THE INHERITANCE AND OUR VALUATION OF IT

E. C. Burr

Numbers 27: 1–7; 1 Kings 21: 1–6; 2 Kings 8: 1–6

I want to say a word about the inheritance, and about our valuation of it. A good deal is said in the ministry of the recovery about what the inheritance is and I think that even the simplest of us by just reading the Bible could understand something of what was meant by it. That is to say, God had promised the land to the children of Israel. To them that land is still very precious. They still value it, even in their dispersion, the physical land. In fact I believe there are certain sections of the orthodox Jews who each year as they partake of the passover say, “Next year in Jerusalem!” That is, they are looking forward to being re-settled in their own land. They still regard with affection and feeling the physical land that God prepared for them.

Even, a simple person reading the Bible would see that the things that happened to them happened as types of us—Christians are not given the inheritance of certain portions of the earth, but it must have application to what is spiritual. I think we would all understand that the bearing of the inheritance on ourselves is spiritual. It is set out in the beginning of Ephesians—that we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ. That sets out in a general way what the inheritance is.

One thing that was true for the children of Israel that is not true for us is that the physical land which was their inheritance was divided by lot. The piece that was yours could not be mine. In fact, if I attempted to move the landmark between my land and yours, so that I claimed a bit of yours, I came under a curse, (Deuteronomy 27: 17). The effect of that was that the whole land was divided up under individual proprietorship. That is not so in Christianity. The great truth of Christianity is that I can have it all and you can have it all, at the same time.

And the more I appreciate it, the more shall understand that my enjoyment of it all depends on your having it all as well. So that Christianity involves a great system of mutuality and therefore of fellowship.

In the course of the teaching in Leviticus 25 it is contemplated that my neighbour may grow poor, and if he grows poor that I shall look after him, and bring him back to the standards of the inheritance. Even that shows that, while the land in Israel was divided into individual proprietorship, yet there would be a great deal of consideration to see that what belonged to the land was being thoroughly enjoyed, and to be thoroughly enjoyed it had to he worked over and cultivated. They had to see to it that it gave its yield, in the proper way.

Now all that has a bearing on us. In Christianity, God has prepared the greatest things for those that love Him. They are not searched out by the natural mind, indeed the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; but there are things that God has prepared for those that love Him, and they are revealed to us by His Spirit.

Therefore, to have any impression of what the inheritance is for us it is essential first of all that we have the Holy Spirit. We cannot enter into the blessedness of Christianity without the Holy Spirit. As having the Holy Spirit there is a very great depth and wealth of things which you find that God has prepared for you, as loving Him. I do not seek to go into detail now, but I can suggest some things—redemption—justification—even the possession of the Spirit—eternal life—the knowledge of acceptance before God—adoption in Christ—a position in Christ Jesus—a position in the Lord—all these things are available to us as part of the spiritual inheritance. These are things that we are to go in for. They are things that God would make available to us and disclose to us by His Spirit as we are ready to engage with them. I think the Lord is currently helping the brethren as desirous of the truth, as being set in the truth, to go in more for the things of God.

It is notable what depths there are with the brethren at the present time; depths that have not been experienced over the last two or three years—not to say anything about the preceding period; but there is new depth being disclosed among the brethren, such as we experience then the tide comes in very quickly. We know that the tide is there and that it can come in, but one day we are astonished that it has come in so quickly. The thing is not to be cut off by it! When the tide comes in quickly a good thing is to know that you can swim, and find that you have ability to enjoy with the brethren the depths of God, which the Spirit is introducing them to.

I think we have found that we may sit down on a Saturday morning with more or less a handful of brethren—and you are very thankful for every one that is there—and what the Lord discloses as there is disposition to learn from Him is like the tide coming in, very fast, and very deep. You thank God for it that there are circumstances in which the depths of God can be explored in a company of believers. I think we would all delight if that process should continue amongst us. The real fulness of Christianity does not lie in paddling about in shallow things; in the blessedness and enjoyment of it, it lies in getting down into the depths of God. The Spirit brings things up from there, and in a sense too, we go down into them, and find that there is a vein for the silver; there is a place for gold which is refined, and we are able to go down and explore those things.

