Clough Genesis Lesson 97

Concept of inheritance – Genesis 49:1-7

In the last part of the Scripture reading, in case you wonder what kind of a compliment that was to Judah, that his eyes were dull with wine and his teeth white with milk, that is an idiom for wealth, and what the blessing is there is a blessing that prophesies wealth for that particular tribe.

Paul says that “the Word of God is sufficient for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God might be mature, having been thoroughly furnished unto every good work.” And dying is one of those good works for which the Word of God prepares us. Genesis 48-50, which is the passage we’ve been studying, is the passage that shows the principles of dying. These are principles in our society that are overlooked, simply because many Americans are not spiritually prepared and those who are still have no perception of what death is all about.

As we go through this passage on death and dying there’s a question you ought to be asking yourself, and that is, can you honestly say today that “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” If you are a Christian and all is right between you and the Lord you ought to be able to say that. It doesn’t mean that you enjoy death but it does mean there should not be a morbid fear of death. If you cannot say that to yourself, that “though I walk through the valley of the shadow, I will fear no evil,” if that isn’t real to you personally, then that may be a warning light that all is not well between you and the Lord. So as we go through these principles of dying and how to prepare for death and what ought to be done in a family where there’s a dying member, if you happen to be in such a family, think about the personal application, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Is that or is that not true for me.

We looked at one of the principles of dying and we saw that in Genesis 48:1; as Jacob calls for Joseph. We said that this first principle of dying is the dying have a right to know they’re dying; very simple. The dying have a right to know they’re dying! It sounds very simple but if you watch a modern hospital at work or if you watch some families at work you’ll discover quickly that that principle, though very simple, is not followed. It’s violated in a thousand different ways. In verse 1-2 where it says, “And it came to pass after these things, that one told Joseph, Behold, thy father is sick,” the word “sick” means in this case totally without strength. All the probability is that he’s going to die. And you’ll notice that immediately, verse 2 Joseph comes in, there’s no embarrassment, there’s no nervousness about the situation, there’s been no family deception, nobody is hiding something from the old dying man, nobody is pretending he’s going to get better when in fact he isn’t. There’s no systematic lying and therefore you observe in verse 1 and 2 there’s good communication; the communication can be free because there’s no violated consciences in the situation.

You’ll notice, of course we don’t know who the doctors were or what the medical profession was back in his day but we notice that there is no dictatorship by them, there’s no coercion that says you are my patient and I refuse to tell this person that they’re going to die because of the psychological implications and so on. As a result of Jacob and his family following this biblical principle of death and dying, he is able to pray, knowing he’s going to die, he’s able to raise prayer petitions to God and take care of the final events in his life; he is able to review the Word of God in context with the fact of his imminent death; he’s able to make application both to him and to his survivors. All that’s not possible if we’re going to indulge in this sophisticated subterfuge that goes on around people who are dying.

Last Sunday we covered a second principle: not only do the death and dying have a right to know that they’re dying but the dying also have a right to be coherent as long as possible. That means not drugging them into a stupor prematurely. Now oftentimes pain requires the administration of pain killing drugs but just remember, every pain killing drug, because it is a pain killing drug necessarily debilitates the nervous system; necessarily makes it inoperative and therefore necessarily separates my mind from its ability to use my body because how does my human spirit use the body; it only uses it through contact with the central nervous system and if I’ve essentially rendered the central nervous system inoperative then I’ve essentially excluded my human spirit from the use of my own body. So that’s a trade off and anytime you administer anesthetic to a dying person you’ve to think of the tradeoff that’s being made here. How far do you go to deal with the pain, which may be very real and very awful, how far do I go dealing with the pain problem versus how do I far excluding them from dealing with spiritual problems. And it’s a balance that’s very delicate.

We gave as an illustration last week the scene from the cross and we showed you one verse in that dying scene of Christ where He’s offered medication and He refuses it, and then He takes care of certain things, one of which we’ll see today, and then after He takes care of everything He needs to take care of for the survivors of his family, then He says “I thirst.” Then they give Him the medicine and then He says I take it, and He does. So Jesus Christ in His own death on the cross gives us a model of this second principle; the dying have a right to be coherent as long as they possibly can. The worst enemy the Christian faces at death is not pain; now pain is an enemy and it’s an awful one. The reason why pain bothers us is that we originally weren’t made to experience pain. After all, prior to the fall Adam and Eve had no pain in their bodies; Romans 8 tells us that; Romans 8 tells us that pain is abnormal, it’s foreign to us, we don’t like pain, but pain is here since the curse so it must be endured.

But there’s something worse than pain for a dying person, far worse than pain. What’s worse the pain is the sense of knowing there are unfulfilled commands and obligations of God; that’s worse than pain because that’s the pain of the conscience that’s going to be taken through death. The pain is going to be over when the body is eliminated. And so this is why the second principle of death and dying is so important that the dying have a right to be coherent as long as they can to take care of these kinds of problems that they face.

