Hebrews Lesson 150 March
5, 2009
NKJ Isaiah 26:3 You will keep him in perfect
peace, Whose mind is stayed on You, Because he trusts in You.
We’ve been in Hebrews 9.
NKJ Hebrews 9:15 And for this reason He
Jesus Christ
is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of
death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant,
That’s the payment for sin that
occurred in the Old Testament.
that those who
are called
That is a term that refers to those
who have trusted in Christ as their Savior.
may receive the
promise of the eternal inheritance.
So those who are called look back. That
term looks back to phase 1 justification; salvation that occurs when we put our
faith alone in Christ alone, that instant we are regenerated. God the Holy
Spirit gives us a new human spirit, and we have a new life. We move from spiritual
death to spiritual life. That occurred whenever you believed in Jesus Christ as
your Savior.
may receive the
promise of the eternal inheritance.
Now that indicates a shift in time
from the past response in phase 1 to the future phase 3 glorification and then
reward at the Judgment Seat of Christ. It indicates the purpose for Church Age
believers has to do with that future inheritance. We began a study a couple of
weeks ago on the Doctrine of Inheritance. The important thing to see in the
Doctrine of Inheritance is what we see in Colossian 3:23-24. That is that
inheritance is related to something that is earned and identified as a reward.
NKJ Colossians 3:23 And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord
and not to men,
NKJ Colossians 3:24 knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the
inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ.
So there are two things that we have
to keep in mind. Number 1 is that salvation is not a reward; it is a free gift
– Ephesians 2:8-9.
NKJ Ephesians 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and
that not of yourselves; it is the
gift of God,
NKJ Ephesians 2:9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
Second, we have rewards that are
promised on the basis of service, on the basis of obedience. It’s easy in some
passages to become confused. The trend from so many in the evangelical world
today and in past centuries has been to confuse these two types of passages so
that salvation becomes linked to a work in a backdoor sense. Now of course
there’s the Arminian position that sort of front doors works. But there are
many evangelicals who backdoor works so that if the works aren’t there, then
you weren’t really saved. We usually refer to that position as lordship
salvation. That’s more of a modern designation because there are those like
John MacArthur out in Southern California who is very well-known on the radio
who emphasizes that faith in Christ is submitting to His Lordship. So that’s
the idea there is that when you believe in Jesus, it’s not simply trusting in
Christ or believing certain truths about Him - that He is the Messiah, that He
is the eternal Second Person of the Trinity, incarnate in humanity who died on
the cross for our sins - but that faith really has the idea of commitment.
If you look the word faith up in any
thesaurus, you’re not going to find commitment as a synonym. So there are some
fundamental errors that are made. But that’s the idea in Lordship salvation is
that people commit their lives to Christ. If they haven’t committed their lives
to Christ or committed themselves in obedience or submission to the sovereignty
of God, then they’re not really saved. It’s just a head-knowledge and not a heart-knowledge.
They bring in that little truism that is often repeated in churches that sounds
nice but is totally fraudulent.
Belief is a matter of understanding
certain propositions, certain statements. The term proposition is really a
technical term. A proposition in logic is any statement that can be verified or
falsified. A question - what’s the temperature outside? That can’t be verified
or falsified. It’s a question, a command. Go get me a cup of coffee. That can’t
be verified or falsified. That’s a command. But a statement – there is
snow on the ground outside. Well, that can be verified or falsified. Jesus is
the Son or God. That can be verified or falsified. It is either true or it’s
false. So that’s what a proposition is.
No one has direct, immediate
knowledge of Jesus. Not one of us ever saw Jesus. Not one of us has ever had
that personal encounter with Jesus. No one we know has had a personal encounter
with Jesus despite the fact that we may know some odd people. No one has ever
had a personal encounter with Jesus.
They have only known about Him through the statements of the Scripture.
John says in John 20:
NKJ John 20:31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.
That’s a proposition. These are
written – these propositions, these statements about Jesus that you read
about all the way through the Gospel of John. These are propositions. They are either true or they’re
false. These can be true or falsified. So we only know Jesus through the
statements of Scripture. We come to Scripture and we believe these
statements.
Now some people say, “Well that’s an
awfully cold impersonal kind of religion. Isn’t Christianity all about a
relationship?”
