WEBVTT 00:00:37.040 --> 00:00:39.520 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. 00:00:39.520 --> 00:00:40.720 I am Corey J. 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:41.680 Mahler. 00:00:41.680 --> 00:00:44.320 And I'm still Wo. 00:00:44.320 --> 00:00:48.000 On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the subject of 00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:53.760 inheritance. As we began this mini two-part series last week discussing jealousy 00:00:53.760 --> 00:01:00.960 and zealousness, we are continuing now with notions of how God and 00:01:00.960 --> 00:01:04.720 how man deals with subject of inheritance. 00:01:04.720 --> 00:01:06.480 What does it mean to inherit something? 00:01:06.480 --> 00:01:09.040 What are the systems by which that operates? 00:01:09.040 --> 00:01:10.240 Why do we do it? 00:01:10.240 --> 00:01:11.760 Why does God do it? 00:01:11.760 --> 00:01:14.160 When and where does that occur? 00:01:14.480 --> 00:01:17.440 Before we get into it properly, just a brief update on the 00:01:17.840 --> 00:01:19.200 challenge coins. 00:01:19.200 --> 00:01:21.520 Corey has pictures of the samples. 00:01:21.520 --> 00:01:24.000 The physical samples are en route to his house. 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:26.480 Should be getting them hopefully by the end of this week. 00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:29.840 As soon as we get those, we'll post some pictures online so 00:01:29.840 --> 00:01:31.280 everyone can see them. 00:01:31.280 --> 00:01:34.880 Probably be making a couple tiny tweaks and then placing that order. 00:01:34.880 --> 00:01:36.960 So thank you to everyone for your patience. 00:01:37.120 --> 00:01:40.800 Also I've noticed in the download stats in the last 10 days. 00:01:40.720 --> 00:01:42.800 we have a ton of new listeners. 00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:44.960 I honestly have no idea from where. 00:01:45.200 --> 00:01:48.080 We didn't see any bump in any of the places that we 00:01:48.080 --> 00:01:50.640 would expect to find incoming traffic from. 00:01:50.640 --> 00:01:53.760 So if you're a new listener, joined recently, thank you very much 00:01:53.760 --> 00:01:54.080 for joining. 00:01:54.080 --> 00:01:55.600 We're happy to have you. 00:01:55.600 --> 00:02:00.560 As we routinely say, if you're enjoying these shows, we highly recommend 00:02:00.560 --> 00:02:03.440 that you go back to the beginning and start with all of 00:02:03.440 --> 00:02:08.000 them. We don't really do timely episodes as much as possible. 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:12.000 We're trying to create a catalogue here, so it's worth listening to 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:14.640 an episode from a year or so ago because it's still gonna 00:02:14.640 --> 00:02:17.520 be fresh because you know, it's not current events as much as 00:02:17.520 --> 00:02:18.400 we can help it. 00:02:18.400 --> 00:02:21.360 And even when we do tackle current events, it's because those are 00:02:21.360 --> 00:02:24.720 examples of broader issues that are affecting all of us. 00:02:24.720 --> 00:02:28.960 So if you're enjoying it random episodes, highly recommend you listen to 00:02:28.960 --> 00:02:30.800 order. It works better that way. 00:02:30.800 --> 00:02:33.920 There are a lot of foundational concepts that we rely on from 00:02:34.000 --> 00:02:34.960 PAPS episodes. 00:02:34.960 --> 00:02:37.840 So just something to keep in mind and welcome. 00:02:37.840 --> 00:02:41.760 If you're listening, please leave a five star review on Spotify or 00:02:41.920 --> 00:02:43.760 Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. 00:02:43.760 --> 00:02:49.200 It helps with discoverability and also helps to overwhelm the hate listeners 00:02:49.200 --> 00:02:52.320 who like to leave one star reviews just because they hate us 00:02:52.320 --> 00:02:52.800 so much. 00:02:52.800 --> 00:02:56.800 It's pretty comical how mad people get when they don't agree. 00:02:56.800 --> 00:03:00.960 On the subject of inheritance, to begin with, I want to distinguish 00:03:00.960 --> 00:03:05.600 between when we're talking about what we think of as man-made customs 00:03:05.760 --> 00:03:09.520 and we're talking about things that are from God that are godly 00:03:09.600 --> 00:03:13.680 or that are biblical commandments in some cases, because this subject really 00:03:14.160 --> 00:03:17.120 kind of overlaps all of that. 00:03:17.120 --> 00:03:21.920 And I think it's important for us whenever we're approaching really any 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:28.640 subject in human life is to consider that God created us, he 00:03:28.640 --> 00:03:30.320 created man in his image. 00:03:30.320 --> 00:03:34.640 We have the fallen image of God now that is restored through 00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:41.840 sanctification. As creatures made in God's image, there are things that 00:03:42.800 --> 00:03:46.160 we do because we are like him. 00:03:46.160 --> 00:03:50.400 There are certain things that are typological that naturally occur to man 00:03:50.480 --> 00:03:53.440 that we simply do it because this is how God does things. 00:03:53.440 --> 00:03:56.000 And inheritance is one of the examples of that. 00:03:56.000 --> 00:03:59.280 So we're as we make the case today for why inheritance is 00:03:59.280 --> 00:04:01.120 interesting and important. 00:04:01.120 --> 00:04:04.640 I want to distinguish between things that we think of as man-made 00:04:04.720 --> 00:04:10.000 human procedures or customs or laws and things that we do because 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:11.520 God established them. 00:04:11.520 --> 00:04:14.560 And so when we look at the passages about inheritance in scripture, 00:04:14.560 --> 00:04:19.280 it's clear that God establishes inheritance just as he establishes the legal 00:04:19.280 --> 00:04:23.520 system, which is to be clear, is not synonymous with the Levitical 00:04:23.520 --> 00:04:26.240 law. I'm not saying God has given us a list of laws. 00:04:26.240 --> 00:04:29.040 I'm saying that God invented the concept of laws. 00:04:29.040 --> 00:04:34.320 God invented the concept of a judge, of evidence, of witnesses. 00:04:34.320 --> 00:04:37.760 These are all things that God baked into creation. 00:04:37.760 --> 00:04:42.160 And so when humans do those things, it's not because we made 00:04:42.160 --> 00:04:43.200 'em up ourselves. 00:04:43.200 --> 00:04:46.320 This is a a lie that comes from the secular humanist camp 00:04:46.480 --> 00:04:50.000 where really I think kind of beginning with guys like Jung and 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:54.960 then their acolytes down the road in history, the secular humanists want 00:04:54.960 --> 00:04:57.440 everyone to think that I think that the reason that all these 00:04:57.440 --> 00:05:02.080 various cultures all around the world have things like a flood narrative, 00:05:02.080 --> 00:05:05.920 or have various types of legal systems, or have some sort of 00:05:05.920 --> 00:05:10.160 patriarchy or matriarchy, if it's an evil society. 00:05:10.560 --> 00:05:13.840 Secular humanists want you to think that man invented all of these 00:05:13.840 --> 00:05:17.440 things as an upwelling of our own spirit, and there's no supernatural 00:05:17.440 --> 00:05:18.640 connection to any of it. 00:05:18.640 --> 00:05:22.000 It's all just entirely man, and there's no God. 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:24.800 That's their goal for talking about things in that way. 00:05:25.760 --> 00:05:30.000 As Christians, we have to understand that all the things that we 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:33.600 do, we do because God made us to do them, or we 00:05:33.600 --> 00:05:36.400 do because we're rebelling against the way God made us to do 00:05:36.400 --> 00:05:38.080 things. Both of those happen. 00:05:38.080 --> 00:05:39.360 But it's always one or the other. 00:05:39.360 --> 00:05:42.480 When God is your creator, either you're doing what He created you 00:05:42.480 --> 00:05:45.760 to do, or you're rebelling against the purpose for which you were 00:05:45.760 --> 00:05:50.240 created in and are fallen and sinful nature, it's always rebelling against 00:05:50.240 --> 00:05:53.760 the purpose for which God created us, which is why things like 00:05:53.760 --> 00:05:58.560 judicial systems and all these other things always have serious problems. 00:05:58.560 --> 00:06:00.880 But they don't have problems because they're man-made. 00:06:01.200 --> 00:06:04.960 They have problems because sinners are using the tool. 00:06:04.960 --> 00:06:08.320 But the tool itself, whether it's the legal system or even something 00:06:08.320 --> 00:06:11.360 like poetry, there's lots of poetry in scripture. 00:06:11.360 --> 00:06:14.640 And men naturally create poetry in other art. 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:18.640 And I think when we read the Bible and we recognize that 00:06:18.640 --> 00:06:23.600 there are different genres of literature in the Bible, we think that 00:06:23.600 --> 00:06:27.280 that's because that's God talking to us in our language. 00:06:27.280 --> 00:06:30.880 I think it makes a lot more sense to recognize that that 00:06:30.880 --> 00:06:34.240 is us recognizing God speaking his own language. 00:06:34.240 --> 00:06:38.880 There are times when God has facts and figures and entire chapters 00:06:38.880 --> 00:06:42.240 that are nothing but numbers, basically a spreadsheet. 00:06:42.240 --> 00:06:44.400 And then there are times where there's poetry. 00:06:44.400 --> 00:06:46.720 And we also see this in creation. 00:06:46.720 --> 00:06:50.160 You know, if you see a beautiful mountain vista or you see 00:06:50.160 --> 00:06:55.440 a sunset, the ephemeral beauty of that sort of thing can't be 00:06:55.440 --> 00:06:56.800 captured in a spreadsheet. 00:06:56.800 --> 00:06:58.960 You can't capture it quantitatively. 00:06:58.960 --> 00:07:03.920 And even to try to describe it in clinical terms really does 00:07:03.920 --> 00:07:06.960 a great violence to the beauty of what you're seeing. 00:07:06.960 --> 00:07:11.840 And so things like poetry are how we like a god communicate 00:07:11.840 --> 00:07:14.800 certain types of beauty that you can't capture any other way. 00:07:14.800 --> 00:07:17.600 It's not, you know, the part of the beauty of a sunset 00:07:17.760 --> 00:07:20.160 is that it's passing. 00:07:20.160 --> 00:07:24.320 It's beauty is that you are witnessing something beautiful even as you're 00:07:24.320 --> 00:07:25.040 losing it. 00:07:25.040 --> 00:07:28.160 You're watching this beautiful moment slip away. 00:07:28.160 --> 00:07:31.360 And then when the sun goes beneath the horizon, it's over. 00:07:31.360 --> 00:07:32.160 That's it. 00:07:32.160 --> 00:07:35.520 And the beauty is then the passage and the loss of that 00:07:35.520 --> 00:07:39.600 thing. So when we as humans appreciate or engage in all these 00:07:39.600 --> 00:07:43.840 things, you know, whether it's poetry or inheritance or anything, we're doing 00:07:43.840 --> 00:07:49.840 something because it's typologically what God has given us to do. 00:07:49.840 --> 00:07:52.560 Now it's not always 100% the case, but I think but when 00:07:52.560 --> 00:07:55.280 you think in those terms and you look in scripture and you 00:07:55.280 --> 00:07:59.120 find these same sorts of things, it's not just guys living, men 00:07:59.120 --> 00:08:02.560 living together in societies and coming up with rules. 00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:04.960 You know, I as I was looking at some of the history 00:08:04.960 --> 00:08:09.200 of things like inheritance and dowry, once again Babylon came up. 00:08:09.200 --> 00:08:12.080 You know, four thousand years ago, when you look at things like 00:08:12.080 --> 00:08:16.240 the Code of Habarambi, there are very similar rules and processes that 00:08:16.320 --> 00:08:20.880 that pagan society was using that you also find in believing societies 00:08:20.880 --> 00:08:21.680 throughout time. 00:08:21.680 --> 00:08:23.760 And the rules vary and the details vary. 00:08:23.760 --> 00:08:27.120 And as we talk about inheritance today, I want to make clear 00:08:27.120 --> 00:08:31.760 up front, we're not giving a prescription for here are exactly what 00:08:31.760 --> 00:08:34.800 we must do with inheritance in our own families. 00:08:34.800 --> 00:08:37.840 We're going to give some examples and I'll point out specifically what 00:08:37.840 --> 00:08:38.640 I mean then. 00:08:38.640 --> 00:08:43.840 But we want to appreciate God's creation in giving us these tools 00:08:44.160 --> 00:08:49.360 because God not only talks about the blessings of material wealth and 00:08:49.520 --> 00:08:53.120 and and temporal things that are given to us for our benefit 00:08:53.120 --> 00:08:56.720 and our aid, but our salvation is also an inheritance. 00:08:56.720 --> 00:09:00.080 It's the most important one, but it's not the only one. 00:09:00.080 --> 00:09:03.200 And so there are times where when we're looking at this subject 00:09:03.200 --> 00:09:03.760 in particular 00:09:04.720 --> 00:09:09.600 We have to recognize that as God is operating in these terms, 00:09:09.600 --> 00:09:12.960 it's for our benefit and it's not something we came up with. 00:09:12.960 --> 00:09:16.960 And so as we discuss inheritance today, don't get plugged into the 00:09:16.960 --> 00:09:20.000 legal thinking about it, even though we discuss some of those things. 00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:24.000 Just keep in mind that this is fundamentally God giving us something 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:26.800 and showing us how his world works. 00:09:26.800 --> 00:09:31.440 And so when we're participating in the concept of inheritance and of 00:09:31.440 --> 00:09:37.440 property and of jealously possessing our property and having zeal for those 00:09:37.440 --> 00:09:40.480 property rights, it's not greed. 00:09:40.480 --> 00:09:45.680 It's not mine mine, it is properly ordered, it is a stewardship 00:09:45.760 --> 00:09:49.360 of that which God has blessed us with, and inheritance is a 00:09:49.360 --> 00:09:54.000 means by which those blessings propagate through generations. 00:09:54.000 --> 00:09:54.320 As we 00:09:54.320 --> 00:10:01.520 pointed out last week, inheritance ties in intricately and extensively to 00:10:01.520 --> 00:10:05.120 the idea of jealousy, and that is why we did the jealousy 00:10:05.120 --> 00:10:08.880 episode first, and why this is really sort of a two-part episode 00:10:08.880 --> 00:10:14.800 Episode. Fundamentally, that is how God has structured things. 00:10:14.800 --> 00:10:18.960 Because the things of which you are jealous in large part are 00:10:18.960 --> 00:10:20.640 the things that you have inherited. 00:10:20.640 --> 00:10:24.480 They are the things that constitute your inheritance. 00:10:24.480 --> 00:10:28.400 And in fact, the things that God gives you then become part 00:10:28.400 --> 00:10:31.360 of the inheritance that you pass forward. 00:10:31.360 --> 00:10:36.480 And we see this concern in many places in Scripture, and obviously 00:10:36.480 --> 00:10:40.560 children are mentioned many times in Scripture as being a blessing, but 00:10:40.560 --> 00:10:45.200 part of the reason that children are that blessing is that children 00:10:45.200 --> 00:10:49.040 are what enable you to pass forward the inheritance that God has 00:10:49.040 --> 00:10:50.400 given you. 00:10:50.400 --> 00:10:54.560 And so, of course, as those children who have received that inheritance 00:10:54.560 --> 00:10:57.840 from our forefathers, we are to be jealous of that because God 00:10:57.840 --> 00:10:58.640 has given that to us. 00:10:58.720 --> 00:11:01.680 To us, it is a blessing from God. 00:11:01.680 --> 00:11:05.120 One of the examples in Scripture that should very clearly come to 00:11:05.120 --> 00:11:09.920 mind is, of course, Abraham, called Abram at the time of this 00:11:09.920 --> 00:11:14.160 particular instance in Scripture, but we'll just use Abraham, except when I'm 00:11:14.160 --> 00:11:17.520 reading it, because that's easier to understand and remember. 00:11:17.520 --> 00:11:19.520 But from Genesis fifteen. 00:11:19.520 --> 00:11:22.400 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in 00:11:22.400 --> 00:11:23.120 a vision. 00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:27.120 Fear not Abram, I am your shield, your reward shall be very 00:11:27.120 --> 00:11:31.600 great. But Abram said, O Lord God, what will you give me, 00:11:31.600 --> 00:11:35.840 for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliasar 00:11:35.840 --> 00:11:36.880 of Damascus? 00:11:36.880 --> 00:11:41.200 And Abram said, Behold, you have given me no offspring, and a 00:11:41.200 --> 00:11:43.840 member of my household will be my heir. 00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:47.280 And behold the word of the Lord came to him, this man 00:11:47.280 --> 00:11:50.560 shall not be your heir, your very own son shall be your 00:11:50.560 --> 00:11:54.400 heir. And he brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven and 00:11:54.400 --> 00:11:57.600 number the stars, if you are able to number them. 00:11:57.600 --> 00:12:01.040 Then he said to him, So shall your offspring be. 00:12:01.040 --> 00:12:04.160 And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as 00:12:04.160 --> 00:12:10.800 righteousness. Then We can see here one of the fundamental aspects of 00:12:10.800 --> 00:12:14.240 inheritance, as I just mentioned, is this 00:12:15.120 --> 00:12:19.440 giving forward of what God has given to us to those who 00:12:19.440 --> 00:12:24.560 come after us, and obviously that means first and foremost to children. 00:12:24.560 --> 00:12:28.640 Yes, there are others to whom an inheritance can be given. 00:12:28.640 --> 00:12:32.560 Obviously, it benefits the larger family as well, your cousins and others 00:12:32.560 --> 00:12:36.400 are going to benefit if you leave behind a large inheritance, but 00:12:36.400 --> 00:12:39.920 first and foremost it is a matter of what you are giving 00:12:39.920 --> 00:12:41.680 to your children. 00:12:41.680 --> 00:12:45.360 And there are some specifics about this in scripture and in human 00:12:45.360 --> 00:12:48.960 custom, we'll get into those later in the episode. 00:12:48.960 --> 00:12:52.640 But fundamentally this needs to be borne in mind. 00:12:52.640 --> 00:12:55.760 An inheritance belongs to your children. 