Now we noticed a third principle last time and we just started that one and today we’re to expand that one; in fact next week we’re going to still be on expanding this one. The third principle of death and dying, besides number one, they have a right to know; besides number two, that they have a right to be coherent as long as possible, the third one is that the dying have a right to rule their posterity. They have a right to rule their posterity; that means they have a right to subdue the earth, even in their dying moments, through their children and their grandchildren by allocating resources and property and so on, which we’ll notice in this passage.

Remember in Genesis 48:13-20, Jacob allocates his inheritance among his sons and grandsons. There’s a place in there where Jacob, instead of giving his property to Joseph, who was his son, he bypasses Joseph and gives it to two of his grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim. This particular technique of bypassing the immediate son and going on to give the inheritance to the grandson is followed several places in the Scripture. I’m not sure always why this happens, I just observe that this is something that recurs in Scripture. This is also the solution to the problem we raised a year ago when we were going through the allocation of Noah’s inheritance to his sons and you remember that he cursed one of his sons; he cursed Ham, the third son. But when he went to curse Ham he didn’t curse Ham directly, he cursed Ham’s son. So Noah conveyed cursing on his own son through cursing his grandson. And here blessing, the opposite of cursing, is conveyed in a similar way, it’s conveyed to Joseph but by means of blessing his grandchildren. So we have this dealing with posterity at the point of death.

Then the passage which was just read to you, particularly in verse 1-2, here the dying man gathers the rest of his family around him. “And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days. [2] Gather yourselves together, and hear, ye sons of Jacob; and hearken unto Israel your father.” Obviously the old man could not have done this had he been drugged into a stupor at this point in his life. Obviously he couldn’t have done this had he not known he was dying. So the two principles were working in these verses. And he calls them together and he explains that I am going to tell you what will “befall you in the latter days.” Be careful here, the expression “in the last days” is a technical one. It does not mean in the last days of those son’s lives. It means in the last days of history.

Genesis 49 is one of the most prophetically large passages in all the book of Genesis. What we have here is a panorama of history from the time of Jacob, approximately 1600 or 1800 depending on which chronology you follow, all the way down, beyond our day, future to 1979. That’s how large the panorama is in this chapter. When you see the expression “in the last days” you and I have not yet seen those “last days” yet; they are future to our time. So this is a prophecy that goes centuries through time and as you can see from what was read to you. [3, “Reuben, thou art my firstborn, my might, and the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power: [4] Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou went up to thy father’s bed; then defiled thou it: he went up to my couch. [5] Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. [6] O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they digged down a wall [hamstrung oxen]. [7]: Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.”].

You notice, you take a passage like verse 5, verse 6, verse 7, Simeon and Levi are two good examples, as the old man blesses these sons, he says in verse 7 that “I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.” Now that’s a prophecy of the destiny of not just the sons but it’s a prophecy of their progeny. Here’s Jacob; here’s Simeon and here’s Levi. Jacob prophesies about those two sons but in so doing he’s really prophesying about their progeny, the posterity. And here we have to remember something. It’s a vital rule to interpret and understand God’s Word, and it’s a rule that if you don’t understand you will not grasp and appreciate some of the things that are yours in Jesus Christ.

Now here’s the principle: the principle is that there’s such a thing in the Bible as corporate personality. You and I have grown up in a generation, we talk about I’ve got to find myself, I’ve got to find out who I really am, and we visualize ourselves as Adam’s; we are an individual distinct person, we are individual distinct people, we may cluster in a group but basically we’re like marbles, we have an independent existence all our own. That’s somewhat true, but our generation is wrong here. This is where a dominating idea in the culture has to be by the Christians adjusted and regurgitated here differently.

The Bible argues that we are not individuals, that we are in a sense united and here’s how. As we said last week, today we could say everyone in this auditorium is Adam; I didn’t say everyone in this auditorium is represented by Adam; I said everyone in this auditorium is Adam. We are Adam because this flesh is his flesh, this genetic material is his genetic material. And so the Bible speaks of us in Adam. The Bible also speaks, for those here this morning who have trusted in Jesus Christ, the Bible speaks of those of us as “in Christ,” in fact there’s a passage we’re coming to tonight in the doctrine of spiritual gifts that says oJ Cristo~ (ho Christos) and it doesn’t talk about Jesus, it’s talking about the entity collective together of Christians and says that is Christ. Well, why is that Christ? Because every person who has Christ, every person who has trusted in Him is part of Him in some way, this corporate way, and the Bible recognizes this.

Now in this case we have Jacob and you’ll notice in verse 7, it says “I will divide them in Jacob,” what that means is that Jacob looks down the corridors of time, century upon century upon century and he says what I’m saying is I see myself; when I see you children and your children’s children and their children’s children’s children, and I look down to almost an endless hallway seeing one family after another through time, that’s me, that is Jacob. And so all the progeny of Jacob are collectively called Jacob; they’re part of Jacob. And so this is why the father, at the point of death, has a right to talk about himself; in talking about his children he talks about himself. And this is why he can say to the brothers, though they were not scattered, verse 7 did not come true in the lifetime of those two brothers, Simeon and Levi. Verse 7 came true centuries later when the tribes of Levi and the tribe of Simeon branched out and were scattered.

