A Better Inheritance

(ROCKWALL, TX – March 18, 2016) My husband unloaded his treasure from the car and carried it downstairs. The large box held dismantled pieces of a crystal lamp that once adorned the homes of both his parents and grandparents. Jim hoped we could find a place for it in our home—some day. For now, his inheritance needed to wait in a corner of the basement.

Several years later, after we moved to a house with a spacious dining room, the box rested in a more hopeful corner. “The lamp will look great here,” Jim said.

But the room already had a beautiful crystal chandelier. In fact, I could hardly walk by without admiring its delicate prisms. So I wasn’t disappointed when Jim’s attempt to assemble the lamp was unsuccessful. Its sterling silver fittings had compressed from supporting heavy crystal pieces for a half-century. Yet he was determined: “Maybe we can find a lamp repair shop.”

The man behind the counter looked wide-eyed when he opened the box I’d hauled in. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

Days later, I couldn’t wait for Jim to see the resurrected lamp. I set it on the dining room table and stood back for a better look. In the afternoon sunlight, the lamp’s thick prisms sparkled in colors of the rainbow. But I noticed something else. The overhead chandelier now looked inferior compared to the lamp.

C. S. Lewis observed that we content ourselves with lesser things because we don’t know of better ones. “We are far too easily pleased,”¹he said.

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.” The Apostle Paul was quoting the prophet Isaiah when he suggested the rulers of Jesus’ day would not have crucified “the Lord of glory” if they had understood the hidden things of God.²

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, provides glimpses of hidden things that await those “from every tribe and language and people and nation”³ who’ve been redeemed by the shed blood of the Lamb of God. It describes a heavenly city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The city’s wall of jasper has a twelve-layer foundation containing every kind of precious stone; its twelve gates are made of pearl.⁴

And the city needs no sun or moon, “for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”⁵

¹From the book, The Weight of Glory. Bible references from the New International Version (1984) include: ²1 Cor. 2-9;³Rev. 5:9, ⁴21:18-21, and ⁵21:23.