Qualities of a Divine Inheritance!

Qualities of a Divine Inheritance!
An inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade - kept in heaven for you. (1 Peter 1:4)
THE CORROSIVE ACTION OF UNBELIEF in our day has worn down the Christian hope of heaven until there seems to be very little joy and expectation concerning the eternal inheritance which God has promised.
I think we have a right to be startled by the thought that very few people really believe in heaven any more. Oh, we may hear a hillbilly with a guitar singing about heaven in a way that would make an intelligent man turn away from the thought of such a heaven. But, for the most part, we do not think about heaven very often and we talk about it even less!
Two men in our human history have had great influence upon modern man's general thinking in regard to heaven and the universe. I refer to Copernicus and Einstein.
Geocentric thinking
Before Copernicus, men were geocentric in their thinking. They considered the earth to be everything and the center of everything. This was largely man's concept - "God made the earth and put it here and everything revolves around it. It is solid and fixed. God has nailed it down and established the foundations and there is nothing that can change that."
But along came Copernicus and, willing to risk his life as a heretic, proved that the earth does not stand still and it is not nailed down. As an astronomer he insisted that the sun, not the earth, is the center of the universe and the sun only seems to stand in the earth's motion. The sun, in fact, moves in a wider orbit, a faster and all but limitless orbit out yonder through the vast, vast space.
So that knowledge filtered down from the scientists into the colleges and then into the high schools and from the grade schools onto the street. Everyone knows it and accepts it now, with this common question resulting: "What about this heaven idea?"
There was a day when heaven was right "up there" and the stars were its peepholes. You could look up and see a bit of the light of the glory that was never on land or sea.
But now, the idea that heaven is actually a place is something to laugh about, for men have allowed new ideas and information about the universe to act like a corrosive in wearing down their belief in heaven.
The second man to whom I refer was Einstein who came along with his theories and statements of relativity. He not only took out the earth but he took out the sun and the stars and everything, insisting that nothing is actually fixed or established anywhere. It was his theory that nothing is standing still - everything is in motion. Everything exists only in relation to something else. There is not one thing against which you can measure something else and conclude, "That's it!" This can go on ad infinitum, world without end, and there is nothing absolutely fixed, according to Einstein.
I do not know about you, but I get to a certain point with the theories of scholarship where I am inclined to say: "Oh, rest my long-divided heart, fixed on this blissful center, rest!"
There is a place where neither Copernicus nor Einstein troubleth and I am able to rest in the wisdom and love of God, who made all of these whirling planets and the worlds which are within the worlds!
Science should not erode faith in heaven
Personally, I do not see why the idea of relativity or the motions of the heavenly bodies should destroy or erode the Christian's faith in heaven as a place. If God could create an earth and put a race on it, why could He not create another home and put a redeemed race on it?
Perhaps it can be attributed to my small mind and untroubled intellect, but I do not have the problem that some people have in giving God that much credit - that if He would make the earth a race of humans, He could surely make another place and call it heaven and put on it a race that has been redeemed. This is very simple for me!
So Copernicus and Einstein can lie down with their follies and they won't bother me at all. But I do realize they have taken away the idea and reality of heaven from many people.
Some are saying, "Heaven is just another dimension, let's not try to figure it out." Still others say that heaven is a state of mind having to do entirely with life here upon the earth.
All of our human reasoning which does not take the Word of God into account is simply the artful dodging of unbelief. I still believe that the God who made earth and put people here can make heaven to be the habitation of His redeemed people. Do you?
Incorruptible, undefiled and unfading
Perhaps in our churches we have not adequately taught the qualities of the divine inheritance which awaits the children of God. Let us look now at three words used by Peter to describe the qualities of our heavenly inheritance and note that they are precisely the qualities that belong to our heavenly inheritance through Christ Jesus our Lord.
These are the words he uses: incorruptible, undefiled and unfading. These are the inherent qualities of our heavenly legacy. These are part of it and they describe it. They do not define it, but they are the qualities that belong to our heavenly inheritance through Christ Jesus our Lord.
