Ezekiel corrects a false understanding of God and his justice system that was embraced by the Jewish exiles in Babylon and supported by a catchy, but twisted proverb. The Jewish captives held to the worldview that God would punish the children and the grandchildren for the wickedness of their parents and their grandparents. This false view, which is called transgenerational accountability, was summed up in this erroneous proverb:

        “The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” - Ezekiel 18:2

In this proverb the parents commit the action of eating grapes, but it is the children who experience the bitterness of the grape. The parents commit the action, but the children experience the result. The point was that the Babylonian captives had been punished because of their parents? sins, but the captives themselves were innocent victims. Jeremiah saw the day when people would realize they are responsible for their own fate when he spoke in Jeremiah 31:

“In those days people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ ” - Jeremiah 31:29

The exiles found comfort in their false doctrine of fatalism. Their inability to alter the cosmic events was confirmed by their hopeless situation.

Indeed, Ezekiel and Jeremiah were not ignoring the fact that children tend to behave as their parents. (This truth is presented in Ezekiel 16:44; Exodus 34:6-7; Deut. 5:9) But, a child behaving like their parents is not the same thing as the children being punished for their parent’s behavior. In fact, the children are being punished for behaving like their parents.

A man has the freedom to respond to his world and his God differently than his parents.
Ezekiel gives three illustrations of a children making their own decisions that determine their
own fate in Ezekiel 18:5-18.

The Jewish captives were not innocently suffering for the sins of their parents, but were suffering the results of their own choices and lifestyle. This generation of exiles in Babylon needed to repent of their own sins. This repentance needed to begin with a correction of their own false views of God.

“If you will here stop, and ask yourselves, why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly
intended it.”
– William Law in his book
“A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”
written in 1728
(Read the book here;
details on William Law here.)