“Whom have I in heaven but You? And earth has nothing I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:23-26)
In the Old Testament, the Levitical priests were given the profound privilege of having the Lord as their “share” or “inheritance”. While every other tribe in Israel was allotted an inheritance of land in Canaan, the Levites who were responsible for overseeing the sacrifices and offerings of the people of Israel in the tabernacle were given God Himself as their “portion”. In essence, God Himself was to be their truest source of fulfillment, identity, significance, purpose, and ultimate satisfaction. God was setting them apart for the purpose of displaying and foreshadowing the deepest desire of His heart for all men. That we might truly know and experience Him as our ALL in ALL.
While throughout the Old Testament we see the significance of God’s commitment to bring His people into the promised land as their inheritance, in the New Testament the notion of our inheritance or “portion” is deeply connected to the person and redemptive work of Christ on our behalf.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time” (1 Pet. 1:3-5)
The main idea of what Peter is saying is essentially that because of Christ and His atoning death and resurrection in the place of sinners, those who trust in His finished work have access to that which we couldn’t afford even with all of our best attempts at appeasing a holy God. As a gift, we have received an inheritance that extends far beyond this life into an eternity of blissful fellowship with the One who knows and loves us beyond what our brains have the bandwidth to understand or our hearts have the capacity to hold. It is as if we have been given a seat at a table with an abundant and endless supply of everything that we could possibly need to be nourished and sustained in this life and in the life to come.
I am tempted to be ashamed of how often I have to pray for the Lord to sanctify the appetites of my heart because as much as I want it to be true that the earth has nothing I desire besides Him, I can think of more things than can even be counted that vie for the attention and affection of my heart almost every minute of every day. I have to be reminded daily that in Jesus and because of Jesus, my cup is already full. In fact, it is overflowing. Because He drank in full the cup of God’s wrath, we not only get to drink in full the cup of salvation but we also get a lifetime and an eternity of pleasures evermore when we find them in Him!
So when days are mundane and life loses it’s vibrancy, pause and take a moment to remind your weary flesh and your ransomed heart that You have God Himself as Your portion. His abiding presence, His all-sufficient grace, His all-encompassing love....all yours to taste, see, and be fully satisfied in.
I pray by the power of His Spirit at work in you, that God would so root your heart in the reality of His sufficiency that the song that rises from your soul would be “Hallelujah, what a Savior, my redeemer, my reward, Hallelujah endless treasure, my delight forevermore”!
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