I think we must come to this point in our faith concerning God's great future plans for His children: to believe that the things of God and heaven are not simply an upward projection of our imagination of the very best that we have or can know or can imagine in this world. Actually, they are contrary to the things of earth because of their heavenly qualities - incorruptible, undefiled and unfading!
According to the meaning in the Greek language, our word incorruptible expresses the quality of undecaying in essence and endless in years. That which cannot be corrupted is undecaying in essence and, I suppose, only secondarily endless in years.
I ask you if there is anything on this earth that can properly and accurately be described as incorruptible, that does not decay in its essence and is endless in its sphere?
Our Lord Jesus said, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal" (Matthew 6:19). Now, those were not the words of a defeatist.
I know that we Christians are often charged with being defeatists. Psychologists will tell you that the black man in the South sings so beautifully about heaven and the golden streets because he has owned only a wooden shack. Therefore, in his mind he is trying to create for himself what his master possessed in the slave days, and that is his idea of heaven.
Similarly, they tell us now that heaven is the dream of those who are defeated and unhappy - a dream of a happy, happy land where no one needs to wipe away a tear.
Well, that would explain everything except for the small matter that it is not true. Our Lord Jesus Christ was not a defeatist. He did not suffer as they said Abraham suffered. Because Lincoln pitied people, the experts surmise that he suffered from a "glandular deficiency."
Not a defeatist
Our Lord Jesus Christ had no such deficiency and He was not a defeatist. On the other hand, He certainly was not a silly optimist. Neither did He have any of the gloomy, heavy-hearted pessimism that has characterized a great many of this world's thinkers.
Jesus saw everything clearly and in a true light! If there ever existed in the wide world a man who earned the right to be called a realist, Jesus Christ was that man.
It was all real to Him. He never shaded one edge of anything to bring something else into relief. He saw everything exactly as it was and described it and spoke of it exactly as it was.
Jesus Christ was the world's most perfect realist because He Himself was Truth!
Therefore, He was neither dreaming of some heaven that He had never seen, nor was He projecting His imagination upward away from the grief and miseries of this world to some lovely heaven, some mansion which was being prepared.
He spoke of things as they were and as they will be found to be. He spoke of all of man's treasures and warned that moth and rust will corrupt. He said corruption is an earthly reality and it is futile for a man to put his trust in the vanity of the corruptible things which he may possess.
Oh, what a cheat the devil is! What a deceiver and what a confidence man he is!
I think of the cheating devil when I think of the sly confidence men who have sold the Brooklyn Bridge to poor people, grinning as they have taken their last dollar, leaving them to find out too late that the Brooklyn Bridge was never on the market.
The devil is a liar, I say, and a deceiver. He is busy leading people to spend the best years of their lives laying up treasures for themselves, which even before they die will begin to rust and rot and decay.
Incorruptible is a word that cannot be applied to any earthly thing. There is nothing that we can know down here that is undecaying in its essence and endless in its years. But there is an inheritance which Jesus Christ the realist, Jesus Christ the heavenly one, came to give to His believing saints.
The resurrection
All of this leads on to the resurrection. This word incorruptible used to describe a quality of our inheritance is the very same word describing the state of the dead who are to rise up at the coming of Jesus Christ.
In one of our great Christian anthems, the singers declare with great feeling: "The dead shall be raised incorruptible!" That is exactly the same word describing the glorified human body that Peter used to describe the heavenly inheritance of the saints.
It cannot decay. It cannot be corrupted.
As a human being, I must think of what Job said in the Old Testament about the human prospect. Weary, sick and tired, Job said that he knew that the skin worms would devour his body. In spite of the fact that I like to spend my time thinking along more pleasant lines, I am well aware that the forces and elements that will devour our bodies in the grave are already at work in our physical bodies.
But God Himself has promised that there will be a day when those worms will be no more. God will shake them loose and He will say: "Let him alone. Let him alone forever!" The Bible says that the children of God will be raised with incorruptible bodies.
Incorruptible - without decay and endless in years! That is why I have said that this quality describing our heavenly inheritance is precisely the quality that distinguishes it from all earthly things.