00:12:55.760 --> 00:12:59.760 It is something that you are holding in trust after a fashion 00:13:00.080 --> 00:13:01.760 for those children. 00:13:01.760 --> 00:13:06.480 And so we like to think in the modern context, particularly living 00:13:06.480 --> 00:13:10.400 under the sort of political and economic system Systems we do that 00:13:10.560 --> 00:13:14.960 this is mine and I can do whatever I want with it. 00:13:14.960 --> 00:13:18.080 And that's simply not true. 00:13:18.080 --> 00:13:20.720 That's not the reality of the situation. 00:13:20.720 --> 00:13:23.200 Because the things that you have by and large 00:13:24.560 --> 00:13:26.080 were inherited. 00:13:26.080 --> 00:13:30.720 You inherited them from previous generations. 00:13:30.720 --> 00:13:34.880 You didn't necessarily earn them, so to speak, and they are not 00:13:34.880 --> 00:13:35.600 really yours. 00:13:36.640 --> 00:13:39.680 They will be carried forward, they will be given, they will be 00:13:39.680 --> 00:13:44.400 bequeathed to the next generation, as part of the inheritance you leave 00:13:44.400 --> 00:13:49.120 behind. It's that unbroken chain all the way down through history And 00:13:49.120 --> 00:13:52.880 of course, it has to be an unbroken chain, because if there's 00:13:52.880 --> 00:13:57.520 any break in that chain, there's nothing to carry forward. 00:13:57.520 --> 00:14:00.560 This is most clear when it comes to children, when it comes 00:14:00.560 --> 00:14:02.640 to biological descent. 00:14:03.360 --> 00:14:09.600 All of us can trace our ancestry directly back to Noah and 00:14:09.600 --> 00:14:12.320 then from Noah back to Adam, of course. 00:14:12.320 --> 00:14:15.440 That is an unbroken chain, because a break in the chain would 00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:19.280 mean someone did not have children, you wouldn't exist. 00:14:19.280 --> 00:14:23.520 If any one of your ancestors were removed from that chain, you 00:14:23.520 --> 00:14:25.360 would not exist. 00:14:25.360 --> 00:14:29.680 And so think about that if you are thinking about the scope 00:14:29.680 --> 00:14:33.280 of inheritance, because inheritance is not just property. 00:14:33.280 --> 00:14:37.920 We like to think that, oh, inheritance is the real estate that 00:14:37.920 --> 00:14:41.040 our parents passed to us or the bank account they pass to 00:14:41.040 --> 00:14:46.080 us or any of these material possessions as it were. 00:14:46.080 --> 00:14:51.200 But first and foremost, your first possession really is your body. 00:14:51.200 --> 00:14:53.920 It is who and what you are. 00:14:53.920 --> 00:14:57.360 And that is also an inheritance, because that is something that was 00:14:57.360 --> 00:14:59.520 given to you by your parents. 00:14:59.520 --> 00:15:03.680 It is something they received from their parents, and their parents from 00:15:03.680 --> 00:15:07.360 their grandparents, and so on and so forth, and Again all the 00:15:07.360 --> 00:15:09.200 way back to Noah and Adam. 00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:13.440 And we see this also in Scripture, because Scripture speaks of the 00:15:13.440 --> 00:15:18.000 fact that the Levites who were still in the loins of their 00:15:18.000 --> 00:15:22.080 ancestor in Abraham, Tithe to Melchizedek. 00:15:22.080 --> 00:15:26.240 Well that's because they are part of that inheritance. 00:15:26.240 --> 00:15:31.520 They are what Abraham passed forward genetically biologically in this case. 00:15:31.520 --> 00:15:36.640 And so it's not just material possessions that constitute the inheritance one 00:15:36.640 --> 00:15:38.960 receives and one transmits. 00:15:38.960 --> 00:15:42.720 It is also all of these other, and quite frankly, more important 00:15:42.880 --> 00:15:47.440 things. And so, in a very real sense, your nation is an 00:15:47.440 --> 00:15:51.440 inheritance. Yes, it is something of which you should be jealous as 00:15:51.440 --> 00:15:55.280 we discussed in last week's episode, but it is also part of 00:15:55.280 --> 00:15:57.840 your inheritance, and of course that is part of the reason you 00:15:57.840 --> 00:15:59.600 should be jealous of it. 00:15:59.600 --> 00:16:01.600 It is yours. 00:16:01.600 --> 00:16:06.160 It belongs to you and to your fellow members of your nation. 00:16:06.160 --> 00:16:09.360 Because it was given to you by your ancestors, because it was 00:16:09.360 --> 00:16:11.680 given to them by God. 00:16:11.680 --> 00:16:16.000 And so we're not saying that you have your genetic makeup and 00:16:16.000 --> 00:16:21.120 it's yours and you possess it and it's Yes, that's true, but 00:16:21.120 --> 00:16:24.160 on a higher and more important level that is true because it 00:16:24.160 --> 00:16:26.080 was given to you by God. 00:16:26.080 --> 00:16:29.200 And that is why, as we went over in last week's episode, 00:16:29.200 --> 00:16:32.640 it is something of which you should be jealous, because it is 00:16:32.640 --> 00:16:35.200 rightfully yours, because it was given to you by God as a 00:16:35.200 --> 00:16:41.920 blessing, and you should be protective of that, you should be jealous 00:16:41.920 --> 00:16:44.320 of that, you should be proud of that. 00:16:44.320 --> 00:16:47.920 That's something given you by God. 00:16:47.920 --> 00:16:52.400 And so when someone tells you that you can't be proud of, 00:16:52.400 --> 00:16:55.440 say, your ancestry, and this is one of the best examples because 00:16:55.440 --> 00:16:59.120 we hear this all the time in the modern world, that's simply 00:16:59.120 --> 00:17:04.560 wrong. That's telling you to be ashamed of something God gave you. 00:17:04.560 --> 00:17:08.320 It's telling you to denigrate one of God's good gifts. 00:17:08.320 --> 00:17:10.320 That's not something that a Christian does. 00:17:10.320 --> 00:17:12.160 That's something the modern world does. 00:17:12.160 --> 00:17:15.680 That's something the people who argue for the blank slate do There's 00:17:15.680 --> 00:17:20.400 no blank slate, you are not a blank slate, because you received 00:17:20.400 --> 00:17:26.000 an inheritance biologically, genetically, and yes also culturally in all these other 00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:29.840 ways. So you are not a blank slate because all of those 00:17:29.840 --> 00:17:34.000 things were there from the beginning, because that is how God designed 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:37.760 humanity, that is how God designed you, as Scripture says he knew 00:17:37.760 --> 00:17:40.400 you in the womb when he knitted you together. 00:17:40.400 --> 00:17:41.440 God intended you to be 00:17:42.400 --> 00:17:46.560 who and what you are, and in large part, that is a 00:17:46.560 --> 00:17:48.480 function of inheritance. 00:17:49.360 --> 00:17:54.080 The single most obvious example in scripture of an inheritance that we 00:17:54.080 --> 00:17:56.720 all share is share is original sin. 00:17:56.720 --> 00:17:59.120 You can go back to I think episode two. 00:17:59.120 --> 00:18:01.840 We talk about election in view of headship. 00:18:01.840 --> 00:18:06.800 We discuss the nature of inherited sin, and this is something that 00:18:07.040 --> 00:18:10.640 different denominations treat somewhat differently. 00:18:10.640 --> 00:18:12.720 And it's really important to get it right. 00:18:12.720 --> 00:18:15.760 And although we're not going to talk about it here today, once 00:18:15.760 --> 00:18:20.320 you understand that you die, as scripture says, because you inherit Adam's 00:18:20.320 --> 00:18:26.880 sin, you must understand that there are generational curses and generational blessings. 00:18:26.880 --> 00:18:32.560 That the post-Enlightenment notion that we are atomized individuals, and when you're 00:18:32.560 --> 00:18:36.560 born, you're basically starting from scratch and you live your best life 00:18:36.640 --> 00:18:39.760 and then you vanish and you try to zero your bank account 00:18:39.760 --> 00:18:41.040 on the day you die. 00:18:41.040 --> 00:18:43.440 That's kind of the boomer ethos today. 00:18:43.440 --> 00:18:45.360 But it's not human. 00:18:45.360 --> 00:18:46.800 It's certainly not Christian. 00:18:47.360 --> 00:18:50.080 It's never been true and it doesn't work. 00:18:50.080 --> 00:18:54.000 But it doesn't work because it's contrary to God's design for the 00:18:54.000 --> 00:19:00.720 universe. So when you're looking at inheritance in any sense, y you 00:19:00.720 --> 00:19:02.880 have to acknowledge that it's a real thing. 00:19:02.880 --> 00:19:08.000 If you deny that inheritance is real and substantial, at some point 00:19:08.080 --> 00:19:12.240 you're going to say something that forces you to deny original sin. 00:19:12.560 --> 00:19:18.240 And the useful thing about speaking honestly and directly and precisely about 00:19:18.240 --> 00:19:21.520 these matters is that when you treat each of the individual little 00:19:21.520 --> 00:19:25.760 details, like you know, inheritance law or the the proper structure of 00:19:25.760 --> 00:19:29.600 things and you order it according to the way God says these 00:19:29.600 --> 00:19:32.080 things should operate, you're never going to fall into the trap of 00:19:32.080 --> 00:19:35.200 saying, Well, there's no such thing as a generational curse because there 00:19:35.200 --> 00:19:37.520 are no generations, because there's no inheritance. 00:19:37.520 --> 00:19:43.040 Well Well, as Gory just said, like the man who denies race 00:19:43.360 --> 00:19:47.440 is also going to eventually have to deny original sin. 00:19:47.440 --> 00:19:50.640 He's going to have to deny his creator at some point. 00:19:50.640 --> 00:19:55.120 Because as you work back through the generations, you find that all 00:19:55.120 --> 00:19:59.360 sorts of things are passed on from one generation to the next, 00:19:59.360 --> 00:20:04.640 but they don't necessarily, genetically speaking, they don't necessarily go down, you 00:20:04.640 --> 00:20:07.440 know, five, ten generations, they may fade away. 00:20:07.440 --> 00:20:11.200 But when you're talking about something that is not material, something that's 00:20:11.120 --> 00:20:16.640 spiritual, particularly something like original sin, yes, it propagates until the last 00:20:16.640 --> 00:20:22.000 man is born, because that is the way the world is designed. 00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:26.560 Now, God didn't design man to inherit sin, God designed man to 00:20:26.560 --> 00:20:28.640 inherit the image of God. 00:20:28.640 --> 00:20:32.720 Adam was made in the perfect image of God, and Adam destroyed 00:20:32.720 --> 00:20:36.080 it by listening to his wife and disobeying God. 00:20:36.080 --> 00:20:39.840 And that sin is the reason that I die and you die, 00:20:39.840 --> 00:20:43.120 and everyone we've ever known and loved has or will die. 00:20:43.120 --> 00:20:46.400 And there's something I said a week or two ago that as 00:20:46.400 --> 00:20:49.360 I was re-listening to the episode, I wanted to clarify. 00:20:49.360 --> 00:20:52.640 First let me give you just a couple passages from Proverbs. 00:20:52.640 --> 00:20:57.440 Proverbs 1322 says a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's 00:20:57.440 --> 00:21:01.120 children, but the sinner's wealth is laid up for the righteous. 00:21:01.520 --> 00:21:05.040 I looked that up, you know, that's obviously just directly to material 00:21:05.040 --> 00:21:08.400 wealth, which is a good thing, it's a blessing from God. 00:21:08.400 --> 00:21:11.760 Two verses later it says, Whoever spares the rod hates his son, 00:21:11.760 --> 00:21:14.720 but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him. 00:21:14.720 --> 00:21:17.040 And so a week or two ago I said that 00:21:17.920 --> 00:21:19.920 it is good news that we die. 00:21:20.160 --> 00:21:23.120 I think I basically called our death in essence the gospel. 00:21:23.920 --> 00:21:25.760 I just realized I was listening to that that there's a lot 00:21:25.760 --> 00:21:27.840 of thought behind it that I didn't explain at the time. 00:21:27.840 --> 00:21:30.320 That probably sounded weird if you're paying attention, it it may have 00:21:30.320 --> 00:21:31.760 sounded blasphemous to you. 00:21:31.760 --> 00:21:32.560 It it's not. 00:21:32.720 --> 00:21:34.960 what I was talking about is is what we're talking about here 00:21:34.960 --> 00:21:41.120 today. The fact that we die is because we inherit Adam's sin. 00:21:41.120 --> 00:21:43.200 And that is a bad thing. 00:21:43.200 --> 00:21:45.680 I'm not saying it's a good thing that we die. 00:21:45.680 --> 00:21:49.840 But I am saying it's also a good thing that we die. 00:21:49.920 --> 00:21:54.080 As one of the really difficult parts for people to wrap their 00:21:54.080 --> 00:21:57.600 heads around in Christianity, is that there are certain times and places 00:21:57.600 --> 00:22:03.520 where God is operating in creation, where both and applies, where two 00:22:03.520 --> 00:22:09.920 contrary things, not even seemingly contrary, but actually explicitly mutually exclusive things 00:22:10.080 --> 00:22:12.240 are simultaneously true. 00:22:12.240 --> 00:22:16.080 As we did in the the episode on the Eucharist on communion. 00:22:16.080 --> 00:22:20.320 If you agree with the Lutheran conception of what scripture says about 00:22:20.320 --> 00:22:24.640 communion, it is simultaneously bread and his body. 00:22:24.640 --> 00:22:26.400 It's blood and it's wine. 00:22:26.400 --> 00:22:28.320 It's both of those things at the same time. 00:22:28.640 --> 00:22:30.880 The Calvinists say it can only be one or the other, the 00:22:30.880 --> 00:22:33.280 Roman Catholics say it can only be one or the other, and 00:22:33.280 --> 00:22:36.320 they disagree about which one it has to be. 00:22:36.320 --> 00:22:38.800 When you look at the passages and scriptures we went over in 00:22:38.800 --> 00:22:42.080 that episode, it's clearly both, even though it's contradictory, it doesn't make 00:22:42.080 --> 00:22:45.680 sense. You look at it like I I can't reconcile that. 00:22:45.680 --> 00:22:49.280 Which is why it's important to as a have as a predicate 00:22:49.280 --> 00:22:51.920 to any of these discussions, trusting in God. 00:22:51.920 --> 00:22:54.800 And when you clearly look at God's word, and He says it's 00:22:54.720 --> 00:22:58.000 one thing and it's the other at the same time, you have 00:22:58.000 --> 00:22:59.040 to believe him. 00:22:59.040 --> 00:23:02.160 Because the God who spoke the universe into existence, when he says 00:23:02.160 --> 00:23:06.640 something's true, it is true, even when our brains can't handle it. 00:23:07.040 --> 00:23:11.600 Now, we've said this before, you have to be careful that sort 00:23:11.600 --> 00:23:15.120 of sales pitch because any manner of garbage can be fed to 00:23:15.120 --> 00:23:17.360 someone say, oh yeah, don't worry about the fact that it seems 00:23:17.360 --> 00:23:19.120 insane and doesn't make any sense. 00:23:19.120 --> 00:23:23.280 That's potentially a setup for you to digest all manner of wicked 00:23:23.280 --> 00:23:24.720 teachings. So 00:23:25.760 --> 00:23:27.360 scripture is the judge. 00:23:27.360 --> 00:23:30.240 When scripture says it's one thing and it's another thing and they 00:23:30.240 --> 00:23:32.960 contradict each other Each other, Scripture is still right. 00:23:32.960 --> 00:23:37.520 Because God is not contradicting Himself, He's giving us a hard teaching. 00:23:37.520 --> 00:23:39.680 And that is the case with death. 00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:43.680 Death is our punishment for Adam's sin and for our sin, because 00:23:43.680 --> 00:23:47.120 Adam's sin as we inherit it is our sin. 00:23:47.120 --> 00:23:50.560 We're guilty of our own sin because we're Adam's sons. 00:23:50.560 --> 00:23:54.400 And on top of that, inherited guilt, we pile on a lifetime 00:23:54.400 --> 00:23:57.200 of brand new sins that we add to the pile. 00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:00.960 As we're recording this, this is just after Holy Week, which culminated 00:24:00.960 --> 00:24:03.840 in Good Friday and Easter. 00:24:03.840 --> 00:24:08.000 God paid the price for all those sins on the cross, and 00:24:08.000 --> 00:24:11.680 he paid the price for our sins loving us before we were 00:24:11.680 --> 00:24:15.280 created, knowing that we were going to commit those sins. 00:24:15.280 --> 00:24:18.720 So as we said in a recent episode, when you point to 00:24:18.720 --> 00:24:22.800 the cross, it is simultaneously the law and the gospel. 00:24:22.800 --> 00:24:26.880 You point to Christ's crucified body on Good Friday, the law is 00:24:26.880 --> 00:24:29.200 that my sins death did that. 00:24:29.200 --> 00:24:31.360 My sins killed God. 00:24:31.360 --> 00:24:34.240 And you point to that very same body hanging on the cross 00:24:34.240 --> 00:24:36.160 and say, This is the gospel. 00:24:36.160 --> 00:24:39.440 God loved me so much that while I was his enemy, he 00:24:39.440 --> 00:24:40.560 died for me. 00:24:40.560 --> 00:24:43.360 That is the love that he had, and he died to cancel 00:24:43.360 --> 00:24:46.560 out my sin, so that it's wiped away forever. 00:24:46.560 --> 00:24:48.720 It's both of those things at the same time. 00:24:48.720 --> 00:24:51.040 So is the crucifixion a good thing or a bad thing? 00:24:51.360 --> 00:24:54.720 But it's the worst, most evil crime ever committed in history, and 00:24:54.720 --> 00:24:58.480 it's the greatest act of love ever committed in history, too. 00:24:58.480 --> 00:25:00.400 It's both at the same time. 00:25:00.400 --> 00:25:04.480 So while Adam was cast out of the garden because he sinned 00:25:04.480 --> 00:25:09.920 against God, the specific reason he was removed because God says very 00:25:09.920 --> 00:25:13.520 clearly in Genesis, if he was still able to eat from the 00:25:13.520 --> 00:25:16.640 tree of life life, he wouldn't die. 00:25:16.640 --> 00:25:18.320 And then what would happen to him? 00:25:18.320 --> 00:25:20.560 He would be God's enemy forever. 00:25:20.560 --> 00:25:24.560 An immortal fallen Adam is a horrendous curse. 00:25:24.560 --> 00:25:26.400 It's an unimaginable curse. 00:25:26.400 --> 00:25:29.360 It's worse than any transhumanist fantasy. 00:25:29.360 --> 00:25:33.200 The idea that we would live in enmity with God for eternity 00:25:33.200 --> 00:25:37.280 without dying, I can't think of anything more horrible than that. 00:25:37.280 --> 00:25:42.080 And so it's simultaneously true that Adam's death was a blessing from 00:25:42.080 --> 00:25:47.840 God because in death, the Christian death, where we have already been 00:25:48.160 --> 00:25:52.880 baptized into Christ, where we go into the water with him and 00:25:52.880 --> 00:25:57.680 we die and we arise a new man, The new regenerate man, 00:25:57.680 --> 00:26:01.680 when his death occurs, his bodily death, it is an entry into 00:26:01.680 --> 00:26:02.960 eternal life. 00:26:02.960 --> 00:26:04.560 Again, that's a thing that's contradictory. 