This is one of a few different subjects I see tossed around on social media from time to time, and especially among those who are deconstructing/remodeling their beliefs to better match New Creation realities in the Kingdom. As people go on this journey of rediscovery of what it looks like to be a Christian, there are quite sensibly a lot of questions about most of the things we have been taught in the past. As such, it is no surprise that the subject of curses would come up. And I don’t think the problem is that people are asking questions. The freedom to question is imperative. The problem is that some of the conclusions people reach are problematic. I want to break the subject down a little from a perspective of the fact that we are already new creations in Christ, from a position of what Jesus already finished on the cross, and also keeping in mind that we have been given a job to transform and transfigure creation.
The first question is pretty easy to answer. “Are curses real?” Yes. Proverbs 26:2 says “Like a fluttering sparrow or a darting swallow, an undeserved curse does not come to rest.” There are some shades of detail to this that I won’t go into here, but Proverbs is quite clear that curses fly forth and have the potential to land. The Bible also quite clearly states of Jesus Christ in Galatians 3:13 that He became a curse to redeem us from them. Jesus isn’t an idiot, and He didn’t spend his time and energy to take curses upon Himself to set us free from something that doesn’t exist. So it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about a generational curse, a curse thrown at you from witchcraft, or any other sort of curse, they do exist, and part of Jesus’s work on the cross was to set us free from them.
And this brings us to the next question, which is “Can Christians be harmed by them?” The short and extremely incomplete answer is also “yes.” Christians can be harmed by curses. But there is a lot more to the subject than a simple yes/no answer that we really should understand about it.
First, we need to understand free will. Every single human alive has been created in the image of God. We have been given free will, and God does not violate our free will even if we are doing something ill-advised or even flat-out evil. Which means if person A chooses to curse person B, then a curse is released from person A to fly to person B because they chose to by enacting their free will. Now whether that curse will actually land or not is a separate issue, and there are multiple factors that can influence that, including: the belief of person B, prayer for protection over their life, angelic involvement, demonic opposition, contracts and agreements in the spirit (which is often referred to as “open doors”), or anything else that creates access for the demonic to attack or afflict someone. This can even include agreements in an individual’s bloodline that they are not consciously aware of because they were not personally the one who made those agreements. This is a result of the principle of Federal Headship, which is found throughout the Bible, and is both one of the major reasons why generational curses exist, as well as the primary reason they are broken in Christ.
The reason I mention all of this is that when it comes to walking on the path of truth, it can be easy to fall into a ditch on either side. On the one side, we have people believing some version of the idea that curses don’t exist, have never existed, or cannot influence believers because Jesus already took care of it on the cross. On the other side, we have hyperfocus into trying to cleanse one’s generational line all the way back to Adam step-by-step through every generation in order to root it all out.
The latter is both a ton of work, and also wouldn’t fix all of it anyway because if you deal with bloodline issues and don’t deal with all the other stuff in the spirit, things in pre-incarnation, etc. then you did a lot of work and yet probably still didn’t catch it all. With the former, you simply ignore the problem to begin with and act like it’s going to automagically go away if you ignore it—which it largely will not. Now, part of where people get caught with this is that both sets of erroneous beliefs have certain things going for them that will yield a measure of fruit. And that measure of fruit becomes the corroboration someone is looking for to tell themselves that their belief is accurate. The problem is that there are aspects of each belief that are accurate or that produce results, but it is by no means the full picture.
So how does believing that curses don’t exist produce results? Faith. In Ephesians 6:16 it tells us that faith is protective. It is a shield, specifically to extinguish the darts of the evil one thrown at us, which could include curses. So if I don’t believe that curses exist, then some of the curses that are sent my way will automatically get extinguished and will not land because my faith that says they don’t exist revokes their right to influence my life. The problem is that for whatever reasons, this doesn’t always work. And truth be told, I can’t honestly tell you why it works for some curses and not others, but that’s just how it is. It might have something to do with the fact that people who believe curses don’t exist quite often also believe that demons don’t exist, which is categorically inaccurate, and opens them up to another set of problems.
If I believe a sentient entity who is attacking me of its own free will doesn’t exist, it doesn’t suddenly make the attack go away. As philosopher Descartes once said, “I think therefore I am.” The converse of that is not true though. If I don’t think something, it does not automagically blip that something out of existence. So maybe some curses that are thrown by people without much demonic involvement don’t take purchase in that individual‘s life because faith is protective, and when other ones do land its because there is more significant demonic influence behind them that overpowers the shield? I don’t fully understand the mechanism behind why some curses land and others don’t in those scenarios. I just know that because faith is protective, people who believe curses don’t exist will see a measure of results from that belief, and those results will serve to them as confirmation their belief is accurate (it isn’t). What they will not see is freedom from any of the other curses that are affecting them that are not influenced by that belief.