It is. But the relationship comes
after you put your faith in Jesus Christ. At that instant that we’re adopted
into the family of God, we are identified with Christ in His death, burial, and
resurrection through the baptism of God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit takes
up residency in us. The Father and the Son take up residence in us. Then a
relationship begins. But that’s not the starting point. It doesn’t matter if
you have a relationship with Jesus. That’s not going to get you into heaven.
Judas had a relationship. He had a close personal relationship with Jesus. That
isn’t going to get him into heaven. It’s trusting in Jesus Christ as the one
who died on the cross for our sins and that believing that, trusting in Him,
accepting. That’s receiving Him. That’s another synonym that the Scripture
uses. That’s what faith is. It is believing something to be true and relying
upon it; it’s not this idea of committing to it.
Now when you get into the Gospels,
which is where we are headed eventually, when we get to point 13 or 14 we’ll
get into some of these Gospel passages, and what’s really tricky there is that
statements about inheritance are closely united in statements that talk also
about salvation. So you have to pay attention to context.
Then you have to look at these
verses and say, “What’s a work and what is a gift? What’s a reward and what is
something that is freely given as a result of faith in Christ?”
We usually refer to some of these
statements as discipleship statements where Jesus says, “If you want to be a
disciple, then you need to take up your cross daily and follow Me.”
Well, some people will say or take those
as all salvation verses. But if that’s a salvation verse, then salvation is
based on doing something. It’s not based on simply believing that Jesus died on
the cross for your sins, but you have to do something else.
Now everybody who gets rewarded has
eternal life. But not everybody who has eternal life is going to get rewarded
or have an inheritance. As we saw last time there are two kinds of inheritance
that are spoken of specifically in Romans.
So I want to go back and pick up a
little review starting with point 6. I’m not going to go all the way back to
the first point. We’ll just start at point 6 recognizing that our heirship is
based on adoption and sonship. Therefore inheritance is related to our position
in Christ.
NKJ Romans 8:16 The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that
we are children of God,
That comes about through adoption, which is true of
every person when they trust Christ as Savior. When a person trusts Jesus
Christ as Savior, God does a number of different things in every believer’s
life. I’ve seen these categorized and enumerated. I know one person who says
185 different things God does for you at the point of salvation. Then there are
others. Originally in Louis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic
Theology, he had (I forget) 33 or 34 things that were listed. One category
is that we have a close relationship with God the Holy Spirit. Then it lists
all the ministries of God the Holy Spirit – indwelling, giving spiritual
gifts, filling. All those were subcategories of one point. So somebody can come
along and break those out into individual points. Now you have 5 more things
that God does for you at the point of salvation. So it doesn’t matter how many
numbers there are, but there are a vast number of things that God does for
every person at the instant of salvation.
And they’re not experiential. What I mean by that is
you don’t feel it when it happens. You don’t suddenly have this little
vibration or charge that goes through you and now you know that you’re saved. You
may be sick. You may have the flu. You may be hanging on a cross like the thief
next to Jesus and he certainly didn’t get the rosy glow and have an ecstatic
experience as he was hanging there being crucified when Jesus said, “Today I
will see you in paradise.” So it’s not experiential. It is only after you’re
saved, after you are regenerate and have the Holy Spirit that you go through
the Scripture and begin to study that you realize and you learn all of these
tremendous things that God did for us at the instant of salvation. They are the
resources that every believer has. It gives us tremendous potential. Every
believer has access to the same power of the Holy Spirit. Every believer has
access to the same position that he has in Christ. Every believer has all of
these things without distinction.
One of those is that we’re all members of God’s royal
family. We are all children of God. That qualifies us. Verse 17 says:
NKJ Romans 8:17 and if children, then heirs -- heirs of God and joint
heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him,
that we may also be glorified together.
I pointed out last time that this is
a really an important verse. It’s important because it identifies two
categories of inheritance. There is an inheritance that is related to God. We
are heirs of God. And there is a second heirship that is joint heirship with
Christ. The way the English Bible translates this and punctuates the sentence
makes it look as if they are synonymous. That’s how I’ve got this on the screen
in front of you. The phrase “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ”
indicates that there is a synonymous relationship between the two and that
every child of God gets these two types of heirship. The problem is there is
this conditional clause that follows the phrase “joint heirs with Christ”.
If indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.
That seems to put a condition on
inheritance, on all inheritance that is related to suffering in Jesus. You can
believe in Jesus; but if you don’t suffer - have you really been saved?
Some would say, “Well, if you
haven’t suffered…”
Of course then you have to define
what suffering is because what is suffering to one person may not be suffering
to another person. But we have to go back and look at how that particular word
is used. That word is used to describe the Lord Jesus Christ in His spiritual
growth. In passages such as Hebrews 2:10, God the Father took Him through
various sufferings, the adversity of living in a fallen world where He matured.
He set that pattern as He faced all these different kinds of adversity and
testings that we face. He handles them the same way that we can handle them through
the Spirit of God and through the Word of God. So He set the precedent for us
and He set the precedent for the spiritual life of the Church Age.
The precedent of the spiritual life
of the Church Age is not in the Mosaic Law. That’s another problem not only
Lordship salvation has; but this was a problem coming out of the Roman Catholic
Church that all of the theologies of the Reformation had. They got
justification right, but they weren’t real clear on sanctification, which is
the spiritual life. So they were trying to grow spiritually by bootstrap
spirituality – by performing works, by being obedient without
understanding the role of the Holy Spirit.
One of the dominating theologies
throughout all that period was what we call Reformed Theology or Calvinism. What’s
interesting is you go back and you read Calvinistic theology. As rich of a
heritage as it is and as much as it contributed to our understanding of the
Bible and even though I don’t agree with Calvinistic theology in many areas,
historically we have to recognize that Calvinistic theology shaped Western
Civilization in magnificent ways primarily because of the high view of God that
it had and the low view of man that it had. What I mean by a low view of man is
it recognized that man is a corrupt sinner and could do nothing to improve
himself spiritually and that man is not basically good, but basically evil. Man
is basically a sinner. The implications of their high view of God and their low
view of man were profound and changed Western Civilization. For that we can be
grateful.
Nearly everybody who was in the
colonists in American in the 16th and early 17 centuries came out of
a Calvinistic or reformed heritage for the most part. They were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and Congregationalists;
and they were independent Baptists from England. They were very Calvinistic as
well.
But the problem in that whole system
,as well as with Lutheran theology, was that after you get justified by faith
alone; you’re basically being sanctified by works. Your spiritual growth is
through morality, and they didn’t understand the ministries of the Holy
Spirit.
I was amazed when I was taking a
doctoral course at Dallas Seminary back in the 80’s and we had to do a certain
amount of extracurricular reading. The two books that were supposed to be the
best theologies on God the Holy Spirit - one was written by John Owen called The Holy Spirit. He was the premier
Calvinist Puritan theologian in England. He was Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain and
Chief of Staff. When you look at him in context he just absolutely brilliant. Then
the second work was a work by a man Abraham Kuiper who again was absolutely
brilliant individual. He was not only one of the premier theologians within the
Dutch Reformed denomination in Holland in the late 19th century, but
he was the president or premier of Holland – Prime Minister of Holland
and was brilliant in many, many areas. These are 400, 500, 600 page books in
8-point print. (They didn’t do 14-point print with a lot of white space like they
do today to get a big book) This is detailed material. But what’s interesting
is they leave out things like the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the filling of
the Spirit. You can’t even find a chapter on the filling of the Holy Spirit. Then
if you also try to look for spiritual warfare you don’t find Calvinist theology
or Reformed theology trying to deal with spiritual warfare until the 20th
century. Once they came under attack from the charismatics and the charismatics
started making a big deal about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, indwelling of
the Holy Spirit, and filling of the Holy Spirit; then all of a sudden in the 20th
century the reformed camp starts trying to make up for lost time. But up until
1900 there was nothing there about the role of the Holy Spirit in the spiritual
life of the believer. It was all sort of bootstrap Christian life - just go out
and be moral and obey the Bible and you’re going to grow spiritually - no
understanding of the role of God the Holy Spirit. So all of this ties together
because they don’t recognize a distinction between a carnal Christian, someone
who is a believer and justified but their whole life produces dead works and a
believer who is walking by means of the Spirit therefore is growing and
advancing the spiritual life. If you don’t have a category for the carnal
rebellious apostate believer, then you end up making works your ultimate tool
to evaluate if a person is saved or not.