The second quality
For the second quality of our inheritance, Peter uses the word undefiled.
The question we must ask ourselves immediately is this: What earthly treasure do any of us possess that is safe from defilement?
The Bible has very few kind things to say about money and earthly possessions and it is most frank in its expressions against the heaping up of treasures.
The Bible mentions lucre, describing money and profit and earthly gain, and then drops in a startling and descriptive adjective to make it "filthy lucre."
The Apostle Paul, who was not a defeatist and was not compelled to rationalize his poverty, had given up a prominent position to become a follower of Jesus Christ. He wrote that the love of money is a root from which evil springs. He did not single out money itself, but he spoke of an attitude and condition of a man's heart that could put his greed and selfishness and love of money above everything else. We should note, too, that Paul did not insist that all evil springs from the love of money, but said that love of money is one of the roots from which evil springs.
Now, money and every other thing that we have in this world are defiled and have been defiled. A saint of God may own and possess certain things, but they rarely come to him without having been defiled.
You may have a ten-dollar bill folded in your wallet which you intend to give to the missionary cause. There is always a possibility that those dollars were once a part of a wad paid to someone to commit a murder. Or, it could easily have been part of a purse of money handed out in a gambling den or a scandalous brothel.
It has always seemed to me that the very smell of the currency we pass around indicates where it has been. It smells like itself - as though it could tell its own story of crime and violence and immorality!
Must keep ourselves clean
Brethren, we keep ourselves clean in the midst of human defilement because we know the cleansing power of the blood of Christ, our Savior! It is not morally wrong for us to have money for our needs, but we ought to guard our own spirits against defilement by virtue of the washing of the blood of Christ.
There is an element of defilement upon everything in this lost world. The very lot upon which your house now stands once belonged to an Indian tribe, and history is very plain in recounting the sad story. We white men came and without any payment in kind kicked the Indians out to the western sea. We put them on little lice-infested reservations and tossed them a pittance from year to year, trying to salve our consciences!
On the other hand, historians and anthropologists also tell us that the Indians we abused and chased out had in a previous time invaded the land and taken it from a race that preceded them.
It is the same situation around the world. Go to the map of Europe and you will see how men have argued and fought for their borders, those flexible and changing borders.
Long ago I threw up my hands in confusion and said, "I will never be able to decide which nation owns what land over there." If we go back far enough in history, we will find those who have the land got it by invasion, by massacre, by murder. Then they had squatters' rights, forgetting how they seized it with the only payment being the blood of the people that owned it.
Almost everything is defiled
So, almost everything we touch in this life is defiled. Injustice and oppression run through everything. You know what I think about the devil-possessed origins of communism and its godless partisans who criticize our faith and our ideals and our way of life. But it is the human defilement on every hand which gives the communist his one lone weapon - because what he says about us is not all lies.
I am pained by the injustices in our society. I drive by the gleaming mansions and the stately lake shore hotels - and what do I think about?
I think about the poor, tired old women with their buckets and mops. Weary, often-defeated and disenchanted people - thankful for a small wage for a night's dreary work!
Drive down the coast of Florida and notice those graceful yachts floating at anchor. It is our natural inclination to think: "It must be fantastic to be in that bracket!"
But if you knew how much of iniquity there was wrought into one of those graceful things, you would never desire it for yourself!
Not a political comment
Emerson once said to a young man with political aspirations: "Young man, you want to be president? You want to go to the White House? Ah, if you only knew how much of his manhood that man had to sell out to get there, you wouldn't want it. If you only knew how he must obey those who stand erect behind the throne and tell him what to do, you wouldn't want it!"
I do not make this as a political comment. No matter which party is in office or what man is in office, it is true that everything is defiled all over the world.
Why? Because everything flows out of the human being and the human being is defiled. You cannot draw pure water from a defiled fountain. You cannot pluck sweet figs from a thorn tree. You cannot pick sweet grapes from a wild vine and you certainly cannot get edible chicken eggs from a buzzard.
Likewise, you cannot get pure treasures from impure hearts!