00:26:04.560 --> 00:26:07.600 You're talking about, you know, temporal death and eternal life. 00:26:07.600 --> 00:26:10.080 These are, you know, these are these are po it's like yin 00:26:10.080 --> 00:26:10.960 and yang stuff. 00:26:10.960 --> 00:26:12.480 It's polar opposites. 00:26:12.480 --> 00:26:15.680 And yet it's true at the same time because God says so. 00:26:15.680 --> 00:26:17.920 So if Adam had never died, that would have been a horrible 00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:20.800 curse, which is why I said it's good news that you die. 00:26:20.800 --> 00:26:23.200 It's good news when God disciplines you. 00:26:23.600 --> 00:26:27.120 It's good news when God doesn't spare the rod, but when he 00:26:27.120 --> 00:26:29.760 loves you and he's diligent in disciplining you. 00:26:29.760 --> 00:26:32.480 And that ultimate discipline is our death. 00:26:32.560 --> 00:26:33.040 But the 00:26:34.640 --> 00:26:39.600 our death, our inheritance of Adam's death, while it is a temporal 00:26:39.600 --> 00:26:45.360 punishment for our sin, the Christian hope is that God has earned 00:26:45.360 --> 00:26:48.480 our salvation on the cross and gives it to us freely in 00:26:48.480 --> 00:26:52.720 faith. And so when we die, as terrible and tragic as that 00:26:52.720 --> 00:26:55.760 day is for all of our friends and family, when you lose 00:26:55.760 --> 00:26:58.480 a loved one, you're mostly feeling sorrow usually. 00:26:58.480 --> 00:27:02.400 But But especially if it's a believer who's had strong faith and 00:27:02.400 --> 00:27:06.080 you have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they're in heaven, you can 00:27:06.080 --> 00:27:07.920 still be joyful simultaneously. 00:27:07.920 --> 00:27:08.720 It hurts. 00:27:08.720 --> 00:27:12.240 It hurts to have that loss, but there's joy in that death 00:27:12.400 --> 00:27:15.600 because you know you know that they are now perfected in Christ. 00:27:15.600 --> 00:27:18.240 That's the greatest hope that any of us can have. 00:27:18.240 --> 00:27:22.160 And is as I've said before, hope is not hopeful. 00:27:22.160 --> 00:27:24.080 It's not a probabilistic thing. 00:27:24.080 --> 00:27:27.440 Our hope in God is certainty, because it's a certainty in His 00:27:27.680 --> 00:27:30.960 promises. And so when God talks about 00:27:32.160 --> 00:27:37.120 us inheriting Adam's death, what's the offset? 00:27:37.120 --> 00:27:38.480 We inherit Adam's death. 00:27:38.480 --> 00:27:40.800 That's one part of our spiritual inheritance. 00:27:41.200 --> 00:27:45.040 And then as Christians, what does God say? 00:27:45.040 --> 00:27:48.880 We are adopted as sons of God, which makes us co-heirs with 00:27:48.880 --> 00:27:50.800 Christ of eternal life. 00:27:50.800 --> 00:27:52.960 You can go read Romans 8. 00:27:52.960 --> 00:27:56.800 Paul goes on at some length talking about the heirship that we 00:27:56.800 --> 00:28:00.000 have with Christ in the eternal life, which he won on the 00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:04.560 cross. And so while death is our inheritance according to our fallen 00:28:04.800 --> 00:28:10.560 sinful nature, eternal life is our inheritance according to God's perfect will 00:28:10.640 --> 00:28:15.200 and his perfect grace to save us despite not deserving anything. 00:28:15.360 --> 00:28:19.760 I think that's another aspect of all this inheritance that really, especially 00:28:19.760 --> 00:28:22.000 in modern years, rubs us the wrong way. 00:28:22.000 --> 00:28:24.720 Because we think about everything in terms of deserving. 00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:27.840 Well, I don't deserve to die because Adam listened to his wife 00:28:27.840 --> 00:28:29.280 and ate the wrong piece of fruit. 00:28:29.280 --> 00:28:30.240 That's not fair. 00:28:30.240 --> 00:28:30.880 It isn't. 00:28:30.880 --> 00:28:31.840 That's not fair at all. 00:28:31.840 --> 00:28:33.840 Some other guy did something and I get punished for it. 00:28:33.840 --> 00:28:35.120 It's totally unfair. 00:28:35.120 --> 00:28:37.920 And that's exactly how it works. 00:28:37.920 --> 00:28:40.000 Why? Because it's what God says. 00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:41.600 And we don't get to argue. 00:28:41.600 --> 00:28:45.120 And the only response that we should have is Lord have mercy, 00:28:45.120 --> 00:28:46.080 I believe. 00:28:46.080 --> 00:28:50.000 There's no back talk to the Creator. 00:28:50.000 --> 00:28:52.880 As we've again said many times, go read Job, see what happens 00:28:52.880 --> 00:28:54.080 when you back talk God. 00:28:54.080 --> 00:28:55.840 And you start at Job thirty eight. 00:28:55.840 --> 00:28:58.480 God puts him in his place in a hurry. 00:28:58.480 --> 00:29:02.080 And Job wasn't even that bad, certainly not nearly as bad as 00:29:02.080 --> 00:29:05.040 much of the unbelief that we have today. 00:29:05.040 --> 00:29:09.840 The manner in which we are given eternal life is inheritance, but 00:29:09.840 --> 00:29:11.760 it's one that's not deserved. 00:29:11.760 --> 00:29:16.320 And that's it's a distinct part of this because when we look 00:29:16.320 --> 00:29:21.360 at what is deserved and undeserved, in a sense you don't deserve 00:29:21.360 --> 00:29:25.840 to have your parents' stuff when they die, but in another sense 00:29:26.000 --> 00:29:28.080 you do, because it's your inheritance. 00:29:28.080 --> 00:29:30.640 Do you deserve it because you're a good person? 00:29:30.640 --> 00:29:32.640 No, that's not really how it works. 00:29:32.640 --> 00:29:34.720 But you're their son or their daughter. 00:29:34.720 --> 00:29:36.160 We'll get to that in a minute. 00:29:36.160 --> 00:29:43.280 But to inherit something temporal, something material from an older generation is 00:29:43.280 --> 00:29:45.120 a blessing from God. 00:29:45.120 --> 00:29:49.840 And it's something we don't necessarily deserve, yet at the same time 00:29:49.920 --> 00:29:53.760 we recognize that it is rightly ours. 00:29:53.760 --> 00:29:59.520 And eternal life, our inheritance of eternal life, is it's equally true 00:29:59.520 --> 00:30:00.400 of that. 00:30:00.400 --> 00:30:03.520 You don't inherit eternal life because you deserve it. 00:30:03.520 --> 00:30:06.800 And even when eternal life is promised to us and is given 00:30:06.800 --> 00:30:09.840 to us, and even when we are jealous of our inheritance of 00:30:09.840 --> 00:30:13.040 eternal life, which every Christian should be, what do you do? 00:30:13.040 --> 00:30:17.520 You zealously guard your promise of eternal life by living a Christian 00:30:17.520 --> 00:30:20.320 life. When you're adopted as a son of God and a co 00:30:20.480 --> 00:30:22.960 heir with Christ, what kind of life are you going to lead 00:30:22.960 --> 00:30:23.680 after that? 00:30:23.680 --> 00:30:27.120 Are you going to continue in the waves that you realize once 00:30:27.120 --> 00:30:30.000 you find Christ are the reason he was nailed to the cross 00:30:30.000 --> 00:30:30.800 in the first place? 00:30:30.800 --> 00:30:32.400 Or do you try to cut it out? 00:30:32.400 --> 00:30:34.480 Do you try to not do the things that you know you 00:30:34.480 --> 00:30:35.600 shouldn't have been doing? 00:30:35.600 --> 00:30:39.360 And either in your willful evil or in simply in your ignorance 00:30:39.520 --> 00:30:40.640 you persisted. 00:30:40.640 --> 00:30:46.240 Once you know, you realize I'm God's son now, I've been adopted, 00:30:46.240 --> 00:30:49.360 and as God's son, as an adopted son of God and co 00:30:49.520 --> 00:30:52.160 heir with Christ, I'm gonna stop messing around. 00:30:52.160 --> 00:30:53.920 I'm not going to break the rules. 00:30:53.920 --> 00:30:57.440 I'm going to try to do those things which bring God honor. 00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:01.760 Not because it's going to make me deserve my inheritance, but because 00:31:01.760 --> 00:31:05.200 I wish to be an honorable participant in it and to receive 00:31:05.200 --> 00:31:07.120 it with gratitude. 00:31:07.120 --> 00:31:08.640 And it's still imperfect. 00:31:09.040 --> 00:31:12.960 that's where the original sin continues to lag behind. 00:31:12.960 --> 00:31:16.000 We don't lose our original sin in baptism. 00:31:16.000 --> 00:31:18.400 We still bear that guilt, which is why we die. 00:31:18.400 --> 00:31:23.120 Our death is a proof that our original sin remains with us. 00:31:23.120 --> 00:31:26.080 But the inheritance of eternal life comes at death, so it is 00:31:26.080 --> 00:31:28.560 actually good news that God kills us. 00:31:28.560 --> 00:31:31.920 If he were an absentee father that didn't care at all, he 00:31:31.920 --> 00:31:35.280 let us live forever, is his eternal enemies. 00:31:35.280 --> 00:31:39.680 And that frankly seems like a worse description of hell than anything 00:31:39.680 --> 00:31:41.200 that could actually be there. 00:31:41.200 --> 00:31:43.360 So we should be thankful for for 00:31:44.240 --> 00:31:47.840 for all of these inheritances, and particularly in the Christian life, that 00:31:47.840 --> 00:31:52.240 the inheritance of eternal life, which is totally undeserved, is given freely. 00:31:52.240 --> 00:31:53.520 And then he tells us. 00:31:53.760 --> 00:31:56.160 he goes out of his way, he gives us the Bible, he 00:31:56.160 --> 00:32:00.000 gives us faithful preaching, and we hear, hopefully every week, the good 00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:04.880 news proclaimed, that despite deserving nothing, our inheritance is an eternal life 00:32:04.960 --> 00:32:07.200 that's waiting for us when we die. 00:32:07.200 --> 00:32:09.600 Does that make your death a good thing or a bad thing? 00:32:10.160 --> 00:32:11.440 It kind of makes it both. 00:32:11.440 --> 00:32:12.480 And that's okay. 00:32:12.480 --> 00:32:14.160 It can be both at the same 00:32:14.160 --> 00:32:14.800 time. 00:32:15.760 --> 00:32:20.080 One of the most important things that we inherit is in fact 00:32:20.400 --> 00:32:22.080 the church. 00:32:22.160 --> 00:32:26.160 We went over this, as Woe mentioned, in Episode four, Election in 00:32:26.160 --> 00:32:28.400 View of Headship. 00:32:28.400 --> 00:32:31.040 So I won't repeat all of that here, but I do want 00:32:31.040 --> 00:32:37.920 to emphasize the fact that the church is an inheritance. 00:32:37.920 --> 00:32:42.960 Now I want to explain that, because some will maybe push back 00:32:42.960 --> 00:32:45.040 against that. 00:32:45.040 --> 00:32:48.400 First off, it is important to note that God acts in time 00:32:48.400 --> 00:32:49.040 via means. 00:32:49.040 --> 00:32:53.680 We went over this to some extent in the aforementioned episode, so 00:32:53.680 --> 00:32:56.160 I recommend you go and listen to that or re-listen to that 00:32:56.160 --> 00:32:58.400 if necessary. 00:32:58.400 --> 00:33:02.480 But it is fundamentally important to understand that God does not simply 00:33:02.960 --> 00:33:06.560 zap someone and give him belief. 00:33:06.560 --> 00:33:08.400 That's not how it works. 00:33:08.400 --> 00:33:12.560 God has decided he is going to act via means. 00:33:12.560 --> 00:33:15.200 And that typically means his word. 00:33:15.200 --> 00:33:20.800 Whether it is preached or read, however you happen to encounter the 00:33:20.800 --> 00:33:26.160 word, however you experience the word and understand it, the word is 00:33:26.160 --> 00:33:30.640 the means that God uses to transmit that faith forward. 00:33:30.640 --> 00:33:32.960 Well, how do you receive the word? 00:33:32.960 --> 00:33:36.560 There are verses that should come to mind, of course, but quite 00:33:36.560 --> 00:33:39.280 simply, it's very straightforward. 00:33:39.280 --> 00:33:43.280 Someone has to present it to you. 00:33:43.280 --> 00:33:46.000 Now you may think, well, I could read it. 00:33:46.000 --> 00:33:49.360 Well that's true, but someone had to create the book. 00:33:49.360 --> 00:33:54.400 That actual physical artifact, the printed version of the Bible, because if 00:33:54.400 --> 00:33:57.200 you are the one picking it up and reading it, particularly if 00:33:57.200 --> 00:34:01.760 it's for the first time, you most certainly did not create it. 00:34:01.760 --> 00:34:05.680 When you hear the word for the first time, you are not 00:34:05.680 --> 00:34:07.280 the one doing the speaking. 00:34:07.280 --> 00:34:09.680 Someone else is doing that. 00:34:09.680 --> 00:34:14.400 That had to have been transmitted down through the generations over a 00:34:14.400 --> 00:34:18.400 course of millennia in order for you to hear that truth. 00:34:18.400 --> 00:34:22.800 Now, yes, God has ensured, because he has promised, that his word 00:34:22.960 --> 00:34:27.040 will remain, and that we will be able to have that word, 00:34:27.040 --> 00:34:29.840 and to read, to hear it, etc. 00:34:30.080 --> 00:34:34.640 However, that is a general promise. 00:34:34.640 --> 00:34:38.960 It is not given to any one specific person or group of 00:34:38.960 --> 00:34:44.720 people. In order for you to have heard the word, it is 00:34:44.720 --> 00:34:49.840 necessary that you had faithful ancestors or that someone else had faithful 00:34:49.840 --> 00:34:54.080 ancestors who then sent a missionary for your people to hear that 00:34:54.080 --> 00:34:57.600 word. And so the church is an inheritance. 00:34:57.600 --> 00:35:05.280 Thankfully, the church, unlike most inheritance, because typically most inheritance, you inherit 00:35:05.280 --> 00:35:09.040 something and it gets split among the children. 00:35:09.040 --> 00:35:11.920 We'll go into some of the details on that in a little 00:35:11.920 --> 00:35:15.760 bit, but typically it's split among the children, and so the inheritance 00:35:15.760 --> 00:35:19.200 is to an extent diminished as it is split. 00:35:19.200 --> 00:35:23.040 Yes, you can then use that inheritance to grow your own inheritance 00:35:23.040 --> 00:35:25.360 to pass on to your own children as it is supposed to 00:35:25.360 --> 00:35:27.680 work, you aren't simply supposed to sit on it. 00:35:27.680 --> 00:35:31.680 That makes you the wicked servant who buried his talent. 00:35:31.680 --> 00:35:34.320 However, that division does take place. 00:35:34.320 --> 00:35:36.640 That's not the case with the faith. 00:35:36.640 --> 00:35:41.360 The faith can be transmitted with no loss, which is to say 00:35:41.360 --> 00:35:45.280 that each new believer adds to the inheritance and does not detract 00:35:45.280 --> 00:35:45.680 from it. 00:35:45.680 --> 00:35:48.800 There's no division in the same sense as, say, if you took 00:35:48.800 --> 00:35:51.440 a bank account with a hundred thousand dollars in it, and you 00:35:51.680 --> 00:35:55.760 divided it among two children, they would each get fifty thousand, assuming 00:35:55.760 --> 00:35:58.480 you did it evenly. 00:35:58.480 --> 00:36:00.480 That's not the case with the faith. 00:36:00.480 --> 00:36:04.000 If I tell you about Christ and you believe because what I 00:36:04.000 --> 00:36:07.280 told you, there are now two believers, and we both have the 00:36:07.280 --> 00:36:12.080 faith. There's no diminishment there. 00:36:12.080 --> 00:36:15.200 However, that transmission was necessary. 00:36:16.080 --> 00:36:22.000 And so the church herself is fundamentally a matter of inheritance, and 00:36:22.000 --> 00:36:27.280 that is the way in which nations, peoples, eras even, can be 00:36:27.280 --> 00:36:32.880 faithful, a faithful nation is going to transmit forward that inheritance of 00:36:32.880 --> 00:36:35.760 the truth to future generations. 00:36:35.760 --> 00:36:39.440 And that is, of course, what makes that nation faithful. 00:36:39.440 --> 00:36:46.320 If at some point, some generation, some certain link in the chain, 00:36:46.320 --> 00:36:51.120 is faithless and does not transmit the faith forward, the next generation 00:36:51.120 --> 00:36:52.480 will not have faith. 00:36:52.480 --> 00:36:54.240 It doesn't just come out of nowhere. 00:36:54.240 --> 00:36:57.120 Again, God doesn't just zap you and give you faith. 00:36:57.120 --> 00:36:58.800 He works via means. 00:36:58.800 --> 00:37:02.080 This is something that has to be transmitted forward. 00:37:02.080 --> 00:37:03.920 It is an inheritance. 00:37:03.920 --> 00:37:07.120 And if you do not receive it as an inheritance, you simply 00:37:07.680 --> 00:37:09.920 will not receive it. 00:37:09.920 --> 00:37:13.680 And so that is why it is so fundamentally important for the 00:37:13.680 --> 00:37:19.680 older generations to transmit this faith forward to future generations, to pass 00:37:19.680 --> 00:37:21.360 on this inheritance. 00:37:21.360 --> 00:37:24.720 They received it from those who came before them, they are supposed 00:37:24.720 --> 00:37:27.120 to pass it to those who come after them. 00:37:27.280 --> 00:37:31.760 That is one of the most important parts of the Christian life. 00:37:31.840 --> 00:37:35.120 Old men are supposed to teach young men the faith. 00:37:35.120 --> 00:37:38.480 You are supposed to grow in your faith over the course of 00:37:38.480 --> 00:37:42.240 your life so that you are able to teach younger men, particularly 00:37:42.240 --> 00:37:44.880 if you are a father so you're able to teach your sons, 00:37:44.880 --> 00:37:47.840 and then your grandsons and your great grandsons, if you are so 00:37:47.840 --> 00:37:51.440 lucky that God keeps you alive long enough to see them. 00:37:51.440 --> 00:37:55.600 That is part of your duty as a Christian. 00:37:55.600 --> 00:37:57.280 It is a matter of inheritance. 00:37:57.280 --> 00:38:01.760 You are passing forward that inheritance, it's not again, it is not 00:38:01.760 --> 00:38:03.440 just material. 00:38:03.440 --> 00:38:07.040 It's not just money, it's not just real estate, it's not your 00:38:07.040 --> 00:38:10.480 collection of whatever you happen to collect. 00:38:10.480 --> 00:38:14.960 Yes, those things are also an inheritance that you pass forward, but 00:38:14.960 --> 00:38:20.160 the most important inheritance is the church. 00:38:20.160 --> 00:38:24.960 The church has to be maintained generationally because as Wo just explained 00:38:25.680 --> 00:38:30.240 and as we all know, we die. 00:38:30.240 --> 00:38:37.440 You cannot have a church maintained by mortal human beings who die, 00:38:37.440 --> 00:38:41.520 who have finite lifespans, if it is not passed on to their 00:38:41.520 --> 00:38:45.040 children, if that inheritance is not carried forward. 