“Well, look at that person. Look at
what they did. Look at where they go. How can they be saved?”
Immediately when you make those
statements you’re arguing subtly maybe but you are arguing that works is the
basis for salvation. So they would link these two things together. You have one
heirship. Everybody gets it. So everybody gets to heaven with the same things.
I pointed out last time that it’s
all about punctuation and in the original Greek there is no punctuation. So, I
always enjoy having fun with this little exercise, statement. “Woman without
her man is nothing” can be punctuated two different ways. One way, you put in
two commas. It is basically saying:
Woman, without
her, man is nothing.
So your main phrase there is “man is
nothing.”
Whereas, if you only put a comma
after man, what you are saying is woman is nothing.
Woman without
her man, is nothing.
In the first case a man without a
woman is nothing. In the second case, a woman without a man is nothing. So it’s
all in where you put the commas. So if we re-punctuate Romans 8:17 so that we
put a comma after God and no comma after Christ, then we have a phrase that “if
we’re children then we’re heirs of God”. In addition to that – "joint
heirs with Christ if indeed we suffer with Him".
That word suffer is the same word
that’s used to describe Jesus’ advance in His humanity as He dealt with the
testing and the things that He faced as He was maturing in His own spiritual
life in His humanity. So if we go through that process with Him, if there is
spiritual growth and spiritual maturity, which is when we’re walking by the
Spirit and God the Holy Spirit is producing fruit and growth in our lives then
that’s what’s rewarded, what’s rewardable. That becomes the basis for
inheritance
In point 7, I pointed out that
heirship means to share the destiny of Christ. Christ has an eternal destiny.
We share that as we share His election. There are some key verses to look at in
regard to this.
NKJ Ephesians 1:11 In Him also we have obtained an inheritance,
It could be translated “we have
receive an inheritance.”
being predestined
according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel
of His will,
Now 1 Peter 1 is a key chapter for
understanding inheritance. We’re going to come back in about two points and
we’re going to look at verse 4 and look at verse 5 in 1 Peter 1. Let’s remember
that.
NKJ 1 Peter 1:3 Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy
has begotten us again
This is past tense; when we trusted
Christ as Savior.
to a living
hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
That’s future. Hope in Scripture in
the New Testament means a confident expectation. It is a confident expectation
of a future reality. Hope is always oriented to what is going to happen in the
future. That hope is tied in this passage to verse 4 when it talks about inheritance.
So the hope looks forward to that inheritance that God has reserved for us
until there is phase 3 glorification.
8.
Now as we
understand this, we move from understanding that heirship is sharing the
destiny of Christ and then we have to answer the question – so what
exactly is Christ’s heirship? I pointed out last time that He’s an heir because
of who He is not because of what He did.
Matthew 21:28 deals with the parable of the landowner sending his son.
He’s a son before He’s sent. He is the heir before He is sent. But He qualifies
for his inheritance by the things that He suffered - Hebrews 1. We looked at
Psalm 8:3-6 which focuses on the fact that Jesus Christ as man is created lower
than the angels so that He can fulfill the original destiny of Adam to be
elevated over all of God’s creation. Mankind, the human race, will eventually
rule and be at Christ’s ascension. He’s at the right hand of the Father. At
Christ’s ascension, it is a man who is now sitting at the helm of the universe.
This is picked up and quoted in Hebrews 2:6-8. I pointed out in verse 8 that
the writer of Hebrews applies this by saying:
NKJ Hebrews 2:8 You have put all things in subjection under his feet." For in that
He
The first He there is God the Father.
put all in subjection under him,
That is, Jesus Christ.
He left nothing that
is not put under him. But now we do not yet see all things put under him.
That won’t happen until the future when Jesus Christ comes to the Father
(Revelation 4 & 5) as the Lamb and takes the scroll from the Father’s hand
(the title deed for the earth) and then begins to open those seals to establish
His authority over the planet during the Tribulation period. That takes us up
to point 9.
