149 - Doctrine of Inheritance - Part 2 [B]

Hebrews Lesson 149    February 26, 2009

^NKJ Isaiah 40:31 But those who wait on the LORD Shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.

We are in Hebrews 9:15 but only briefly. We'll start off with a test. It's always good to have a test every now and then not just to see if people are awake, paying attention. This is one of those critical thinking type of tests. There are going to be two questions. This is sort of a true or false kind of thing. Then the second part is going to be - can anybody explain why it's true or why it's false? I ran across this quote today in a book that was recommended to me several years ago by a doctrinal pastor. That's all I remember. I know it wasn't someone I spend a lot of time talking with or a lot of time communicating with, so that will remove a lot of people from your thinking. It was someone else. It was someone peripheral. They had recommended this particular book. 

I picked it up and they said, "This is a great book for understanding things that are going on in Hebrews." 

I've looked at it here and there along the way. I looked at so many things actually I had forgotten about it. So I picked it up yesterday and there was a chapter in this book on inheritance. I thought, "Well this should be interesting." Now the title of the book is Slaves, Citizens, Sons - Legal Metaphors in the Epistles. The author is a legal professor and he also has some theological training. I ran across this statement. You need to tell me whether this is true or false. This is in the second page of the chapter. He said:

As with the other metaphors we have looked at, we will refer most of the imagery (That is imagery related to inheritance) to Roman law for its content. Inheritance is such we can take it more generally; but the technical ideas of heirship need to be located in a single legal system.  As we will see the Roman and the Jewish laws have markedly different concepts of heirship and the evidence argues for the Roman reference. Briefly the heir in Jewish law does not exist until the death of his ancestor. In Roman law the concept of heir is more profound, the heir having legal existence during the life of his predecessor. 

Is that true or false? This is a good critical thinking quote. See if anyone was paying attention last Thursday night. False, why is it false? The point is that in Roman law someone has to die. I pointed out last time that when you go to the Old Testament you don't always have a death before there is inheritance. So I would disagree with his analysis that in Jewish law there has to be the death before there's an inheritance. I'm going to show you another scripture passage on that in just a minute. 

Can anyone point out another methodological flaw that's here? Where is he looking for his understanding of inheritance in the New Testament? Where is he looking for the background to the concept of inheritance? He's looking to Rome. What about the Old Testament? Aren't Old Testament concepts the framework for understanding New Testament concepts, not Rome or Greece? That's a really important thing to understand because a lot of times you will have people make those errors. It seems like a lot of times we become enamored with Greek culture and Roman culture, with Greek history and Roman history and there's a lot there that's important to understand for background, for isagogics. But when we look at the New Testament, the New Testament writers are all Jews. Paul arguably was the most brilliant rabbinical student of his day, so that when they talk they're not talking in the context of Greek or Roman culture. They may be speaking Greek, but they're thinking in terms of Old Testament categories, in Old Testament vocabulary and expressing them more precisely in New Testament categories.

In fact I had a group of pastors over here this morning. On Thursday mornings we have 3 or 4 that meet here and we have another 3 or 4 around the country that will Skype in so we have some good conversations as we work through various theological topics. This morning we got off onto something related to this in understanding. One of the pastors asked a question about a passage he was dealing with. His question: is this an Attic Greek idiom and how much do we need to understand other forms of classical Greek to understand Koine Greek which got us into an interesting discussion on just understanding idioms. How many idioms that we have in English that we don't understand their origin, but in modern 20^th century English we know the meaning of the idiom? For example, if you say kicked the bucket, do you know where that came from? Well, there are some people who think that kicking the bucket had to do with somebody who was getting hung, and they'd stand them up on a bucket and hang 'em. But there is an old English word that came over from the French that sounds like bucket. It became bucket. If you look in some old like 17^th, 16^th century English dictionaries the word bucket had another meaning. That was a beam, a cross-beam. At a butcher shop when they would kill an animal and hang it upside down in its death throws the feet would kick the bucket, meaning kick the beam. That was in its final death throes. But we use that phrase kick the bucket, raining cats and dogs, and all kinds of other idioms that have their origin in the 13^th or 14^th century maybe even earlier and we don't even understand what they mean etymologically and all of that history. But do we have to understand Elizabethan English or Middle English or any of that in order to be able to understand those idioms? Not at all, because the idiom itself has its own distinct meaning and that has been brought over into modern English. And we know what that means. So we have to be careful with how we handle these ancient languages and other cultures.