00:38:45.040 --> 00:38:48.640 If you know something, and you tell no one about it, and 00:38:48.640 --> 00:38:52.560 then you die, that knowledge dies with you. 00:38:52.560 --> 00:38:57.120 Now, as we have explained a number of times in previous episodes 00:38:57.120 --> 00:39:03.040 and elsewhere, the Christian faith is a matter of knowledge, not just 00:39:03.040 --> 00:39:08.800 knowledge, also faith, also belief, but you have to have the knowledge. 00:39:08.800 --> 00:39:11.920 Because otherwise, in what are you believing? 00:39:11.920 --> 00:39:14.640 If you just have some sort of as if this were even 00:39:14.640 --> 00:39:18.320 possible, but if you just had some sort of nebulous faith, it 00:39:18.320 --> 00:39:21.920 would not be the Christian faith, because the Christian faith is in 00:39:21.920 --> 00:39:25.200 a concrete set of tenets. 00:39:25.200 --> 00:39:29.040 We enumerate those, you can just look at the creeds. 00:39:29.040 --> 00:39:34.240 We know what the Christian faith teaches, what you have to believe 00:39:34.240 --> 00:39:35.920 to be a Christian. 00:39:35.920 --> 00:39:39.760 And this is the three forms of knowledge, as it were, we've 00:39:39.680 --> 00:39:46.160 gone over many times Notitia, Ascensus, and Fiducia, those first two are 00:39:46.160 --> 00:39:50.480 essentially purely a matter of what we are discussing in this episode, 00:39:50.480 --> 00:39:55.440 inheritance, passing forward the knowledge that is the Christian faith. 00:39:55.440 --> 00:39:59.280 Yes, those to whom it is passed must believe, that's the third 00:39:59.280 --> 00:40:04.240 fiducia. If they do not have that faith, they are not Christians. 00:40:04.240 --> 00:40:07.280 But they have to have the content of the faith first in 00:40:07.280 --> 00:40:10.560 order to believe in it, because that is the means through which 00:40:10.320 --> 00:40:14.080 the Spirit works, that is what Scripture tells us. 00:40:14.080 --> 00:40:18.480 And so when we think of inheritance, we shouldn't just think in 00:40:18.640 --> 00:40:21.200 the secular terms as it were. 00:40:21.200 --> 00:40:24.480 We need to think about the fullness of what God gives us 00:40:24.640 --> 00:40:28.880 and what we are passing forward to future generations, and first and 00:40:28.880 --> 00:40:34.000 foremost, it is the Christian faith that is an inheritance. 00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:39.040 And Scripture speaks of not just the Christian faith as an inheritance, 00:40:39.040 --> 00:40:42.640 but also what you receive with the Christian faith, eternal life and 00:40:42.640 --> 00:40:47.600 all these other things, as an inheritance we inherit with Christ, because 00:40:47.600 --> 00:40:48.800 we are made sons of God. 00:40:49.840 --> 00:40:55.200 We are restored to that right relationship with God through the blood 00:40:55.200 --> 00:40:57.440 of Christ. 00:40:57.440 --> 00:41:00.720 And yes, it is sons, as we've gone over in previous episodes, 00:41:00.720 --> 00:41:04.960 but I will go over again, the reason it says sons is 00:41:04.960 --> 00:41:12.160 because historically, traditionally, as scripture says, and quite frankly, rightfully, it is 00:41:12.160 --> 00:41:15.680 sons who inherit, and not daughters. 00:41:15.680 --> 00:41:21.760 And that is why Scripture is explicit in saying sons, because every 00:41:21.760 --> 00:41:28.240 Christian, whether male or female, man or woman, inherits as a son 00:41:28.480 --> 00:41:29.760 of God. 00:41:30.080 --> 00:41:33.360 Because we all inherit eternal life equally. 00:41:33.360 --> 00:41:34.480 There's no distinction there. 00:41:34.480 --> 00:41:37.040 This is where Galatians three twenty eight comes in. 00:41:37.040 --> 00:41:42.320 We have gone over that in an episode entitled Galatians three twenty-eight. 00:41:42.320 --> 00:41:44.640 And I generally just recommend listening to that one again. 00:41:45.680 --> 00:41:48.560 But that is why it says that we are sons of God, 00:41:48.560 --> 00:41:52.880 because even women inherit as sons. 00:41:52.880 --> 00:41:59.600 Now yes, in scripture there are cases where a daughter does inherit, 00:41:59.600 --> 00:42:04.640 but the general rule is that inheritance goes to the sons. 00:42:04.640 --> 00:42:09.120 The reason for this is a distinction in the way that marriage 00:42:09.120 --> 00:42:12.320 works for a man versus a woman. 00:42:12.320 --> 00:42:16.080 For a man, he takes a wife. 00:42:16.080 --> 00:42:18.960 She becomes part of his family. 00:42:18.960 --> 00:42:22.560 They are forming a new link in that chain. 00:42:22.560 --> 00:42:24.560 She is joining a family. 00:42:24.560 --> 00:42:25.920 He is the head. 00:42:25.920 --> 00:42:27.360 She is not the head. 00:42:27.360 --> 00:42:28.720 The head is in control. 00:42:28.720 --> 00:42:30.720 The head is in the position of authority. 00:42:30.720 --> 00:42:34.560 And so she joins under him in his family. 00:42:34.560 --> 00:42:39.440 For the woman, as I just said, she is joining another family. 00:42:39.440 --> 00:42:40.960 She is not the head. 00:42:40.960 --> 00:42:44.640 And so that is why traditionally she didn't one of the reasons 00:42:44.640 --> 00:42:50.160 that traditionally the woman does not inherit because she is no longer 00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:54.480 in the same way part of her original birth family. 00:42:54.480 --> 00:42:56.560 She has become part of her husband's family. 00:42:56.960 --> 00:43:00.240 She has created a new link in that chain, and that is 00:43:00.240 --> 00:43:02.480 what she is helping to carry forward. 00:43:02.480 --> 00:43:07.280 And so she has that inheritance from that family, which will be 00:43:07.280 --> 00:43:09.840 then passed on to her children. 00:43:09.840 --> 00:43:13.280 So there's a fundamental difference in the way that marriage and all 00:43:13.280 --> 00:43:16.880 of these things work for men versus women, and that's one of 00:43:16.880 --> 00:43:21.840 the reasons that daughters traditionally do not inherit. 00:43:21.840 --> 00:43:24.240 Now, of course, the big exception is when 00:43:25.280 --> 00:43:29.760 a man has no sons, then he has no son to whom 00:43:29.760 --> 00:43:34.480 to pass the inheritance, and so scripture in a couple places addresses 00:43:34.480 --> 00:43:36.080 this explicitly actually. 00:43:36.320 --> 00:43:40.240 the daughters then would inherit, and that is how it has functioned 00:43:40.240 --> 00:43:41.680 in many societies. 00:43:41.680 --> 00:43:45.920 Some have passed it to the nearest male relative. 00:43:45.920 --> 00:43:49.520 This is not something that scripture says you must absolutely do it 00:43:49.520 --> 00:43:50.320 this way. 00:43:50.320 --> 00:43:53.840 It is not a matter where the moral law speaks to us 00:43:53.840 --> 00:43:56.720 explicitly in detail as it were. 00:43:56.720 --> 00:44:01.280 Now, there are general recommendations, there's no set of rules, which is 00:44:01.280 --> 00:44:05.600 to say that society is free, the godly prince is free, in 00:44:05.600 --> 00:44:10.640 light of what Scripture says, to draft rules for inheritance, for how 00:44:10.640 --> 00:44:14.480 these things work in reality, because that is the civil law. 00:44:14.480 --> 00:44:18.880 And the civil law, yes, there's civil law in scripture, but the 00:44:18.880 --> 00:44:22.160 civil law is not binding on us in the same way and 00:44:22.160 --> 00:44:24.720 to the same extent as the moral law. 00:44:24.720 --> 00:44:28.560 Because as mentioned many times, the moral law flows from the nature 00:44:28.560 --> 00:44:32.880 of God and is therefore unchanging, and man has no say in 00:44:32.880 --> 00:44:34.000 it as it were. 00:44:34.000 --> 00:44:37.840 We are required to follow the moral law exactly as it has 00:44:37.840 --> 00:44:40.880 been passed to us or revealed to us by God. 00:44:40.880 --> 00:44:44.160 There are no exceptions to it, there's no well I would like 00:44:44.160 --> 00:44:45.840 to do no. 00:44:45.840 --> 00:44:48.640 The moral law says X, you do X. 00:44:48.640 --> 00:44:51.360 If the moral law says do not do X, you do not 00:44:51.360 --> 00:44:52.560 do X. 00:44:52.560 --> 00:44:57.040 The civil law is by and large left up to human wisdom 00:44:57.280 --> 00:44:59.680 with the guidance of scripture. 00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:00.640 If 00:45:00.640 --> 00:45:04.320 you happen to be a fellow Crusader Kings 3 player, you're probably 00:45:04.320 --> 00:45:10.080 familiar with some of the elaborate permutations of inheritance that exist historically 00:45:10.080 --> 00:45:13.680 in the West and as well as in other cultures dealing with 00:45:13.920 --> 00:45:20.000 which sons receive which portions are their preferences for male versus female. 00:45:20.000 --> 00:45:22.000 It's very elaborate and it varied by culture. 00:45:22.000 --> 00:45:25.920 And as Corey said, there's not an explicit law from God saying 00:45:26.000 --> 00:45:27.600 that it must be this way. 00:45:27.600 --> 00:45:32.240 And I want to make an explicit note here because Stonequar listeners 00:45:32.240 --> 00:45:34.880 want to try to be God and do what God says. 00:45:35.120 --> 00:45:38.080 We are absolutely not saying write your daughters out of your will. 00:45:38.080 --> 00:45:40.240 Please don't do that. 00:45:40.240 --> 00:45:46.000 What we are saying is that when a society is godly, generally, 00:45:46.000 --> 00:45:48.960 there's no need for daughters to be in the will. 00:45:48.960 --> 00:45:52.720 Because as Corey said, when a daughter marries, she's marrying into a 00:45:52.720 --> 00:45:56.960 family. So it's just marrying for love, just marrying because the guy's 00:45:56.880 --> 00:45:58.880 really cute, not enough. 00:45:58.880 --> 00:46:01.280 Not really the right barometer. 00:46:01.280 --> 00:46:03.200 You hope absolutely for both of those. 00:46:03.200 --> 00:46:04.800 Those should be there. 00:46:04.800 --> 00:46:07.280 But you are marrying into a family. 00:46:07.280 --> 00:46:09.360 It's a package deal. 00:46:09.360 --> 00:46:11.760 And that's why she takes his name. 00:46:11.760 --> 00:46:16.160 That's why the father gives her hand to her groom in marriage 00:46:16.320 --> 00:46:21.600 as a transfer, saying she is now your principal problem. 00:46:21.600 --> 00:46:25.920 The interesting thing when you look at the history of things like 00:46:25.920 --> 00:46:31.200 inheritance, there is also historically going back all the way to antiquity, 00:46:31.200 --> 00:46:36.240 the notion of dowries, which is basically a form of inheritance for 00:46:36.240 --> 00:46:40.000 the female that doesn't occur at the death of the parents, but 00:46:40.240 --> 00:46:41.760 it occurs upon marriage. 00:46:41.760 --> 00:46:45.760 It is in effect a portion of her inheritance, but it's received 00:46:45.760 --> 00:46:48.000 at the moment when she needs it the most. 00:46:48.000 --> 00:46:54.320 And historically, dowries are given primarily for two overlapping purposes one so 00:46:54.320 --> 00:46:58.400 that at the moment when the new husband and wife, the newly 00:46:58.400 --> 00:47:03.440 formed bond of marriage is created, they can hit the ground running 00:47:03.520 --> 00:47:07.280 having kids, and they will have the means to care for the 00:47:07.280 --> 00:47:12.080 kids. Because while the father of the bride might not care about 00:47:12.080 --> 00:47:18.000 the welfare of her new husband, not directly or necessarily implicitly. 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:22.240 He certainly still has an invested interest in his daughter's children, because 00:47:22.240 --> 00:47:26.480 those are just as much his grandchildren as his heirs on the 00:47:26.480 --> 00:47:27.360 male side. 00:47:27.360 --> 00:47:31.840 And so what Dowry has historically done is for parents to be 00:47:31.840 --> 00:47:35.840 able to transfer a portion of their wealth to their daughters upon 00:47:35.840 --> 00:47:39.360 their marriage so that in the moment when they're forming a family, 00:47:39.360 --> 00:47:42.880 that family formation can go as optimally as possible possible. 00:47:42.880 --> 00:47:46.400 And the other purpose of dowries was to ensure even if the 00:47:46.400 --> 00:47:49.680 husband turned out to be a bad husband or if the husband 00:47:49.680 --> 00:47:53.440 dies, the dowry was there in part to ensure that the wife 00:47:53.440 --> 00:47:57.040 and any of her offspring would be cared for materially. 00:47:57.040 --> 00:47:59.760 And so it was there to provide security for her. 00:47:59.760 --> 00:48:04.560 And often in various cultures, when the dowry was given to the 00:48:04.560 --> 00:48:08.000 wife, she would have legal rights to it that the husband would 00:48:08.240 --> 00:48:10.720 would not have over that portion of the dowry. 00:48:10.720 --> 00:48:13.760 We'll link in the show notes the Wikipedia article so you can 00:48:13.760 --> 00:48:15.840 just see again some of the variations there. 00:48:15.840 --> 00:48:18.640 So there's not necessarily a right answer for any of this, but 00:48:18.640 --> 00:48:22.240 it's interesting just to pay attention to the fact that historically 00:48:23.280 --> 00:48:26.880 these considerations have always been a part of human experience. 00:48:26.880 --> 00:48:30.400 And again, because we're atomized today, we have no notion of this. 00:48:30.400 --> 00:48:36.400 We have no notion in the West of faith family formation and 00:48:36.400 --> 00:48:40.160 sacrificing now for the sake of future generations. 00:48:40.160 --> 00:48:42.960 It's basically unthinkable to most people today. 00:48:42.960 --> 00:48:46.880 What's interesting that it absolutely exists today in other cultures. 00:48:46.880 --> 00:48:50.800 When I lived in the Bay Area, it was the norm among 00:48:51.120 --> 00:48:55.600 East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Indian families. 00:48:55.600 --> 00:48:58.160 Generally they would have, you know, a number of family members, a 00:48:58.160 --> 00:49:00.960 lot of family members, all in the same general area, even if 00:49:00.960 --> 00:49:02.320 they're around the country. 00:49:02.320 --> 00:49:04.960 When a couple would get married, you know what they'd do? 00:49:04.960 --> 00:49:07.600 They'd buy them a house, pay cash. 00:49:07.600 --> 00:49:09.520 The house would be paid for. 00:49:09.520 --> 00:49:12.320 The new couple, when they got married, would be handed the keys 00:49:12.320 --> 00:49:13.600 without a mortgage. 00:49:13.600 --> 00:49:16.240 And you know, this is the Bay Area, you know, 15 years 00:49:16.240 --> 00:49:16.960 ago or so. 00:49:16.960 --> 00:49:20.480 We're talking about five, eight hundred million dollar houses. 00:49:20.480 --> 00:49:21.840 Not a small investment. 00:49:21.840 --> 00:49:25.920 So these families were doing well for themselves, but they're also putting 00:49:25.920 --> 00:49:27.360 their money where their mouth was. 00:49:27.360 --> 00:49:30.560 Because you know, they're probably, you know, a dozen families chipping in 00:49:30.560 --> 00:49:34.800 for, you know, easily five or six figures to ensure that that 00:49:34.800 --> 00:49:38.160 new couple could get off on the best possible foot. 00:49:38.160 --> 00:49:41.680 And then the expectation is that everyone in the community continues to 00:49:41.680 --> 00:49:42.800 pay it forward. 00:49:42.800 --> 00:49:45.680 So later on, when that couple has had a bunch of kids 00:49:45.680 --> 00:49:50.800 on our shores and they've done even better for themselves financially, they 00:49:50.800 --> 00:49:54.480 will help to buy other people's kids' houses and they'll buy their 00:49:54.480 --> 00:49:57.600 own kids' houses when they get old enough for the same purpose. 00:49:57.600 --> 00:50:00.640 So it's not exactly a dowry, but you can see the principle 00:50:00.640 --> 00:50:01.520 is the same. 00:50:01.520 --> 00:50:06.160 There is a natural godly impulse for every people to want to 00:50:06.160 --> 00:50:08.080 see their kids do well now. 00:50:08.080 --> 00:50:10.800 And I think it's one of the things that's in some cases 00:50:10.880 --> 00:50:13.760 it's almost gone again from the boomer ethos. 00:50:13.760 --> 00:50:16.640 If you're new and you haven't heard us talk much about boomers, 00:50:16.640 --> 00:50:17.680 we did an entire episode. 00:50:17.680 --> 00:50:19.840 We've done a couple episodes about generations. 00:50:19.840 --> 00:50:23.840 And the one particular in the generational divide, we talk about when 00:50:23.840 --> 00:50:26.800 we say this, we're not trying to be hateful or spiteful. 00:50:26.800 --> 00:50:31.120 We describe there how there's a particular set of set of beliefs 00:50:31.120 --> 00:50:35.040 and behaviors in the generation, particular to the boomers and the older 00:50:35.040 --> 00:50:40.640 Xers, that isn't even present for the silent generation, their own parents. 00:50:40.640 --> 00:50:43.440 And one of the problems that we have is that there's this 00:50:43.440 --> 00:50:47.120 notion, like I said earlier, you make sure that the last check 00:50:47.120 --> 00:50:48.320 you write bounces. 00:50:48.320 --> 00:50:49.840 That's a boomer joke. 00:50:49.840 --> 00:50:52.960 The idea that I'm gonna run everything to zero, maybe I'll run 00:50:52.960 --> 00:50:54.160 up credit card debt. 00:50:54.160 --> 00:50:57.200 And so the day I die, all the bills come due and 00:50:57.200 --> 00:50:57.600 I'm gone. 00:50:57.600 --> 00:50:58.640 It's not my problem. 00:50:58.640 --> 00:51:00.240 Well, what are they doing? 00:51:00.240 --> 00:51:02.960 They joke about it and it's not a joke either. 00:51:02.960 --> 00:51:07.920 They have the incentive in their own moral compass to not leave 00:51:07.920 --> 00:51:11.360 an inheritance to their children, let alone their children's children. 00:51:11.360 --> 00:51:15.520 It's the opposite of the notion, particularly manifests in the dowry, to 00:51:15.520 --> 00:51:19.680 see your children do well in your life, and then certainly for 00:51:19.680 --> 00:51:22.960 your male heirs when you die, or again, as I said, for 00:51:22.960 --> 00:51:24.320 your daughters as well. 00:51:24.320 --> 00:51:26.640 Don't write your daughters out of your will because you heard this 00:51:26.640 --> 00:51:29.440 episode. Act in wisdom. 00:51:29.440 --> 00:51:34.000 If we solved about 30 or 40 other problems, maybe someday we'll 00:51:33.920 --> 00:51:36.080 get to the point where we can go back to having proper 00:51:36.320 --> 00:51:40.240 dowries and proper inheritances, but we don't s first solve the problem 00:51:40.240 --> 00:51:41.680 of cutting kids out of wills. 