The Lord has, of course, operated in a sovereign way in recovery, beginning in the first quarter of the last century, and He has established ground on which the depths of God can be explored and gone into. And, whatever may be said in a critical way about any position that is taken up or sought to be identified, I do not think it can be denied that it is amongst those who stand in separation from evil that the depths of the truth are opened up in a way that they are not anywhere else.

I have the greatest respect for other believers. If my eye alights on something someone else has written from which one gets some impression that deepens one’s knowledge of the things of God, then one is thankful for it; but I think that as a matter of habitual experience the area where the depths of God are exposed and where the inheritance is known, is amongst those who seek to walk in separation from evil. And you would expect that, because separation from evil is a scriptural principle. It is not something that has been invented by men as a good idea at different times in the 19th and 20th centuries, and reinforced at some times and eased off in others, something that varied according to the political nature of the day; it is something that the simplest believer can read about in the Bible, and therefore it is clear that it is one of the principles on which God will rest in drawing out the truth.

Now God has, as I have said, operated sovereignly in the last century and since, and developed things in the truth. That there have been times of sorrow and weakness, and almost, it might seem, of hiatus, in that development of the truth does not diminish the fact that characteristically the truth has been brought out in the time of the recovery. The result of this has been that a corpus of truth has been established and developed and it is that body of the truth that makes up for us at the present time, as founded on scripture and developed in the power of the Holy Spirit, the substance which we enjoy, the inheritance that God has given to us.

One observes with sorrow the manifest evidence of attempts to fossilise things in a purely natural line and to reduce things to a purely natural way of going on, but what gives me rather more concern is how those who survived one division seek to arrange things as if the Lord was beginning again in our day. I do not think that is right. I do not think it is characteristic of the Lord, and I think we should ourselves be on guard against it. The Lord has not begun again. He may have brought us through exercises and sorrows, but it is a development of what is natural that begins to feel that after a certain period during which things have progressed, they can, as it were, be rearranged to suit the day in which any particular persons happen to live.

I think it is a very natural thing, and you can observe it in political history, that there may be striking new lines of thought opened up in one generation and these are sustained in the energy of that generation; then in the next generation they are sustained with something of the same energy and some further advancement and development in the line of thought that was being opened up. This may go on into another generation, but one day there comes a generation whose determination is to think everything through afresh, and they will get rid of what does not suit ‘our day’, meaning, in fact, that we will get rid of what does not suit us.

One’s day is one’s self in that sense. And a process of what in political terms would be called revisionism comes in so that what was held as clearly established doctrine at the beginning tends to be entirely set aside in the interests of what is thought suitable for the present day.

You can observe these processes in many political systems around us, but it is of political systems that they are characteristic; they are not characteristic of the things of the Spirit of God. The things of the Spirit of God represent one coherent whole that has been brought out in the power of the Spirit; that may in some sense have been diminished in man’s knowledge by the neglect of the Spirit over very long periods of history, but then the progressive development and opening up of the truth revived by God, still as one coherent whole, but in a progressive way because of our incapacity to take everything in at once. Nevertheless, the truth of God is one coherent whole; not needing revision to suit any particular day; not needing to be thought through again because it is a different year from what it was when the operations of the Spirit began afresh. One coherent whole to be held to in the sense of an inheritance which is to be passed on intact to another generation as it comes along, if that is the Lord’s will. It is clear that in the tendency to revise everything there is just what is natural, whereas what is needed is the maintenance of the power of the Spirit of God Who maintains in its coherence and unity what the Lord has given during the whole period in which He has operated, especially in recovery.

It causes great sorrow to hear things that the Lord brought forward through men such as Mr.

Raven and Mr. Taylor Sen, set aside and questioned. We may feel this in relation to the servants whom the Lord has used without going so far as to feel it in relation to the Lord Himself. What Paul would say in that context is, “Who then is Apollos, and who Paul?

Ministering servants through whom ye have believed”. (1 Corinthians 3: 5). And while each of us would care very much for the memory and the service of these distinguished men through whom the Lord gave the truth and helped in the opening up of the truth, our concern should be not so much for individuals and their memory as for the truth itself. While it may have been a convenient way of expressing things to say that so and so are giving up what was in J.T., that is only a convenient way of expressing things. The fact is that if the Lord gave the truth, it is the truth that has to be held to, whoever it was given through. I would be second to none in treasuring the memory and valuing the service of distinguished men, but I would prefer to value the truth itself above even the servants through whom the Lord gave it.