Now in light of this I want you to turn to a passage we will look at later on in tonight's lesson. In Matthew 21:33, Jesus gives a parable of two sons working.

^NKJ Matthew 21:33 " Hear another parable: There was a certain landowner who planted a vineyard and set a hedge around it, dug a winepress in it and built a tower. And he leased it to vinedressers and went into a far country.

So the owner of the vineyard leaves.

^NKJ Matthew 21:34 "Now when vintage-time drew near, he sent his servants to the vinedressers, that they might receive its fruit.

³⁵ "And the vine-growers took his slaves and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third.

Finally he sent his son. 

³⁷ "But afterward he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'

³⁸ "But when the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and seize his inheritance.'

Is he alive? See he's the heir and he's alive. This is Jewish culture. So I don't know where he got his information, but I think you demonstrate from the Scripture that it's not quite squared away. 

So we're in Hebrews 9-15. You don't need to turn there. This is just our touchstone for the doctrine of inheritance. Hebrews 9:15 in English translation says:

^NKJ Hebrews 9:15 And for this reason He

That is Jesus Christ.

is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called

That is believers, those who respond by faith alone in Christ alone. I'll repeat this. Maybe you'll catch it. This is one of those words that you'll find a lot of 4 and 5-point Calvinists will trap you on that the concept of being the called refers to the elect. The way the word is used in the Scripture is in two senses, one in terms of an open invitation of the gospel (That's how we would express it in modern language) to believers and unbelievers and the other is in response to those who respond to the call. They are the called. They are the ones who believe. So it's just a synonym for those who respond in faith.

may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

So once again Hebrews is focusing us on this important doctrine of inheritance. Now last week I went through the first 3 or so points. I started off with a key passage, Colossians 3:23-24 - the last phrase there, the last three lines.

^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.

Showing that inheritance in this verse speaks of this being given as a reward. A reward is for service. We also think of reward in other passages as a gift. So the real crux of the issue is trying to understand inheritance in terms of some places it is a gift, some places it is a reward. How are we to understand inheritance? 

I looked at the basic Greek words. The whole word group kleronomos, kleronomeo, kleronomia - these are the Greek words. Just like the Hebrew they have that same concept of possession or ownership, not just the death of someone who's passing on property but the core idea of ownership. The two Hebrews words are nahala for inheritance, heritage or possession and yarash to take possession of something, to dispossess, to inherit it, disinherit. It has a wide range of meaning. Both of these have at the very core this idea of possession or ownership of something. Now one of the reasons this is important in Hebrews is because this word group kleronomos based on kleronomos is used 9 times in the book of Hebrews (one form of the word or another), which tells us that this is a major focal point in Hebrews. It's about challenging these Jewish believers who are tempted to just bail out on the Christian life because their under persecution, they're under rejection from their friends and family.

The writer of Hebrews is challenging them not to give up because there is a reward, an inheritance: don't be like that Exodus generation that was not allowed to enter into the Promised Land because of their disobedience so they lost the realization of their inheritance. They were still saved. They were still part of God's people, but they lost that realization of what God had promised them. Point 1 was just nomenclature. 

Point 2 dealt with our position in Christ, which for us is the center point for us. Christ is the heir of all things. Now remember this because where we're headed (I don't know if we'll get there tonight. I hope we do) is the passage in Romans 8:17-17 that we are joint heirs with Christ. So Christ is he heir of all things and that passage talks about being joint heirs with Christ. How does that come together for us? 

Hebrews 1:2 is our key passage there. 

^NKJ Hebrews 1:2 has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;

So He is an heir even before He comes. That's a point we'll get from Matthew 21:33, the passage we just looked at when the Son came to the vineyard He was an heir before He came. He wasn't an heir after He came. So His position is because of who He is, not because of what He did.