00:51:41.680 --> 00:51:42.480 Don't do that. 00:51:42.480 --> 00:51:45.040 Let's try to build a society where this stuff just works the 00:51:45.040 --> 00:51:46.080 way it used to. 00:51:46.080 --> 00:51:49.600 Because for thousands of years, this stuff was basically sorted out. 00:51:49.600 --> 00:51:50.480 It was never perfect. 00:51:50.720 --> 00:51:52.080 There are sinners involved. 00:51:52.080 --> 00:51:55.280 There's jealousy and foolishness and rivalries. 00:51:55.280 --> 00:51:56.000 Guess what? 00:51:56.000 --> 00:51:57.280 That's human life. 00:51:57.280 --> 00:51:59.120 You can't solve that with the law. 00:51:59.120 --> 00:52:03.200 You can only solve that with God's love and with people actually 00:52:03.200 --> 00:52:05.680 believing and wanting to obey God. 00:52:05.760 --> 00:52:11.520 But when you think about structuring society, when inheritance is taken from 00:52:11.520 --> 00:52:14.560 the children, one of the things that we're seeing in our own 00:52:14.560 --> 00:52:19.520 church today, the LCMS, is making a very concerted grab against the 00:52:19.520 --> 00:52:24.400 trusts and the inheritances of the boomers as they're dying to divert 00:52:24.400 --> 00:52:29.040 that transfer of intergenerational wealth away from their children, if they have 00:52:29.040 --> 00:52:30.240 any, into the church. 00:52:30.320 --> 00:52:32.160 Because they oh no no, your kids are gonna be fine. 00:52:32.160 --> 00:52:33.600 You don't want them to be spoiled. 00:52:33.600 --> 00:52:34.400 You know what? 00:52:34.400 --> 00:52:36.240 Let's just give that to the LCMS. 00:52:36.240 --> 00:52:37.440 We're gonna use it for missions. 00:52:37.440 --> 00:52:39.120 We have all these foreigners coming here. 00:52:39.120 --> 00:52:41.280 We're gonna tell 'em about Jesus, it's gonna be great. 00:52:41.280 --> 00:52:44.480 You should give most of what you have, give it to God, 00:52:44.480 --> 00:52:47.440 and just make the checkout to the LCMS corporation. 00:52:47.440 --> 00:52:50.640 That's typical in a lot of churches today, to try to drain 00:52:50.640 --> 00:52:55.680 that intergenerational wealth, to be envious of it, to covet that which 00:52:55.680 --> 00:53:01.360 is rightly being passed from fathers and grandfathers to children and grandchildren, 00:53:01.360 --> 00:53:06.400 and put it into something that is outside of the typical way 00:53:06.400 --> 00:53:07.760 these things are treated. 00:53:07.760 --> 00:53:10.640 Now, a lot of these matters are going to be a function 00:53:10.640 --> 00:53:13.040 of how wealthy you are personally. 00:53:13.040 --> 00:53:15.440 I'd imagine that there are probably not many of our listeners, because 00:53:15.600 --> 00:53:18.960 it's just there aren't that many people in the world who actually 00:53:18.960 --> 00:53:20.880 have to worry about intergenerational 00:53:21.920 --> 00:53:26.480 estate management and setting up trusts because there's so much there that 00:53:26.480 --> 00:53:28.320 there's plenty to spread around. 00:53:28.320 --> 00:53:30.560 And that's a reasonable consideration. 00:53:30.560 --> 00:53:35.200 If you have a hundred million dollars, it's perfectly fine as a 00:53:35.200 --> 00:53:37.920 matter of wisdom to say I'm not going to give my son 00:53:37.920 --> 00:53:39.360 a hundred million dollars. 00:53:39.360 --> 00:53:41.760 Or if you know maybe you have enough kids and grandkids you 00:53:41.760 --> 00:53:43.120 can spread it evenly. 00:53:43.120 --> 00:53:44.640 It's up for grabs. 00:53:44.640 --> 00:53:49.280 There's no moral dicta that says you must give this percentage to 00:53:49.280 --> 00:53:51.120 this and not this. 00:53:51.120 --> 00:53:55.120 For many people, it's absolutely a laudable thing to give some money 00:53:55.120 --> 00:54:00.400 to a worthwhile charity, including a worthwhile church program. 00:54:00.400 --> 00:54:02.080 That's a good thing. 00:54:02.080 --> 00:54:02.400 But 00:54:04.560 --> 00:54:07.840 the consideration is how much is there to go around? 00:54:07.840 --> 00:54:10.560 And what we see is that in most families, in a typical 00:54:10.560 --> 00:54:15.280 American family, like right now, somebody who's, you know, fifteen, twenty years 00:54:15.360 --> 00:54:19.280 younger than me will probably never be able to afford a house, 00:54:19.280 --> 00:54:22.880 which is kind of bonkers because their parents probably own homes. 00:54:22.880 --> 00:54:25.760 Will they be given those homes as an inheritance? 00:54:25.760 --> 00:54:28.480 In some cases, yes, in some cases no. 00:54:28.480 --> 00:54:31.680 You know, in some cases the house has to be sold and 00:54:31.680 --> 00:54:36.000 liquidated to settle the estate to divide it up among various children. 00:54:36.000 --> 00:54:41.120 That winnowing function that occurs when things are diluted, it's an opportunity 00:54:41.120 --> 00:54:44.160 to decide as individuals what makes sense. 00:54:44.160 --> 00:54:48.480 You know, they're entirely permissible cases where maybe a child does need 00:54:48.480 --> 00:54:50.800 to be removed from a will, or maybe they don't need to 00:54:50.800 --> 00:54:54.880 be removed, but they can't really be trusted in their own judgment. 00:54:54.880 --> 00:54:57.600 And so anything that's given to them needs to be put in 00:54:57.600 --> 00:55:00.880 a managed trust so that they can have access to what they 00:55:00.880 --> 00:55:04.160 need, but they won't have access to, you know, do drugs or 00:55:04.160 --> 00:55:08.720 w whatever damaging thing makes their judgment suspect. 00:55:08.720 --> 00:55:12.240 You know, if you give this kid a hundred thousand dollars, he's 00:55:12.240 --> 00:55:13.920 probably gonna be dead in a week. 00:55:13.920 --> 00:55:15.200 There are people like that. 00:55:15.200 --> 00:55:19.920 There's absolutely no moral or scriptural argument to say you gotta give 00:55:19.920 --> 00:55:21.440 somebody a loaded gun. 00:55:21.440 --> 00:55:22.480 Absolutely not. 00:55:22.480 --> 00:55:24.560 These are all matters of wisdom. 00:55:24.560 --> 00:55:28.480 But the moral necessity is that, you know, Proverbs 13, a good 00:55:28.960 --> 00:55:32.080 man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. 00:55:32.080 --> 00:55:36.720 Now, as we said earlier, the one of the fundamental things to 00:55:36.720 --> 00:55:43.840 understand about all inheritance is that this intergenerational transfer is never 00:55:43.840 --> 00:55:46.000 deserved by any generation. 00:55:46.000 --> 00:55:50.800 It's God pouring out his blessings on us generation after generation. 00:55:50.800 --> 00:55:54.160 So if your parents did really well in life, guess what? 00:55:54.160 --> 00:55:54.880 God bless them. 00:55:55.360 --> 00:55:59.360 And so for them to remember you in their will is God 00:55:59.360 --> 00:56:00.640 blessing you. 00:56:00.640 --> 00:56:05.840 And if unfortunately, because so many of these things have been completely 00:56:05.840 --> 00:56:10.160 lost from society and culture, and especially inside the church, but just 00:56:10.160 --> 00:56:12.480 in general, no one thinks about this anymore. 00:56:12.480 --> 00:56:18.320 Frankly, the pattern that has emerged in the last couple decades, really 00:56:18.400 --> 00:56:21.200 some of the the richest people on earth, I think, began really 00:56:21.200 --> 00:56:22.560 heavily pushing it. 00:56:22.560 --> 00:56:25.360 The idea, I'm not going to leave my kids anything because they're 00:56:25.360 --> 00:56:26.720 going to be spoiled. 00:56:26.720 --> 00:56:31.280 Because, you know, guys like Buffett have accumulated so much wealth in 00:56:31.600 --> 00:56:33.280 evil ways. 00:56:33.280 --> 00:56:36.800 But even assuming that it's entirely possible to accumulate wealth in a 00:56:36.800 --> 00:56:39.280 morally illicit fashion, that's it happens. 00:56:39.600 --> 00:56:40.880 it's a blessing from God. 00:56:40.880 --> 00:56:43.760 Again, if somebody has more money than you, don't assume they're a 00:56:43.760 --> 00:56:46.800 crook. Assume for the sake of charity that God has blessed them 00:56:46.880 --> 00:56:48.400 and be thankful for them. 00:56:48.400 --> 00:56:52.880 Don't covet it and don't envy them that they have it. 00:56:52.880 --> 00:56:57.760 But the thing that has happened at the richest echelons of Western 00:56:57.760 --> 00:57:02.080 culture and that's trickled down and been normalized really throughout all boomer 00:57:02.080 --> 00:57:04.880 in in younger culture today is that I'm not gonna leave my 00:57:04.880 --> 00:57:05.440 kids anything. 00:57:05.440 --> 00:57:06.400 They're spoiled brats. 00:57:06.400 --> 00:57:07.760 I we don't really get along. 00:57:07.760 --> 00:57:09.120 I'm not gonna give them anything. 00:57:09.120 --> 00:57:10.240 They don't deserve it. 00:57:10.240 --> 00:57:11.760 I don't owe it to 'em. 00:57:11.760 --> 00:57:12.960 They don't they get nothing. 00:57:12.960 --> 00:57:15.440 Or they get a pittance and I'm gonna give it to a 00:57:15.440 --> 00:57:18.720 dog shelter or to my church or whatever. 00:57:18.800 --> 00:57:23.040 At some point those things cease to be matters of wisdom and 00:57:23.040 --> 00:57:25.360 actually do become matters of sin. 00:57:25.360 --> 00:57:30.480 Because there is a rightful expectation that children will receive their parents' 00:57:30.560 --> 00:57:34.880 inheritance. As we were saying last few minutes, how it's divided up 00:57:34.880 --> 00:57:36.880 is entirely a matter of wisdom. 00:57:36.880 --> 00:57:40.800 In a perfect society, probably your girls wouldn't get anything when you 00:57:40.800 --> 00:57:43.520 die, but you would have given them a large check the best 00:57:43.520 --> 00:57:45.440 you're able when they got married. 00:57:45.440 --> 00:57:47.920 So it's never about leaving anyone out in the cold. 00:57:47.920 --> 00:57:49.600 It's precisely the opposite. 00:57:49.600 --> 00:57:53.840 It's about taking care of everyone in her intergenerationally as good stewards 00:57:53.840 --> 00:57:57.520 of the blessings from God, which is really the other crucial aspect 00:57:57.520 --> 00:57:58.000 of this. 00:57:58.000 --> 00:58:01.120 When we're talking about the material, it's stewardship. 00:58:01.120 --> 00:58:03.840 It's again not as I said last week, it's not mine, mine, 00:58:03.840 --> 00:58:06.560 mine. It's not I'm jealous of this, I'm hoarding it, I'm gonna 00:58:06.560 --> 00:58:07.280 keep it all. 00:58:07.280 --> 00:58:11.200 It's I'm going to be zealous for the gifts of God and 00:58:11.200 --> 00:58:16.080 make sure that those gifts as best as possible can be perpetuated 00:58:16.080 --> 00:58:20.160 to my heirs, to my future generations, not to random people are 00:58:20.400 --> 00:58:21.600 all around the world. 00:58:21.600 --> 00:58:26.080 If someone loves the stranger six thousand miles away more than they 00:58:26.080 --> 00:58:28.800 love their own kids, they're evil. 00:58:28.800 --> 00:58:30.320 They're straight up evil. 00:58:30.320 --> 00:58:31.840 That is not godly. 00:58:32.160 --> 00:58:34.160 Even pagans do better than that. 00:58:34.160 --> 00:58:39.200 And scripture often contrasts pagans who behave better than Christians who are 00:58:39.200 --> 00:58:40.960 not behaving like Christians at all. 00:58:40.960 --> 00:58:43.200 We should take those passages a lot more seriously. 00:58:43.200 --> 00:58:46.080 God is very clear that there are a lot of pagans that 00:58:46.080 --> 00:58:49.520 live more godly lives than the people who claim his name. 00:58:49.520 --> 00:58:53.840 No, it doesn't save them if they don't know and confess Christ, 00:58:53.840 --> 00:58:56.560 if they don't acknowledge his sacrifice for their sins For their sins, 00:58:56.560 --> 00:59:00.000 they're not saved, but in this life, they will behave in a 00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:04.000 more godly manner and they will confess a more godly system of 00:59:04.000 --> 00:59:08.400 behavior. For whatever reason, either they're just raised right, or they have 00:59:08.400 --> 00:59:12.880 an instinctive heart towards doing that which is ordered towards godly things, 00:59:12.880 --> 00:59:14.240 which is also possible. 00:59:14.240 --> 00:59:17.920 God's law is written on every man's heart, and we reject it 00:59:17.920 --> 00:59:19.600 by varying degrees. 00:59:19.600 --> 00:59:24.240 But the fact that we have Christians in the church who are 00:59:24.880 --> 00:59:29.200 leaving their kids with nothing or next to nothing out of spite, 00:59:29.200 --> 00:59:30.160 out of just 00:59:31.040 --> 00:59:33.680 really contempt, is wickedness. 00:59:33.680 --> 00:59:38.320 And unfortunately, many of us now are becoming victims of that sort 00:59:38.320 --> 00:59:38.960 of wickedness. 00:59:38.960 --> 00:59:42.480 And particularly because it's your parents, but just in general, because you 00:59:42.480 --> 00:59:45.520 are a Christian, you have to forgive them. 00:59:45.520 --> 00:59:48.080 You know, when we pray forgive us our debts as we forgive 00:59:48.080 --> 00:59:52.320 our debtors, this is a part of that. 00:59:52.320 --> 00:59:56.080 The to the extent that the inheritance from your parents is a 00:59:56.080 --> 01:00:00.480 debt owed to you, if you don't receive it, if you are 01:00:00.480 --> 01:00:03.200 cheated out of it, you have to forgive it. 01:00:03.200 --> 01:00:04.880 You can't hate them for it. 01:00:04.880 --> 01:00:08.080 You lament that they lack the wisdom and the godliness to do 01:00:08.080 --> 01:00:13.200 what was right, but you cannot hate family, especially, especially your own 01:00:13.200 --> 01:00:16.480 parents. You must love them even when they do wicked things. 01:00:16.480 --> 01:00:20.080 Now, that doesn't mean you have to be in their lives as 01:00:20.080 --> 01:00:21.360 though nothing is wrong. 01:00:21.360 --> 01:00:22.560 There are absolutely cases. 01:00:22.560 --> 01:00:26.240 I think we talked about this in the generational divide episode. 01:00:26.240 --> 01:00:28.720 Maybe the most loving thing you can do with your parents is 01:00:28.720 --> 01:00:31.600 to have them out of your lives, especially if they're harming your 01:00:31.600 --> 01:00:35.200 children. But you can't hate them. 01:00:35.200 --> 01:00:36.560 You have to forgive them. 01:00:36.560 --> 01:00:40.160 So when we talk about these things, obviously these are real life 01:00:40.160 --> 01:00:44.080 subjects and many people's lives and they will be for others. 01:00:44.080 --> 01:00:47.200 You're gonna hear some things, many of you, they're like, Yeah, this 01:00:47.200 --> 01:00:50.000 is either I've done this wrong or my parents did me wrong 01:00:50.080 --> 01:00:53.280 or my grandparents or you know, sin is all around us, news 01:00:53.280 --> 01:00:57.680 flash. I Means you're alive, means you're a human being on earth. 01:00:57.680 --> 01:01:01.120 Remember that everything that we do in the Christian life is predicated 01:01:01.120 --> 01:01:05.760 on our ability, our gift from God to forgive sins in God's 01:01:05.760 --> 01:01:09.120 name. And when you forgive someone's sins, they are forgiven. 01:01:09.120 --> 01:01:14.240 When someone sins against you and you ask God to forgive them, 01:01:14.240 --> 01:01:15.600 it's done. 01:01:15.600 --> 01:01:17.920 To the extent that they owe you a debt, that debt is 01:01:17.920 --> 01:01:20.080 forgiven and God And God won't hold it against him. 01:01:20.080 --> 01:01:25.360 And the very end of Job, God tells him, basically, your friends 01:01:25.360 --> 01:01:27.920 have been foolish, they've been wicked. 01:01:27.920 --> 01:01:31.440 Offer sacrifice to intercede for them, and I will forgive them for 01:01:31.440 --> 01:01:32.160 your sake. 01:01:32.160 --> 01:01:36.880 That is intercessory prayer and that is forgiveness of sins with man 01:01:36.880 --> 01:01:40.000 as a proximate cause, not because we have the power to forgive 01:01:40.000 --> 01:01:44.000 sins, but because God has given us as Christians the authority to 01:01:44.000 --> 01:01:46.400 forgive those who sin against us. 01:01:46.400 --> 01:01:49.520 And when we talk about these, you know, matters, some which are 01:01:49.520 --> 01:01:53.040 moral, some which are matters of wisdom, there are always gonna be 01:01:53.040 --> 01:01:56.400 cases where someone's like, man, this is I this hits me close 01:01:56.400 --> 01:01:57.280 to home. 01:01:57.280 --> 01:01:58.080 Remember that. 01:01:58.080 --> 01:02:00.000 As a Christian, you must forgive. 01:02:00.000 --> 01:02:02.880 And maybe it's going to take you a couple days or weeks 01:02:02.880 --> 01:02:04.480 to work through it and to 01:02:05.360 --> 01:02:09.520 deal with the injury and the pain and the suffering that has 01:02:09.520 --> 01:02:11.760 been done to you or perhaps that you have caused. 01:02:12.000 --> 01:02:14.640 If you've done something, listen to the repentance episode. 01:02:14.640 --> 01:02:16.800 Repent. Reverse course. 01:02:16.800 --> 01:02:19.440 Turn away from the thing you did and do the thing that 01:02:19.440 --> 01:02:20.240 was right. 01:02:20.240 --> 01:02:22.800 In more often cases, and the and certainly in the case of 01:02:22.800 --> 01:02:27.280 inheritance, because we're talking about intergenerational stuff, you're more likely as a 01:02:27.280 --> 01:02:31.040 listener to have been on the receiving end of a bad deal. 01:02:31.040 --> 01:02:33.120 And you have to forgive that too. 01:02:33.120 --> 01:02:38.800 And it's okay to be sorrowfully acknowledging and recognizing that these things 01:02:38.800 --> 01:02:41.920 have happened, but don't let it be a source of bitterness. 01:02:41.920 --> 01:02:44.320 That's the exact wrong response. 01:02:44.320 --> 01:02:48.400 When we see that other generations have made a mess and have 01:02:48.400 --> 01:02:52.000 hurt us or have hurt others, that is all the more incentive 01:02:52.000 --> 01:02:54.080 to do better for the next generation. 01:02:54.080 --> 01:02:58.080 Because ultimately, as Corey was saying earlier, that is the most important 01:02:58.080 --> 01:03:00.000 inheritance that we pass along. 01:03:00.000 --> 01:03:03.520 Not the money, not the stuff, but the faith and a pattern 01:03:03.520 --> 01:03:04.720 of godly living. 01:03:05.040 --> 01:03:08.320 And so if the story in your family from your parents or 01:03:08.320 --> 01:03:11.600 grandparents was that they did you wrong and they were greedy and 01:03:11.600 --> 01:03:17.600 selfish and profligate or whatever, make sure that your kids understand how 01:03:17.600 --> 01:03:19.920 to do things the right way and show them how to do 01:03:19.920 --> 01:03:21.200 things the right way. 01:03:21.200 --> 01:03:27.360 When we have these intergenerational curses through wickedness being propagated, all we 01:03:27.360 --> 01:03:28.640 can do is break the cycle. 