4: I am an Adopted Son of God
Four
I AM AN ADOPTED SON OF GOD
Suppose you are a convicted serial killer sitting on death row awaiting execution, guilty of every charge for which you have been imprisoned. One day the prison warden comes to your cell door and announces that you have been fully pardoned. You are now free. But then the warden tells you that the governor who pardoned you has also adopted you. You are to go live in his home, take his family name, and become heir to his estate.
What?!?
When it comes to spiritual adoption, this is essentially what God has done for us. He has pardoned us by forgiving us of our sins. He has clothed us in the perfect righteousness of his Son. And then he adopts us into his family. In fact, Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:4-5 that this was God’s plan from the beginning: he had predestined us for adoption before the foundation of the world.
As we begin to consider our status as adopted sons of God, we need to understand its meaning, and its relationship to justification.
• Justification secures our legal relationship with God as judge. In justification God declares that we are righteous in Christ.
• Adoption secures our family relationship with God. Through adoption God makes us his children.
Although we distinguish between justification and adoption, we should never separate them. They always go together in God’s actions toward us. Adoption cannot occur apart from justification, and justification always results in adoption.
In one sense adoption takes our relationship with God to a higher level. Think of the serial killer and the governor. The governor can pardon the killer with a few strokes of his pen. He doesn’t have to get personally involved. But to adopt the serial killer, he does have to get personally involved. By adopting him he has become personally responsible for both his welfare and his behavior.
An analogy usually breaks down at some point, and the one in the previous paragraph certainly does. The governor can pardon by a few strokes of his pen, but God cannot do that. He pardoned us at infinite cost to himself through sending his only Son to live and die in our place.
Inheritance
The primary Scripture passages on the subject of adoption are Romans 8:15-17 and—the more complete treatment—Galatians 3:25-4:7. As we look at this section of Scripture, the first thing that strikes us is Paul’s use of the word sons instead of children. Paul is not being gender-specific and ignoring women. In Galatians 3:27-29 he makes it clear that both males and females are included in the category of sons. Then why the word sons? Because Paul was placing a priority on communicating clearly to his immediate audience.
In the Jewish culture of the day, only males were eligible to receive a part of the family inheritance. So, far from putting down women or ignoring them, he is actually making them equal with men in sharing the family inheritance. We are all one in Christ Jesus, spiritual offspring of Abraham, and equally heirs of God’s promise.
Adoption in Paul’s day was completely different from our practice today. In our modern culture, adoption usually refers to the adoption of an infant or small child. In the Greco-Roman culture, a childless man would adopt a mature young man to continue the family name and to receive the family inheritance. In the Jewish culture, adoption was the recognition that a son had reached an age of maturity whereby the authority and resources of the father would be passed on to him. In either case it was the family inheritance that was in view.
Paul’s emphasis in his treatment on adoption is simply on the fact that we have become heirs of God. As he says in Romans 8:16-17, “and if [we are] children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ.” And in Galatians 3:15 through 4:7, his main point is that being a “son” means being an heir (See 3:18, 3:29, 4:1, 4:7).
Our culture doesn’t value the concept of inheritance as it did in the past, primarily because overall economic conditions have changed so much. Consider the difficulty of simple survival in the first century. The vast majority of people lived in what we would consider abject poverty, with few possessions and little or no economic cushion. The proportion of relatively wealthy people today is far, far higher than it was then. Any sort of substantial inheritance in that day was not simply a nice addition to your net worth, as it often is today. It was a completely life-changing event, a rescue from the futility of subsistence living, an elevation from one kind of life to a completely different, exceptionally rare, and far better kind.
That is what our inheritance is like as heirs. And our inheritance is not that of some unusually wealthy person, but of God himself. We have been adopted by Father God, and that fact has completely changed our future.
Granted, we have yet to fully come into our inheritance, and will not until resurrection day. This is why, following his brief treatment of adoption in Romans 8:15-17, Paul puts so much emphasis on hope.
Hope. Paul begins his brief discourse on hope (Romans 8:18-25) with the statement, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (v 18). Why does he begin the subject of hope with the idea of suffering in this life? Because suffering in one form or another is the inevitable lot of most believers. And one of the many benefits of suffering is that it tends to draw us away from the allurements of this life, even the legitimate ones, and turns our attention to our eternal inheritance.
