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Hohenwald SDA Church

Norman McNulty

Daughters of Inheritance

I'm going to offer a word of prayer and we'll get into the message for today.

Father, we thank you for this opportunity to worship you today.

We thank you for this Sabbath day and I pray that you would speak through me now as we reflect on scripture.

And we just thank you for this opportunity to worship you.

Well, you've heard the announcements and it has been a blessed week for our family.

So on Monday, our fourth daughter, Ruby Elizabeth, was born.

And she's healthy and Joelle's doing well, so we're very grateful for that.

Joelle did have a bit of a complication this pregnancy where she had intrahepatic holostasis of pregnancy, which simply means that because of the pregnancy, the liver and the gallbladder were not communicating well with each other, which placed the baby at risk if it were to go to full term.

So that's why she was induced 3 weeks early.

And I do have to say that it's amazing to me every time you see a woman push a baby out.

You know, the name that we picked, Ruby was the name of my father's mother, my grandmother, and she died when I was in uterus so I never met her but she knew that I was on the way and then Elizabeth is the name of my mother's sister so it's a name in the family but there's also Bible meaning to it and so we're We're very thankful and you'll get to meet her pretty soon.

She's only 5 days old, so she's still quite young.

And yesterday I turned 42, and so Ruby was a nice early birthday present for me.

So it was a special birthday today celebrating her arrival.

And so we're very grateful and we're very thankful.

You know, I've been blessed with 4 daughters, and so that's the theme of the sermon for today.

You heard the scripture reading about Zelophehad and his daughters.

And we are very grateful and we're very thankful to have 4 beautiful daughters.

And no, we're not going to try for a boy, in case you're wondering.

We're very grateful for the 4 that we have, and we're done at 4.

I don't need to be having more babies anyway.

So we're very grateful and we're very thankful.

It's kind of interesting how many people will come up to you and say, are you disappointed?

Are you going to try for a boy and all of that?

We're thankful for what the Lord has given us.

And there's some families here as well that have all girls.

And we're thankful, and we're grateful, and we're blessed.

So that's just the update from our family side of things, but I want to go to scripture because I do find in this story of Zelophehad and his daughters an understanding that God has a special place for women in the family of God.

And so the title for this message is Daughters of Inheritance.

I got that title from a book written by an Adamist gentleman named Wellesley Muir.

And I'm going to start now in Numbers chapter 27.

We're going to consider the plight of the daughters of Zelophehad because in their time, if a man didn't have any sons, his inheritance would automatically pass to the other men in his family.

If he had brothers or so forth, they would get his inheritance and the daughters would be left out.

So this is the basis for this passage in Numbers chapter 27.

We also see a little bit more in chapter 36.

So we're going to look at this passage again, Numbers 27 starting in verse 1.

Then came the daughters of Zelophehad, the son of Hephir, the son of Gilead, the son of Makar, the son of Manasseh, of the families of Manasseh, the son of Joseph.

So these were of the descendants of Joseph.

Manasseh was the son of Joseph and there were 2 tribes in Israel from Joseph, Manasseh, and Ephraim.

And so these were from the tribe of Manasseh.

And we keep reading here and it says, and these are the names of his daughters, Mala, Noah, and Hagla, and Milcah, and Tirzah.

Very beautiful names, I'm sure they were beautiful women.

And they stood before Moses and before Eleazar the priest, and before the princes and all the congregation by the door of the tabernacle of the congregation." Now just to paint the picture of what's happening here, you know you didn't just go up and talk to Moses.

I mean, Moses is kind of like the general conference president of our time.

And you have however many hundreds of thousands of Israelites there in the wilderness.

I've heard estimates of like 2 million people.

So to gain a hearing with Moses was no small task.

So it's not like you can just go up and say, hey, I'm going to have a little talk with Moses.

This was a big deal that the 5 daughters of Zelophehad gained an audience with Moses and obviously they had put a lot of thought and concern into the fact that they would gain a hearing with Moses ahead of time.

So it would be like you, if you gained a hearing with the conference president or even the general conference president, and you have a certain amount of time, and I'll say this just as an aside, From time to time I'll have people who will come and talk to me about a request.

If you have that moment of time to talk to someone with a request, you want to make sure that your request is on point and that it's concise and that your reason behind your request is clear.

Because when a leader like Moses has a hundred thousand things on his plate, you can't waste his time.

So you better come prepared with your request.

So obviously these daughters came well prepared with a request on their behalf.

So it says in verse 3, our father, so they're speaking here, they say our father died in the wilderness And he was not in the company of them that gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company of Korah, but died in his own son and had no sons.

Now, notice what they say about their father, they say, he was not of the company that sided with Korah.

Now for those of you who were here 2 weeks ago, that was my sermon about the rebellion of Korah.

And they had reason to believe that because their father was a righteous man, and he had not been in the apostasy or the rebellion of the church of that time, that they had a better chance that the Lord would hear their request than if their father was part of the apostasy.

Because many in the congregation of Israel had sided with Korah.

But Zelophehad was a righteous man and his daughters had a holy boldness and they came to Moses and said, ìOur father was not part of the company of Korah.î Now notice their request in verse 4 and they have a holy boldness here when they make this request they say, ìWhy should the name of our father be done away from among his family?

Give unto us, therefore, a possession among the brethren of our father.

It was just assumed that the inheritance of Zelophehad would be passed along to his brothers or the other men in the family because he had no sons.

And they're like, why should his inheritance be done away with?

Give us a possession among the brethren of our Father." Now, just to make another point of clarification, this is before the children of Israel cross over Jordan into the Promised Land because Moses is still alive.

And so it was a big deal to gain a possession in the new promised land.

This is something that they had been waiting 40 years for.

And to see their father die and then to not see his name gain an inheritance in the promised land was something they didn't want to see.

He didn't side with the apostasy with Korah.

Why should he lose his inheritance simply because he didn't have a son?

Give unto us therefore a possession among the brethren of our Father.

Now again this is something that they hadn't seen before so Moses said I'm going to have to talk to God about this.

So notice what happens in verse 5, "...and Moses brought their cause before the Lord." So Moses comes to the Lord, We don't know how long this interaction would have taken place.

But he probably says something to the Lord along these lines like, Lord, the daughters of Zelophehad have made a request.

I want to make sure that I am doing according to your will, so tell me what I should say to them." So notice verse 6, "...and the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, The daughters of Zelophehad speak right.

Thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren.

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Daughters of Inheritance

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