Ezekiel 18:4

_ _ all souls are mine — Therefore I can deal with all, being My own creation, as I please (Jeremiah 18:6). As the Creator of all alike I can have no reason, but the principle of equity, according to men’s works, to make any difference, so as to punish some, and to save others (Genesis 18:25). “The soul that sinneth it shall die.” The curse descending from father to son assumes guilt shared in by the son; there is a natural tendency in the child to follow the sin of his father, and so he shares in the father’s punishment: hence the principles of God’s government, involved in Exodus 20:5 and Jeremiah 15:4, are justified. The sons, therefore (as the Jews here), cannot complain of being unjustly afflicted by God (Lamentations 5:7); for they filled up the guilt of their fathers (Matthew 23:32, Matthew 23:34-36). The same God who “recompenses the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children,” is immediately after set forth as “giving to every man according to his ways” (Jeremiah 32:18, Jeremiah 32:19). In the same law (Exodus 20:5) which “visited the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” (where the explanation is added, “of them that hate me,” that is, the children hating God, as well as their fathers: the former being too likely to follow their parents, sin going down with cumulative force from parent to child), we find (Deuteronomy 24:16), “the fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither the children for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” The inherited guilt of sin in infants (Romans 5:14) is an awful fact, but one met by the atonement of Christ; but it is of adults that he speaks here. Whatever penalties fall on communities for connection with sins of their fathers, individual adults who repent shall escape (2 Kings 23:25, 2 Kings 23:26). This was no new thing, as some misinterpret the passage here; it had been always God’s principle to punish only the guilty, and not also the innocent, for the sins of their fathers. God does not here change the principle of His administration, but is merely about to manifest it so personally to each that the Jews should no longer throw on God and on their fathers the blame which was their own.

_ _ soul that sinneth, it shall die — and it alone (Romans 6:23); not also the innocent.