I have had about a half-dozen events or trips in my adult life that I looked forward to with great anticipation. In each case, God has in some way blighted them with some disappointment or even trial. Why? Is God a sadist who delights to dash our expectations of a joyous time? Of course not. I don’t know the mind of God, but I think it is one of his ways of drawing my heart away from even the legitimate pleasures of this life to my heavenly reward. God wants us to, as Paul says in Colossians 3:2, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
The word hope in our everyday vocabulary usually means no more than wishful thinking— “I hope it will not rain on our picnic today.” But in the New Testament it most often means “confident expectation” in the promised eternal inheritance (See Romans 8:24, Hebrews 11:1, and 1 Peter 1:3-4). And Peter says of this inheritance that it “is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you” (1 Peter 1:4).
I came to appreciate the meaning of Peter’s words when I experienced an inheritance that proved to be perishable. Some years ago I inherited the house which my father and step-mother had bought many years before. Unfortunately, after my father died, my step-mother unwittingly allowed the house—primarily the foundation and the roof—to fall into a state of disrepair. When I engaged a realtor to sell the house, she told me that it was not sellable in its present condition. To make a long and tortuous story short, after all the expensive repairs were done, I ended up selling the house for $2000 less than I had paid for the repairs.
Paul says our inheritance will be just the opposite. Let’s go back to Paul’s contrast between our sufferings and the glory of our inheritance that is to be revealed to us. My parent’s house was a modest one in a low cost-of-living area, so in 1990 the price I hoped to receive at its sale was only about $45,000. That is actually about what I paid for the extensive repairs, and then ended up taking a $2,000 loss just to sell the house. But suppose their house had been an elegant one in the high-priced area of town, and I had sold it for 4.5 million dollars. Then my repair cost would have been only one percent of the sale price, really a bargain for the return I received. Paul was basically saying that this is how we should view our eternal inheritance. The sufferings we experience in this life are not worth comparing—they are not even one percent of the glory of our inheritance. To use some hyperbole to help us grasp what Paul is saying, suppose I had sold the house, not for 4.5 million dollars, but for 45 million. Then the $45,000 I had spent on repairs would truly not be worth comparing with my return. That is the contrast Paul is drawing between our sufferings and our coming glory.
I do not mean to minimize the pain and heartache of the difficult experiences of this life. The Scripture itself says that for the moment (that is, in this life), all the disciplines of adversity seem painful rather than pleasant (Hebrews 12:11). Nor does Paul minimize our sufferings. He simply says they are not worth comparing with the glory of our inheritance that is to come. He does not minimize our pain, rather he maximizes our inheritance.
This is what it means to be adopted sons of God. To return to the illustration of the serial killer and the governor who adopts him, the just-pardoned murderer not only becomes a part of the governor’s family, he also becomes heir to all of the governor’s valuable estate. That pardoned criminal has a secure inheritance, and that fact alone has changed his life, but he does not yet possess or enjoy his inheritance in full. It is similar for us in that, in this life, our inheritance is always in the future, so we look forward to it with expectant hope.
I grew up in the 1930s Great Depression when many families struggled to make ends meet, and in an area where old-fashioned country gospel music was popular. Later, as an adult with a more mature outlook on Christianity, I realized that a lot of that music was rather shallow. But there was one consistent theme that ran through those songs: hope. Because life was so difficult for so many believers, they tended to look forward with hope to their eternal inheritance, and that hope was reflected in their music—hope that God would help believers “make it to the end,” and then usher them into the joy and blessing of his loving presence.
Today, with our far more affluent culture, we have virtually lost sight of our eternal inheritance and the importance of hope. Yet God intends for part of our identity as those “in Christ” to be the recognition that the full realization of our identity will only come when we receive our eternal inheritance.
Abba! Father!
Paul’s emphasis on our future inheritance as the most significant result of our adoption does not mean there is no benefit in this present life of being an heir. Far from it. In both Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6, Paul says that the Spirit prompts us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” Abba was an Aramaic word, a term of family intimacy, used primarily by Jewish children when addressing their fathers. It implied a sense of child-like dependency but also of expectation that Abba would meet their needs. It was likewise the term Jesus used as he prayed to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Paul was apparently brought up in a strict Jewish family; in fact as an adult he became a Pharisee. As a small child, therefore, Paul would have addressed his father as Abba. So when he wants to express the deep intimacy believers enjoy with God, he reverts to this childhood word. Because he is writing to Greek-speaking Gentiles in Rome and Galatia, for clarity he adds the Greek word, pateer, which we translate as Father.