Third, Christ's inheritance is based on His successful completion of His strategic victory on the cross. The realization of that comes from His successful completion of His mission.

Then the fourth point that we looked at is the Jesus Christ is qualified because He was impeccable in His humanity. He learns obedience through the things that He suffered, goes through the same process that we go through. That is where I ended last time.

Hebrews 2:10, 5:8 are two key passages that talk about the fact that God had to mature the Lord Jesus Christ through suffering. In His humanity He goes through the same process that we go through in learning to be obedient. Learning to be obedient doesn't mean that you're disobedient in the process. But He is learning in His humanity that God supplies the need. God strengthens Him so that later when He is in His ministry He has the spiritual maturity to handle that which He faces. Those four points we covered last time.

5. His spiritual growth qualified Him for His inheritance, Psalm 2:8, Hebrews 1:2 tying those together. Because of that spiritual growth He is qualified for the inheritance – Psalm 2:8. This is that great Christological Psalm. God the Father is speaking.

^NKJ Psalm 2:8 Ask of Me, and I will give You The nations for Your inheritance,

Now what this points out is that as the Son the heir of all things that we saw in Hebrews 1:2 relates to that Jesus Christ is going to become the ruler of planet earth and the ruler of the universe. He is going to be given the nations as His inheritance. Now when does that happen? It happens in Revelation 4 and 5. We studied the whole scene there in the heavens when the Lamb of God comes forward to take the scroll. That is when He is being given the nations as His inheritance. The breaking of those seven seals on the scroll is the Lamb of God taking dominion over the planet during that 7-year period culminating in His return at the Second Coming. 

So the Father says:

And the ends of the earth for Your possession.

Now here we have a second word that's used. It's not a word that's used for inheritance. It is a word that is restricted to the idea of possession. But notice how it is used in synonymous parallelism with the word inheritance. Remember in Hebrew poetry they don't rhyme words; they mirror ideas, especially in this kind of parallelism. You have other kinds of parallelism. But in this kind of parallelism the first line is synonymous with the next line.  So here we understand that the core idea of inheritance is possession, not necessarily the death of the one preceding.

6. Our heirship is based on adoption, sonship. So that is the believer's basis for each of us. We are adopted into God's royal family at the instant of salvation. That's one of those 40 things that God does for us at the instant of salvation. We are instantly adopted into God's royal family and we are given special privileges and power because of our position in Christ. Ephesians is loaded with this, as is Colossians. These are some of the great truths that we have as believers is our unique position in Jesus Christ. So our inheritance is related to that position in Jesus Christ. The passages that we're going to look at are Galatians 3:29 and 4:1. 

In Galatians 3:29 Paul says:

^NKJ Galatians 3:29 And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. 

So we are heirs according to promise, and that promise goes all the way back to Abraham when God promised him that through him all nations would be blessed. It is to Abraham and his faith in God that Paul goes to in Romans 4. It talks about that we justified by faith just as Abraham was justified by faith.  So we are Abraham's descendents spiritually, not physically. That's what he's talking about here. You belong to Christ and you are Abraham's descendents because you have followed Abraham in his faith in God, which is the basis for justification. 

Then Galatians 4:1. Now we're going to come back as we go through these points we're going to see that the Scriptures that we go to fall in clumps.  Galatians 3, Galatians 4, especially the first 6 verses, is one solid clump. Another clump that we'll go to is in Romans, and a couple of other clumps that we'll go to that give us information on inheritance. So Galatians 4:1:

^NKJ Galatians 4:1 Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all,

See he's talking about as a child he hasn't reached adulthood yet. Paul is talking about the fact that now as Church Age believers we are huios sons. We are adult sons that are adopted. That gives us special privileges.

So there are stages here. That's the main point, but our position in Christ is the issue.