9. Inheritance is
both a present reality and a future possession according to 1 Peter 1:4-5. Now
the translation I’m using in these slides is from the New King James. The New
King James translated the first part of 1 Peter 1:4 the same way it had
translated Ephesians 1:11 that we looked at a minute ago – to obtain an
inheritance. But that idea of obtained isn’t there. It is simply that we were
born again to a living hope to an inheritance. There is not a verbal idea
there. It’s just stating that is an aspect, a reason that we were saved is for
that inheritance. Then there are
three adjectives that describe the inheritance. It’s imperishable, undefiled
and won’t fade away. It is permanent. One aspect of this that is so important
is it’s related to eternal security. We can’t lose a certain aspect of this
inheritance.
NKJ 1 Peter 1:4 to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade
away, reserved in heaven for you,
The word there - the Greek word
there that’s the word tereo, which
means protected or be kept. It’s the same word that Jesus uses in His high
priestly prayer when He prays to the Father that He keeps us. It’s one of the
key words that we have in the Gospel of John for eternal security. So it is an
extremely strong word for the preservation of this inheritance. It is reserved
or kept or preserved in heaven for you.
Then I put a note there at the end
as a reminder that the inheritance there is the hope that we have. We are
future looking. The main point here as I keep reiterating is we’re living today
in light of that future reality. That’s what has to become so real to us. Faith
is when we come to the Scripture and walking by faith; it’s when the truths of
the Scripture are more real to us than our experience, the things that we go
through, our emotions, the difficulties we face in life. Faith is trusting that
what God reveals to us in His Word is true and accurate no matter what
experiential evidence may seem to say.
This applies to areas in science
like in the creation-evolution debate. We see Darwinist, evolutionists coming
with an old earth view. They have all kinds of evidence, all kinds of data. The
propaganda machine in the public schools is in high gear. So the average person
thinks it’s silly to think that the earth isn’t old. And the average Christian
thinks that too. They’ve become convinced because of all this propaganda
running around that the earth is old. But there is no evidence for an old
earth. In fact there is a lot of scientific evidence for a young earth and a
lot of scientific evidence that says the evidence that they use for an old
earth doesn’t fit. There are some technical DVD’s out that the
Institute for Creation Research has produced as a result of their RATE Project. That is an
acronym for the real age of the earth. They have a ten-year study.
One of the things that I’m thinking
about next year for the Chafer Conference as we look at the issue of evolution
and creation is having one of their guys come out here and talk about, give
that evidence in a couple of sessions so that people are more familiar with all
the evidences for a young earth. But it happens in science. We looked out there
with the experience of looking at these fossils, the experience of certain
scientific data.
“Well, the earth’s got to be
old.”
Well, wait a minute; the Bible seems
to suggest that it’s young. So the truth of God’s Word has to be more real to
us than experience.
People go out and they have
experiences with the supernatural, and they think they’ve encountered demons or
spirits. They get involved in all kinds of things. I’ve seen a major trend in
the last 50 years among missionaries that go out on the edge of civilization
dealing with a lot of very primitive stone-age tribes and they’ll encounter all
kinds of animism and spiritism.
Then they come back and they say,
“Well, we led this person or that person or this other person to the Lord. We
know they’re saved, yet they are still demon possessed.”
Or, the demon possession came back
on them. So they are looking at a certain behavior pattern in somebody and
they’re saying that on the basis of their limited, finite knowledge they are
able to truly access whether the person is demon possessed or whether or not
they’re just emotionally unstable. We have to make a decision on the basis of
Scripture that Scripture teaches that a Christian cannot be demon possessed. But
if they made a clear statement that they believe in Christ as their Savior then
that means that whatever is going on isn’t demon possession. It’s something
else.
You have to make the truth of God’s
Word more real to you than your experience. When you are going through
difficult times in life – and that is very likely in the coming years
especially in light of what’s happened with the economy and many of the
decisions that are being made and have been made.
We are going to see a very different
financial picture I believe in the next decade than we’ve seen for the last 30
or 40 years. We’ve had an expansive growing economy ever since World War II. But
if you go back and look at the charts on the growth of the stock market after
the Depression, after the Great Depression – the stock market crashed in
‘29, the Great Depression in the early part of the 30’s. It took decades before
people really had restored confidence in the market. The growth pattern through
the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s is just barely above flat. That’s because there wasn’t much
of a trust in the market. Yet there was still a progression and there was a lot
of prosperity during that time especially coming out of World War II. But it
wasn’t as fast. You didn’t see
that dynamism that we’ve had in the last 30 years.
