(30) You Have an Inheritance

Immanuel Fellowship Church

We all want a place to belong. We have that in part here and now. We have families, and we can be living members of the church of Jesus Christ. But we still long for something more. God has put eternity into our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). We want to be part of what God will do when he finishes his work in this world. We who have accepted God's promises by faith still "desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one" (Heb. 11:16).A word that Scripture uses to capture this desire to receive all that the Lord has promised is "inheritance"; the Old Testament uses the word almost 200 times. It usually refers to the land that God would give his people, which Ezekiel describes in the closing verses of his book; six times in our text he calls the land an inheritance. That this land was a true inheritance is confirmed in the New Testament (Acts 13:9). But the gift of land is only a shadow of the full gift that God promises to his people. Believers have "an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you" (1 Pet. 1:4).Studying the close of Ezekiel's vision can give us a taste of God's kindness and make us long for what it to come.