On the other side of things, we have people who are trying to manually deal with every curse step-by-step throughout their generational line and anywhere else they find them. To a certain extent, this will also yield fruit because they are actively breaking curses that do exist. The problem with this belief is the exact opposite of those who let curses run amok in their lives because they think they’re not real. In this case, this generational cleansing is a treadmill that is almost impossible to know when to climb off of. It can also generate a certain measure of legalistic thinking that gets us more focused on following or breaking cosmic laws and as a result it prevents us from fully walking in what Jesus already accomplished.
So where should we land in all of this??
Obviously, I’m going to recommend that we land somewhere in the middle. We need to recognize that curses are real. We need to not be naïve, and understand that humans who actively partner with the enemy through witchcraft, voodoo, sorcery, necromancy, and the like can and do send curses on people, and Christians are not exempted as targets. If anything, Christians are primary targets because they are Christians. We need to understand our identity in Christ and the authority that comes with it and break any and all curses—on us, our bloodlines, other people, and anywhere else we encounter them. And we need to also not get so bogged down with all of it that we spend a decade going through our ancestry with a fine toothed comb to pray through anything and everything that maybe could somehow possibly potentially be set against us. And how do we do that? It’s actually such a simple answer that it sounds too obvious to be the truth—we just need to ask the Holy Spirit. It is His job to lead and guide us into all truth and to counsel and guide us, so it is His job to help us walk the middle path in all of this.
We access things in the Kingdom through belief. But it is possible for someone to not even know about curses and yet still be affected by them. And then, if we pray to break those curses, and the curses get broken at that time, the oppression leaves. We could argue that it’s a problem of belief system, but if somebody’s belief system doesn’t include it to begin with and yet they are still being afflicted by it, then there is obviously more to it than simply belief, and there is something we have to do in the moment to enforce what Jesus did on the cross. And when we do enforce it, what Jesus did shines through. This isn’t because we are trying to “do more” than what Jesus finished, or even necessarily because we “don’t believe”. It’s a matter of enforcement. If things do not yet fully look like “on earth as it is in heaven” and if as Romans 8 speaks of, we the sons and daughters of God have not fully removed the decay from the cosmos yet, it isn’t a lack on Jesus’s part of failing to do something on the cross. It is simply that some things require enforcement, and we are God’s enforcement team in the earth.
I’m going to use an adjacent example to drive this point home, and possibly make it a little clearer to the reader using something more tangible than curses The Bible is quite clear that Jesus took care of all sickness, infirmity, and disease of every kind on the cross. And yet in the New Testament there still exists a divine empowerment from the Holy Spirit called “gifts of healing”. On a very real level, if what Jesus did on the cross was sufficient to manifest all healing for everyone without us ever doing anything to enforce it, then a gift of healing would be entirely unnecessary. And theologically, I actually agree that it should be unnecessary. But all of the injured people who check in at my hospital still need help in the moment, so what I think should be theologically accurate doesn’t really matter at that point.
The error of the “Finished Works” teaching of the 2010s is that it explains that the solution to healing (and every other problem) is simply for people to believe harder and believe more, and if they just more fully and completely believe the truth, then it will manifest for them. Which means any problem they have in their life is directly due to a failure on their part to believe what Jesus did, and it makes “belief” the new works. What it does not take into account is how fragmentation works and how one’s core believing something is not always the barrier or the solution (I write on this extensively on this blog and in my book Broken To Whole). It also does not account for the overlap in free will from one person to another and how that overlap affects us. If person A chooses of their free will to injure person B, then person B is most likely going to get an injury. Now because of what Jesus did on the cross, we can command healing and watch it get healed right in front of our eyes. But the injury will probably still occur because somebody enacted their free will upon the situation. Curses are the same. If someone enacts their free will to curse someone, that person will receive a curse (with the exception of mitigating factors as mentioned before). However, it can quickly and easily be broken because of what Jesus did on the cross.
We don’t need to spend time with endless focus on curse-breaking because we can believe what Jesus did is sufficient and walk in freedom by faith. And we can also take authority over curses in our lives as they get revealed to us and enforce the work of Jesus on the cross. Likewise we can live in divine health as a general lifestyle, and yet if an injury comes or an accident happens, we can command it to be healed and walk in wholeness and life once more.
There is much more I could go into detail about regarding fragmentation of the soul and how it influences free will, but this article would end up becoming so long it would be what I plan to someday write on the subject—another book teaching on all of this so we can walk in the freedom Jesus already worked out for us on the cross. Regardless of where you find yourself on this journey we call Christian Life, I encourage you to seek the Holy Spirit to help you walk the middle road where you can live from a place of rest, not needing to re-accomplish what Christ already did, and also not being so rigid in your thinking that when it comes time to enforce what He did, you are ready for the task. Be well and be blessed!