Some of you remember the recessions
in the 70’s. So we’ve gotten used to (I believe it was partially artificial) a
lot of this growth that seemed to be there the last 20 years or so. Now we’re
going to see a different environment. For some people, that’s going to become
very difficult.
Some people are going to face the inability
to pay their mortgage. Some people are going to lose their job. We’re in
Houston and it won’t be as difficult for us as other places, but it doesn’t
matter whether you’re in New York or in Houston. If you lose your job and can’t
get one for a year, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the best place or the
worst place in the world; it still impacts you in ways that are very tough to
deal with. So it’s going to depend on the doctrine in your soul and your
ability to focus on what God is doing in your life and how God is training you
and preparing you for that future orientation. That means keeping your eye on God’s plan and what He is
ultimately doing in your life and preparing you for a future ministry in the
kingdom.
So we have in 1 Peter 1:4-5, this
inheritance is kept for us. We are protected. That’s the same word in the Greek
that’s used over there in Philippians 4:5-6 that we are to pray to God.
NKJ Philippians 4:6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer
and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God;
NKJ Philippians 4:7 and the peace of God, which surpasses all
understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
So we are protected. We are guarded.
There’s a fortification that occurs in our soul by the power of God through faith
for a salvation ready to be revealed in last time.
That word salvation there is not
talking about phase 1 justification, but phase 3 glorification when we are
absent from the body, face-to-face with the Lord. The rapture occurs and we are there, present at the Judgment
Seat of Christ.
So inheritance becomes a present
reality because we understand what it is. It motivates us and strengthens us
today because that future hope is so real to us now that it is more real than
whatever negative experiences there might be.
Ephesians 1:11 which I’ve used
already in other places states the same idea.
NKJ Ephesians 1:11 In Him also we have obtained an inheritance,
That’s the verb kleroo which is the root of klernomos,
kleronomia, the words for inheritance.
being
predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to
the counsel of His will,
There’s a plan and He is moving us
in terms of that future realization of the plan. Then when we go to a couple of
verses later in Ephesians:
NKJ Ephesians 1:13 In Him you also trusted,
after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom
also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,
So our inheritance is related to the
promise of God the Holy Spirit. That is, He seals us in our relationship with
God. Sealing is a sign of His ownership.
Somehow in here I left a point out
and the verses go with another point. God the Holy Spirit is the down payment
of our inheritance. Ephesians 1:14 as well as Galatians 4.
9.
Heirship means
eternal security. It’s an inheritance that’s undefiled which we just saw in I
Peter 1:4-5, also Ephesians 1:13-14. It means that we can’t lose. Because it’s
grounded in Christ, it can’t be lost. We’re identified with Christ and we’re
placed in Christ. That is a position that can’t be shaken by anything that we
do because it’s all dependent upon who Christ is and what He did on the cross.
As Church Age believers we receive God the Holy Spirit who is the down payment of
our inheritance. That’s again Ephesians 1:14 and Galatians 4:6 speaking of His
sealing. Texas is good cattle country. It’s like getting branded.
10. That seal is a mark of ownership. It’s not visible. I
can’t look at you and see that. It’s the same word used in Revelation. I think
the sealing there may become visible, the second half. I’m not sure of that,
but it’s possible because it seems to be that there is a clear marking. But
it’s like a brand.
What’s interesting is back in the
wild and wooly days of the Old West when they were branding cattle to mark
ownership what would often happen out on the range is that rustlers would come
along and they would steal some cattle or find some running lose out there
might have somebody else’s brand on it.
What they would do is go out and they would capture these cattle. Then
they would use the cinch rings on their saddles as a make shift branding iron
and they would reshape the brand so that it would look from the outside as if
it didn’t have the original brand; but it had their brand. Or they would have a
branding iron that they would have made to fit over the original owner’s brand.
Then the only way you could tell if the brand had been changed was to kill the
animal and skin it. Then when you reverse the hide (looked on the inside of the
hide) then you could see that the brand had been changed, the brand had been
fixed.
I always thought that was a great illustration for a lot of
Christians. They get saved and are sealed by the Holy Spirit, but then they live
like the child of the devil for the rest of their lives. They live completely immersed
in the cosmic system. You look at their lives and you can’t tell if they’re
saved or not. You can’t look at their lives and see any evidence of salvation.