01:03:28.640 --> 01:03:31.920 If you have a godly parent and your inheritance is godly living 01:03:31.920 --> 01:03:36.240 and godly belief, thank God you like I say you won the 01:03:36.240 --> 01:03:38.160 lottery, you didn't you were blessed. 01:03:38.160 --> 01:03:40.080 You're tremendously blessed. 01:03:40.080 --> 01:03:42.720 But if you inherited a raw deal and your parents were idiots 01:03:42.800 --> 01:03:46.240 and they were sinful and they treated you poorly, forgive them and 01:03:46.240 --> 01:03:48.000 do better. 01:03:48.000 --> 01:03:48.800 That's it. 01:03:48.800 --> 01:03:52.000 The Christian life is forgiving others and doing better in our own 01:03:52.000 --> 01:03:54.960 lives. And when we look at the society that we live in 01:03:55.600 --> 01:03:59.360 today on fire with all these things going wrong in so many 01:03:59.360 --> 01:04:02.800 different ways, sometimes the best we can do is just to start 01:04:02.800 --> 01:04:06.880 saying, I repent, I forgive, I'm gonna do better, I'm gonna set 01:04:06.880 --> 01:04:08.240 a better example. 01:04:08.240 --> 01:04:11.360 Knowing that it you can't perfect any of this in your lifetime. 01:04:11.360 --> 01:04:13.680 But if you can teach your kids to do these things well, 01:04:13.680 --> 01:04:16.880 you know, if if you have young daughters, plan A is not 01:04:16.880 --> 01:04:20.160 cut them out of your will, but you do want to teach 01:04:20.160 --> 01:04:22.560 them that you're marrying into a family. 01:04:22.560 --> 01:04:24.480 You're not just marrying a cute guy. 01:04:24.480 --> 01:04:26.880 You're not just marrying someone who, you know, is going to even 01:04:26.880 --> 01:04:27.680 take care of you. 01:04:27.680 --> 01:04:30.560 You're going to marry into someone into his family. 01:04:30.560 --> 01:04:33.680 And this adoption in effect is kind of what that is again 01:04:33.840 --> 01:04:35.440 that's why she takes his name. 01:04:35.440 --> 01:04:39.600 That sort of transfer into another family does have implications. 01:04:39.600 --> 01:04:42.240 And so if you're in a position where God has blessed you 01:04:42.320 --> 01:04:45.840 that you can do something like a dowry, like a dowry's not 01:04:45.840 --> 01:04:46.320 a law. 01:04:46.320 --> 01:04:48.240 It's not a stricture. 01:04:48.240 --> 01:04:49.120 But you know what? 01:04:49.120 --> 01:04:50.960 It's a pretty good idea. 01:04:50.960 --> 01:04:54.160 And we certainly see in places like you know the Bay Area 01:04:54.240 --> 01:04:58.400 and all other places where foreigners to our lands, who are pagans, 01:04:58.400 --> 01:05:01.920 you know, like those people are overwhelmingly not Christian, and yet they're 01:05:01.920 --> 01:05:05.680 doing things that are going to foster family formation for their own. 01:05:05.680 --> 01:05:09.280 Why do you think those populations are exploding where ours are declining? 01:05:09.280 --> 01:05:10.560 This is part of why. 01:05:10.560 --> 01:05:12.560 We're bad at inheritance where others are good. 01:05:13.200 --> 01:05:19.920 We're bad at things like dowries, at bootstrapping healthy, functional families that 01:05:19.920 --> 01:05:22.400 can take care of their kids and don't have to worry about 01:05:22.400 --> 01:05:24.160 being able to feed a new mouth. 01:05:24.160 --> 01:05:26.560 No one should be worrying about birth control. 01:05:26.560 --> 01:05:29.280 They should be worrying about having enough room, you know, to add 01:05:29.280 --> 01:05:30.720 another crib or something. 01:05:30.720 --> 01:05:31.920 That's the good worry. 01:05:31.920 --> 01:05:34.000 Not how am I gonna feed 'em. 01:05:34.000 --> 01:05:34.320 So 01:05:35.920 --> 01:05:38.880 we should as Christians, we just need to take the approach that 01:05:39.040 --> 01:05:42.320 this inheritance stuff is not incidental. 01:05:42.320 --> 01:05:47.040 It's sometimes it's moral, sometimes it is a matter of wisdom. 01:05:47.040 --> 01:05:50.480 Sometimes it's just you know, wisdom just flows into a good functional 01:05:50.480 --> 01:05:50.800 society. 01:05:51.760 --> 01:05:54.880 And you don't have to go test, you don't have to treat 01:05:54.880 --> 01:05:56.640 these things as matters of right or wrong. 01:05:56.640 --> 01:05:59.440 It's just proper systems to dealing with things. 01:05:59.600 --> 01:06:03.760 As Corey said earlier, it's entirely appropriate for a godly prince to 01:06:04.080 --> 01:06:06.560 set laws around these things and say in this society for this 01:06:06.560 --> 01:06:10.400 time to solve these problems, we are going to say that this 01:06:10.400 --> 01:06:12.000 is the way the rules work. 01:06:12.160 --> 01:06:13.280 That's fine. 01:06:13.280 --> 01:06:16.400 I wish that our government cared about that sort of thing instead 01:06:16.400 --> 01:06:19.040 of all the evil that it cares about instead. 01:06:19.040 --> 01:06:21.840 If we were blessed with a godly government, these would be some 01:06:21.840 --> 01:06:24.080 of the conversations that would be happening politically. 01:06:24.080 --> 01:06:27.280 Just to help get people pointed back in the right direction. 01:06:27.280 --> 01:06:30.480 Because even someone who has not been raised well will still usually 01:06:30.480 --> 01:06:33.680 follow the law because it tends to be an asshole not to. 01:06:33.680 --> 01:06:38.480 So you can take pagans, you can take ungrateful and foolish parents 01:06:38.480 --> 01:06:41.520 and grandparents and still get them to do the right thing according 01:06:41.520 --> 01:06:42.400 to the law. 01:06:42.400 --> 01:06:43.520 And then you know what? 01:06:43.520 --> 01:06:45.360 A law is an inheritance too. 01:06:45.360 --> 01:06:50.000 Good laws are an inheritance that's passed on to future generations. 01:06:50.000 --> 01:06:52.160 This stuff all works together. 01:06:52.160 --> 01:06:56.800 When we have a time horizon that goes beyond the next quarter, 01:06:56.800 --> 01:07:00.640 or even just our own immediate family, and we're looking at multiple 01:07:00.640 --> 01:07:05.600 generations, we're looking at multiple, not decades, but multiple centuries. 01:07:05.600 --> 01:07:09.600 Suddenly the way we treat all of these subjects radically radically changes 01:07:09.840 --> 01:07:13.120 when you have a battle today that we see online in in 01:07:13.120 --> 01:07:19.040 the world where you have Christian nationalism versus basically making significant portions 01:07:19.040 --> 01:07:24.640 of scripture illegal and their confession impermissible in the public space. 01:07:24.640 --> 01:07:27.920 If we had an inheritance of a Christian society, none of those 01:07:27.920 --> 01:07:29.840 things would even be questions. 01:07:29.840 --> 01:07:33.200 But at some point along the way, the Christian society that our 01:07:33.200 --> 01:07:35.920 ancestors inherited, they burned to the ground. 01:07:35.920 --> 01:07:39.760 And so our inheritance is an anti-Christian society. 01:07:39.760 --> 01:07:42.320 That's a problem we have to fix soon. 01:07:42.320 --> 01:07:46.240 Because as it stands today, our kids are going to inherit an 01:07:46.240 --> 01:07:51.440 anti-Christian government, an anti-Christian culture, an anti-Christian country. 01:07:51.440 --> 01:07:55.680 Those are three distinct things, but they're all currently operating in concert 01:07:55.920 --> 01:07:59.120 against everything good and godly. 01:08:00.160 --> 01:08:03.360 When we think in terms of generations and we think in terms 01:08:03.360 --> 01:08:07.680 of inheritance as an obligation to future generations, as a matter of 01:08:07.680 --> 01:08:11.920 stewardship, suddenly the matters of wisdom get pretty crystal clear. 01:08:11.920 --> 01:08:14.960 I gotta fix this problem now so that my kids and grandkids 01:08:16.000 --> 01:08:20.720 don't have to deal with third world nightmares like we see emerging 01:08:20.720 --> 01:08:21.520 right now. 01:08:21.520 --> 01:08:23.680 We have to get it right so our kids can have a 01:08:23.680 --> 01:08:26.000 better life and their kids can have a better life. 01:08:26.000 --> 01:08:29.040 That's the essence of material inheritance. 01:08:29.040 --> 01:08:31.200 And also spiritual inheritance. 01:08:31.200 --> 01:08:35.360 The episode that we did just before Christmas about the liturgical life 01:08:35.360 --> 01:08:38.480 goes back to what Corey said earlier about inheriting the church. 01:08:38.480 --> 01:08:43.600 The liturgical calendar, those traditions, are a salutary inheritance. 01:08:43.600 --> 01:08:47.680 All these good things are the proper inheritance. 01:08:47.680 --> 01:08:51.120 The problem is if you create a hellscape, if you act evilly 01:08:51.120 --> 01:08:55.440 as a generation, if you behave evilly and create evil laws and 01:08:55.440 --> 01:09:00.560 evil morals, false morals in the world, that is also the inheritance. 01:09:00.560 --> 01:09:04.480 There's always an inheritance, even if it's nothing, even if it's a 01:09:04.480 --> 01:09:08.400 negative, even if it's evil, there's always going to be an intergenerational 01:09:08.400 --> 01:09:10.160 transfer of something. 01:09:10.160 --> 01:09:13.360 And what we as Christians need to focus on is making sure 01:09:13.360 --> 01:09:20.160 that what's transferred is God's word, God's will, godly living, godly laws, 01:09:20.160 --> 01:09:23.040 even for those who don't know God, so that they may come 01:09:23.040 --> 01:09:27.120 to know Him through seeing the blessings that obeying God confers to 01:09:27.120 --> 01:09:28.400 everyone. 01:09:29.200 --> 01:09:33.680 Some of our episodes could be summarized by a single verse from 01:09:33.680 --> 01:09:38.000 scripture, but of course there's a reason that we drag it out 01:09:38.000 --> 01:09:41.840 as it were for two hours. 01:09:41.840 --> 01:09:43.760 This is one of those episodes because 01:09:45.920 --> 01:09:51.280 Proverbs addresses this in one verse, really, not even an entire verse, 01:09:51.280 --> 01:09:54.160 Woe mentioned it earlier, but half a verse. 01:09:54.160 --> 01:09:59.440 A good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. 01:09:59.440 --> 01:10:06.800 That verse alone is sufficient for the scriptural teaching on inheritance. 01:10:06.800 --> 01:10:11.040 If you are a good man, you will leave an inheritance not 01:10:11.040 --> 01:10:15.200 just to your children, but to your children's children. 01:10:15.200 --> 01:10:19.200 Which really you can expand that out to the full implication of 01:10:19.200 --> 01:10:21.040 leaving it perpetually. 01:10:21.040 --> 01:10:25.120 It moves forward through the generations as long as the children themselves 01:10:25.360 --> 01:10:30.000 are also good men, which a good man, a good Christian, should 01:10:30.080 --> 01:10:34.160 of course be raising good men, to be his sons and then 01:10:34.160 --> 01:10:37.120 grandsons, and great grandsons. 01:10:37.120 --> 01:10:41.520 That's the fullness really of the scriptural teaching on inheritance. 01:10:41.520 --> 01:10:45.120 Everything else is explanatory, which is the reason, of course, that we're 01:10:45.040 --> 01:10:47.680 doing the episode. 01:10:47.680 --> 01:10:52.080 And again, just to reiterate, this is not simply monetary. 01:10:52.080 --> 01:10:56.640 This also includes in fact it includes first and foremost the Christian 01:10:56.640 --> 01:11:01.200 faith. This is Proverbs, of course, it's a book dealing explicitly with 01:11:01.360 --> 01:11:08.720 wisdom. But to shift gears a little bit, as it were. 01:11:08.720 --> 01:11:15.040 As a general rule, most men have linguistic quirks, and I could 01:11:15.040 --> 01:11:18.880 tie this into inheritance if I were so inclined, because we do 01:11:18.880 --> 01:11:22.800 tend to pass these things on to our children and others around 01:11:22.800 --> 01:11:28.640 us. But certain men favor certain words or set phrases and repeat 01:11:28.640 --> 01:11:32.320 them. You may have noticed, and if you haven't noticed, then perhaps 01:11:32.320 --> 01:11:34.800 I'm sorry for pointing it out because now you will notice it 01:11:34.800 --> 01:11:36.000 going forward. 01:11:36.000 --> 01:11:40.240 When discussing issues like this, I tend to use the word fundamental 01:11:40.240 --> 01:11:41.600 fairly often. 01:11:41.600 --> 01:11:44.720 In the And the reason that I do that is it is 01:11:44.720 --> 01:11:50.880 more or less a shorthand for the concept of priors or presuppositions 01:11:51.040 --> 01:11:52.480 or a number of related things. 01:11:52.560 --> 01:11:54.480 That's why I use that term. 01:11:54.480 --> 01:11:56.560 That's what I'm implying with it. 01:11:57.360 --> 01:12:02.080 On a tangentially related sort of fun note, I had a professor 01:12:02.080 --> 01:12:03.520 in law school 01:12:04.640 --> 01:12:06.720 who had a collection of stuffed animals. 01:12:06.720 --> 01:12:09.840 Now that sounds weird at first, but there's a reason. 01:12:09.840 --> 01:12:14.720 She was the mock trial coach, and as I just mentioned, most 01:12:15.040 --> 01:12:18.160 men have linguistic quirks. 01:12:18.160 --> 01:12:23.200 Those are not advantageous for public speaking, and so mock trial being 01:12:23.200 --> 01:12:27.600 public speaking, one of the goals of a good coach is to 01:12:27.600 --> 01:12:30.080 make you stop using those. 01:12:30.080 --> 01:12:34.080 The primary offender for most men these days, of course, is going 01:12:34.080 --> 01:12:37.520 to be ah and um and all of those various little sounds 01:12:37.520 --> 01:12:41.360 that we inject when we're thinking instead of just being silent. 01:12:41.360 --> 01:12:44.400 Silence is better than those little sounds. 01:12:44.400 --> 01:12:50.960 But she had a particular particular stuffed animal or little creature for 01:12:50.960 --> 01:12:53.840 each one of those linguistic quirks. 01:12:53.840 --> 01:12:56.640 And if you engaged in that quirk, she would just set it 01:12:56.640 --> 01:12:57.760 on the desk in front of her. 01:12:57.760 --> 01:13:00.720 She was up in the depending on the room, sitting up front 01:13:00.720 --> 01:13:02.960 where the judge would sit essentially. 01:13:02.960 --> 01:13:05.280 And so you'd see that and it would remind you, oh I'm 01:13:05.200 --> 01:13:07.920 not supposed to say uh, or I'm not supposed to say um, 01:13:07.920 --> 01:13:10.640 or I'm not supposed to start every sentence with and or but 01:13:10.800 --> 01:13:13.040 or whatever it happens to be. 01:13:13.040 --> 01:13:15.520 If you said it too many times, she'd probably throw it at 01:13:15.520 --> 01:13:18.160 you. I don't remember all of them, but the one in particular 01:13:18.160 --> 01:13:20.560 I do remember is she had a stuffed sloth, and if you 01:13:20.560 --> 01:13:24.800 said so too many times, you started too many sentences with so, 01:13:24.800 --> 01:13:26.640 she would set it on the desk or throw it at you, 01:13:26.640 --> 01:13:29.440 so I did that intentionally. 01:13:29.440 --> 01:13:30.720 But the point is 01:13:32.160 --> 01:13:35.600 sometimes the linguistic quirk serves a purpose. 01:13:35.600 --> 01:13:38.640 And so when I say fundamental, I want you to think of 01:13:39.360 --> 01:13:46.400 presuppositions, priors, things that are indeed foundational to the 01:13:46.400 --> 01:13:49.680 topic or the way we view the topic, the way we understand 01:13:49.680 --> 01:13:50.320 the topic. 01:13:51.360 --> 01:13:55.120 And that leads me into the point that I'm making here. 01:13:55.120 --> 01:13:58.240 We've sort of been dancing around it, but we've implied it very 01:13:58.240 --> 01:14:02.160 heavily. One of the problems that is fundamental 01:14:03.040 --> 01:14:07.200 is To the modern mind when it comes to inheritance in any 01:14:07.200 --> 01:14:12.400 of a dozen, several dozen related matters, is individualism. 01:14:13.440 --> 01:14:19.920 As Wo said, many men today view themselves as atomized individuals, and 01:14:19.920 --> 01:14:22.400 that is simply false. 01:14:22.400 --> 01:14:26.080 As I have mentioned before, you are not an individual. 01:14:26.080 --> 01:14:27.920 Look at yourself in the mirror. 01:14:27.920 --> 01:14:30.880 That isn't your chin, that's your grandmother's chin. 01:14:30.880 --> 01:14:33.120 Those aren't your eyes, they're your mother's eyes. 01:14:33.120 --> 01:14:34.880 And you can go down through the list. 01:14:35.040 --> 01:14:40.560 Everything you have was inherited from an ancestor because that is the 01:14:40.560 --> 01:14:45.760 way that God designed the system Because you are a biological entity. 01:14:45.760 --> 01:14:50.480 You are a creature in the proper sense of the term. 01:14:50.480 --> 01:14:54.800 Everything you are, everything you have, was inherited. 01:14:54.800 --> 01:14:56.480 That's a blessing from God. 01:14:56.480 --> 01:15:02.240 He created those attributes and created the system that passed them on 01:15:02.240 --> 01:15:03.600 to you. 01:15:03.600 --> 01:15:07.280 So when you think of yourself as an individual, you're denying the 01:15:07.280 --> 01:15:08.720 way that God made you. 01:15:08.720 --> 01:15:09.600 You're denying creation 01:15:10.480 --> 01:15:13.680 to a certain extent, and that verges on a number of things 01:15:13.680 --> 01:15:17.600 that are dangerous or disastrous to say. 01:15:17.600 --> 01:15:23.360 But you are fundamentally misunderstanding the way the system works, who and 01:15:23.360 --> 01:15:27.280 who and what you are, and what your role is, what your 01:15:27.280 --> 01:15:31.200 duties are, the way things should be organized, the way you should 01:15:31.200 --> 01:15:34.880 pursue your life, the way you should organize your affairs, the way 01:15:34.880 --> 01:15:41.280 you should conduct yourself in the world as a Christian. 01:15:41.280 --> 01:15:47.200 One of these issues that arises from this, that flows downstream from 01:15:47.840 --> 01:15:50.560 this sense of individualism. 01:15:50.560 --> 01:15:53.760 And I'll get back to a biblical critique of that in a 01:15:53.760 --> 01:15:54.640 minute here. 01:15:54.640 --> 01:15:57.920 But one of the things that flows from it is this alien 01:15:57.920 --> 01:16:00.160 concept of fairness. 01:16:00.160 --> 01:16:02.160 Now Woe mentioned fairness earlier. 01:16:02.160 --> 01:16:05.040 He meant it in a specific sense, and scripture does speak of 01:16:05.040 --> 01:16:10.080 that, because God loves fair scales and a fair balance, and he 01:16:10.080 --> 01:16:10.720 hates 01:16:11.600 --> 01:16:14.000 unfair scales and unfair balance. 01:16:14.000 --> 01:16:19.040 That is something God abhors, incidentally, bear that in mind. 01:16:19.040 --> 01:16:22.400 Not specifically for the purposes of this episode, but just for life 01:16:22.400 --> 01:16:23.440 in general. 