I Rest in Christ, 3: What is Adoption?
Much of this post has been gleaned from a larger article written by John Piper entitled Adoption: The Heart of the Gospel.
It can be found at https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/adoption-the-heart-of-the-gospel
God is a holy and righteous God, not capricious, or given to flights of fancy. We have said before that He has had a plan for creation since the beginning of time, even before there was time, and that plan included the creation of His children and their nurture and care. But it might seem at first glance that that plan was thrown into disarray by the sin of humankind. This of course is not true, as there has been no disarray, because God has thoughtfully and divinely orchestrated events to bring His wayward children into the family of God.
The core of this plan, that is, the core of God’s plan of salvation was always to heal His children from their sin-nature. This He did through the substitutionary sacrifice of His Son Jesus, and because we have been washed clean through this sacrifice, we now can freely approach God. This process is called adoption. Adoption is the legal act of permanently placing a child with a parent or parents other than the birth parents. Adoption results in the severing of the parental responsibilities and rights of the biological parents and the placing of those responsibilities and rights onto the adoptive parents. After the finalization of an adoption, there is no legal difference between biological and adopted children in most jurisdictions (From the Wikipedia article on adoption). It was the same in the Greek world of the first century, and the Greek meaning of adoption in the following verses is to place a son within a family with full family privileges as an adult member of the family.
Galatians 4:3b-9 3……When we were juveniles we were enslaved under the hostile spirits of the world. 4But when that era came to an end and the time of fulfillment had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the written law. 5Yet all of this was so that he would redeem and set free all those held hostage to the written law so that we would receive our freedom and a full legal adoption as his children. 6And so that we would know for sure that we are his true children, God released the Spirit of Sonship into our hearts—moving us to cry out intimately, “My Father! You’re our true Father!” 7Now we’re no longer living like slaves under the law, but we enjoy being God’s very own sons and daughters! And because we’re his, we can access everything our Father has—for we are heirs of God through Jesus, the Messiah! 8Before we knew God as our Father and we became his children, we were unwitting servants to the powers that be, which are nothing compared to God. 9But now that we truly know him and understand how deeply we’re loved by him, why would we, even for a moment, consider turning back to those weak and feeble principles of religion, as though we were still subject to them? (The Passion Translation).
Romans 8:14-17 14The mature children of God are those who are moved by the impulses of the Holy Spirit. 15And you did not receive the “spirit of religious duty,” leading you back into the fear of never being good enough. But you have received the “Spirit of full acceptance,” enfolding you into the family of God. And you will never feel orphaned, for as he rises up within us, our spirits join him in saying the words of tender affection, “Beloved Father!” 16For the Holy Spirit makes God’s fatherhood real to us as he whispers into our innermost being, “You are God’s beloved child!” 17And since we are his true children, we qualify to share all his treasures, for indeed, we are heirs of God himself. And since we are joined to Christ, we also inherit all that he is and all that he has. We will experience being co-glorified with him provided that we accept his sufferings as our own. (TPT).
These verses are speaking to the experience of being adopted by God our Father. The expressions of joy found in ‘Beloved Father’ and ‘You’re our true Father’ are translations of an Aramaic word Abba which has connotations of endearing affection. Some translations use the word ‘Daddy’ in its place. The thing to understand here is that since God is eternal and we have eternal salvation through His Son, we will never, never, be orphans again. And to make it even more profound, we have that ‘still, small voice’ that speaks within us declaring that we are indeed son or daughter of the ever-living God. We have a permanent Father who loves us completely and who will never forsake, leave, or abandon us. In our time of blended families it is almost normal to see families created by the joining of a man and a woman who bring children from previous marriages into the new family. That family is fine as it is, and each parent often loves the other children just as their own. But it is an extreme act of love for the father to take on the full love and responsibility of those children as legally his own. That is what is being described here.
But the process of adoption is not a simple thing for humans, and it wasn’t for God either. We have to understand that God’s righteousness required that we be excluded from His presence because of our sins. Sin carries the consequence of punishment by God. So adoption was a costly process for the Father because of the sacrifice that had to be made by the Son. But having become righteous through the Son, we now have right standing with the Father and so can have close and intimate fellowship with Him. We can call Him Daddy.
It is important to understand that adoption was not some adjustment made when God’s redemptive plan went awry. God’s plan didn’t go awry, and adoption isn’t a corrective measure. It was part of the plan from the beginning. It is also important to understand that before our acceptance of Jesus as Savior we were, just like every other person on this planet, children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). We were not some cuddly, irresistibly cute bundle of joy. We were rebellious, and ugly with the consequence of evil and sin. We were like a teenager in the worst phases of rebellion against mom and dad’s rules. Even worse. It would be unusual for a human to adopt the ugliest baby in the orphanage. But God did just that.
Christ came to redeem us and to adopt us into God’s family. To redeem means to set free from slavery by the payment of a price. You redeemed a slave by paying the purchase price and then setting him free. Now suppose that in addition to freeing that slave, you also said to him, “Come with me to my home and live with me. I want you to legally join my family, take my name, and take an equal share in my inheritance.” As amazing as it sounds, that’s what God did for us the moment we trusted Christ. He set us free (redeemed us) from the slavery of sin with the purchase price of the blood of Christ. Then he brought us into his family and gave us “full rights” as his own children.