So we have at this dying scene Jacob ruling his posterity.

Today we’re going to stop in our forward motion in the text a moment and consider a major biblical theme and I hope this theme will not only make it helpful for you to understand the Old Testament here in this passage but I think this theme I’m about to discuss will help you consider your own family situation. It will also, for sure, help you understand the New Testament. And here’s the idea; it’s an idea that is basic to salvation itself—inheritance, the concept of inheritance. We’re going to spend considerable time giving you the concept of inheritance as the Bible develops it because the concept of inheritance is very much hated in our own time. It’s a hateful, despicable concept in the minds of many who control our present culture. It has been made the butt of ridicule and has been made an object of hate for the past, at least 300 years, going back to the French Revolution in 1789. It is a concept that is of great antagonism at very deep levels. You might not think so; I hope in the next few minutes together, when I finish, you’ll see that this is a war between Christ and the antichrist and it’s appearing in our generation and tragically uniformed naïve Christians have voted for programs that undermine this very biblical concept of inheritance.

First let’s define inheritance and get a feel for it ourselves. How could we pull it together and define inheritance in a broad way, broad way enough so that it could encompass everything in the Scripture. I think the easiest way to define inheritance would be to say it’s the contribution of the past to me in the present. It’s the contribution of the past to me in the present; that is inheritance. Let’s talk a little bit about kinds of things where you’re sitting, right now, that you have inherited. This is to cut down the Greek idea that you are an Adam by yourself, that you are utterly unrelated to the past. Nonsense!

The first thing we all have here this morning by way of our inheritance is physical life. We inherited this from our father Adam; at the point of creation he gave us his life and you inherit and I inherit it through him. Humanity, the genetic structure of humanity that is in your cells is Adam’s. So the first major thing you all have is life.

A second thing that we all have by way of inheritance is death. The concept of death and dying and decay, there’s not a person sitting here this morning that doesn’t have this strange insidious power at work in your body and it’s been at work in your body ever since you were born, the power that fights life, that destroys it, it makes you age and finally makes you go into a period when it just aches and pains and finally to death. What is that force that’s at work? Death, and that is an inheritance. We inherited that from our father and our mother at the time they were cursed, and God said I put death upon you because in the day that you defy Me then the day I will defy you and you will die. So number two, we all inherit death.

A third thing we all inherit is the natural climate around us, our environment, with all its climatic extremes, from hurricanes to tornadoes to earthquakes, the natural environment of the postdiluvian world is an inheritance that comes from the Noahic Covenant. It is a point in time when God said the physical environment of the human race will be thus and such, because before the flood this was not true, there were not the climatic extremes that we now experience from pole to equator. So we have the third great thing we inherit is nature around us.

A fourth thing that we inherit you hold in your hand right now, and it’s an inheritance from Jacob; it’s the Bible. He didn’t write that, I didn’t write and our generation didn’t write that, we inherited the Bible, it was given to us by those who went before, and this is Jacob’s gift to us. Along with the Bible we could Jesus Christ Himself is an inheritance; wasn’t He given to us by Jacob, and later on in this chapter you’ll see, it was read this morning, in verse 10, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” Who’s that? Who’s Shiloh? The Lord Jesus Christ, and so Jesus Christ and the Bible are the fourth thing that we inherit and we inherit them through Jacob.

A fifth thing, those of you who have trusted in Christ have inherited and you didn’t generate yourself, it was given to you, is eternal life and you inherited that through Jesus Christ. And like all inheritances you didn’t get it until He died. If your parents have an inheritance laid up for you, generally speaking, you don’t get it until they die. Jesus Christ had eternal life but we didn’t get it until He died. So we inherit eternal life. But let’s go further.

A sixth thing we all inherit is the form of our physical bodies; by Psalm 139 that’s an inheritance from our mother and father; some may know their mother and father, some may not know. Tragically if you don’t know your own mother and father and there are some that don’t, but most of us do know our mother and our father and therefore we can’t, when we say I wish I were taller, I wish I were shorter, I wish I didn’t have a weight problem, I wish I was better looking or something else, remember that you are looking at an inheritance that was given to you by your parents and when you dishonor yourself and your inheritance you are dishonoring your parents. They gave you that for good or for evil.

A seventh thing that you inherit is wealth; I include that as only one of nine because everyone thinks of wealth when they talk about inheritance but that’s a very small part of what inheritance is scripturally. I do inherit wealth, maybe it’s not much but most of us can say that at least we inherit something, that is before inheritance taxes.

An eight thing, and most important that you inherit from you parents is skills, wisdom and attitude. Now no matter what the situation, we can’t help but inherit certain attitudes and dispositions and views of life. You are largely what you are because of your mother and your father. The way they talked to you or didn’t talk to you, the ideas they had that they shared with you or maybe didn’t share with you, but you are largely molded by your father and your mother and that by God’s design, the deep attitudes and wisdom. Many parents who are poor, who can’t afford to give much to their children have given very much to their children and never noticed it; they gave their children wisdom, they gave their children skill, and children have gone out from poor homes made millions because their parents didn’t give them the millions, the parents gave them the skills that made the millions. So that is part of our inheritance.