And if we cling to the truth itself as an inheritance which God has given, we are more likely to go through with the truth, which is the important thing, and which is the thing which those servants themselves would have had the saints have as the first thing in their minds. Many things that the Lord brought out through distinguished servants are part and parcel of our inheritance in our own day.

You can see the way in which things are being given up even in things that are published.

You can see that they are published to offset something that is being given up. It is often possible to observe through a publication that rests on a process of selection, rather than on what the Lord is giving at the moment, that what is selected will reveal what the selection is intended to counter. It is fairly clear that there must, by way of illustration, be some giving up of the fact that the collection among the saints, while not the same thing as the emblems, yet has its own special place as the giving of the saints in the atmosphere of the supper and the service of God, which is something that we would not want to set aside. That is only illustrative, because there are many aspects of the truth which have become part of our inheritance which we want to cling to.

Now, I have referred to these three particular incidents. The link between them may be clear to the brethren, but what I want to allude to is that in the first one there were women who had the promise of the inheritance and the expectation of it, and were expecting to be disappointed of it, and did not intend to be disappointed of it. They had not yet come into the inheritance and they wanted it. Naboth had got the inheritance and he was not going to give it up. The woman in 2 Kings 8 had lost the inheritance and she wanted it back—and she got it back.

Each of those circumstances may represent the circumstance of any one of us, or, indeed, of other believers. I know from my knowledge of some other believers that there is a great inheritance available for them which they have not yet taken up—which some of them would like to take up. That some of them are not prepared to make the necessary surrenders in order to take it up would be a basis for praying that God may deepen His work in them.

Looking at these women in relation to ourselves, they are right at the end of the wilderness journey. They had come a long way. I do not know whether they were born in Egypt—I suppose not—they were probably born in the wilderness; but all through the wilderness and all through their intelligent history, they would have had in mind that “One day we shall come into the inheritance; we shall come into that land flowing with milk and honey”. And then their father died. Think of that! There is this expectation all the time; we are going on and things may seem rigorous and difficult; it may seem hard all this walking through the wilderness. (Don’t forget that even the women walked through the wilderness. It was not just the men, the women too, for forty years. What labour that must have been!) But here are these women. No doubt in a sense they had been brought up in the truth, and they had gone on confidently expecting that what they had been promised as the inducement to go on in this wilderness history would one day be theirs—and one day their father died!

They see all their hopes dashed to the ground. What do they say? Do they say, “Would that we had never been brought out of Egypt!”? Do they say, “Would that we had died in the wilderness!”? Oh no! “There must be some means of getting hold of what God intended us to have”. So they come to Moses and they set out their case. They do not mask it, and they do not say, “Our father was really quite a good man after all. He just had this unfortunate incident in his history, and we would like that to be overlooked, and maybe some means of accommodating us be found”—Oh no! “Our father died in his own sin”. Everything is quite plain, and very simple; you can see the ingenuousness of these women. They are perfectly innocent—they come and they say, “We do not intend to be disappointed of what God always intended us to have”. Now what a spirit that is! They come, of course, in a good spirit; in a subject spirit. And what a good spirit that is, “I do not intend to be deprived of my inheritance”.

Of course, God is equal to a situation like that. It only takes God a couple of verses to establish a principle that governs us for ever. God does not have a long care meeting about it.

God settles this in two or three verses. And there is something established for ever—that people who want the inheritance shall have it. God has to introduce means for this. He has even to establish principles about marriage in order to do it. But what God is saying is that people who want the inheritance will have it.

Now in a sense we are all like the daughters of Zelophehad. We have lost any natural claim to the inheritance. We might have had it; we might even have thought we could inherit it by natural means; but we have lost all that. Our father has died. All that has come into our own history. Typically, every claim we had has gone. But God is equal to that and He says,

“Those who want the inheritance shall have it, and I will devise means by which it shall be sure that they have it”. Therefore, beloved, let us trust God in relation to that, and let us live up to the thoughts of God. God says, I have a great inheritance and it is for you—and there is a portion for you there, as there was for these women. If their father had lived this matter would never have arisen, but the whole line of claim on the basis of what was natural had gone, as it has for us, and we are dependent on God for bringing us into what, in His view, is ours in any case. God is equal to that. And let us be equal to what God is equal to; and let us, go in and take up the inheritance.