The second set of verses are the fun ones. In Romans 8 we have a focus on the role of the Holy Spirit in the believer's life. Romans 6, 7 and 8 describe the believer's spiritual life. It's sanctification. Romans 1, 2 and the first part of 3 describe the fact that every human being is under condemnation because we're all sinners. First of all it talks about Gentiles. It talks about Jews. Then we have a summary that is quoting from the Old Testament that there are none righteous, no not one. Then we get into God's solutions starting in the middle of chapter 3. God's solution has to do with justification, Romans 3, Romans 4 talks about justification. Romans 5 is reconciliation. But Romans 6 we move from what we would call phase 1 salvation to phase 2 salvation, which is spiritual growth. So everything in Romans 6, 7 and 8 relates to that. Romans 6 talks about the challenge that we need to recognize and reckon ourselves to be dead to sin because of our position in Christ that when we trust Christ as our savior we are baptized into Christ, identified with Him in His death, burial, and resurrection so that the tyranny of the sin nature is broken. 

So now Romans 10:11. 

^NKJ Romans 6:11 Likewise you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We are now bondservants of the Lord Jesus Christ. Then Romans 7 comes along and gives us Paul's whole struggle: "I don't do the things I want to do; I do the things I really don't want to do. Woe is me. I'm a terrible sinner. I can't fulfill what God wants me to do." No mention of the Holy Spirit in Romans 6. No mention of the Holy Spirit in Romans 7. All of a sudden we get to Romans 8 and it's about the Spirit. That's because what God is showing here is the positional reality in Romans 6 that we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin. How do we do that? Is it sort of a bootstrap spirituality where we suck it up and we say, "I'm going to enforce a rigid morality on myself that I'm not going to do what I shouldn't do?" 

Well, that's what Paul tried in Romans 7 and it didn't work, because when man is trying to do it from his own resources; he can't fulfill the Christian life because the Christian life is a supernatural way of life. We just can't do it on our own. We can only do it by means of the Holy Spirit. So Paul brings the Holy Spirit in Romans 8. So Romans 8 is focused on God the Holy Spirit. We come down to about Romans 8:16 and he talks about some of the ministries of God the Holy Spirit to each believer. In verse 15 he ties it to adoption.

^NKJ Romans 8:15 For you did not receive the spirit of bondage

See in Romans 6 born bond slaves to sin. We are slaves to sin. We are in bondage to sin. There is nothing you could do before you were saved other than follow the dictates of the sin nature whether that involved morality or immorality, rather that involved doing relative good or sin. All you could do was the sin nature. That's it. You didn't have any other nature. There's nothing else going on. All you can do is do something that's generated by the flesh. But once you're saved that bondage to the sin nature, that tyranny, is broken so that Paul can say that we are no longer to serve the sin nature; but we are to serve Christ.

Now Romans 8:15

again to fear,

You're not back under that same yoke to the sin nature.

but you received the Spirit of adoption

That's the Holy Spirit. We get the Holy Spirit with our adoption into God's royal family. We'll see that the Holy Spirit is given to us as the pledge to our position and our future destiny at salvation. He is the seal that we are given as a pledge to that future destiny. 

by whom we cry out, "Abba, Father."

Abba in the Hebrew (same as in Aramaic) - Ab is the Hebrew for father. That's the Ab. Then the last ba is the diminutive. It's a term of endearment. It is like daddy. The Ab is father. Abba is daddy. It is a term indicating a very close relationship that we have with the Father. Then verse 16 goes on to say:

^NKJ Romans 8:16 The Spirit Himself

That is the Holy Spirit

bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,

Now how does that "bearing witness to our spirit" take place? It is not verbal audible communication. It is not even a vibration or rosy glow or anything of the other things that people say. It is that sense of assurance of salvation. Now that doesn't mean that everybody recognizes that right away. But the Holy Spirit is doing that, communicating that with out human spirit that we receive at regeneration that we are children of God. The word that's used for children there isn't the word for a small child but the word teknon, which can refer to a small child or an older adolescent. But it's focusing on the fact that we are members of God's royal family. 

Then we get into a train of logic. 

^NKJ Romans 8:17 and if children,

So the first premise is that we're saved so the Holy Spirit bears witness to us that we are adopted children of God. That would be if and it's true, first class condition. 

then heirs -- heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.

Now the problem that we have in this is it looks like if we're children, we are both heirs of God and fellow heirs or joint heirs with Christ as if those are fully true for every believer from the point of adoption on. The problem we run into is a problem that is generated by that next "if". That next if is a third class condition – "if we suffer with Him". Well, maybe we will and maybe we won't. If we don't suffer with Him, does that mean we lose our salvation? We're not heirs of God?

