Adoring God for Our Eternal Inheritance, Part 1 B

The divine Lord of the universe is ours. The Jesus of incarnation, death and resurrection is ours. The Christ, the anointed King and Messiah is ours. Not a distant deity to be appeased but a personal Lord and Savior. What would people think if you never even acknowledged the person who made you his heir?

They might call you ungrateful, at the very least. Well, there is no greater inheritance than the salvation God has provided. So how are you doing at expressing gratitude for that incomparable treasure? An important question to consider as John continues his study, Our Great Salvation. But before we get started, John, we're always encouraged to hear that these broadcasts, as well as Grace To You's many other Bible teaching resources, are hitting their mark. And you have a few letters in front of you that are some great examples of what God is doing through our ministry.

So please take a minute and read those notes. This is my favorite thing to do when we open our broadcast, because I don't need to hear from me, I can hear from somebody else. It's so refreshing. So here's a letter from Ron up in Michigan. He says, For the last three and a half years, some brothers and I have been going through your book, Biblical Doctrine. That's 1,200 pages. That's a huge book. He says, I'm happy and sad to say that after only 1,322 days, gallons and gallons of coffee, and dozens and dozens of eggs, I read the last sentence this morning. This book has been a blessing to me. Thanks for writing it. Wow.

Man, he's got some tenacity. Thank you, Ron. Wherever Walled Lake, Michigan is, is going to be blessed with a Bible-saturated guy like you hanging around. Here's another one.

Let's go south, Dallas, Texas. This is from Ken. I've read several books on forgiveness, but I was never completely clear on the subject until I read your booklet called Forgiving One Another. Also, I am greatly helped in understanding portions of the Bible that I've never understood before by listening to Grace To You broadcasts. God bless you, Brother MacArthur, and all the Grace To You staff. That's right, Ken. God bless the Grace To You staff.

They're, they're the best. So thankful. And finally, another Texas listener named Fernando wrote, I just wanted to say thank you.

What a life transformation. Thank you to Ron, Ken and Fernando for those encouraging letters. And the mention of the MacArthur Study Bible reminds me to let you know that we have them available for you in different translations, different covers.

There's a whole array of them. You will love a study Bible if you've never had one. If you have had one, you'll love another one. We also have the MacArthur New Testament commentary volumes, 33 volumes of the New Testament.

They'll also enrich you if you're going to go deep like these folks have done. On behalf of the people that you help us minister to, thank you for your faithfulness. Yes, thank you, friend, and thank you for your support. It's how we're able to minister to God's people with teaching like the lesson you're about to hear. And so on that note, turn to 1 Peter chapter 1 as John begins the lesson. 1 Peter chapter 1 verses 3 through 5. Peter gives us what really is a very practical and helpful perspective on learning to live looking past earthly trouble to eternal inheritance. Hebrews chapter 9 verse 15 says we have the promise of the eternal inheritance. Well, you know that, and that's talking about the full final salvation. But let me dig a little deeper, all right, and show you something that I think is fascinating. Look in your Bible to Joshua chapter 13.

This is an insight that you might miss if you're not careful. Joshua 13, 33. And here we reach back to the promise of God in an ancient time, nonetheless a promise that we can claim. When they came into the land, verse 32, the territories which Moses apportioned for an inheritance in the plains of Moab beyond the Jordan of Jericho to the east, but to the tribe of Levi, it says, they were the priestly tribe, Moses did not give an inheritance.

No land was given to Levi. The Lord, the God of Israel is their inheritance. Now because they were what?

What were they? Priests. The Lord Himself was their inheritance. They would literally inherit God.

And if we can come over to 1 Peter again and be reminded that we are a kingdom of priests, we too are a royal priesthood, chapter 2 verse 9, we can then know that God, who is the very possession of the priests of Levi, is the possession of the royal priesthood of Christ as well. We inherit God. God is our very inheritance. What a tremendous thought. In Psalm 16, I think David captured this, the Lord is the portion of my inheritance, Psalm 16, 5. He would inherit God before He would inherit anything else.