01:16:23.440 --> 01:16:29.040 But when we speak of fairness to the modern mind, what first 01:16:29.200 --> 01:16:34.080 arises as the sense of what that term means is totally alien 01:16:34.080 --> 01:16:35.280 to scripture 01:16:36.400 --> 01:16:38.960 because you are not an individual. 01:16:38.960 --> 01:16:43.840 And so to the modern mind, it's not fair that I suffer 01:16:43.840 --> 01:16:48.080 and die, because Adam, a man I never met, a man who 01:16:48.080 --> 01:16:54.080 died thousands of years before I was even born, he sinned, and 01:16:54.080 --> 01:16:57.120 so I suffer and die. 01:16:57.120 --> 01:17:01.440 Well to the modern mind that seems entirely unfair. 01:17:01.440 --> 01:17:03.600 But it is in fact fair. 01:17:03.600 --> 01:17:05.840 Because you are Adam. 01:17:05.840 --> 01:17:10.720 Because you are a direct lineal descendant of that man. 01:17:10.720 --> 01:17:14.560 What he did affects you because what he did you did. 01:17:14.560 --> 01:17:18.240 And so when Scripture speaks of the Levites tithing because they were 01:17:18.640 --> 01:17:22.480 in the loins of Abraham when he tithed to Melchizedek, the same 01:17:22.480 --> 01:17:24.320 thing applies here. 01:17:24.320 --> 01:17:30.800 You have to jettison that false idea of individualism. 01:17:30.800 --> 01:17:33.360 One of the One of the ways that we see this in 01:17:33.360 --> 01:17:37.920 Scripture the most clearly, and now that I am going to highlight 01:17:37.920 --> 01:17:40.480 it for you, you will never be able to unsee it. 01:17:40.480 --> 01:17:43.760 You will see it every time, virtually every time you read the 01:17:43.760 --> 01:17:45.120 Old Testament. 01:17:45.120 --> 01:17:50.240 God does not deal with individuals primarily as individuals. 01:17:50.240 --> 01:17:53.200 Yes, he does to some degree, because of course he spoke face 01:17:53.200 --> 01:17:58.320 to face with Moses, he talked to Moses, he gave directions, instructions 01:17:58.320 --> 01:18:00.960 to Moses, he met with Moses in a tent. 01:18:00.960 --> 01:18:06.560 However, what was he doing through Moses, even in that specific case, 01:18:06.560 --> 01:18:10.160 where he dealt extensively with an individual. 01:18:10.160 --> 01:18:13.280 He was dealing with the nation of Israel. 01:18:13.280 --> 01:18:15.440 Well, let's think about that name. 01:18:15.440 --> 01:18:18.240 Why is Israel called Israel? 01:18:18.240 --> 01:18:21.760 As I've mentioned in previous episodes, they're called Israel because they are 01:18:21.760 --> 01:18:25.920 descended from a man named Israel. 01:18:25.920 --> 01:18:31.760 In fact, God often addresses Israel as if Israel were a man. 01:18:31.760 --> 01:18:34.880 There are places in Scripture you will very clearly see this. 01:18:34.880 --> 01:18:38.320 I invite you to go and look for them, particularly in the 01:18:38.320 --> 01:18:42.400 Psalms. There are places, and it's not just references to Christ in 01:18:42.400 --> 01:18:47.120 all those places, sometimes it is referencing the nation as well. 01:18:47.120 --> 01:18:53.200 But Israel is spoken of in some parts of Scripture as being 01:18:53.200 --> 01:18:58.240 almost a singular entity, in the sense of being, Israel is a 01:18:58.400 --> 01:19:03.520 he, he is, because that is how God views it. 01:19:03.520 --> 01:19:08.240 Israel is a nation descended in this sense of Israel, of course, 01:19:08.240 --> 01:19:10.720 I'm not speaking about the church. 01:19:10.720 --> 01:19:15.600 But Israel in this sense is descended from one man, from Jacob 01:19:15.920 --> 01:19:19.920 renamed Israel, and that is why the nation is called Israel. 01:19:19.920 --> 01:19:25.040 And so God is dealing with this very large collection of individuals 01:19:25.040 --> 01:19:29.600 at this point, this large nation of millions of people Sometimes as 01:19:29.600 --> 01:19:33.520 if it were one man, because in a sense it is one 01:19:33.520 --> 01:19:39.520 man, because that is Israel, both in the sense of being the 01:19:39.520 --> 01:19:44.720 man who has passed on this inheritance that God gave him to 01:19:44.720 --> 01:19:52.160 these many millions, and it is also those many millions. 01:19:52.160 --> 01:19:55.520 So we have to change how we think about these things. 01:19:55.520 --> 01:19:58.720 Because the modern world has told us that no, you're an individual 01:19:58.880 --> 01:20:02.640 and everything you have is just your personal preferences and you are 01:20:02.640 --> 01:20:03.760 whatever you want to be. 01:20:03.760 --> 01:20:07.120 You can create yourself, turn yourself into whatever you want, and that 01:20:07.120 --> 01:20:09.280 is a lie. 01:20:09.280 --> 01:20:16.240 Because most of the things you have inherited are unalterable. 01:20:16.240 --> 01:20:20.720 If you are male, you will be male for eternity, because that 01:20:20.720 --> 01:20:22.480 is how God made you. 01:20:22.480 --> 01:20:25.040 If you're German, you'll be German for eternity. 01:20:25.040 --> 01:20:29.600 If you're American, you'll be American for eternity, or any other nation 01:20:29.600 --> 01:20:31.440 or ethnicity. 01:20:31.440 --> 01:20:35.840 That is how God made you, and he passed those things to 01:20:35.840 --> 01:20:38.240 you as part of your inheritance. 01:20:38.240 --> 01:20:42.560 It is so fundamentally important to God that he designed the systems 01:20:42.560 --> 01:20:46.480 in such a way that these things are passed forward and given 01:20:46.480 --> 01:20:49.600 to you and you cannot change them. 01:20:49.600 --> 01:20:52.480 They are unalterable. 01:20:52.480 --> 01:20:57.520 That's how important inheritance is to God. 01:20:57.520 --> 01:20:58.560 That's true when it comes to 01:20:59.600 --> 01:21:01.840 biological things. 01:21:01.840 --> 01:21:07.440 The material things of course are not unalterable, and for better or 01:21:07.440 --> 01:21:12.960 worse, neither is the Christian faith when it comes to transmission. 01:21:13.280 --> 01:21:18.080 So when it comes to inheriting the Christian faith, we inherit it 01:21:18.080 --> 01:21:22.320 from our ancestors in so far as they were faithful. 01:21:22.320 --> 01:21:26.800 My ancestors don't have to be faithful for me to inherit blonde 01:21:26.800 --> 01:21:29.280 hair, which I did have when I was a child. 01:21:29.280 --> 01:21:34.640 All they had to do was reproduce with other members of their 01:21:34.640 --> 01:21:38.560 nation, because God designed the system so that it's exactly what happens 01:21:38.560 --> 01:21:42.720 if you do what comes naturally to human beings. 01:21:42.720 --> 01:21:48.560 Sometimes the blessing flows naturally from the act itself. 01:21:48.560 --> 01:21:51.360 Other times there are things that have to be added to it 01:21:51.440 --> 01:21:52.640 such as faith. 01:21:52.640 --> 01:21:56.480 When it comes to the Christian religion, it has to be passed 01:21:56.480 --> 01:21:58.000 forward faithfully. 01:21:58.000 --> 01:21:59.680 You have to guard that inheritance. 01:21:59.680 --> 01:22:01.680 You have to be jealous of that inheritance. 01:22:01.680 --> 01:22:05.440 Now the same is true of course, with regard to one's nation, 01:22:05.440 --> 01:22:09.360 with regard to one's ancestry, all these various things, because if you 01:22:09.360 --> 01:22:14.560 marry unwisely, you will not be passing forward the things that you 01:22:14.560 --> 01:22:18.240 were given that were passed to you by your ancestors, you can 01:22:18.240 --> 01:22:20.000 break that chain. 01:22:20.000 --> 01:22:23.280 You can fail to pass forward those gifts. 01:22:23.280 --> 01:22:26.080 That is absolutely possible. 01:22:26.080 --> 01:22:29.840 The same is true of the Christian faith, because it can be 01:22:30.000 --> 01:22:33.360 not the faith itself, of course, but the transmission of it can 01:22:33.360 --> 01:22:35.360 be corrupted. 01:22:35.360 --> 01:22:41.440 And so as there are considerations with regard to material inheritance, how 01:22:41.440 --> 01:22:45.040 that is passed forward, how is it divided up, that's an issue 01:22:45.040 --> 01:22:46.480 of wisdom. 01:22:46.480 --> 01:22:51.280 There are the same sort of issues with regard to biological inheritance, 01:22:51.280 --> 01:22:56.400 whom you marry, and therefore with whom you produce children, how those 01:22:56.400 --> 01:22:59.840 things are passed forward, this is also a matter of wisdom. 01:22:59.840 --> 01:23:02.800 Now morality of course flows through all of this as well, but 01:23:02.800 --> 01:23:05.680 these are largely matters of wisdom. 01:23:05.680 --> 01:23:10.720 The Christian faith also calls for wisdom, in how we transmit that 01:23:10.720 --> 01:23:13.840 faith, how we pass that forward. 01:23:13.840 --> 01:23:19.360 The various creeds and confessions we have were crafted using wisdom. 01:23:19.360 --> 01:23:23.600 Yes, of course, with extensive reference to the Scriptures. 01:23:23.600 --> 01:23:25.600 But that requires wisdom as well. 01:23:25.600 --> 01:23:28.880 You need the wisdom to interpret, the wisdom then to draft these 01:23:28.880 --> 01:23:32.480 things, the wisdom to carry them forward, to teach the next generation, 01:23:32.480 --> 01:23:35.760 to pass them forward to their children The same way as Scripture 01:23:35.760 --> 01:23:41.600 instructs us to teach each successive generation, so that each successive generation 01:23:41.600 --> 01:23:44.000 will know God. 01:23:44.000 --> 01:23:49.920 If we fail to pass these things forward in a wise fashion, 01:23:49.920 --> 01:23:53.360 in a way that can be maintained. 01:23:53.360 --> 01:23:55.120 They're all lost. 01:23:55.120 --> 01:23:59.280 You can lose material wealth if you manage it unwisely. 01:23:59.280 --> 01:24:02.000 You can lose the gifts that God has given you that are 01:24:02.000 --> 01:24:06.240 stored essentially in your DNA, yes, it's more complicated than that, but 01:24:06.240 --> 01:24:08.240 that's sufficient for our purposes here. 01:24:08.240 --> 01:24:12.480 These things that are stored in your DNA, if you reproduce unwisely, 01:24:12.480 --> 01:24:14.400 you can squander that. 01:24:14.400 --> 01:24:18.720 If you fail to teach your children the Christian faith, you can 01:24:18.720 --> 01:24:21.600 squander that inheritance as well. 01:24:21.600 --> 01:24:26.560 There is no form of inheritance that you cannot squander, that you 01:24:26.560 --> 01:24:31.760 cannot destroy by failing to transmit it faithfully. 01:24:31.760 --> 01:24:34.880 And if you do not do that, you are not acting as 01:24:34.880 --> 01:24:36.640 a faithful steward. 01:24:36.640 --> 01:24:39.200 And one of the things that we are, one of the prime 01:24:39.200 --> 01:24:45.920 roles for humanity in this life, is as steward. 01:24:45.920 --> 01:24:50.080 This goes directly to the heart of the false idea that is 01:24:50.080 --> 01:24:55.680 individualism. Because you are not just an individual who possesses these things. 01:24:55.680 --> 01:24:59.440 It's not, well, this DNA is mine and I can do with 01:24:59.440 --> 01:25:00.800 it whatever I want. 01:25:00.800 --> 01:25:03.120 And it's not just this money is mine and I can do 01:25:03.120 --> 01:25:04.000 with it whatever I want. 01:25:04.000 --> 01:25:06.480 It's not this faith is mine and I can do with it 01:25:06.480 --> 01:25:08.240 whatever I want. 01:25:08.240 --> 01:25:11.360 These are all held in trust. 01:25:11.360 --> 01:25:15.040 They do not fundamentally belong to me. 01:25:15.040 --> 01:25:18.480 They are mine in so far as they have been given to 01:25:18.480 --> 01:25:22.080 me by those who came before me, insofar as God blessed them 01:25:22.160 --> 01:25:26.560 and God has blessed me, but they are to be used to 01:25:26.560 --> 01:25:28.640 carry forward these things. 01:25:28.640 --> 01:25:32.800 This is right back to the parable of the talents. 01:25:32.800 --> 01:25:35.680 The talents aren't just money. 01:25:35.680 --> 01:25:40.240 The talents aren't just talents in the English sense of the term. 01:25:40.240 --> 01:25:43.600 It's all of the things that God has given us in this 01:25:43.600 --> 01:25:47.120 life, we are to use all of them wisely. 01:25:47.120 --> 01:25:51.200 That applies to every single form of inheritance. 01:25:51.200 --> 01:25:54.240 And in order to do that, in order to have the right 01:25:54.240 --> 01:25:59.360 view of that, we have to jettison this false idea that is 01:25:59.360 --> 01:26:04.960 individualism. Because again, we are not individuals. 01:26:04.960 --> 01:26:07.440 You are part of a family. 01:26:07.440 --> 01:26:09.120 You are part of a clan. 01:26:09.120 --> 01:26:10.080 You are part of a tribe. 01:26:10.080 --> 01:26:12.880 You are part of a nation, you are part of a chain 01:26:12.880 --> 01:26:18.720 that leads all the way back through all of your ancestors. 01:26:18.720 --> 01:26:24.000 You are part of a greater whole, not an atomized individual. 01:26:24.000 --> 01:26:27.360 Satan wants you to be an atomized individual because then you are 01:26:27.360 --> 01:26:29.360 much easier to target. 01:26:29.360 --> 01:26:33.040 Because if you're an atomized individual, all he has to do is 01:26:33.040 --> 01:26:36.640 entice you with whatever sounds good to you. 01:26:36.640 --> 01:26:40.000 If you're part of a greater whole, if you recognize that you 01:26:40.000 --> 01:26:43.120 have duties to those around you and even more so than to 01:26:43.120 --> 01:26:46.400 those around you to God, it is going to be much more 01:26:46.400 --> 01:26:49.200 challenging for Satan to lead you astray. 01:26:49.200 --> 01:26:52.800 Because then you recognize there are things that you have to do, 01:26:52.800 --> 01:26:57.200 things that you should do, duties you should fulfill, and not just 01:26:57.200 --> 01:26:59.440 whatever you prefer. 01:26:59.440 --> 01:27:04.560 Satan wants you to follow whatever you prefer, with no regard, for 01:27:04.560 --> 01:27:07.600 those who came before or those who will come after, and yes 01:27:07.680 --> 01:27:09.600 you have duties to both. 01:27:09.600 --> 01:27:13.120 There are duties not just to children and grandchildren, but also to 01:27:13.120 --> 01:27:16.720 ancestors That flows in both directions. 01:27:16.720 --> 01:27:19.840 They had duties to you, they had duties to those who came 01:27:19.840 --> 01:27:20.720 before them. 01:27:20.720 --> 01:27:24.800 The same is true of every single link in the chain. 01:27:24.800 --> 01:27:29.920 That is faithfully passing forward the inheritance that came from the link 01:27:29.920 --> 01:27:35.520 before. Satan wants you to be an atomized individual, and as a 01:27:35.520 --> 01:27:40.000 general rule, whatever Satan wants you to be is probably pretty close 01:27:40.800 --> 01:27:44.720 to the opposite of what you as a Christian should want to 01:27:44.720 --> 01:27:45.680 be. 01:27:46.080 --> 01:27:49.440 We could have very easily doubled the length of this episode if 01:27:49.440 --> 01:27:53.280 we had just read a few of the passages that reference inheritance 01:27:53.680 --> 01:27:54.720 and heirs. 01:27:54.720 --> 01:27:56.400 We're not going to belabor that point. 01:27:56.400 --> 01:27:58.880 We will put some links in the show notes and I'll mention 01:27:58.880 --> 01:28:01.360 a couple interesting passages you should read. 01:28:01.360 --> 01:28:06.800 One is Numbers twenty seven, which deals with females inheriting Luke Luke 01:28:06.800 --> 01:28:12.480 twelve and Luke fifteen, which involve some of Jesus' teachings related to 01:28:12.480 --> 01:28:17.040 both possessions and inheritance and confidence in him. 01:28:17.040 --> 01:28:20.640 In particular, there's a portion of Luke twelve that we've quoted many 01:28:20.640 --> 01:28:24.000 times, talking about God taking care of the birds of the air 01:28:24.000 --> 01:28:27.280 and the beasts of the field, and giving them everything they need, 01:28:27.280 --> 01:28:28.960 so we don't need to worry. 01:28:28.960 --> 01:28:30.560 I mentioned that, I want you to go read it. 01:28:30.560 --> 01:28:32.640 We're not going to read it again today, but 01:28:33.600 --> 01:28:37.840 I can think of someone hearing us saying these things today, at 01:28:37.840 --> 01:28:42.320 least the portions that had to do with monetary or physical material 01:28:42.320 --> 01:28:45.520 possessions, and thinking, well you're not trusting in God. 01:28:45.520 --> 01:28:49.440 And so go read specifically Luke twelve. 01:28:49.440 --> 01:28:53.920 And when that parable ends, I just want to read the very 01:28:53.920 --> 01:28:57.760 last verse of it, because it really refutes the notion that we've 01:28:57.760 --> 01:29:00.240 said anything that's contrary to scripture here today. 01:29:00.480 --> 01:29:04.560 After Jesus gets through saying, Oh you have little faith, at the 01:29:04.560 --> 01:29:08.240 very end, verse 31 in Luke 12, he says, Instead seek his 01:29:08.320 --> 01:29:11.920 kingdom, and these things will be added to you. 01:29:11.920 --> 01:29:16.640 So prior to that in Luke 12, Jesus is going over a 01:29:16.800 --> 01:29:21.280 discourse talking about possessions and wealth and material, and he's saying, Don't 01:29:21.200 --> 01:29:23.200 worry about that stuff. 01:29:23.200 --> 01:29:26.160 I think that the problem that we have today sometimes when we're 01:29:26.080 --> 01:29:31.200 being lazy listeners, lazy hearers, and lazy readers, is that when Jesus 01:29:31.200 --> 01:29:34.640 says don't worry about it, we say, well, it's not Christian to 01:29:34.640 --> 01:29:36.080 think you need that stuff. 01:29:36.080 --> 01:29:37.920 Two completely different things. 01:29:38.080 --> 01:29:40.320 Jesus doesn't say you don't need food. 01:29:40.320 --> 01:29:42.400 Jesus says of course you need food. 01:29:42.400 --> 01:29:43.840 God is going to give it to you. 01:29:43.840 --> 01:29:46.960 What you don't need is to worry about it. 01:29:46.960 --> 01:29:52.480 So what is condemned in that passage is not needing food or 01:29:52.480 --> 01:29:56.560 shelter or clothing or any of the human needs that are bodily 01:29:56.560 --> 01:30:00.800 needs, because we're creatures on a planet that has weather. 01:30:00.800 --> 01:30:02.000 There's stuff that we need. 01:30:02.000 --> 01:30:04.320 We have to We have to have food or we die. 01:30:04.320 --> 01:30:06.800 That's how God I want to say it's how God made it. 01:30:06.800 --> 01:30:08.800 We don't know what the stuff was like before the fall. 01:30:08.800 --> 01:30:11.680 We know we didn't die, but again from the beginning, we know 01:30:11.680 --> 01:30:14.240 that Adam could eat from the tree of life and he stayed 01:30:14.240 --> 01:30:19.360 alive. What we have today is not that the Christian no longer 01:30:19.360 --> 01:30:23.520 needs physical protection or had to have his physical needs met. 01:30:23.520 --> 01:30:27.120 What the Christian has is a confident faith not to have to 01:30:27.120 --> 01:30:30.080 worry that God won't provide for those things. 