When they crossed the Jordan did these women say, “Well, perhaps after all we don’t want it?” I don’t think so. Did they say, “Perhaps after all our claim is not as good as that of other people”? I don’t think so. I think they would go up boldly and take their inheritance. I do not think their bit of the land would be amongst that of which it was said that there was much land remaining to be taken possession of. I think they would be keen to get their foot on what would have come to them through their father, but which they had been dependent on God to get for themselves. Therefore, let us, beloved, be encouraged in energy and not be defeated by circumstances that might appear to deprive us of our inheritance. There are localities, for instance, where you might say what lay in the line of the father has gone and there are just one or two left. Perhaps just a family, or two or three families. Do they intend to give up the inheritance? I do not think so. I think they intend to claim it and to enjoy it. What others of us would want to do is to assist them and help them in the cultivation of their land in the sense of prosperity in it.

So, if we have some impression that there is an inheritance lying before us, but the means by which we might have inherited it appears to have gone, let us go back to God and find that He has a solution for that problem, and the intention is that we shall take it up as He had intended us to have it.

Now Naboth is not like that. He has his land already. The land was divided by lot, and you might wonder at the sovereignty of God which gave Naboth a piece of land next to the king’s palace. That was sovereignty. He had not chosen it. You are not entitled in the course of this scripture to think that Naboth had bought it. Sovereignty had put Naboth there, and Ahab there. And I suppose that Naboth was diligent about his inheritance. He must have been. He could not have let it just grow weeds and become uncultivated and matted over with rubbish.

No Naboth valued what was his and cultivated it to a degree that the king who was sovereignly next door wanted it. Now what is Naboth going to do? Is he going to make a good bargain? Is he going to say to himself, “Well, if I give up this inheritance, the king has already offered me money for it. I could bid him up a bit and I could be wealthy for the rest of my life”? Is it worth while being wealthy in material things at the expense of cultivating the inheritance of God? Not to Naboth. He might have said, “Well, I shall find honour in the kingdom”. Daniel had a word as to that; he said to a great king, “Let thy gifts be to thyself” (Daniel 5: 17). “Give thy rewards to another” said Daniel, “what I want is to be faithful to God”. I do not think any Christian would accept formal honours from the world—I do not see how he could. “Let thy gifts be to thyself”.

Naboth sets aside every possible claim. A better piece of land? There could not be a better vineyard! Naboth has the best vineyard that there could be in the whole land of Israel, and he is not going to give it up, let the king say what he may. I have not gone on to read about Jezebel’s political activities in order to get it for the king anyway, because that is not a side of things I want to bring out. What I want to bring out is that there is a man who had an inheritance and he cultivated it to the point where even the king coveted it, but the thing is that Naboth cultivated it and valued it.

Now, brethren, what are we doing with what is ours? Are we just letting the weeds grow over it? Anyone who has had a garden knows that you can have a piece of ground and if it has always been left alone it is not much trouble. It will grow grass and one or two weeds; but it will grow grass of a fairly even character—not a very good quality—but it will grow that kind of thing. But then you say, “Next year we must grow So-and-so on that piece of land, and I will dig it this autumn”. You dig it this autumn and next spring you do not get as far as sowing. You will not just get a bed of poor quality grass—you will get all the weeds in the neighbourhood growing over it! Ground that has once been dug attracts weeds to a degree, but land that has never been dug does not attract them in the same way.

That is what happens. We give ourselves to divine things for a time and then we lie back and rest, and the result is that what was ours and should have yielded something for God becomes weedy and unattractive. And what is the result? You have to go to a great deal more toil to put it back in order. If you applied yourself just a little bit every day, just hoed the weeds when they first began to appear, all that would have been kept down and you could have put the ground back into cultivation at any time, if only you had cared about it. But, if you neglect it, you find that it is a back-breaking task to get back to it.

