HEIRS OF GOD
‘Heirs of God.’
Plainly an heir is one who has some future property coming to him—a property which he will come to, and which no one can take from him. It is his for certain. But it is in the future, and as yet he is not in the enjoyment of it. There are many ways in which the heir to a fortune may never come to his fortune.
I. He may make away with it beforehand, squandering it during the time of his minority.—This is one way in which we see many a fine fortune wasted. The case of Esau is a case in point. How many Esaus will there be?
II. He may break the covenant.—Or, again, the will may have had conditions attached to it, saying that the heir should come to the property if he did so-and-so, or abstained from doing it. No one could take away the property from him; but he can break the conditions, so that when he comes of age there is nothing for him to come to—only the vexatious, bitter feeling that he has, of his own choice, voluntarily broken the terms of the will by which he was made heir to the property which he can look at but never enjoy. So with the Christian. Our Catechism teaches us that there is such a thing as the baptismal covenant. Now a covenant means an agreement or a bargain. And the baptismal covenant is that which sets forth to us the conditions on which the christened child shall come hereafter to the inheritance which is then sealed to him. No one can say that he is ignorant of the conditions of his heavenly inheritance, for they are the very first things which every Christian child is taught. The worst of it is that so many of us grow up without attending to them, and so the words lose their force, like all words do which we hear often without obeying them. But this is our fault, and in the world to come we shall have to confess that it has been our own carelessness, and that alone, which has led us to think little of the conditions of our inheritance.
III. He may lose his life.—Or a person may be heir to a property, but he may never live to enjoy it. And this leads us to the most dreadful thought of all that are connected with our heavenly inheritance. Our inheritance is a spiritual one. Our coming of age is in the world to come. The life which we commence in our baptism is a spiritual life. What if that spiritual life should die out utterly, even before this life is over? Then for us there is no hope. There may be such a thing as being spiritually dead even while we live. It may be that a man may so utterly brutify himself—that he may give himself up so utterly to sin and evil—that the spiritual nature may be as good as dead, so that there is nothing in him which can inherit the Kingdom of God.
IV. Spiritual minors.—There is yet one more thought which this word heir brings before us. When a man makes a will, and leaves an estate to an heir, an estate which the child is not to come to before he is of age, he provides that the child shall be sustained during his minority. It is so again with us. God does not leave us to all the dangers of this world without giving us the food and sustenance necessary to keep up our spiritual life until our minority is over; neither does He leave us without that education in things spiritual which is necessary to prepare us for our future inheritance. What is our minority? All through this life we are spiritually minors. We are unable to provide for ourselves, and God provides for us. We cannot provide our own spiritual sustenance any more than an untaught child could provide its own living. We cannot teach ourselves any more than a young pupil could be his own tutor or his own guardian. And so this is what God gives us His Holy Spirit for—the Spirit of Wisdom and Knowledge, the Spirit of Counsel and true Godliness—to train and teach us and to educate us until, when our minority is over, we are fit for the spiritual inheritance we are to enter upon in God’s own world hereafter.