consider whether the lock might be on the inside.

Consider whether the redemption Christ won — which is real, which is finished, which is yours — might require you to walk through the doorway you have so far been praying outside of. Consider whether what is needed is not more volume but more recognition. Recognition of the chain. Recognition that you did not put it there. Recognition that the Christ who redeemed you from the curse is also the Christ who, by his own authority that lives in you, can walk into the chamber with you and seal it from inside.

That is the work. That is what Lamentations 5:7 cried out for and what Galatians 3:13 made possible. Both verses, the same Christian, the same redemption, the same Christ.

A closing prayer, in my grandmother’s spirit

I am not going to write a deliverance prayer in this article. The tradition I come from prefers the prayer to happen in the room, between the descendant and the Lord, with at most the reader present as witness. But I will close with what my grandmother used to pray, in Spanish, when she had laid the third card and it was time for the woman at the table to go home and begin the work.

“Señor Jesucristo, hijo del Dios viviente, tú compraste la libertad de esta hija con tu sangre. Lo que su bisabuela cargó, lo que su abuela cargó, lo que su madre cargó — ya no es de ella. Por tu nombre, séllale los tres aposentos. Que la cadena no encuentre puerta abierta. Amén.”

Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, you purchased the freedom of this daughter with your blood. What her great-grandmother carried, what her grandmother carried, what her mother carried — is no longer hers. By your name, seal the three chambers. May the chain find no open door. Amen.

She prayed this hundreds of times in her kitchen over forty-five years. I have prayed it in my own way thousands of times since. The doors close. Slowly, in some souls. Quickly, in others. Sometimes the door closes immediately and the descendant lives differently from that day. Sometimes the door closes over the course of years, in tiny acts of refusal, in small sealings that accumulate.

In every case, what closed the door was not my grandmother’s prayer alone, and not the cards, and not me, and not the descendant’s own willpower. It was Christ — the Christ of Galatians 3:13 — finally being walked into by a descendant who had finally seen what was sealed and refused to keep carrying it.

The redemption was always real. The walking into it is the work.

The chain ends here.