In 1 Corinthians 6:9, Paul uses a perplexing phrase. “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” (1 Corinthians 6:9a, NASB 2020) What does it mean to inherit the kingdom? How does that fit our common understanding of inheritance passing from generation to generation? Let’s take a look.
Jesus often spoke of the kingdom. In John 3, He said the following to Nicodemus. ““Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a person be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born, can he?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3–5, NASB 2020) But seeing the kingdom and entering the kingdom are not the same as inheriting the kingdom.
Jesus did use the phrase “inherit the kingdom” in a warning concerning the final judgment in Matthew 25:31-46. For the sake of space, we won’t reprint the whole passage. The verse we are most interested in is this, “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (Matthew 25:34, NASB 2020) The context of Jesus’ statement is future eternity. This brings us back to 1 Corinthians 6:9. Looking closely at “inherit” in the original Greek, we see that it also has a future tense.
Does that mean that God passes the Kingdom to us? Or, to be hyper-literal, does that mean that God dies? No, God is eternally existent. Neither does it mean that God will retire and leave the kingdom in our less-than-capable hands. I’m intentionally being a bit silly to make a point. The problem is that there isn’t a word in any human language to explain what inheritance in this context really means. But we can describe it.
Inheriting the kingdom deals with our eternal life in Christ. At some point, the King is going to say, “Here, this is your portion.” Jesus said, “In My Father’s house are many rooms; if that were not so, I would have told you, because I am going there to prepare a place for you.” (John 14:2, NASB 2020) That promise of being at home with Jesus forever is an exceedingly greater inheritance than all the gold in the world.
There is great peace in holding on to that promise. We may not fit in well in our world or family. We may be on the lowest rung of society and barely scraping by. And yet, we have a place with Jesus. A home that we are looking forward to enjoying for eternity. Like an inheritance, we don’t earn our eternal home, it is given to us through the blood of Jesus. That’s what it means to inherit the kingdom. And yet that’s not the whole story.
While the fullness of the inheritance is in the future, we see and enter into aspects and glimmers of the kingdom today. We are invited into God’s presence to pray and worship anytime we want. The Holy Spirit moves us to respond to the lost, dying, lonely, and hopeless in our world with love, grace, and compassion. We see the hand of God all around us. In a baby’s cry, a painted sunset, the refreshing rain, answers to prayer (expected and unexpected), a peace we can’t understand, and a joy that is unstoppable. And those are just glimpses, a down payment if you will, on our future inheritance of being forever with Christ.
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