What's going on here? Well we have to understand that this is a matter of punctuation. In the original Greek manuscripts there's no punctuation. They don't even have spaces between words. You take a look at some of the codexes in some of the unctuals where it's all capital letters, and they run together. There are no commas. They don't have rules of hyphenation like we have where you hyphenate between syllables. When you run out of space on the line, you just start the next line with whatever letter's next. So it looks like one long run on sentence. The brilliance of Greek is that the grammar and punctuation is embedded in the grammar. That's why Greek grammar is so important because it helps us to understand where the thought structure is and how to understand the thought of the writer. So we look at this in the English and we see that the English translators put a hyphen or a dash after the first heirs – heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, and then a comma. Now I think this is the New American Standard. Different translations will put the commas in a couple of different places.

"heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ". 

Now that punctuation makes it look as if heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ are synonymous. Then they would both be conditioned by the "if" clause, the conditional particle there that we're only heirs of God and joint heirs of Christ if we suffer with Him. This is the problem that you get into when you don't know what the punctuation is. 

I'm going to give you a little exercise here. This is the night for having pop quizzes and congregational involvement. So I want you to look at this first sentence. There's no punctuation there. I want you to think about how that should be punctuated.  Some of you have heard me do this before.  It's a great illustration.

Woman without her man is nothing.

Those are the words. Now women will often punctuate it this way.

Woman, without her, man is nothing.

So the subject is – you're talking about the man and that if he doesn't have a good woman, that he's just nothing. But that looks at that sentence and sees your main clause as "man is nothing."

Men on the other hand will put the commas in a slightly different place. They'll take the first comma out. It becomes:

Woman without her man, is nothing. 

So now what you have is woman is nothing. That becomes your main clause. She is nothing because she doesn't have a good man. So just the addition or subtraction of a comma can completely change the meaning of the sentence. The commas and the periods and the quotation marks and the colons and the semi-colons that you have in your English Bibles aren't inspired. Those are added by translators based on their understanding of the grammar of the Greek.  There is no objectivity there. I mean you don't appeal to some sort of objective grammar and go "Okay, I'm going to look at Blass-Debruner-Funk paragraph 95, subparagraph 3 and that's going to tell me exactly how to punctuate that. It just doesn't work that way.

Sometimes you compare Scripture with Scripture. You look at it and say, "Well, if I punctuate this way it would mean that. Then that would contradict this verse over here in Peter. Well, that may not be right." 

So you go to the second option. That's how you work with translations. But if your theology is skewed to begin with, then that shapes how you translate. I used to not understand this.

The key speaker we're going to have this year at the Pastor's Conference during the day is Dr. Robert Thomas. Dr. Thomas is a great old curmudgeon. He's been teaching Greek for almost 50 years. I think in 1961 he received his Doctorate of Theology from Dallas Seminary was the first full time faculty member hired by Talbot Seminary which was the seminary graduate school of Biola, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, back when they were all pretty solid. In the 80's when John MacArthur took over the old Los Angeles Baptist College and renamed it Master's College and Seminary, by then Talbot was already beginning to drift. A lot of their better faculty shifted and moved up to the Masters College and Seminary. Bob Thomas was one of those who went up there.  He's written numerous articles and technical theological journals. I've always benefitted from him. He's got one of the finest technical two volume commentaries on Revelation. I don't always agree with him. He takes some positions I think are more sympathetic to lordship, but he never goes there. He never talks about that subject. So I have no idea where he stands on that. But he's very good. He came out with a book a couple of years ago called Evangelical Hermeneutics. I think it was published about 2002 or 2003. That's what he's going to be talking about at the conference. 

As I was reading through one of his chapters on translation theory, I came to understand something I hadn't realized before.  He said, "It's not the job of the translator to solve the ambiguities in the Greek."

Now see most of us because you've listened to pastors who teach like I teach and get into the Greek and Hebrew and retranslate, we tend to come to the Scripture and say, "Why didn't they translate it that way?"