We could add more to these but I want to conclude with a ninth thing that we inherit, and that is our understanding of the Word of God is largely an inheritance. When I get up in this pulpit I don’t teach you new ideas that I just dreamed up. Very rarely do I introduce a new idea, very rarely! To dramatize that this is why in the bulletin we have that recitation section that deals with the great creeds of the historic faith; I’m doing that just to educate us all to appreciate what saints in the past have done. I know some of you have spoken to me in the foyer and said when you read a section, you say gosh, they believed that too, as though it’s a real big surprise that somebody else besides us in the 20^th century believed those kind of things. Well of course, didn’t they have the Holy Spirit, didn’t they have a personal relationship with Christ, didn’t they have the same Bible? Incidentally, while we’re talking about the Bible, one last remark about that, what is the name of the two sections of the Bible that tell you it’s an inheritance? The Old and New Testament; what’s the word “testament?” It’s a testament that controls the inheritance, so even the very name of the Bible shows you its inherent nature.

Now let’s turn to the New Testament and see a principle of inheritance; 2 Corinthians 12:14. We have to learn some common sense things before we can draw great spiritual truths, like in the New Testament we know about Christ as the lamb of God but if we don’t know anything about real literal lambs, then how are we going to appreciate what it means to call Christ the lamb of God. Well, if inheritance is used in the Bible we have to first get informed as to what real inheritance was like because we see so little of it in our generation. 2 Corinthians 12:14, the last part of the verse; this is not a very nice text, kind of hard for the modern person. It says, “… For the children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children.” Now there is the normal view of life. Now that’s not to say there won’t come those times when the children, to honor their parents, have to take care of them in old age. But this is to say that the main ideal is for the parents to create the wealth that forms the base of their children’s life. “The children ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children.” And that puts a burden on all parents to be productive so in their last days they won’t have to live off of their children. They won’t have to deplete vital family resources. So let this verse be a little verse of wisdom as a stimulant that wise parents ought to make provisions for the next generation.

Now that is the idea of inheritance, but let’s go further. Let’s go to a new subtopic here. Why is this idea of inheritance so hated in our day? Here’s the eye-opener; it is under a systematic attack in ever area and the question is, what is the attack and why does it come about. Inheritance, passing on from one generation to another generation, to another generation, always is stopped by revolutionists. The radical revolutionary always wants to start history all over again with a clean slate; he doesn’t want to inherit the past, he wants to disinherit the past and so, for example, the first revolution in history was led by Nimrod in Genesis 11, and he had inherited things from his great grandfather, Noah, and Noah had told him, Nimrod, the Lord thy God says that there are certain moral rules that you must follow, there is only one way of salvation, etc. etc. etc. He gave Nimrod an inheritance; an inheritance at least composed of the canon of Scripture that had developed to that point in time. What did Nimrod do? He led his generation in the first great armed revolution of history; throwing their fist in God’s face what did they do? They said we will devise a tower that will reach to heaven, and extra biblical tradition tells us that when they built the tower they pitched it on the outside with the same kind of pitch that grandfather Noah had pitched his ark. Do you know that that is? If the pitch on the ark of Noah represents Christ then the pitch on the tower of Babel represents the antichrist. This is the spirit of the antichrist, the revolutionary spirit that defies the past, that says let God send His flood again and we’ll get in the tower and laugh in His face. That’s the spirit of the tower of Babel. And so therefore Nimrod, the first revolutionary of history wanted a total break with the past; in other words, translated, he wanted to disinherit his generation.

We come forward in time to the communists, 1917, Russia, and what did they want to do? They wanted to disinherit the Russians from the Czarist past; everything that was associated with the Czar was automatically wrong and therefore they wanted to start history over with a clean slate, erase the past they said, it’s all corrupt; we can start a brave new world by human works alone and we will, and this is our revolution and we destroy, including the Czar and his family, we destroy the past, and everybody cheered. And then we noticed something; we noticed in our headline in our paper that here two generations after 1917 the Russian people still can’t feed themselves. With the largest land area on earth, with some of the richest farmland in the world, with a technology that can bring planetary probes into existence, here is a group of people that still can’t raise enough grain to feed themselves. And yet when you go back in history three centuries, where did Europe, the Germans, the Frenchmen, the Austrians, the Czechs, where did they get their food from? They got it from the Ukraine. At one time the Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe; now today in 1979 the Russians can’t even grow enough for themselves. What happened? They tried to disinherit themselves and they went in with boxcar after boxcar after boxcar and they herded those farmer families in the Ukraine, they’re called kulaks and they put them in boxcars by the millions and they sent them to Siberia and those that weren’t shot died frozen to death on railroad boxcars. A brilliant solution, wasn’t it, because what died with the kulaks? Wisdom on how to farm the land and so now two generations after the vaunted communists can’t even grow grain, the most elementary crop on the face of the earth and they can’t grow it. Why? They lost their wisdom, they tried to start history with a clean slate and as a result, by disinheriting themselves they destroyed their own wisdom and skills. And that’s what happens to every generation that tries to erase its past.