But they are. It’s not until they die that it will become evident that well,
they were saved after all.
We will be surprised at a lot of
people who are in heaven. There are presidents of this country that have made
clear statements of their faith in Jesus Christ and they will be in heaven. Now
I know some of you want God to have different districts in heaven so that some
of those presidents aren’t in your district. But you won’t have that sin nature trend when you get there
- neither will I.
11. So the Holy Spirit is that down payment on our
inheritance. It is a seal or pledge of that future inheritance that we will
receive from the Lord. Ephesians
1:14
NKJ Ephesians 1:14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance
A down payment as it were.
until the
redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.
Here is a use of the word redemption that doesn’t look back to the
payment of the price for sin on the cross, but it looks forward to the ultimate
completion of the salvation process when we are fully glorified in the presence
of God.
13. What we realize is that in the Christian life, inheritance is also
said to be earned and a reward. So
we have these two categories of inheritance, one that’s a gift (inheritance,
heirs of God) and one that is a reward.
Now we’re going to have to keep that in mind. So, in the Christian life inheritance is earned.
NKJ Hebrews 6:12 that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith
and patience inherit the promises.
There the word is makrothumia which
indicates long endurance as opposed to hupomone
which is the word that we’ve studied in James for enduring in times of trouble.
There it is talking about patience. Now some of us myself included would have
to give up on salvation if it were dependent on becoming patient. You know who
you are. We’re the ones who pray for patience now. But if salvation is
dependent upon developing patience, I’ll never get to heaven. So that’s a work.
That is related to reward. It’s not talking about entering into heaven or
receiving eternal life. It’s talking about the reward that comes as a result of
spiritual growth and inheriting the promises.
14.
Inheritance has its roots of course in
the Old Testament as we’ve seen already. In the Old Testament with Israel it is
related to the Abrahamic Covenant. Paul picks that up in Galatians 3 and makes
that connection as well. That’s an important passage to look at. So the point
is simply inheritance in relation to Abraham can be related to the land promise
or the seed promise. That is contextually. Sometimes it’s always related to the
land promise; sometimes inheritance is related to the seed promise, the promise
of a Deliverer, the promise of a Messiah. But it’s always related to the idea
of a divine promise. We see that again and again and again: this connection
between an inheritance and a promise. A promise is a statement that has inherently
a future fulfillment. Now a key verse for this is in Galatians 3:18 which comes
at the conclusion of a section.
NKJ Galatians 3:18 For if the inheritance is of
the law, it is no longer of promise;
but God gave it to Abraham by
promise.
Now there’s a contrast here between
promise and law. We’re going to go to Galatians 3. To understand the last part
of Galatians where it talks about this contrast between promise and law, we
have to understand this in terms of the context. This can be a confusing
section to get into when you start talking about inheritance and the promise
and what does all of this has to do with what God is promising here. It’s
connected contextually with the Holy Spirit. The way we see this is to go back
to the first part of the chapter. The key verse for understanding this is Galatians
3:3:
NKJ Galatians 3:3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are
you now being made perfect by the flesh?
This is really a key verse for
understanding the whole epistle of Galatians. It’s a question he asks here; but
he doesn’t answer until Galatians 5:16. There are three words that are used in
Galatians 3:3 that are not used again until Galatians 5:16. That’s Spirit and
perfected and the flesh.
What happens at the time that Paul
wrote this was after he had gone to these cities in the southern part of
Galatia and many of them had been saved, after Paul left the Judiazers came in
and said, “You know you just didn’t get it all by just believing in Jesus. You
have to come under the Law and the men have to be circumcised and you have to
implement the Law to grow spiritually.”
It’s not any different than Lordship
salvation or Reformed theology message that’s dominated so many evangelicals
over the last 400-500 years. It’s a way of growing spiritually just by doing
what the Bible says to do without understanding the role of the Holy
Spirit.
So Paul says:
NKJ Galatians 3:3 Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit,
That’s how they got saved – by
faith alone in Christ alone. The Holy Spirit regenerated them. He says:
are you now
being made perfect
…or completed, matured
by the flesh?
You started the spiritual life
through a spiritual process of the Holy Spirit called regeneration. So do you
produce growth by the flesh or the sin nature? That is his question. That is
what sets the stage here in the middle of this section. He’s going to then
develop this.
