Proverbs 20:7

The righteous who walks in his integrity— blessed are his children after him!

The question of inheritance lies very close to Scripture’s essence; it lies very close, also, to the most violent hatred of modernity. Placing it at the center-heart of either Scripture or of modernity’s enmity would be inaccurate, but withdrawing it significantly would be nearly as inaccurate. The core of the apple, it is not, but it nigh touches the seeds. Inheritance is a theme integrated into our salvation from guilt and from the acts which require guilt’s birth. Modernity’s hatred, born of hating God, therefore turns hot upon inheritance.

Perhaps an obvious reference for inheritance in Scripture is Hebrews 9:16-17, which speaks of the necessity of death to seal the covenant which saves us. Romans 8:16-17, nearly as famous, speaks more directly of our inheritance in Christ: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him.” This ‘suffering with Him,’ as Romans 6:4-6 makes clear, is His work of salvation, and so all who are saved by Him are heirs of God, heirs with Christ (in a different sense, as the fruit rather than the seed) of creation (Gen. 1:28; Col. 1:16-17; Dan. 7:13-14).

This inheritance of God is greater than mere lack of guilt. God’s children are given His righteousness, the inheritance of the virtue of the only-begotten Son (Rom. 6:4), and by that virtue we are raised to rule His world as His stewards (Matt. 5:5). All this is in our inheritance (Gal. 3:29; Eph. 3:6), and it’s just the start, because salvation does not end with the double imputation of guilt from us and righteousness to us, of death away and life towards.

The fruit of salvation in this life, leading towards the next, is growing holiness: “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15). The certainty of this following is perfect, so that James can use it to warn men of the falsity of their seeming faith (James 2:14-17). In the life to come, this inheritance is perfected in us (1 Cor. 15:45), but here before the resurrection of the body, our sanctification is imperfect, marred by sin, but proceeding, painfully and joyously (1 John 1:10; Rom. 8:13; Phil. 4:4,13). This growth in holiness is a part of that inheritance from God.

This inheritance He gives to us not only directly (Is. 26:12) but by many mediate means. The foremost of these, when the world is ordered rightly, is the family. We inherit righteousness from our parents not in the sense of imputation but in learning it by example and instruction (Deut. 6:4-8). Many of man, of course, receive little of this gift from their parents; all of us receive a tainted coin, for our parents are as imperfected as we are. But, by the grace of God, the family is the most powerful instrument given by God for the continuation and growth of righteousness (with all righteousness’s fruits (Gen. 1:28; Matt. 6:33). He gave it to us from the beginning (Gen. 1:26-28), an echo of the Trinitarian relationship (John 1:18).

As the vehicle of God’s blessing, of course, the family is a foremost target of wicked man, who hates God (Ps. 14, 53). Inheritance is therefore an important target for God’s foe; if inheritance is ripped from the mind and action of the family, then within a generation, the family will take deadly ill. Even if it survives, it can do so only by building itself anew and particulate, without union to the past or to kin. Atomistic man is natural prey for statist man or for whatever other power structure seeks to usurp. (The alternate path, oft pursued simultaneously, is to pervert inheritance and the family, making it a rival to God and thus destroying its truth.)

The result in modernity is a society where the child is not told to grow beyond his parents, which all children ought to do as they can, maturing towards fullness in God. A child, instead, is made into a particle disconnected from all else; he has parents only as a mechanical fact explaining his origin, if that. They do not matter now; they are separate; they are caretakers assigned by reason of convenience, who should be set aside so soon as more professional help can be attained. The utter freedom of man from outside relationship and definition thus includes separation from the family and from the inheritance—an inheritance first of wisdom and then, as a lesser-included, of wealth.

A man so separated is taught, we must note, that this is the pattern of reality. He is taught to deny the pattern of inheritance which he innately knows as real and true; he is taught to, when he cannot deny it, re-make and twist it. When God offers him an inheritance of righteousness, then, he is ill-equipped to understand and thus to inherit this. Though God will save all the same, where He wills, the Christian so saved is sore maimed, in need of greater healing. He knows only that all others are separate poles of agency and reality, and so he struggles to recognize that God is sovereign in both agency and reality, not an equal with whom he negotiates. In other words, by denying inheritance, we feed man’s lust for autonomy.

We must return to inheritance. God tells us that the righteous man “who walks in integrity” (Prov. 20:7) leaves an inheritance of blessing to his children; the foundation of righteousness and integrity and therefore of this inheritance is partaking in the inheritance He offers by His shed blood. This pattern of inheritance we must then integrate into the world as He prescribes, ordering inheritance in action according to His law. This is righteousness. By this righteousness, and by all the rest of righteousness which we know by relationship to Him (John 14:26) and by His word (Ps. 119), we build the inheritance more precious than gold (Job 28; Matt. 6:19-20) which we then pass along by means direct (Prov. 13:24; Deut. 6:8) and indirect (Phil. 3:17) to our children—natural, adopted, and analogical—in a line which is God’s purposed method of sanctifying this earth (Ex. 20:12).

God bless.

Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.