Which brings us to what you’ve been seeing on television, commercial after commercial, funded with your tax money on international year of the child, ah, bless all the children of the world and you have these sweet Coca-cola type advertisements. Now that may strike pity or joy into the heart of those of us who do care for children, and that’s what it’s intended to do, except, if you listen carefully you’ll detect there’s a little achromatic note in these advertisements. These advertisements contain a seed of the antichrist. They’re not interested in the children per se, what they’re interested in in the international year of the child is to rip the child away from its family and to make him an Adam, an autonomous individual by himself. And so we find out in the international year of the child, legislation that would have the child, get this, want to choose which home he will live in and let that be made a legal right in the United States.

Now where did this come from? Where does this child worshiping come from? And always, by the way, it’s presented in the most pious of phrases, we always have some very eminent person, some celebrity that’s well respected, Art Linkletter or somebody like that, always will be the one that does this, and what they always seem to omit is that 98% of the homes basically are functioning all right, but they will take the 2% and they’ll show you these gory pictures of child molestation, child beating and look, the failure of the home, we’ve got to do something because following that age old slogan, if we don’t do something, who else will do it. They, therefore, propose radical new programs, the family is a dying institution and therefore we in our day, a brave new age, we’ve got to create something new; we’ve got to save the dear little children from their awful, brutal parents. You see, this kind of pitch and it’s all a very clever pitch and you’ll see more of it as the year goes on because this is part of the scheme for 1979. In 1980 it’ll be another thing but at least in 1979 that’s the theme.

Let’s turn to an Old Testament passage and find out, why is this hatred for inheritance. Turn to Exodus 10, right in the middle of the Ten Commandments, of all places, let me show you why all these different scattered anti-Christian themes basically have a unity in them. In Exodus 20:12 we have the fifth commandment of the ten; it is to “Honor thy father and thy mother.” What does it mean to honor thy father and thy mother? It means many things but one of the things it means is to receive gladly the inheritance they give you, and to despise the inheritance of your mother and your father is to despise your mother and your father, and it’s to do dishonor to them. And the fifth commandment says you will honor your parents, meaning you will honor what they give you; you will care for what they give you, and what they give you is your inheritance; care for it and thereby you will honor your parents.

But this is part and parcel of a very basic concept in the Scriptures. If you look up two verses, in Exodus 20:10, you’ll notice that there, and it’s in the command on the Sabbath day, it’s talking about “thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates,” it summarizes children under the general concept of property. Now try this idea on for size; if you want something really will antagonize your generation, really rip people up tell them that children are the property of the parents. That’s the biblical idea and if it strikes you as offensive it’s because you have a very wrong idea of property. Think of the word, the letter, that property begins with; “P”, property and think then of the other word that begins with “P”, protection. That’s the biblical concept of property, if something isn’t owned by something it is not protected by anyone. Property means protection and in the Bible the children are protected by their parents because they are the property of their parents. You say oh, you’re reading something in there.

All right, the next chapter, Exodus 21:7, try that one on for size. Doesn’t that really send you as a 20^th century person? Here is a father, “[And if a man] sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.” Obviously indicating the possibility the old man could sell his daughter. This went on in the ancient world. How could this go on in Israel, God’s kingdom? Because in Israel the daughter was the property of the father and he could sell her if he so wished. Now she was protected, and this is an example of… in verse 8-9 you’ll see some protections on the girl, she wasn’t just a victim, passive, but how else can you explain the fact that the father could sell his daughter. How do you explain that if you don’t agree that the daughter was the father’s property? You don’t sell what isn’t your own. So the concept of selling the children proves that, in the Bible anyway, children are considered to be property. We forget, as Americans, that one of the slogans of our Revolutionary War was liberty and property, because our forefathers, unlike us, understood that you can’t have liberty or you can’t have rights unless you have property.

Let’s see how children are property of parents and how this works out in practice by turning to Deuteronomy 21; we have to go through some of these Old Testament passages because the New Testament people assume we all know this; well we don’t all know it now so this is why we have to go back here. Deuteronomy 21:15-17, how parents worked with their property, i.e., how they worked with their children. The believing parents of Israel were under God’s laws so they couldn’t do with their children any way they wanted. I’m going to show you two passages in this context, one that prevents the parents from being cruel to their children, but the other one shows and commands them to be cruel. First, the passage that shows them how not to be cruel. “If a man has two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have borne him children, both the beloved and the hated woman, and if the firstborn son be hers that was hated; [16] Then it shall be that when makes his sons to inherit that which he has, that he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated woman, who is indeed the firstborn.” There’d be some interesting applications with the modern divorce mess here. [17] “But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he has; for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his.”