According to Thomas the role of the translator is that if it's ambiguous in the Greek, it should be left ambiguous in the English so that the pastor can interpret it from the pulpit. Well, that's good because translations are going to be used by people of different denominations and they are translated by men who come from different theological persuasions. When you get pastors who are using what's called the dynamic equivalent method of translation…let me see. 

Let's explain this terminology. You have two ways of looking at language. You have what would be a formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Charlie is going to speak on a subject at the conference dealing with language and hermeneutics. He talked about this at the Pre-Trib Conference so those of us who went to that are looking forward to hearing him a second time so that maybe we'll understand him. 

But it's a critical topic on language because language has to convey meaning. What we find today is that students don't think language can convey meaning. I was talking with Tommy not long ago and he said first of all he never gets anybody in his classes that has ever been exposed to the kind of teaching that we do. They've never heard anything like it before. Most of them get to where they like it. 

"We can really learn that much from the Scripture? We can rally do that with the language?"

But there are always two or three who've been influenced by postmodernism and they don't think that language can bear that burden. So how can we really say that we can learn from it and that it really means that?"

I said, "Well you can always say that you don't understand what they're saying because their words can't convey any meaning."

He says, "Yeah, I tried that but they always try to get around that."

So when we look at language, we have to figure out how to translate from one language to another? If you've ever studied languages or if you can fluently speak another language, you know that you can translate a phrase or sentence in a very rigid almost word-for-word manner into another language and if you're real rigid it may not even make sense when you bring it over into the translation. So there's always a sense in which you have to add a certain movement towards that dynamic side to communicate. But then you can also translate something in a very idiomatic way that's almost like street vernacular. You get the same idea but you lose a lot. The more you move in the dynamic equivalence direction, the more the translator is adding ideas and nuances to the meaning of the text. The point is that when it gets done it may not bear any resemblance whatsoever to what you read in the New King James Version for example. A good example is a Bible out there called The Message. It almost gets to the point of a paraphrase, but it's not quite a paraphrase. A paraphrase would be like the old Living Bible that Ken Taylor, Dallas Seminary grad, did back in the 50's. I think there is a good place for a paraphrase like the Living Bible, not for study. But if you don't know anything about the Bible and it's something that's pretty foreign to you, you never heard of Jacob or Esau or Melchizedek or Solomon or Ahithophel or any of these people, then to read a paraphrase can really orient you to the flow of the Bible to the who, what, when, where and why. 

I remember I read a paraphrase digest thing that came out based on the Living Bible back in about '73 and when I got through I said, "Now I kind of understand what the Old Testament's about." 

But you wouldn't want to use it for a study Bible. It is a paraphrase. Ken Taylor did the Living Bible as a way to read the Bible to his 4, 5 or 6 year old children and to take the words of the Bible in the King James (because that's all there was back in the '50's) and take that and put it into a paraphrase in modern English and then read it so his kids could understand it. There's a place for that. But it's not a translation. You wouldn't want to study that way. 

So when you get into a lot of these modern translations, they operate on a much more dynamic equivalence viewpoint, like the New International Version. You have places like I Corinthians 3 where Paul says:

^NKJ 1 Corinthians 3:1 And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ.

It's sarkanos in the Greek which is the word based on flesh, sarxz. The NIV translates it worldly. See he is taking the words for the flesh and he's interpreted that to mean worldliness. It's not a translation anymore. So it's more like his commentary, not a translation. Wayne House calls it the New International Commentary. There's a lot of truth to that. That's the problem you get into. Translators shouldn't be reading their theology into their translation. They should leave the ambiguities there. So that's where you get into problems with punctuation.

Now Romans 8:17 if you translate it with a comma after God. (You can see that. I put a yellow comma after God) and you take out the comma after Christ; then now you have two different heirships. You have one heirship of God that is related to our adoption. That is the unconditional inheritance. Every believer receives that eternal inheritance that every believer receives at the instant of salvation where we have eternal life. We are going to be resurrected. We're going to have no more pain, no more sorrow, no more tears, the old things have passed away. So things that are in common for every single believer are part of our being an heir of God. 

But that next phrase "joint heir with Christ" is qualified by this conditional clause - "if we suffer with Him." Now suffering with Jesus is not a condition for salvation. 

