Los Actores Públicos y Privados Involucrados en Materia de Saneamiento

God’s fatherhood is not a matter of imagery or typology but is a legal fact. By the adoption of grace, we have been made “Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). The promises to Abraham’s seed are for those who are faithful to the covenant with Abraham, i.e., those who are by faith sons of Abraham. Those who meet this “spiritual” requirement are promised far-reaching material blessings (Gen. 17:1-9). If we are sons of God by faith, we are “then an heir of God through Christ” (Gal. 4:7). We are “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together” (Rom. 8:17). The work of Christ makes us His joint heirs; our readiness to stand with Him and to suffer for His name’s sake marks us as true heirs. The inheritance is real because Christ’s work is real, and our membership in Him is real. Every aspect of the equation is real: to spiritualize away a part is to erode all.

Because God’s fatherhood is a legal fact, our heirship is a legal fact, and we have by virtue of it been called to serve God and to reclaim our lost inheritance. The fulness of the inheritance is in the new creation, but it cannot be deferred entirely to the end of time. Proverbs 13:22 declares, “A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children: and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.” Scott comments, “This seems to mean that only the just can leave an inheritance, and they also inherit from the wicked.”217

When the just stand fully and clearly on the whole word of God, they are indeed heirs of all things, but they cannot deny the law of God and be heirs under that law. We are commanded to seek “first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). To place priority on gaining wealth invites judgment: “An inheritance (or, estate) may be gotten hastily at the beginning; but the end thereof shall not be blessed” (Prov. 20:21).

The inheritance of believers is a total one: the Kingdom of God (Matt. 25:34; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; 15:50; Gal. 5:21; Eph. 5:5; James 2:5). They inherit the earth (Ps. 37:29; Matt. 5:5). They are heirs of salvation (Heb. 1:14), or a blessing (1 Pet. 3:9), of glory (Rom. 8:17-18), and of incorruption (1 Cor. 15:50).

To understand the meaning of inheritance, it is necessary to recognize that, in the biblical law structure, land and property belong to the family, not to the individual. There were thus no wills: the estate remained in the family, and the only question was thus whether or not the firstborn was to be passed over, as with Ishmael and Esau, because of unbelief or rebellion, and whether any others were to be cut off for the same reason. Excommunication was from the faith and the family.

Because property belongs to the family, to be with the father meant to hold the property. As our Lord declares, in the parable of the prodigal son, the father reminds the elder son, “Son, thou art

217 _{R. B. Y. Scott, The Anchor Bible: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes (Garden City, New York, NY: Doubleday, [1965]} 1974), 95.

ever with me, and all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31). To be with the father is to be a possessor here and now. This is a theological and legal fact.

To have a godly son was to have an inheritance from the Lord (Ps. 127:3), and God uses the same language concerning His sons: Ephesians 1:18 speaks of the saints as God’s inheritance. However important the later expanded inheritance, the fact of possession is an important one here and now. The Lord God has His covenant people as an inheritance, and the covenant people have the Lord and all the earth as an inheritance here and now. According to R. E. Nixon, “In the Old Testament there are two basic roots for inheritance, nahal and yaras. In each case the emphasis was much more upon possession generally than upon the process of succession, though this is not altogether absent.”218

However, it must be added that there is possession because there is a succession of faith, a covenantal succession.

God’s covenant requires faith and obedience, and the inheritance is conditional upon faith and obedience. This is clear throughout Scripture. Thus, in Leviticus 18:24-30, we read:

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spew not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spewed out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God.

First, it is clear that the defilement of sin is both personal and national. Both are alike made reprobate in the sight of God by the practice of loathsome offenses. Although these verses follow a catalogue of sexual offenses, the same judgment is pronounced on all sins. Second, the disinheritance is both personal and national. The timing of the judgment is in God’s hands, and His patience sometimes exceeds man’s comprehension. His patience, too, is in terms of His plans, and the judgment on Canaan was thus delayed until Israel was a numerous people and ready to utilize that land. Third, the disinheritance and judgment are both of God and of the earth itself, because of His providence and law. God speaks of casting out the Canaanites in His anger, and of their defilement. Sin defiles both the people and the land: “the land is defiled.” Creation, although fallen, is still God’s handiwork, and it rejects as alien all sin: it means a malfunctioning and a breakdown, and, even as the body works to heal and to cast out an infection, so the universe works to cast out sin. This is no less true of man: because man is not his own maker, his being is not only, in its fallen estate, in rebellion against God, but it is also in rebellion against

218 _{R. E. Nixon, “Inheritance,” in J. D. Douglas, ed., The New Bible Dictionary (Grand Rapids, MI.: William B.} Eerdmans Publishing Co., [1962] 1973), 562.

his own sin. When we sin against God, we also sin against ourselves, and we are at cross purposes with our own being. Fourth, sin not only disinherits us but also renders us unclean. Uncleanness in Scripture is ceremonial, moral, and religious defilement, and it means both pollution and ultimately death. Most scholars fail to recognize the moral and religious aspects of uncleanness because they are under the influence of Neoplatonism and cannot see that for Scripture the material and the spiritual are essentially identical. For the same reason, our inheritance from the Lord cannot be separated into the material and the spiritual. The idea that the Old Testament brought forth material promises and blessings, and the New Testament offers spiritual promises and blessings, is invalid and is a false division of Scripture; it rests in part on an evolutionary perspective, so that some openly affirm that the more “primitive” Old Testament saints needed material encouragement to be holy, whereas now believers live on “a higher plane.”

Some will deny the validity of material inheritance by pointing to the persecution of the early church by the Roman Empire. The early church, while not without its sins and shortcomings, was still richly blessed. One of the reasons for the savage hostility of Rome was precisely the rapid growth and success of the church, the prosperity of its members, and their prominence. The church was seen as a threat to Rome even when some described its faith as the silly superstitions of the ignorant. It is false history to read the history of the early church thus as one of persecution only: it was also a history of remarkable growth and prosperity.

To deny the unity of the material and spiritual is to deny the reality of God’s creation and also to deny history. The growing irrelevance of the churches is grounded in part on this fact. Evangelical churches downgrade the material, and modernist churches downgrade the spiritual, and the result is for both of them a failure to cope with reality, let alone command it.

Fifth, inheritance means dominion, because it means that the blessing of God follows obedience (Deut. 28), and all true heirs obey the Father. Antinomianism thus is a mark of the disinherited. To believe and obey means that, despite the struggle with an evil generation, we are blessed with the prospering hand of God. We cannot be sons and not heirs. The sons therefore pray to the Father, their legal Father and Guardian, in the confidence that their common estate, power, and dominion will be used, in the Father’s discretion and wisdom, to prosper His kingdom.

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