Nothing could stand alongside the richness of that reality. In Psalm 73, 23, Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Thou hast taken hold of my right hand. With Thy counsel Thou wilt guide me and afterward receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And beside Thee I desire nothing on earth. And verse 26, God is the strength of my heart and my inheritance forever.

My portion forever. And so again, the psalmist knew that he would inherit God. Jeremiah grasped that thought in Lamentations, chapter 3, and verse 24, The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I have hope in Him.

What a tremendous thought. Beloved, when we go to be with the Lord to inherit our eternal salvation at the same time we inherit God. God comes to pitch His tent with us. God takes up residence with us. We inherit Him just as much as He is inheriting us. We live in His house is one way to put it.

He lives in our house is another way to put it. We also inherit Christ. We also inherit Christ.

1 John says that when we see Him we'll be like Him for we shall see Him as He is. It says we are joint heirs with Christ. Christ becomes our portion. As we read in Ephesians 1.14, the Holy Spirit is the resident guarantee of our inheritance, the arabon, which means engagement ring, down payment. And the Holy Spirit is that engagement ring, down payment, that first installment and His living in us is the guarantee of our eternal down payment. So we have already inherited the Spirit. We will inherit likeness to the Son and we will inherit God Himself in our eternal inheritance.

It seems to me that no matter what we may have or not have of this world's good, it's a small thing. We also must recognize that we will leave this world naked, but if we love Christ we will become clothed with all that God could possibly give, far beyond our wildest imaginations. And that's why Paul said it does not yet appear. The things that eye has not seen and ear has not heard will be revealed to us. That is cause for praise. That is cause for praise. And it is because of that inheritance that salvation not yet revealed waiting for the last season or the last epic, when we see God in Christ in glory, that Peter calls for praise. Back to verse 3, Blessed be the God.

We can stop at that point. Blessed be the God who provides such an inheritance. For a Jew, by the way, the commonest of all beginnings to prayer was to say, Blessed art thou, O God. In fact, they said it if they were faithful to their prayer patterns day in, day out, over and over and over again, many, many times a day. Blessed art thou, O God.

And so it's fitting for us to say the same thing. It should be noted, however, that the Jew typically defined God as Blessed be God, the Creator and Redeemer from Egypt. Those were the two most common ways to identify God. The God who was Creator and Redeemer of His people from Egypt. Here, God is identified as the God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And that is His unique identity in the New Covenant. Now, the term blessed, we don't need to spend much time on that. It simply means worthy of blessing, worthy of adoration, worthy of praise, worthy of worship. And because God is so worthy, we should bless Him. Because of His gracious goodness, we should bless Him. There's a sense in which, even when we bless Him, we seem to come far short of what He deserves.

Robert Layton, writing in 1853, said, All this is far below Him and His mercies. What are our lame praises in comparison to His love? Nothing and less than nothing, but love will stammer rather than be dumb. End quote.

I like that. Even though our praise falls short, love will stammer rather than be dumb. As I mentioned earlier, the verb be is implied, is the key verb to the whole text. It assumes the action is to bless God. It is not only something Peter is doing, it is something that he is instructing others to do. It is a call for adoration, a call for praise. Now, I want you to notice that there are components of this doxology that explain our inheritance in detail. We want to praise intelligently.

We want to adore God with understanding. And so, the better we understand our inheritance, the better Abel will be and the more anxious we'll be to praise him. So, Peter gives us the source of our inheritance, the motive for our inheritance, the means by which we appropriate that inheritance, the nature of our inheritance, that is what it is like, and the security of our inheritance, lastly. Let's look just at the source of our inheritance, the source. Verse 3, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again, and so forth.

Now, let's dig into this for a moment. The source of our inheritance is God. The source is God. What is God's title? God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We know all of that.

We're not really left in the dark about that, but let me just remind you what that means. To say that God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is to give God a new identity to the Jewish mind, because God was always known as Creator and Redeemer from Egypt. He created and He redeemed His people out of Egypt. His creation emphasizes His almighty sovereign power, His redeeming His people, His saving power, His saving work.

