Riches of His Glorious Inheritance

The Riches of His Glorious Inheritance Commentary by Clover Xuesong Zhou and John Camden Cite Share Show Bible Passage Gao Lei’s painting Devonian Christmas presents a horseshoe crab flanked by a murex snail and a trilobite. An explicitly industrial frame encloses the scene, exposing bare metal, screws, and a black square grid which is imposed upon the wild, natural mathematics of the ancient animals’ proportions. Flakes of steel seem to drift down in a teal background which is roughly the colour of the horseshoe crab’s blood. The Devonian period is infamous for its eponymous Devonian Extinction, one of only five known mass extinctions throughout billions of years of prehistory. Most unfortunately, current times offer a spectacularly terrifying view onto the exponential progress of the sixth mass extinction, regrettably dubbed ‘Anthropocene’ in connection with the period of human activity. Both the murex snail and horseshoe crab survived multiple mass extinction events, only to be decimated by overharvesting. Interestingly, the purple cloak that the soldiers produced in their sarcastic coronation of Jesus was meant to imitate the extremely expensive purple dye of murex snails, usually reserved for royalty. The soldiers unknowingly appropriated this symbol of earthly power as a sign of the sovereignty of Christ. Like murex dye, they extracted His blood for the consolidation of empire, but, in so doing, they instead consolidated the kingdom of God. Similarly, while the modern extraction of blood from horseshoe crabs aims to temporarily stave off our inevitable deaths, the blood of Christ, as Paul puts it, secures for us ‘every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places’ (v.3 ESV). In the perverse ‘white Christmas’ conjured up with steel flakes, Gao Lei asks us, what kind of Christmas would we like to receive? The ravenous consumption of the ancient foundations of creation or ‘the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints?’ (v.18). These riches are a major theme in Ephesians 1: ‘Grace to you and peace’ (v.1); ‘his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved’ (v.6); ‘the riches of his grace’ (v.7); ‘which he lavished upon us’ (v.8); ‘[i]n him we have obtained an inheritance’ (v.11; all ESV).