The firstborn son in the Bible was given double inheritance. And you say why this favoritism, don’t child psychologists tell us it’s wrong to treat favoritism in your children? Yes. Why did the firstborn son have double portion? A simple answer; the double portion went to the firstborn son because the firstborn son had the responsibility to be the executor of the family estate; the firstborn son had the responsibility of caring for his aged parents. And the double portion of the inheritance was to supply him with the money that he needed the wealth that he needed, to rule his some. So in the Bible children are property and they are property in verse 15-17 that is protected.

However, now look at Deuteronomy 21:18-21; here is a very serious and what sometimes to the modern reader appears as a very brutal and a very harsh passage to children. Those of you who have been parents more than five years, however, will snicker. “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him,” in other words, they have executed discipline in the home and they can’t get control over this brat, and he “will not hearken unto them,” and the Hebrew is continually, [19] “Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him,” you can see them picking him up by the ears, “and bring him down to the elders of his city, and to the gate of his place. [20] And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This, our sin, is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice; he’s a glutton, and a drunkard.” Now the glutton and the drunkard is an idiom meaning he’s a parasite. He stays at home all day working on his motorcycle instead of getting a job, that sort of thing. [21] And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die. So shalt thou put away evil from among you, [and all Israel shall hear, and fear].” Needless to say, had the Mosaic Law been adequately applied there would not have been a juvenile delinquency problem. Unusual business for the funeral parlors in teenagers, but nevertheless, the point was that the property of the parents was controlled.

Why is there such a fierce attitude to children who can’t learn authority in the home? We got back to a chart that we’ve shown here thousands of times and that is the various institutions of society. One of those institutions is the institution we call divine institution three which is the family and in the family authority must be learned. In the fourth divine institution, which is the state, that takes up the slack when the family can’t do its job and you see when the parents can’t do their job in verse 18, what do they do in verse 20? They take the children and put them under state control. Why? Because they don’t have any more authority and the state tries them and if necessary the state kills them.

Now why is this done? A child who does not learn obedience to authority in the home cannot manage the estate of the family and so this provision was a way of excluding fools from inheriting family wealth. If a child cannot control his own spirit he cannot control his property and if he cannot control his property, parents will say we don’t want that thing to be inheriting our wealth; we will pass the right of primogenitor to another child in the home. And this was done, if you’ve noticed, in the Genesis text. The right of firstborn didn’t always go to the firstborn. Remember the stories we’ve covered in the past Sunday mornings? Remember, who did Abraham have for sons? He had Ishmael; who was firstborn? Ishmael was. Who had the right of the firstborn? Isaac. Why? Because Isaac followed the Scripture, Isaac was the spiritually mature child; he was the one who trusted in Christ and he was most mature.

Let’s go down a generation. Isaac had two sons; Jacob and Esau. Who was firstborn? Esau; who eventually wound up with the right of firstborn? Jacob; why? Because Jacob followed the covenant, Jacob was a child of the Word of God; Jacob was born again and he grew spiritually. So the Bible is not automatically saying that the oldest son always gets the property; it’s saying normally that should be the case, but if the child is a rebel, he’s to be destroyed or dealt with or disinherited.

Consider the words of an English historian who is commenting on how it was that Great Britain could last as long as it did with the concept of aristocracy. Michael Young says: “Aristocratic influence would never have lasted so long in England without the support of the family. Feudalism and the family go together.” Now wait a minute here, because I know some of you when I use the word “feudalism” you think oh-oh, what does he want to do, put us back in the Middle Ages? Feudalism is an ideal of stratified government; do you know that we Americans have the most feudalistic government, and thank we do, in the world? What other country can you name that has three levels of government: county, state and federal? That is feudalistic and it was designed by the forefathers to be that way. I have to laugh when we see these television shows and you get some kids on, what do you think about the draft? Are you for the draft, and that sort of thing, because do you know that every county has its own draft. Do you know that right now the sheriff of Lubbock County has the power of drafting any male in this county? We have a draft, it’s not the case whether we don’t have a draft; every Sheriff in the United States has the right of draft, he does not need any federal enabling legislation whatsoever to call out a posse and if you don’t submit you’re put in jail. That is one of the great freedom powers that we have in America; it’s very rarely used but it’s one of those powers that’s designed into the system to be used someday if we need to. The right of draft is that of the county sheriff; that is feudalism. And feudalism and the family go together, limited government, that is.

“The family is always the pillar,” says Young, “of the inheritance. The ordinary parent in England wanted to hand his money to children, rather than outsiders of the estate. The child was part of the parent and by bequeathing property to the child the father assured a kind of immortality to himself. The hereditary father never died. If parents had a family business which in a sense embodied themselves, they were even more anxious to pass it on to someone of their own blood to manage. Parents,” and this is the key, “Parents, by controlling property, controlled children.” Now do bells begin to ring? Now do we understand why the inheritance is under attack by the socialists in our country? See, they see the logic if we don’t. If we permit parents to control inheritance, then the parents control the children and we can’t break it down unless we first destroy the concept of inheritance. That must be smashed if we are to carry out our socialistic schemes of destroying the family.