So the Jews would bless God as Creator and Redeemer from Egypt. But we bless God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That was instructed to us really by Jesus. Go back to John chapter 4. John chapter 4, verse 21. Jesus, talking to the woman at the well in Samaria, said, Believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall you worship the Father. You worship that which you do not know.

We worship that which we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. So, in verse 21, He mentions worship the Father and twice in verse 23. Now what does He mean by the Father? Does He mean the Father of men?

No. He means the Father not in relationship to men, not in relationship to believers, follow this, but in relationship to the Trinity. Very important point. Every single time Jesus addressed God in the entire gospel record, He called Him Father with one exception. And that's when He forsook Him on the cross and He said, My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me? Every other time He ever addressed God in a prayer, He called Him Father. It is not that God is being described as your Father and My Father, but the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, during the life of Jesus, no individual Jew would address God as My Father. God is very, very seldom called Father in the Old Testament and always in a collective sense as the Father of a nation, not a personal Father. When Jesus uses the term Father personally and calls God My Father as He often does, He is breaking with tradition and He is identifying God as His Father. In John's gospel, chapter 5, for example, in verse 17, Jesus said, My Father is working until now and I Myself am working. Jesus said, I and the Father are one. Jesus said, when Philip said, Show us the Father, He said, Have you seen Me and you don't know that you've seen the Father?

Now, the point is this. By calling God Father, Jesus was saying, I am of the same essence as God, for like produces like. If God was His Father, then He had the nature of God. In John chapter 10, the Jews, of course, knew that. That's why they accused Him of blasphemy.

Chapter 10, verse 29, Jesus said, My Father who has given them to Me is greater than all and no one's able to snatch them out of My Father's hand. And then He said, I and the Father are one and the Jews took up stones to stone Him. Why? For a good work we do not stone you, verse 33, but for blasphemy. You, being a man, make yourself God.

Why? How did He make Himself into God? By saying God was His Father. He was saying, I'm of the same essence as God.

Jews didn't say that. And the only way you can ever say that God is your Father is because He's planted His life within you. In John chapter 17, Jesus again points to the fact that God was His Father. Jesus says in the prayer beginning in verse 1, Father, the hour has come, glorify Thy Son that the Son may glorify Thee. In other words, You're My Father and I'm Your Son. Verse 5, And now glorify Thou Me together with Thyself, Father, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.

In other words, bring Me back to the equality we had before I came into this world. Jesus again is affirming that He is God. And every time He calls God Father, He is affirming that He has the same nature as the eternal God, and that is what infuriated the Jews because He was claiming to be God, and they saw that as blasphemy.

Verse 27 of Matthew 11 says, All things have been handed over to Me by My Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him. In other words, they're just mutually bearing the same life.

One is connected to the other. You can't know the Son except the Father. You can't know the Father except the Son.

They know each other in an intimacy that no one else can understand. This is picked up in the epistles, and you see it many places. Ephesians 1, 3, Blessed be the God. What God? What God are we talking about? The God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that God.

The God who is the Father of Christ. Verse 17, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory. Ephesians 1, 17.

In 2 Corinthians, we find it in chapter 1, verse 3. Blessed be the God. What God? The God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

John, in his second epistle, writing in verse 3, I believe it is, Grace and mercy and peace be with us, from God the Father, and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father. Now get that, because that ought to be filed somewhere in your biblical understanding file. Whenever you see God called Father, it is not primarily that He is your Father and my Father. It is primarily that He is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, which then says Christ is God.

And that's why Jesus said, No man comes unto the Father but by Me. So, what God is the source of all of our inheritance? The God who is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. The God who is one with Jesus Christ. The God who is known only through Jesus Christ. And by the way, Peter chooses to use the full redemptive name of Christ in verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

All three names. Linsky calls that a concentrated confession. A concentrated confession. All that Scriptures reveal for our Savior, God, is crowded into that name. Lord means sovereign. Jesus incarnate. Christ the anointed King Messiah. It's a confession, a concentrated confession just to say, Lord Jesus Christ.