Jesus didn't say, "Believe on Me and suffer with Me and I'll give you eternal life." 

Now He says things like "take up your cross daily and follow Me." That's where Lordship salvation advocates gets messed up because they think that discipleship qualifications are salvation qualifications. That confuses the reward passages with the gift passages. So you have some things that are given as a free gift with the salvation passage at phase 1 that are yours forever that cannot be taken away from you. But there are other things that God will give on condition of spiritual growth, on condition of other aspects of the spiritual life. 

That's what Romans 8:17 does. You split the two apart - two types of heirs – heirs of God on the one hand, joint heirs with Christ on the other hand. Joint heir with Christ is related to ruling and reigning with Him in the Millennial Kingdom and eternity future. It is based upon pursuing the spiritual life the same way Christ did. 

We go back to the verse we looked at earlier in Hebrews.

^NKJ Hebrews 2:10 For it was fitting for Him,

That is God the Father. 

for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

^NKJ Hebrews 5:8 though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.

That doesn't have anything to do with salvation. That has to do with His spiritual growth process going through the adversity of living in the devil's world and living with sinners.

So now when we follow that same process of going through suffering and responding by the application of God's Word and so growth ensues in our spiritual life, then that is suffering with Him. This isn't talking about suffering with Him in terms of the suffering that occurs during the night before the crucifixion, that early morning and on the cross. This is talking about the whole panorama of the suffering Christ went through as a human being living in a fallen world, living with fallen creatures. We're going to encounter adversity no matter what. So those are the two categories of inheritance.

7. So heirship then means to share the destiny of Christ. He has an eternal destiny and we share it as we share His election. The "we" there refers to the body of Christ. That is the destiny of the corporate body of Christ although because of failure in the spiritual life there will be some believers who will not have or experience all the rewards and all the blessings that they would have if they had pursued the spiritual life. This is important because this brings us back down to reality every single day when we face every single situation in life that every decision, every response has to do with where we are headed in training. 

Going back to what I talked about the other night in terms of mental discipline – teaching ourselves, training ourselves to think in terms of all the situations I am going through in life are designed to prepare me for the future. Sometimes I'm going to win some. Sometimes I am going to fail. Sometimes it feels like I fail a whole lot more that I ought to or that I should. It's up to God to sort it all-out. He knows when we are walking by the Spirit and when we're not. We can't evaluate this on our own.

So a couple of passages here that relate this to the believer: Ephesians 1:11 as well I Peter 1:3.

Ephesians 1:11 says:

^NKJ Ephesians 1:11 In Him also we have obtained an inheritance,

That's for every believer. "We have obtained" – the church. Every believer in Jesus Christ at the instant of salvation is automatically a member of the universal church

being predestined according to the purpose of Him

Now don't get hung up on the word predestined. Predestined simply means that there is a destiny or a target or a goal. Predestined means that before time began God established the destiny of every believer and that destiny is to be like Christ and to share in His kingdom. So we are to share that.

who works all things according to the counsel of His will,

Then, 1 Peter 1:3 - that's another one of those key passages. I Peter 1 really focuses on this whole idea of inheritance and what God has given us.

^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 to

See how directional that is? We're born again. That's past. That's what happened in our past when we trusted Christ as Savior. We're born again to something in the future.

a living hope through

A living hope, not a dead hope. See it's related to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  When He was resurrected He goes into phase 3. He's glorified. That's related to our hope. It's our future expectation. So we're caused to be born again to a living hope. 

the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

So that brings us then to what I'll try to cover it in about 5 minutes. That's Christ's heirship. What exactly is Christ's heirship? What is this that He is the heir of? He's appointed heir of all things. How does that come out of the Scripture? First of all, He's called heir because of who He is and not because of what He did. He qualifies for the inheritance because of what He did, but He is the heir because of what He did. Now that takes us back to that passage that I looked at earlier in Matthew 21. I'm not exegeting or going through the whole passage because that would take us far afield of the point I want to make. The simple point is in Matthew 21 when we get down to verse 38:

^NKJ Matthew 21:38 "But when the vinedressers saw the son, they said among themselves,

See, He's alive. He's already the heir. When He comes He's the heir. He's not the heir because of what He does, but who He is. 

