‘Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father.’ If you are converted, you are going to come to something infinitely better than anything you have known. ‘You are my sheep’, says the Lord. ‘You have come to me, but you didn’t do it yourself. My father made you to be his sheep. He put life in you.’ It is important to see that. I must understand I cannot make myself a Christian. I must ask God to give it to life.
We are blessed of the Father for we are the objects of his love and all his resources are available to us. He has planned for all eternity our pleasure at his right hand and designed what infinite wisdom knows is for our good. Though we may have feared God at one time as one who was against us, and ready to condemn us and destroy us, now that we have been justified, we find that God works with all his power to bless us. Can anything stop us being blessed? Satan would certainly like to do so, but at this point the world is over and he has failed. He has not been able to prevent one saint who was truly born again from arriving in heaven and standing in that group at Christ’s right hand.
We are there to receive an inheritance of the kingdom of heaven itself. It will be ours in the sense that we own a place in heaven by legal covenant. To deny us that place would be to attempt to overturn the law of God. It was by the promise of God that the Israelites inherited their land and nothing could prevent it from being given to them. If heaven is ours by inheritance, it is more than just a generous gift of the Father. He has strengthened our claim on it by given us a right to us. The fact that we own that right by grace and not by any good work does not lessen our right to it. What a man has inherited, he has a right to claim in a court of law.
This inheritance was prepared for us from the creation or foundation of the world, that is, it was prepared from the beginning before any of us were born and when we existed only in the mind of God. He has never conceived of us except as those whom he loves. Christ unveils the secret purposes of God and tells the elect that nothing has been left to chance. They have not arrived at this point – standing on his right hand – by accident, but according to the plan of God whose plan leaves no detail unintended. We greatly misunderstand this verse if we think it teaches that God assigns this inheritance to a group, without knowing who will belong to that group. When this inheritance was prepared from the creation of the world, it was prepared for named individuals; unlike the lost, our names were written in heaven from before the foundation of the world. God always knew who he was going to bless. His secret purposes were hidden until the time that each one repented of their sin, trusted in Christ and was born again by the Spirit. Even then the world did not know them and it will only finally be on the Day of Judgment that all of his chosen ones will be presented as those that he always loved and drew to himself. God also planned our inheritance. That inheritance consists in all that has been given to Christ, for all that he has he shares with his disciples.