Inheritances Are For the Living – Brad Jersak

To “Enter/Inherit the Kingdom”

The phrase “enter the kingdom” (of God or of heaven) appears in the New Testament 13 times, all but once in the gospel. And we find “inherit the kingdom” used another 5 times, all but once in Paul’s writings).

Having just read each occurrence again, I was quite surprised at the negativity!

We are given lists of who (types of sinners) or what (flesh and blood) cannot enter.
We are given “unless” conditions (e.g., becoming childlike, giving away everything, exceeding the righteousness of the Pharisees, being born of water and the Spirit) without which you cannot enter.
We are told how hard or even impossible it is to enter (if you’re rich or through persecutions).

Jesus explicitly warns that claiming him as Lord guarantees nothing (Matt. 7:21). In fact, the only straightforward welcome into the kingdom is for those ‘sheep’ who fed, visited, or clothed Jesus in the hungry, naked, sick, or imprisoned (Matt. 25:34).

It’s all a bit disconcerting for those, like me, who believe that salvation by grace through faith in Jesus and that “whosoever will may come” (Rev. 22:17). I don’t think we’re meant to solve the conundrum so easily that we’re complacent. We need to hear Jesus’ call to self-reflection—to stew on the meaning of our lives and recognize our need for his grace.

When Do We Inherit the Kingdom

That said, I’ve frequently stumbled over them by assuming “entering the kingdom” is a reference to the afterlife—about “going to heaven when you die… or being shut out forever.” Hear me well before I continue: I do “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come,” as the Creed says. I think there’s an afterlife when “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8).

But now I’m becoming convinced that this is not what “inheriting the kingdom” is referring to. I suspect Jesus and Paul are mainly talking about the ways we receive or inherit heavenly kingdom or the age to come now, in this life. Not in a naive utopian sense but as grace experienced in the here and now. Here is where I see that:

Jesus teaches us to pray, “Let your kingdom come—i.e., let your will be done—as in heaven, so on earth.” As above, so below. Paul will later define that kingdom as an experience that is “not about eating and drinking, but about righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17). Entering the kingdom, then, is about entering that experience.
Similarly, Jesus’ parallel phrase—“receive eternal life”—may be John the Beloved’s paraphrase for “enter the kingdom.” And again, we stumble into thinking that Jesus means “going to heaven when you die.” But he actually defines it for us as a reality meant to be experienced in this life: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
Paul transposes this heavenly kingdom ‘coming down’ from heaven to earth in this life into an ‘age to come’ breaking in now, in advance of the restoration of all things. Paul calls the Corinthian disciples, “those upon whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11).

Inheriting is About Receiving

I have pondered all these texts for decades, but during a class on 1 Corinthians 6, this passage came up:

⁹Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, men who engage in illicit sex, ¹⁰thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

There’s that negativity I was talking about. And I won’t go into how the sexual stuff mentioned here is largely exploitative (you can research that). Rather, what came up was what we think Paul means by inherit the kingdom of God here.

John Behr reminded the class that ‘to inherit’ speaks of receiving. God has poured out his kingdom—righteousness, joy, and peace in the Holy Spirit—on all flesh, and certainly on those who identify with the gospel. But it is hard to ‘enter’ that experience while were enslaved to our disordered passions and cling to our idols. Paul is not threatening his readers—he’s describing how impossible it is to open our hands to grace while they are clenched tight in self-will.

Or we could say, “How can you feast at the Lord’s kingdom banquet while you’re gorging yourself at tables of your compulsive obsessions? It just doesn’t work! Come back to grace, folks!”

Finally, an attendee raised a point that left me wondering how I missed the obvious: Inheritances are for the living!