'This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.'

Now of course in the parable the son is analogous to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the first thing we understand. The heirship is because of who He is, not what He did.

The second thing we note comes out of a passage in Psalm 8:3 compared to Hebrews 2:5. The second thing we note is the role of the Son in relation to creation. David writes in the Psalm: 

^NKJ Psalm 8:3 When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,

^NKJ Psalm 8:4 What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?

All David is saying is the term "son of man" here isn't a technical term for the Son of Man. It's just another variation to say a human being. What David is saying when you look at the vastness of the universe, the size and scope of the starry skies, the solar system and everything (He didn't have a telescope. He couldn't have comprehended as much as we can) When you look at the vast immensity of the universe, man is just a tiny, tiny little speck. Why are we so important? What is it about humanity and the human race that is so significant that the universe somehow is placed under the authority of man so that man's decisions impact the universe? They don't just impact the Love Canal up in New York. They don't just impact the Hudson River. They don't just impact the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of California. I mean that's just piddly stuff that these ecologists want to come up with. Man's decisions are much more damaging than that. What occurred when Adam sinned reverberated (fractured) the universe so that so that we live in a fallen universe that doesn't function at all like it did before that. 

In physics there are two laws of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics states that matter is neither created nor destroyed. That law doesn't come into effect until after the creation week when God creates energy. The second law of thermodynamics states that all energy is moving toward a state of entropy, or it's going from a state of being usable to a state of being non-usable. But it's not destroyed. It's just not usable. This is one of the great arguments against evolution because if matter is neither created nor destroyed that means that – or energy is not created or destroyed - that means there is only a finite infinite amount of energy. And if energy is running down and if the universe has been around for an infinite amount time, then we ran out of gas a long time ago. See what I'm saying? If you start out with a finite amount, it's going to run down by now. So there has got to be a starting point and we haven't run out of energy yet. That second law comes into effect at the fall when everything begins to deteriorate. Man begins to age. I mean you have progression of time. You didn't have aging. You didn't have all of those things that are a result of sin. So the second law of thermodynamics comes into effect then. 

But man is created to rule over the universe and his very decisions changed the nature of the universe.

Now in verse 5 David says:

^NKJ Psalm 8:5 For You have made him

That is man. 

a little lower than the angels,

Now the Septuagint translates elohim there as angels. The word there in the Hebrew is elohim and elohim has a range of meaning. Normally we think of God. 

^NKJ Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

But elohim can also be little gods or just heavenly beings. It can refer even to human beings as lords, as those in authority. So in the Septuagint the rabbis understood that this was heavenly beings, angels. And that's how it's translated when it's quoted in Hebrews 2.

And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

That's where we're headed.

^NKJ Psalm 8:6 You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet,

So man is to rule over everything. Planet earth is the center of the universe. It's the command station of the universe. Man's decisions are the issue. There's not some other race out there that somehow seeded the planet like we heard the other night when we watched Expelled. Man was made to rule. 

This is picked up in Hebrews 2. Hebrews 2:7-9 applies this to Jesus Christ that He is the man who ultimately fulfills all of this as the second Adam. That's His heirship. He's going to be put in charge of everything so that this human being who ascends to the right hand of God the Father becomes the controller of the universe as a man, as a human being at the right hand of God the Father. Hebrews 2:8 applies this quote. 

^NKJ Hebrews 2:8 You have put all things in subjection under his feet." For in that He put all in subjection under him, He left nothing that is not put under him. But now we do not yet see all things put under him.

It hasn't happened yet. 

^NKJ Hebrews 2:9 But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels,

Namely, Jesus as the ultimate man, the Second Adam. 

for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.

So when you compare these passages dealing with Jesus as the heir before time began, that man was created to rule over the universe even though he's created initially lower than the angels. This is fulfilled in Christ. That's what inheritance in Christ means. It's rulership as God intended man to rule over the works of His hands.

Now next time I'll come back, we'll review that briefly and then we'll go into the next section which talks about inheritance as both a present reality and a future possession where we'll get into 1 Peter 1:4-5. 

Illustrations