But, beloved, if we have neglected the inheritance, let us get back to it. Let us go through that moral process in ourselves, even if it is a back-breaking task of weeding the plot, and let us devote ourselves to cultivating it. Let us have a plot, an inheritance, like Naboth’s. I do not think Naboth’s vineyard had been neglected from Joshua’s day down to Naboth’s day. It was the inheritance of his fathers. They had looked after it, and their children had looked after it.

It had been committed to Timothy, and then to faithful men, and then to others also, and here is an inheritance, a plot of land, that anyone else looking at might covet. And, beloved, a Christian in the full gain of Christianity is something that other people will covet. They will say, “I wish I could be like that, wish I had that man’s moral characteristics. I wish I had the sense of security that that man has. I wish my life radiated the kind of thing that his life radiates”. And people will try to imitate it and acquire it by natural means and it never works because the ground has to be acquired by redemption and has to be cultivated in the Spirit, and according to the truth, with the Father looking over it, and God causing the sun to shine on it, and the rain to fall on it. These things, accepted from God, and understood from God; but the great thing is that if you have acquired an inheritance do not give it up at any price.

The king cannot name a price high enough to make it worth your while to sell—never! Therefore, if you have something if you really have some substance in divine things, hold on to it and cultivate it, as a man who has it and is not going to give it up.

Eventually he dies rather than give it up. You might say, “Well, the result was that the king got the plot anyway”. And so he did; but Naboth had, typically, entered into the fulness of what he had been cultivating in the Spirit. If someone else would take that away from him, he had something that nobody could take away from him. He had the inheritance ultimately in his own soul.

Well, the woman in chapter 8 had had a spiritual experience once. It must have been one of the most profound experiences any woman had ever had. Her son died, and he was brought back to life. Think of that: Think of the exercise that must have entered into that experience. I doubt whether a mother would have found any experience like it, that her son died and he was brought back to life. But then the prophet says to her, “You will have to go where you can, because there is going to be a famine”. And she went and lived in the land of the Philistines seven years. By circumstances under God’s control, she was obliged to move out of her inheritance.

I wonder whether anyone feels that there has been a time of famine that has driven them away from the inheritance and into the Philistine land. I fear that there has. I am not saying that as to the beloved brethren available to us now, but I have heard it said that there has been a famine. I do not altogether believe it, myself, that there has been a famine. There has been error, and there has been failure, and moral failure of a disastrous kind, as anyone could see, but I do not think that for every soul there has been a time of famine. I think that many of the saints have been finding something for themselves, even at a time when publicly there may not have been much to nourish them, if they have not, I wonder how they have come through to the present day. In fact, there are brethren amongst us, I think some sisters in particular, who found, when things in the responsible sphere were getting very much out of hand and out of control, that they were driven the more into what was secret and inward with the Lord. The result is that the period of disturbance and oppression has resulted in something richer in their souls. It does not justify the period, but it is only to identify what has emerged from it by way of substance, at least in the souls of some.

But this woman was out of her inheritance. As soon as she is released she wants it back. As soon as she gets free from the Philistines and from the famine, what does she say? “We’ve got through all right so far and the Philistines have made us very comfortable—I think we’ll be able to settle down here. We’ll hold to what we can hold to, and maybe we will go up and see the land sometimes; but it is in the ordering of God that we are here, and we might as well stay”? Have you ever talked like that? Ever heard anyone else talk like that? “Oh, well, these things have been allowed, and there we are”. Oh no! As soon as the release comes she says, “I must have my land back! I want back what is mine! I want back what I have cultivated, and I want back the circumstances I was used to living in”. That is what she wants. That is what many of the saints want at the present time spiritually. They want back the circumstances which they were accustomed to in another day.

She came back, and in divine ordering it was just at the right moment. Gehazi was telling about the things that Elisha did. He says to the king, “One day there was a woman, and Elisha brought her son back to life and, as a matter of fact—here she is!” You see how God’s hand was over all this. And the king says to the woman, “What do you want?” She says, “I want my land back”. She is not talking about her son—no doubt she would still care for him at home, as one who had been given back to her from the dead; but the great thing was that she should have the inheritance back. The great thing that all of us would feel in regard to every one who has gone out of the way and gone to live amongst the Philistines is that their desire should be to have their land back. God is clearly operating at the present time in relation to those who turned aside in 1970 and pursued after error, and pursued after it for reward. He is working, and the great thing is that people on whom He may lay His hand may desire to have their land back, rather than have their reputation back, or their place back, or their status back, or whatever it may be back. The great thing is to have back the land which was yours.

