Ephesians 1:18: Who Will Receive the Riches of Heaven?
00:00:00.000 | [Music]
00:00:04.000 | Happy Friday! Here is today's question.
00:00:06.000 | Hello, Pastor John. My name is Christina, and I follow you from Italy.
00:00:09.500 | I appreciate how DesiringGod.org makes wonderful resources available for free online.
00:00:15.000 | I praise God for you all.
00:00:17.500 | I particularly appreciate your fairness and honesty in dealing with all kinds of questions,
00:00:21.500 | as well as views on any biblical matter.
00:00:24.500 | Personally, I struggle with interpreting Ephesians 1:18.
00:00:28.500 | "I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened,
00:00:31.000 | in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you,
00:00:34.000 | the riches of His glorious inheritance in His holy people."
00:00:38.000 | Namely, is it about what God is going to inherit, us, the saints,
00:00:42.500 | or is it about what we, as poor, empty-handed people, are going to inherit ourselves?
00:00:47.500 | Is this us inheriting Him?
00:00:50.000 | What's the inheritance, and who inherits it?
00:00:53.000 | Well, Christina, you're not in a class by yourself, because I, too, have struggled with verse 18 of Ephesians 1,
00:01:01.000 | because in English, the wording is ambiguous, and frankly, it is in Greek as well,
00:01:08.000 | though not quite as ambiguous.
00:01:10.500 | So let's get it in front of us.
00:01:15.000 | In the first 15 verses of Ephesians, Paul laid out the magnificent saving work of God from eternity to eternity,
00:01:26.000 | and then in verse 15 or 16, he turns from theology to prayer.
00:01:33.500 | It's a beautiful example of how we need both theology, verses 1 to 15,
00:01:38.000 | and then divine, supernatural, spiritual illumination in verses 16 to the end of chapter 1.
00:01:44.500 | Just a beautiful example of how to go about seeing and savoring the glories of God.
00:01:50.000 | So here's the key text that she's referring to.
00:01:52.500 | Start at verse 17.
00:01:54.000 | "I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him,
00:02:05.000 | having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know..."
00:02:10.000 | And then he mentions three things, and she's asking about the second one.
00:02:14.000 | One, "What is the hope to which He has called you?"
00:02:18.500 | Or literally, "What is the hope of His calling?"
00:02:21.500 | Two, "What are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints?"
00:02:29.500 | And three, "What is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe according to the working of His great might?"
00:02:38.000 | That's Ephesians 1, 17 to 19.
00:02:40.500 | And Christina's question is, "What does this phrase mean?"
00:02:44.000 | "The riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints."
00:02:49.000 | Does it mean that God inherits us, the saints, or does it mean that we, the saints, will have an inheritance from God?
00:03:00.000 | And I think the correct interpretation is the second one,
00:03:03.500 | namely, the inheritance is given by God and is in or among the saints.
00:03:10.500 | We receive it into our midst and in our hearts.
00:03:15.000 | I don't think, Paul, means that God gets us as an inheritance.
00:03:20.500 | And there are at least four reasons why I think this.
00:03:24.000 | Number one, Paul is praying that the saints would have the eyes of their heart enlightened to grasp the majesty and glory and riches and wonder of the things he's been talking about.
00:03:37.000 | And just before the prayer, we read this, "In Him, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,
00:03:45.000 | who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory."
00:03:54.500 | That's verse 14, just before the prayer begins.
00:03:57.500 | So the most immediately near reference to an inheritance is not God getting one, but giving one to us for His glory.
00:04:07.500 | So I think it would be natural to think that's what he's praying about, that we would grasp that inheritance.
00:04:14.500 | Number two, second reason for thinking it's God giving an inheritance rather than getting one.
00:04:21.000 | If we look at what comes later as a possible help and filling in of a description of what the inheritance is,
00:04:33.000 | I think we find it in chapter 2, verse 6 and 7.
00:04:37.000 | See if you don't think so.
00:04:39.000 | "He raised us up with Him and seated us with Him, with Christ, in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
00:04:46.000 | so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus."
00:04:57.500 | So what he calls the riches of the glory of His inheritance in verse 18 of chapter 1,
00:05:05.000 | I think he describes in chapter 2, verse 7 as the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us.
00:05:13.000 | In other words, the riches of the glory of the inheritance is what He gives us, not what He gets.
00:05:21.000 | Third reason.
00:05:22.500 | If we focus on the three specific realities that Paul wants us to see with the eyes of the heart and grasp in a profound way,
00:05:32.500 | it turns out that he uses the very same wording with regard to each of them as to whether they come from God or go toward God.
00:05:45.000 | For example, the hope—he wants us to see the hope of His calling, 2) the glory of His inheritance, 3) the greatness of His power.
00:05:58.000 | Now that's a significant level of symmetry or of parallel, and I think it would be really strange if the modifier "His" had a different meaning in regard to the inheritance than it has in regard to the calling and the power.
00:06:17.000 | It's His calling in the sense that He gives it, it's His power in the sense that He has it and gives it, and it's His inheritance in the sense that He gives it.
00:06:28.500 | That's argument number three.
00:06:30.000 | And finally, if you do a word study and look up all the places, which I did, where Paul uses the word "inheritance" or "inherit" or "heir,"
00:06:42.000 | we find that in all of Paul's uses of these words, they never refer to God inheriting or God's receiving an inheritance or God's being an heir.
00:06:54.000 | So I conclude that Paul, in Ephesians 1.18, is talking about the riches of the glory of the inheritance God has laid up for the saints.
00:07:10.000 | Now before I stop, of course it's not false that the church is God's treasured possession, and He will rejoice over us.
00:07:22.000 | Indeed, that spectacular experience may well be part of the inheritance He gives to us.
00:07:32.000 | But the focus of Ephesians 1.18 is what we will inherit, not what God will inherit.
00:07:40.000 | So good. Thank you for taking us on this guided tour inside the inner logic of this passage.
00:07:45.000 | This is really reminiscent of something Pastor John does regularly through a series of videos online called "Look at the Book."
00:07:52.000 | It's worth checking those videos out as he marks up a Bible text on a screen with a digital pen and makes interpretations and draws connections within the text itself.
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00:08:41.000 | We're going to break for the weekend and return with another Bible question on Monday.
00:08:45.000 | But the theme of that question eludes me. I can't recall it at the moment.
00:08:51.000 | In any case, I'm your host Tony Reinke and we will see you on the other side of the weekend.
00:08:56.000 | [ End ]