Stop and think about what this means. The One we are addressing is the sovereign creator, sustainer, and ruler of the entire universe. He is also infinitely holy in his moral purity. We, on the other hand, are dependent creatures who were dead in our trespasses and sins, and were enemies of God. How can we dare to address this sovereign and infinitely holy God as our Father? It is because we are in Christ, united to him in his sinless life and sin-bearing death. Christ is the one true Son of the Father, but because we are in him, God makes us his Sons also.
No other religion in the history of the world has ever had a god (or gods) who could be addressed in such intimate terms as Abba. Even the Jews of the Old Testament who worshiped the one true God did not address him as Father. And though there were notable exceptions such as Abraham, Moses, David, and Daniel, the vast majority of Jews did not enjoy an intimate relationship with God.
Opening the way. In the Old Testament era God symbolically dwelt in the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle or temple. Only the High Priest could enter that space, and even he could enter only once a year on the Day of Atonement, and then only with the blood of the sacrificial animal. So the Most Holy Place was guarded by three restrictions (See Hebrews 9:7-8). Entrance to it could only be made:
1) By the High Priest
2) Once a year
3) With the sacrificial blood
At the precise time of Christ’s death on the cross, the curtain separating the Most Holy Place from the holy place was torn from top to bottom by the invisible hand of God (Matthew 27:51). So now, under the New Covenant, the first two restrictions in that list have been removed!
According to Hebrews 10:19-23, all of us now have access to God. In fact, we are encouraged to draw near to him, implying that our access is continual. The third restriction, however, has not been removed, although it has been changed. No longer do we come to the Father with the blood of a sacrificial animal. We come by the blood of Jesus himself. (Indeed, the blood of a sacrificial animal was only ever sufficient under the Old Covenant because to God it represented and looked forward to the shed blood of Jesus.) So through Christ, more specifically through our union with Christ, we have continual and confident access to God, whom we may freely and rightly address as Father.
In coming to him, we come to one who sympathizes with our weaknesses and frailties. We come to “the throne of grace” where we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:15, 16). We come to the one who says to us, “Cast all your anxieties on Me, because I care for you” (altered version of 1 Peter 5:7). We come to the one who says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). As we come, we may with the young Jewish children cry out “ABBA! FATHER!” expressing our dependence on him, and confidently, as little children, expecting him to hear us and to answer us according to his infinite wisdom and love.
Some readers may have problems with the treatment of God as our Father. Perhaps the behavior of their human fathers has made it more difficult for them to see God the Father as loving and benevolent. But the fact is, even the best of human fathers fall far, far short of the infinite perfection of our heavenly Father. True, God requires perfect obedience, but Jesus, as our representative, has already perfectly obeyed in our place. And now we stand before God as righteous as Jesus himself. This is true of all of us who have trusted in Christ as our Savior, whether we had a good human father or a difficult one.
Of course, if we are honest with ourselves, we see so much sin still in our lives. And it seems the more we grow spiritually the more sin we see. And because we are performance-oriented by nature we tend to subjectively feel God’s displeasure more than we do his loving, fatherly care. This means that, in order to experience the reality and full meaning of our adoption, we must also keep in mind our identity in Christ. This is how we counteract our own tendency to focus on our performance as a measure of God’s acceptance. We must remind ourselves that God loves us, not because we are loveable, but because we are in Christ, and the love which the Father has for his Son flows over to us because we are in him.
There is an old hymn titled “A Child of the King,” written by Harriet E. Buell (1834-1910). Sometimes when I feel discouraged about my Christian life, I sing to myself the words from the refrain, “I’m a child of the King,” and it dashes my discouragement. Let me give you just one stanza of the hymn:
I once was an outcast stranger on earth,
A sinner by choice, and an alien by birth;
But I’ve been adopted, my name’s written down,
An heir to a mansion, a robe, and a crown.
I am an adopted son of God. I’m a child of the King. I have the privilege in this life of an intimate father-child relationship with him, and I look forward with expectant hope to an eternal inheritance that is far more glorious than anything I can imagine.