In verse 5 he says:
NKJ Galatians 3:5 Therefore He who supplies the Spirit to you and works
miracles among you, does He do it by
the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? --
See that’s the contrast. Is it works
or is it by faith or by promise – trusting in the promise?
Then he goes to Abraham as his
illustration in verse 6.
NKJ Galatians 3:6 just as Abraham "believed God, and it was
accounted to him for righteousness."
I believe that statement as we’ve
studied it in the past in Genesis 15:6 is a statement that related to Abraham’s
original salvation. It should have been translated from the Hebrew “Abraham had
already believed God and it had been imputed to him as righteousness.” So the
promise is given to Abraham, and it’s a promise of the land that he is going to
possess. That’s the inheritance. Inheritance is used there as a synonym for
possession or ownership.
NKJ Galatians 3:7 Therefore know that only those
who are of faith are sons of Abraham.
Now he’s not talking physically here;
he’s talking spiritually. Those who believe God’s promise of salvation follow
in the spiritual footsteps of Abraham.
God made the promise to him in the Abrahamic Covenant that by your seed
all will be blessed. That is the promise. We are blessed with spiritual
blessings by following Abraham in his faith in God. He believed God would
provide a future Savior for the Messiah. We look back to the accomplishment of
that.
NKJ Galatians 3:8 And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by
faith, preached the gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, "In you all the nations shall be blessed."
Paul just extracted this from the
Old Testament passage. Then in verse 10 he says:
NKJ Galatians 3:10 For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it
is written, "Cursed is everyone
who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law,
to do them."
Works in terms of trying to gain
approbation from God apart from the Holy Spirit may make you more moral. You
may memorize a lot of Scripture, lead a lot of people to the Lord, read a lot
of the Bible and go to church a lot. But if it’s done in the power of the flesh
and the power of the sin nature; then it’s wood, hay and straw. It’s not going
to do anything for you spiritual growth.
NKJ Galatians 3:11 But that no one is justified by the law in the sight
of God is evident, for "the just
shall live by faith."
NKJ Galatians 3:12 Yet the law is not of faith, but "the man who does them shall live
by them.
The point that he’s making is you
can’t advance by works. Faith is related to promise. He’s develops this.
NKJ Galatians 3:14 that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the
Gentiles in Christ Jesus,
So that what?
that we might
receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.
So, here the indwelling on God the
Holy Spirit is part of our inheritance. It’s that promise. It’s part of what we
possess now as believers that current pledge, the sealing of the Spirit that is
ultimately going to be fulfilled in our future inheritance. So this is how Paul
develops his argument.
NKJ Galatians 3:16 Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made.
This is one of the key verses on the
importance of syntax and grammar.
Paul says:
He does not
say, "And to seeds," as of many, but as of one, "And to your
Seed," who is Christ.
So he bases his interpretation of
the passage on the singular noun seed and says that refers to Jesus Christ not
to His physical descendents.
NKJ Galatians 3:18 For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no
longer of promise; but God gave it to
Abraham by promise.
So the point that he is making here
is that inheritance that we have is based on a promise. It is based on grace
and is related to the Holy Spirit. It’s not based on works through the Law. So
this has to be understood. That makes inheritance therefore something even
though it’s earned; it is done through grace through the Holy Spirit.
That takes us to the 15th
point, which is:
15.
Inheritance is
related to rewards for what is earned for service whereas salvation is a free
gift, back to where I started with Colossians 3:24 understanding that distinction.
Now having gone through these
passages, we are prepared to go into the inheritance passages used in the
gospels and to try to understand what Jesus is talking about in these various
passages. You have in Matthew 5:5 the meek or the humble will inherit the
earth. What does that mean? That’s in the Beatitudes. Is that for today? What’s
the significance of that in terms of inheritance? You have “inheriting the
earth” there. You have other passages that talk about “inheriting eternal
life.” You have other passages that talk about “inheriting the kingdom.” What
do these terms mean?
We will come back next time and
start to go through these passages. There are 8 or 9 key passages in the
gospels and then in the epistles to understand the different ways in which
inheritance is talking about different things that are inherited and how that
relates to us as believers and our future orientation.
Let’s bow out heads in closing
prayer.