It was still this woman’s. There is no question of anyone else having a right to it. It was still hers. If the king said she was to have it back, then all he had to do was to say so. And that is what happened. But, more than that, she is to have all its profit from the time she went away.

Everything that had been gained in that time is hers. She has not got to work it all over again. It had been put in the bank for her, I suppose. You get that idea in Matthew 25: 27. Here is the fruit of the land itself earning interest. That requires that there be those among whom the fruit of the land is deposited while others are out of their inheritance. Are we amongst those in whom the deposit can be held for the time being? Are you a good deposit account for those who have turned aside? What belongs to them rightly, spiritually is deposited with you. And it is not deposited at some nominal rate of interest; it is deposited at a rate of interest that will make it grow. If it was deposited at a rate of interest that would be regarded as low at the present day, do you know that things at 2.5% compound interest double in 28 years? Rates are much higher than that at the present time. Interest rates amongst the saints in spiritual things are much higher than that. Things double in value in a very short time where spiritual people are looking after the entrusted deposit. Therefore, beloved, if there are people who are out of their inheritance for the moment, what are we doing with the deposit entrusted? Are we working it so that there is good interest from it—so that it is going to become more valuable to them in a time when they are released from what is Philistine and come back into it? I think so, I think that God is helping the brethren already, as I have said, so that divine things may be developed among them in power and with penetration and with profit and therefore with an increased yield.

You go to a meeting and discover something that you had not known before. Something comes out by way of the truth—not necessarily that the brother who is ministering says something that you can write down and take away and reflect on. A brother told me a story once about someone who was converted in the preaching. At the back of the room afterwards the brothers all gathered round him and were speaking encouragingly to him and they said, “What was it in the preaching that affected you?” He said, “It was that moment when he stopped and said nothing”. Think of that! It is not necessarily the word a brother says. It is what you gather up by way of impression in the truth as you are together. What you gather up by way of impression today is available to you to bring in to the meeting tomorrow, or next week, and there it can earn something more; and the Lord will in any case be working with all that is amongst the brethren on that occasion so that what each has acquired so far will multiply on the next occasion. And on the next occasion after that there is compound interest on what you acquired in the first meeting.

As I have said, at the lowest rate of interest anyone would even think about today, a thing will double in 28 years. At the rates of interest that there should be amongst people who are growing in the Spirit, spiritual things will double in value in a very short time.

Well, brethren, let us be sure that we are cultivating the inheritance. Let us have a longing that there may be those who, while out of the inheritance for the moment, may soon be brought back again and find that in the development of the truth—not that the truth itself can be enlarged, because the truth is the truth, but we can be developed in our knowledge of it and our understanding of it, and it can even be recovered to us—it is growing at a rate such that the king can say, “The revenue of the land since she left the country, even until now”.

“Well”, you might say, “I know somebody who left the country in August 1970. I know somebody who left the country in the beginning of 1972”. The best banks credit interest daily, so there will be something more tomorrow, compared with what there was today, in the yield from the inheritance which people may be out of for the moment. But the entrusted deposit is still held; and it is held on our behalf and it is held on their behalf. And it would be a fine thing, if the Lord operated for the restoration of any, if they could say that they never really credited that there would be truth like this available for them. No one of us would be able to set it on ourselves. It depends on the liberty and activity of the Spirit of God. But the great thing, beloved, is that the inheritance should be valued and held, and its revenue held as well, so that there may be ultimately what is for them, meanwhile what is for God.

Well, may these individuals who stand in relation to the inheritance encourage us. The women who were not in it but wanted it; the man who had it and was determined to keep it, and the woman who had had it and wanted it back. I think all these classes are alive today.

May the Lord encourage us, as having some sense of what the inheritance is, to hold it for Himself, and for His God, and for one another, and for all the saints, for His name’s sake.

Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex
12th August 1972

 

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