Before we leave this subject, I must make this observation: I do not go along with those who hold that every businessman is a crook. I want to say that I know there are men in public life who would scornfully turn their back on anything that is not honest and fair. I believe, particularly in the Christian faith, that it is possible to live a clean and upright life.
My point is this: because of humanity's lost and defiled condition, money and influence and power generally bear the taint and touch of defilement on them. This is in contrast to the believer's divine inheritance, pure and unsoiled.
So, we trace our inheritance back to its source. Because it flowed out of the pure, undefiled heart of Jesus Christ, it is as undefiled as He is, and He is the one who is described as holy and harmless and undefiled, separate from sinners.
It is unfading
The third quality of our eternal inheritance is that it fadeth not away. It is unfading!
Now, I refer you to your knowledge of this present world once again. Do you know of anything in this present world that can be described as unfading in quality or value?
In all of our larger cities, you can drive down certain streets and avenues and find clusters of old brownstone mansions. When they were built, they were the pride of the wealthy and the elite. They were a mark of social standing and of the so-called "blue bloods."
But the years have passed and the splendor of those mansions has faded away. In many places they are now shabby and in need of repair, often housing a dozen or more families of low income status.
The social royalty of a few generations ago has passed away. Though their names were in the Who's Who they didn't happen to know what's what! In their lifetime they would not have dreamed that those mansions would deteriorate, lose their value and, in effect, fade away.
That is the way it is with the things of this life.
A young man marries his bride today in her blushing womanhood. She is beautiful to behold. But a few years pass and she notices this human process that we call fading.
So, she scrambles off to the beauty parlor and the cosmetics counter and probably even to the pharmacist in the drug store; she feels she has to do something to prop up her fading beauty.
Also, I know lots of men who may not be concerned about their looks but they are supporting the druggists and the medicine houses because of an ulcer or a rheumatic pain; they realize their physical health is fading!
Old letters fade as do old books and other old things. Sometimes they can be restored for a price, but in another generation or two they will have to be restored again and each restoration means a fading.
The Bible plainly and clearly tells us that we are like the flower of the field that fadeth. Today it is and tomorrow it is cut down and is withered and gone.
I don't mind telling you that I am vitally interested in this inheritance which is reserved in heaven for us! As far as I am concerned, it is just as real as my right hand. I am satisfied with Peter's description of our future inheritance and his promise that we are kept by the power of God through faith unto that inheritance.
"Kept by the power of God through faith unto an inheritance"
Why does Peter speak of us in this way? Why didn't he speak of the inheritance itself as being kept?
No, he speaks of our inheritance and then plainly says, "We are kept by the power of God."
The answer
I think I have the answer.
It would be unthinkable if our inheritance was incorruptible and then we corrupted, wouldn't it?
It would be unthinkable if our inheritance was unfading and we ourselves faded.
It would be unthinkable if our treasure outlasted us and God found Himself in the embarrassing position of preparing unfading treasure for a people He could not keep to enjoy it!
Is God going to be caught in such an emotional tangle? Is God going to allow Himself to preserve an inheritance for a people whom He cannot preserve?
Never, never! Not while the world stands, for we are kept by the power of God through faith unto an inheritance reserved in heaven for us.
So, I am leaning back very strongly on the keeping power of God!
Now, finally, if you are being kept by the power of God, what kind of indications of that plan and of that power are being reflected in your daily life?
Peter has made it plain in this same passage: we are elect, begotten, obedient and believing!
That is the entire answer.
Elect - that is God's business and it was His business before we knew anything about it!
Begotten - that is God's business as we believe in His Son!
Obedient and believing - we who are kept by the power of God through faith unto an inheritance.
So there we are, friends - and as Christians, we are not only rich but nobly rich! Rich with riches which need no apology. Riches which have no taint of having come to us through defiled hands!
I wonder when we will begin to behave and to live on the level of our riches instead of acting like poverty-stricken creatures trying to crawl under a leaf so we will not be seen.
Let's let the world know how rich we really are! Let's tell it - we are being kept by the power of God unto an inheritance reserved in heaven for us!
That's the full-time business of the child of God!