Now if you turn to Hebrews 12 I’ll show you the philosophy that goes along with this that is so hated. We’re still on this topic of why inheritance is hated and we’ve come to a conclusion that inheritance is hated because inheritance is the structure that up girds the family. Hebrews 12:7-10, it’s a passage that applies spiritually but most of us don’t get the force of the passage because we don’t know the physical metaphor that it originated with. It says, “If ye endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chastens not? [8] But if ye be without chastisement, of which are all partakers, then ye are bastards, and not sons. [9] Furthermore, we have had fathers of our flesh,” now look at the philosophy, look at it here, verse 9-10, “we have had fathers of our flesh who corrected us, and we gave them reverence. Shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and life? [10] For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness.”

Now the whole logic of this passage breaks down if we don’t understand the philosophy of inheritance. Why, in verse 7, does the father want to chasten his son and correct him? Do you know why? Because he wants something to transmit his wealth to; he’s got a selfish motive, he wants to make sure his children in the future can use his wealth so he can rule in the future because he can only rule through his own sons, hence he is very interested in how his sons turn out.

Now, in verse 8 there’s a word often used in a cursing way in our everyday street lingo, a “bastard.” We want to talk about the word because unconsciously we still know the meaning of the word even though it’s lost. When you refer to somebody you despise you call them a bastard. Why do we call him a bastard? Why don’t we call him something else? Why is that word used of someone we despise? Do you know how that got started and it’s so deeply imbedded in our society it’s automatic, we don’t even think about it but this shows you how powerful language is. Back in the days of the King James a bastard was despicable, not because he didn’t know his parents or he was an illegitimate child because an illegitimate child could still be adopted. A bastard was one whose parents had disinherited him. Why would parents disinherit a child? Because he was considered incompetent; he was considered to be despicable, and in that Deuteronomy passage instead of disinheriting them they killed them. In our western civilization you disinherit, and the parent’s right to disinherit a child was a powerful lever over the child. You see, parents used to have tremendous pressure they could bring to bear because when this kid got to be 21, feeling his oats and daddy and momma don’t know anything and I’m the world’s greatest genius since Einstein, when this came along the parents could say okay, genius, you can do whatever you want to but you just remember, I’ve got the keys to the property and I may or may not give them to you so put that in your equation and solve it.

You see the power that a family had by the use of property, inheriting and disinheriting. This, of course, is also under attack. Part of the new legislation is designed to limit what a parent can give to his child, that you must do it this way and not another way. Who says? The moment that law comes into effect the parent’s authority is destroyed; you have emasculated the father from being able to wield the powerful property stick over his children. This is where all this attack goes on today. It can be seen in three areas. Now maybe those of you who have noticed these areas in the TV ads, you’ve noticed them in the papers, watch how they all fit together. And they look distinct and they look absolutely separate, absolutely disjointed from one another but after we’ve talked so long this morning about inheritance, watch how they fit neatly together.

One of the new things that the IYC people want to do, (International Year of the Child), is that they want to have the child rule by being able to choose which home the child is going to be in. If he doesn’t like your home he can choose Aunt Hilda’s home or something or go down the street and join Joe Snodgrass’ group. You see, the child can rule. And I kid you not, this legislation is being proposed in the House of Representatives of the United States Government today, at least it’s in committee, that sort of thinking.

That’s one point; now notice how that’s coupled with another thing you’ve noticed; ridicule the past, that way you can get rid of the Bible and all authority and tradition. Notice, for example if you want to see this, read your children’s latest social study textbook that you taxpayers pay for with your own money and notice how they treat the past; notice how they treat the past of American history. We had one man who was a great textbook writer in the United States get up to a hearing last week and say of course we repudiate the past American history, how can we teach kids respect for American history and hope to develop one world. So there’s obviously a very coherent set of ideas that are functioning, ideas of the antichrist that worm their way inch by inch into the fabric of our country.

A third thing that we’ve seen, I’ve spoken of before, is the concept of inheritance tax. Inheritance taxes were never designed to raise revenue for the state because they raise so little revenue for the state. Inheritance taxes were designed from the very beginning to smash families. And don’t you think they’re going to smash the Rockefellers, the Rockefeller family hasn’t been touched with an inheritance tax problem; all they wind up doing is smashing your family and mine. The farmer out here, who has for all his life generated acreage after acreage and he wants to give it to his son and he can’t do it because his son has to sell half the farm to pay for the inheritance tax.

Why these things, why are these crippling things coming into our society? All of it is part of a grand scheme and the grand scheme is the family must go before the state can control everything. The logic is clear; these are just three fronts but it’s the same battle. It’s the same strategy; it just shows up in different places.

The Bible protects the family; turn to Deuteronomy 19 I’ll show you an example of how careful the law was in yesteryear of making sure that the family could be protected. The Bible did this in two major ways; one I’m showing you now is not well known, the other one is well known. The well known way the Bible had of protecting the inheritance was the genealogies. You know how you start reading the Bible and more people have been torpedoed out of a “read through the Bible in a year” program when they hit the genealogies, oh man, I got to chapter 5 and so and so begot so and so, and so and so begat so and so, and so and so begat so and so begat so and so begat so and so, and that’s what happened to my Bible program because it didn’t have any meaning to it. The meaning is that the genealogies trace the line for the inheritance; that’s why the genealogies are there. There were considered part and parcel of the legal record; I have a right to property because of my genealogy.