01:30:30.240 --> 01:30:33.200 And so at the very end, when Jesus says, instead seek his 01:30:33.280 --> 01:30:38.160 kingdom, and these things will be added to you, inheritance of the 01:30:38.160 --> 01:30:40.240 material is part of that. 01:30:40.240 --> 01:30:44.480 God taking care of your material needs as in part the stewardship 01:30:44.480 --> 01:30:48.560 of prior generations, passing along every good thing. 01:30:48.560 --> 01:30:54.320 First and foremost our faith, and then secondarily the material, the possessions, 01:30:54.320 --> 01:30:59.200 wisdom, every good thing that God gives to one generation, He intends 01:30:59.200 --> 01:31:02.000 to be passed on to the next. 01:31:02.000 --> 01:31:04.880 So I said earlier, we're always inheriting something. 01:31:04.880 --> 01:31:08.320 The question is: are we inheriting a world that's on fire, or 01:31:08.320 --> 01:31:10.880 are we inheriting a world that's in good shape? 01:31:10.880 --> 01:31:14.720 And if we're inheriting a world that's on fire, our duty is 01:31:14.720 --> 01:31:17.120 to put the fire out and try to make sure that our 01:31:17.120 --> 01:31:20.480 children and our grandchildren inherit a world that's not on fire. 01:31:20.480 --> 01:31:24.320 One that's actually structured so that there's actually a little more leeway 01:31:24.320 --> 01:31:27.520 to make some errors in judgment because you're not gonna immediately go 01:31:27.520 --> 01:31:30.400 flying off the rails, which is where things stand today. 01:31:30.400 --> 01:31:33.520 There's no margin for error for our kids, because 01:31:34.400 --> 01:31:36.800 so many things are right on the cusp. 01:31:36.800 --> 01:31:40.480 And what we can do is to give them an inheritance of 01:31:40.480 --> 01:31:45.200 wisdom, of faith, and of as much as possible the material things 01:31:45.200 --> 01:31:45.760 that we need. 01:31:45.760 --> 01:31:48.960 And obviously that's the least important, but it's also important. 01:31:48.960 --> 01:31:51.840 So we'll put links to a couple of those chapters in the 01:31:51.840 --> 01:31:54.560 show notes along with a link to I think probably Bible Hub 01:31:54.880 --> 01:31:58.000 just searching for the word inheritance in air. 01:31:58.000 --> 01:32:00.480 Go rec read some of those passages. 01:32:00.480 --> 01:32:03.120 Make sure you read from both the Old and the New Testament. 01:32:03.280 --> 01:32:07.600 I say that specifically because most of the New Testament discussion of 01:32:07.600 --> 01:32:12.640 inheritance is generally around salvation, which is crucial. 01:32:12.480 --> 01:32:16.400 without salvation, there's no point in any of this. 01:32:16.400 --> 01:32:20.640 More of the conversations in the Old Testament deal with the material, 01:32:20.640 --> 01:32:25.520 but it was material not in the sense of materialism, but in 01:32:25.520 --> 01:32:29.440 the sense of God reminding Israel and God reminding his pre people 01:32:29.680 --> 01:32:33.680 long before Israel, that He will bless his people. 01:32:33.920 --> 01:32:37.040 In fact that He blesses everyone with the rain and the sun 01:32:37.280 --> 01:32:39.840 and everything that's needed for our bodily needs. 01:32:39.840 --> 01:32:44.320 Every man's bodily needs are met, not only the believer. 01:32:44.320 --> 01:32:48.240 And so read passages throughout scripture, you just pick a few and 01:32:48.240 --> 01:32:51.120 don't just read the verses, go drill down and read a few 01:32:51.120 --> 01:32:54.320 chapters that sound interesting, take a look at where God talks about 01:32:54.320 --> 01:32:54.960 this stuff. 01:32:54.960 --> 01:32:56.080 It's everywhere. 01:32:56.080 --> 01:32:59.520 If we only read the passages that talk about heirs and inheritance, 01:32:59.520 --> 01:33:01.520 it probably would have been close to four hours. 01:33:01.520 --> 01:33:05.680 Without us adding a word, there's that many references to it. 01:33:05.680 --> 01:33:07.920 So we didn't go into a ton of them today, but I 01:33:07.920 --> 01:33:11.360 hope that you will find that our words here are consistent with 01:33:11.360 --> 01:33:11.920 what's said. 01:33:11.920 --> 01:33:15.200 If you think they're not, go find some passages that say something 01:33:15.200 --> 01:33:17.280 the opposite of what we said. 01:33:17.280 --> 01:33:18.080 You won't. 01:33:18.240 --> 01:33:20.880 And as I said, I highlighted in Luke 12, there's a specific 01:33:20.880 --> 01:33:25.120 example. If you're being a lazy listener, God's not saying you don't 01:33:25.040 --> 01:33:25.840 need stuff. 01:33:25.840 --> 01:33:27.680 He's saying I'm gonna give you the stuff. 01:33:27.680 --> 01:33:29.280 Don't worry about it. 01:33:29.280 --> 01:33:33.040 That is one of the great inheritance we can give to our 01:33:33.040 --> 01:33:36.880 children is a confidence that God will provide for them. 01:33:36.880 --> 01:33:39.040 I don't know where it's going to come from, but I trust 01:33:39.040 --> 01:33:40.080 in God. 01:33:40.080 --> 01:33:43.440 When we have that sort of faith, we're a better example for 01:33:43.440 --> 01:33:47.680 children, for neighbors, for family, for church and community. 01:33:47.680 --> 01:33:51.760 When people aren't freaking out, when things are going poorly, they become 01:33:51.760 --> 01:33:55.760 leaders just because everyone else who is afraid and doesn't know what's 01:33:55.760 --> 01:34:00.240 going on when they see that someone has some source of confidence, 01:34:00.240 --> 01:34:03.760 that they have some sort of foundation and roots, that is someone 01:34:03.760 --> 01:34:05.440 they're going to naturally listen to. 01:34:05.440 --> 01:34:06.480 And guess what? 01:34:06.480 --> 01:34:09.840 That may well be one of the prime opportunities for you to 01:34:09.840 --> 01:34:11.760 share all of God's word. 01:34:11.920 --> 01:34:15.120 The gospel, the wisdom, good advice. 01:34:15.120 --> 01:34:18.480 Hey, just do this because it's gonna be better for you. 01:34:18.480 --> 01:34:19.920 God gives us all these things. 01:34:19.920 --> 01:34:21.520 We need to share them with others. 01:34:21.520 --> 01:34:26.000 We need to make it our children's inheritance and our nation's inheritance. 01:34:26.000 --> 01:34:30.080 So the future generations won't have the sort of problems we have. 01:34:30.080 --> 01:34:33.760 Because we're all seeing right now that we are inheriting problems. 01:34:33.760 --> 01:34:36.480 We're inheriting evil circumstances. 01:34:36.480 --> 01:34:39.680 That's not the fruit of a Christian nation. 01:34:39.680 --> 01:34:43.280 This has clearly not been a Christian nation for a long time. 01:34:43.280 --> 01:34:46.800 It can be again, it should be, and it must be our 01:34:46.800 --> 01:34:48.960 goal to see that it becomes one. 01:34:48.960 --> 01:34:51.440 We don't get to check out and say, well, I guess our 01:34:51.440 --> 01:34:52.080 time is over. 01:34:52.080 --> 01:34:54.320 We'll just be replaced by somebody else. 01:34:54.320 --> 01:34:56.960 The idea that we can be replaced in our own lives and 01:34:57.040 --> 01:35:01.280 our own lands is a despising of the inheritance that God has 01:35:01.280 --> 01:35:03.840 given to us as profoundly wicked. 01:35:03.840 --> 01:35:07.520 And anyone who's trying to sell you that is seeking the destruction 01:35:07.520 --> 01:35:08.400 of your soul. 01:35:08.400 --> 01:35:11.120 Even if they're saying some of the other stuff that's right, that's 01:35:11.040 --> 01:35:12.640 a profoundly wicked thing. 01:35:12.640 --> 01:35:16.080 What we have inherited is ours to be good stewards of and 01:35:16.080 --> 01:35:17.120 to pass it on. 01:35:17.120 --> 01:35:19.520 We don't get to give it away to strangers. 01:35:19.520 --> 01:35:21.760 We must preserve it for our own. 01:35:21.760 --> 01:35:25.600 Everyone else has their own too, and God has given them their 01:35:25.600 --> 01:35:30.800 things and their places to be despiced as they see fit. 01:35:30.800 --> 01:35:35.280 That's for them and their lands to deal with, not us. 01:35:35.280 --> 01:35:38.800 So as we've looked at inheritance today, I want you to just 01:35:38.800 --> 01:35:40.080 keep in mind that 01:35:41.360 --> 01:35:43.600 it's multiple things at the same time. 01:35:43.600 --> 01:35:49.600 It's spiritual, it's material, it's the church, it's the nation. 01:35:49.600 --> 01:35:51.360 Which is why we did an episode about it. 01:35:51.360 --> 01:35:51.920 Like that. 01:35:51.920 --> 01:35:55.040 You take those four things out of the Christian life and what's 01:35:55.040 --> 01:35:55.440 left. 01:35:56.480 --> 01:35:57.600 It's everything. 01:35:57.600 --> 01:36:00.880 In its one context, it's one way of viewing it. 01:36:00.880 --> 01:36:05.680 But the inheritance in a godly nation is all these things being 01:36:05.680 --> 01:36:09.840 propagated for the benefit of everyone, the godly and the ungodly alike. 01:36:10.000 --> 01:36:13.840 Even someone who's not a believer in a Christian nation benefits from 01:36:13.840 --> 01:36:16.160 Christian laws and Christian neighbors. 01:36:16.160 --> 01:36:17.680 And the opposite is true. 01:36:17.680 --> 01:36:21.280 When you have wicked unbelievers coming into your nation, they're going to 01:36:21.680 --> 01:36:26.240 devour and destroy your inheritance so that your children can't have it. 01:36:26.240 --> 01:36:28.720 And that's something that we have a duty to God to end 01:36:28.720 --> 01:36:31.520 and to preserve so that we do the good things that God 01:36:31.520 --> 01:36:34.400 expects and not the evil that He promises will come to those 01:36:34.400 --> 01:36:36.880 who abandon him. 01:36:36.960 --> 01:36:41.600 So I want to close out this episode by reiterating something that 01:36:41.600 --> 01:36:46.080 I said earlier and adding a note of comfort as it were 01:36:46.240 --> 01:36:51.520 for particularly the younger members of the audience as it will undoubtedly 01:36:51.520 --> 01:36:55.040 prove necessary in the years ahead. 01:36:55.040 --> 01:37:00.480 God acts in time via means. 01:37:00.480 --> 01:37:03.600 This is fundamentally important to remember. 01:37:03.600 --> 01:37:05.520 Never forget this. 01:37:05.520 --> 01:37:09.760 Again, God does not just zap you and give you faith. 01:37:09.760 --> 01:37:13.040 God does not just make a chest of gold fall out of 01:37:13.040 --> 01:37:17.600 the sky, and therefore you have wealth and material prosperity. 01:37:17.600 --> 01:37:20.480 That is not how God works. 01:37:20.480 --> 01:37:22.000 Can he work that way? 01:37:22.000 --> 01:37:25.840 Absolutely. If he so chooses, we see the mana in the desert, 01:37:25.840 --> 01:37:29.120 for instance, would be an option for something falling out of the 01:37:29.120 --> 01:37:31.920 sky as it were. 01:37:31.920 --> 01:37:36.080 But as a general rule, God acts via means, and when it 01:37:36.080 --> 01:37:41.920 comes to inheritance, the means that he uses, well, those are our 01:37:41.920 --> 01:37:47.040 ancestors. They are the ones who transmitted the inheritance to us down 01:37:47.040 --> 01:37:49.520 through the centuries. 01:37:49.520 --> 01:37:53.760 Now in the last century or so we have had many faithless 01:37:53.760 --> 01:37:58.560 ancestors who have failed to transmit what was given them by those 01:37:58.560 --> 01:37:59.920 who came before them. 01:37:59.920 --> 01:38:01.920 They have squandered the principle. 01:38:01.920 --> 01:38:04.240 They have not transmitted forward 01:38:05.120 --> 01:38:09.040 any of the three things mentioned, the three kinds of inheritance that 01:38:09.040 --> 01:38:10.640 I distinguished. 01:38:10.640 --> 01:38:15.840 In many cases they have incidentally transmitted forward that biological inheritance, so 01:38:15.840 --> 01:38:17.520 at least we have that with which we can work 01:38:18.480 --> 01:38:23.840 toward establishing something godly to pass on to those who follow us. 01:38:23.840 --> 01:38:28.560 They've squandered in large part the material inheritance and and the Christian 01:38:28.560 --> 01:38:31.600 inheritance, the spiritual inheritance. 01:38:31.600 --> 01:38:36.480 Thankfully, with regard to the spiritual inheritance, we still have ready access 01:38:36.480 --> 01:38:42.240 to Scripture, and the writings of many faithful forefathers. 01:38:42.320 --> 01:38:43.840 We can rebuild that. 01:38:43.840 --> 01:38:46.960 We can resurrect that, as it were, because in some cases it 01:38:46.960 --> 01:38:48.400 does not even need to be rebuilt. 01:38:48.400 --> 01:38:52.720 It is already there, waiting for us to rediscover it, sort of 01:38:52.720 --> 01:38:56.240 like a scroll in a wall. 01:38:56.560 --> 01:39:00.800 But when it comes to the material inheritance, much of that has 01:39:00.800 --> 01:39:05.200 been squandered, and we will indeed have to rebuild it. 01:39:05.200 --> 01:39:08.640 And this is where it may seem mixed, but it is a 01:39:08.640 --> 01:39:09.840 word of comfort. 01:39:10.240 --> 01:39:13.520 Comes into the picture. 01:39:13.520 --> 01:39:20.160 Just because you are lacking some of the material or related comforts 01:39:20.480 --> 01:39:23.760 does not mean that God has not answered your prayer or that 01:39:23.760 --> 01:39:26.320 He has answered it with a no. 01:39:26.320 --> 01:39:30.480 Rather it means that the way that God works again is in 01:39:30.480 --> 01:39:33.040 time via means. 01:39:33.040 --> 01:39:37.920 And so the faithlessness from which you may very well be suffering 01:39:38.400 --> 01:39:41.280 may have occurred five generations ago. 01:39:41.280 --> 01:39:44.480 That doesn't mean that our case here and today 01:39:45.440 --> 01:39:46.880 is hopeless. 01:39:46.880 --> 01:39:50.640 It just means that we have a challenging road ahead. 01:39:50.640 --> 01:39:55.440 We have to rebuild the inheritance that was squandered so that we 01:39:55.440 --> 01:39:59.840 can pass it forward, so we can be almost not even faithful 01:39:59.840 --> 01:40:03.600 stewards at this point because there's nothing to steward. 01:40:03.600 --> 01:40:08.320 But once built, then we are faithful stewards to pass it forward 01:40:08.320 --> 01:40:10.720 to future generations. 01:40:10.720 --> 01:40:12.880 It doesn't mean it's an easy task. 01:40:12.880 --> 01:40:15.200 It's undoubtedly a difficult task. 01:40:15.200 --> 01:40:19.440 Rebuilding a civilization, which quite frankly is what we have to do, 01:40:19.440 --> 01:40:22.640 is not an easy thing. 01:40:22.640 --> 01:40:26.800 But just because the road is hard, the task is difficult, and 01:40:26.800 --> 01:40:30.880 in some cases the rewards are minimal, does not mean that God 01:40:30.880 --> 01:40:33.440 has abandoned us or there is no hope. 01:40:33.440 --> 01:40:35.920 It just means that it's difficult. 01:40:35.920 --> 01:40:41.120 Sometimes some things in this fallen world are difficult. 01:40:41.120 --> 01:40:43.520 That is the reality of the fallen world. 01:40:43.520 --> 01:40:49.520 It is the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves. 01:40:49.520 --> 01:40:54.240 But the only thing God requires of us is that we do 01:40:54.240 --> 01:40:55.920 our duty. 01:40:55.920 --> 01:40:59.040 Look at again the parable of the talents. 01:40:59.040 --> 01:41:03.760 God recognizes that He does not give out gifts equally, as it 01:41:03.760 --> 01:41:08.000 were, because again God is not concerned with that modern sense of 01:41:08.000 --> 01:41:12.320 fairness. God gives out talents unequally. 01:41:12.320 --> 01:41:15.360 Some are richer, some are poorer, some are more intelligent, some are 01:41:15.360 --> 01:41:16.800 less intelligent. 01:41:16.800 --> 01:41:21.920 Some Some have parents who faithfully transmitted the faith to them, some 01:41:21.920 --> 01:41:24.480 have parents who are apostate. 01:41:24.480 --> 01:41:28.960 Different men have different starting conditions, as it were. 01:41:28.960 --> 01:41:32.080 It is what we do with what we have been given that 01:41:32.080 --> 01:41:38.960 matters. We are to be faithful stewards with regard to our stewardship. 01:41:38.960 --> 01:41:44.240 One steward may have a very vast estate, one may have a 01:41:44.240 --> 01:41:46.080 much more modest estate. 01:41:46.080 --> 01:41:52.080 It is the faithfulness with which you exercise your stewardship that matters. 01:41:52.080 --> 01:41:54.640 Look at what Christ says of the widow who puts in the 01:41:54.640 --> 01:41:57.840 two mites in the donation box. 01:41:57.840 --> 01:42:02.160 She gave more than those who gave vast sums of money, because 01:42:02.160 --> 01:42:05.120 it was what she did with what she had been given. 01:42:05.120 --> 01:42:07.280 I'm not saying you have to give away all of your wealth. 01:42:07.280 --> 01:42:10.000 That's not even the point of what Christ was saying. 01:42:10.000 --> 01:42:15.120 The The point is how you use what you have been given. 01:42:15.120 --> 01:42:19.520 And God has given to each of us various talents to use 01:42:19.520 --> 01:42:24.720 in this life for the purpose of growing his kingdom. 01:42:25.280 --> 01:42:27.520 Yes, the material is important. 01:42:27.520 --> 01:42:29.680 Yes, the biological is important. 01:42:29.680 --> 01:42:31.360 Yes, the spiritual is important. 01:42:31.360 --> 01:42:33.760 We cannot neglect any of them. 01:42:33.760 --> 01:42:40.320 That is the mistake of Gnosticism and so many other heresies. 01:42:40.320 --> 01:42:44.560 To pay attention to the spiritual and ignore the biological is again 01:42:44.640 --> 01:42:50.880 gnosticism. It's to deny the reality of how God created us. 01:42:50.880 --> 01:42:52.960 All of these things matter. 01:42:52.960 --> 01:42:55.600 All of them are matters of inheritance. 01:42:55.600 --> 01:42:59.920 All of them are matters for our stewardship and passing forward what 01:42:59.920 --> 01:43:04.960 we have and what we have done with it to future generations. 01:43:04.960 --> 01:43:08.240 And so there's no place for despair in any of this. 01:43:08.240 --> 01:43:09.840 Yes, it may be difficult. 01:43:09.840 --> 01:43:13.600 Yes, some of the things we ask of God we may not 01:43:13.600 --> 01:43:13.920 get 01:43:14.800 --> 01:43:19.920 immediately, in the near future, or in some cases even at all, 01:43:19.920 --> 01:43:22.960 in this life. 01:43:22.960 --> 01:43:27.040 That does not mean that God has abandoned us, because He promises 01:43:27.120 --> 01:43:29.280 that he will not do that. 01:43:29.280 --> 01:43:32.480 It is for us to be faithful, and God will see us 01:43:32.480 --> 01:43:35.040 through the challenges ahead.