And I love to say all three, and we should say all three. The full name in whom our salvation is bound up. But would you please notice the little pronoun, our, in verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of not just the Lord Jesus Christ, but our Lord Jesus Christ.

And Peter thus, with that simple little word, personalizes everything. The divine Lord of the universe is ours. The Jesus of incarnation, death, and resurrection is ours. The Christ the anointed King and Messiah is ours.

Not a distant deity to be appeased, but a personal Lord and Savior. He is ours now, and the fullness of all that He is will be ours in the future when we are like Him. The fact that the Lord Jesus Christ is ours connects us with God, because if we're one with Him, we're one with God. In 1 Corinthians 6 17 says, He that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit. We're one with Christ. We're one with God. That's why Jesus says, Come and sit with Me in My throne as I sit in the Father's throne. In eternity, Christ will be in the Father's throne, and we will be in Christ's throne, therefore in the Father's throne.

We will, in a very real sense, be lost in a relationship of eternal intimacy with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Who is the source, then, of our inheritance? Who is the source, the one to whom we give the praise? We wouldn't bless God if He hadn't given it to us. If you had earned your inheritance by works, why would you bless God? If you had gained your inheritance through a preacher, why would you bless God? If you had been given your inheritance through somebody who witnessed to you, why would you bless God? If you had received your inheritance by your own ability to understand Scripture, why would you bless God? We bless God because He is the source, and He is the source who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and apart from the work of Christ, God couldn't be the source because we couldn't get the inheritance. So, we have a gift, an inheritance given to us as a free gift because we have been made children of God.

How so? At the end of verse 1, we were chosen according to the predetermined love relationship of God the Father through the sanctifying, saving work of the Spirit. God chose us to be children, and when He chose us to be children, He therefore chose to give us an eternal inheritance.

He's the source. And you see, that's why Peter calls for praise. Praise the God who's the source of your eternal inheritance.

Let me tell you something. It isn't right. It is a sin, I believe, of massive proportions to live a thankless life. It is a sin not to be ever and always praising God, blessing God, adoring God, honoring God, extolling God, worshiping God for your eternal inheritance of which He is the sole source through Christ. Do you have a thankful heart? I mean a constantly thankful heart.

I hope you do. Let's share together in a word of prayer. Father, we thank You for the way in which You have revealed to us Your generosity and Your goodness. We thank You for the absolutely unending and eternal mercies which You have poured out upon us due to nothing which we have done. And we want to come to You in praise. We want to come to You in adoration.

We want to thank You for the gift that You have given to us. We praise You, Lord, for our eternal inheritance. And, Lord, we pray that our praise might go beyond just a moment's thought, that it might go beyond just a breath or two. We pray, Lord, that it might linger with us so that we remember day in and day out to offer You our praise. And, Lord, if there is in any of our hearts a spirit of ingratitude, a spirit of discontent, a spirit that rejects praise, forgives us, cleanses us, fill our hearts with joy. Lord, help us to be faithful to render to You what You are due. No matter how deep the trouble, no matter how anxious the heart, may we be filled with praise. We pray in Christ's name.

Amen. And, friend, a quick request. If Grace To You has helped you grow in thankfulness for what God has given to you in Christ, or if you know someone who has come to Christ because of these daily radio broadcasts, we'd love to hear your story. Contact us today. You can write to us at Grace To You, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412, or just send an email to letters at gty.org. And thank you for mentioning the call letters of this radio station when you write.

That helps us. And while you're at gty.org, keep in mind that there are thousands of free resources there that will help you dig deeper into God's word. You can download all of John's sermons, more than 3500 messages, including those from his current series, Our Great Salvation, all of them free in MP3 and transcript format. And if you want to know what the Bible says about the person of Christ or the purpose of the church or how to defeat sin in your life, you will surely find a sermon that covers that subject. And be sure to download the Grace To You Sermons app, which gives you access to all 54 years of John's teaching right from your mobile device. That address again?

gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be back tomorrow to learn how remembering your life apart from Christ can help you find joy united with him today. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace To You.