That was one way but in Deuteronomy 19:14 was another way that property was protected. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbor’s landmark, which they of old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in the land that the LORD thy God gives thee to possess.” In other words, when Israel went into the land they divided the land. The land was wealth, capital investment, and they marked off the capital investment lines with landmarks; surveyor’s stones. But what would happen if somebody wanted to rip somebody off they moved the landmark. We had an example of this, it wasn’t insidious but it’s kind of an example of it when the church bought this new property and the farmer that had been farming the field started plowing part of the field because he didn’t know where the boundary was and the men had to go out there and they had to get the surveyor to put the stake down to where the corner was or we’d have had cotton growing all over. Again, I don’t think it was intentional but that’s the kind of problems you can into when landmarks aren’t clear. The landmark device in the Old Testament guarded inheritance because the inheritance was largely a property type inheritance.

Now we want to go to one final principle on inheritance to show you the importance of the dying parent passing his inheritance to his children as an act of ruling. Turn to John 19:26; again we go back to the cross of Jesus Christ. Here Jesus Christ is dying and although He is not the parent in this case, He is the head of the home because Jesus was the firstborn in His own house. And as He dies between the two verses that we pointed out last time, remember that at one verse they offered Him the drink; and then in verse 30 He took the drink. If you back up to verse 26-27 you’ll see what He did with His mother. Here Christ is dying on the cross, He’s in tremendous excruciating pain, He has rejected the medication for a while, temporarily, until He can take care of things, and remember, under Roman law the last words of the criminal who was dying was considered a legal testament.

So now in John 19:26-27 Jesus rules his posterity, or He rules the survivors by an act prior to His death. “Jesus, therefore, saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved,” that’s John, “He said to His mother, Woman, behold thy son! [27] Then He said to the disciple, Behold, thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her,” Mary, “into his own home.” At that point Jesus allocated His survivors, and He ruled them, He told Mary I’m the head of this home, Mary, even though Mary was the mother, He was the head man in the house, Jesus said you, Mary, I want you to go, as it were, to this firstborn, which is John, the apostle. Now here’s the strange thing. Jesus had brothers; and two of them became New Testament authors. The book of Jude was written by one of his half-brothers and the book of James was written by his other half brother. Now if he had those older brothers and they were pretty old by that time, and He had sisters, why didn’t Jesus leave Mary, his mother, with His other brothers? The answer apparently is that none of them believed on him, so He therefore chose a foreigner, outside the house to inherit, as it were, his own mother, rather than turn His mother over to unbelieving blood line.

Now it doesn’t always have to follow but I just mention this, some of you parents think in these terms, that on your death think about if your children are habitual non-Christians and they rebelled against you, are they going to be wise; will your property be used as unto the Lord if your children aren’t Christian. It’s something to consider. Jesus evidently drew the conclusion Mary would be misused; I don’t want to put her under the care. Some of you parents might think of this when you make your will out, and you ought to make your will, when you make your will out and if both of you were to die, we had a girl here a few years ago, one night, both parents wiped out in an automobile wreck, and in that situation who gets the children. You ought to think, who gets your children if you and your wife today were to die; who would care for them? Who have you stipulated to rule; have you made sure that the people who inherit your children and your wealth would inherit and raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord or are you just to kind of blind guess that your family is going to grope its way around and solve the problem. Think, Jesus did and Jesus took care of the problem in His dying days.

All of this, we’ve basically summarized the idea of inheritance this morning because in ensuing Sundays we want to show how Jacob passed this inheritance on. My purpose in developing and taking a whole Sunday morning to show you inheritance is to warn you about a collision of Scripture in our time; we are seeing ourselves as Christians progressively pushed back and pushed back and it’s ever so slow; it’s like you’re in the bathtub and somebody slowly turns the water off, you never see it happen but the constriction gets greater and greater, and what’s happening is that the state, under the guise of all kinds of pious excuses of so-called failure is encroaching one thing after another. You saw the three fronts: education, ridicule the past, child welfare, oh, we’ve got to protect the children with all this brutality and so we bring in this, and then we come on over here and we say who takes care of the aged? Oh, the state will do that.

Note the astute words of Rushdoony, and I’ll end with these: The state is making itself progressively the main, and sometimes in some countries the only heir. The state, in effect, is saying that it will receive the blessings above all others. There is, however, a perverse justice and logic in the state’s position, in that it is assuming the dual roles of parent and child. The state offers to educate all children and to support all needy families as a great father of all. It offers to support the aged as the true son and heir, who is also entitled to collect all the inheritance on his own. In both roles, however, the state is a great corruptor and is at war with God’s established order, the family.”

We will sing in conclusion….