Union with Christ VIII: The Foundation of Adoption

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Council Podcast, I'm Jon Snider and with me again is A .C. Floyd, and this has been a terrible week because the three of us all have different baseball teams that we like.

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Boston Red Sox. Boston has a team? I thought once they sold Bay to New York, they just shut down.

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It's been a great week to be a Boston Red Sox fan. So Boston's not doing great this year, but not doing terrible.

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They're in third place. Yeah, yeah, it's not. Yeah. So then there's

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Atlanta. Atlanta has a team apparently and, and they're doing okay. Not great. Not, not terrible.

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New York's been the head ahead of everybody in the MLB for a couple of weeks. Now they're like third in the MLB. So they're still ahead of Boston and Atlanta, but they played

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Boston and then they played Atlanta in the last eight days and got publicly humiliated by both.

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So it was bound to happen. So I think that like I, I did, I bought the drinks today, right? I bought your, your monster drink.

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I didn't drink monster because I'm a Christian. Oh, okay. You drink liquid death. There you go, folks.

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Liquid death, a lot of money for bubbly water. So all right, well, we're looking at the theme of union with Christ in spite of that introduction.

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And we've been talking about the different aspects of salvation that reach us by virtue of union with the new mediator, not in Adam, but in Christ.

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And not just when we embrace Christ by faith. Of course, that's when so many of these things are actually applied.

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They become our experience. But prior to that, prior even to our birth, prior to the creation of the cosmos,

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God in Christ chose to save his enemies. And so it's such a wonderful, rich doctrine, which really forms the hub of Paul's teaching about salvation throughout the new

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Testament. Now we've come to the doctrine of adoption and how that's linked with union with Christ.

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But it's not just union with Christ. There are some other aspects of our salvation that adoption seems, when we think of adoption into the family of God, immediately, there's some other things that are very similar to it.

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Yeah, so when we think about adoption, we also have to think about, you know, how it might relate to other doctrines like justification or regeneration.

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So adoption would relate to justification in the sense that it's like justification, in that it occurs outside of the believer.

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It's something that changes the position of a believer before God. They were outside of Christ and really orphans.

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But now in Christ, they're the adopted, the beloved children of God. Adoption is like regeneration in the sense that we are born into a family.

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We're not born as isolated individuals. We're joined to the family of God.

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And we'll talk about that a little later in our podcast, but adoption places us legally in a family and regeneration.

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And then what flows from the act of regeneration, that lifetime of transforming sanctification, these guarantee that we will start to take on that family's likeness.

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Listen to what John Murray in his little book, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, which is, again, the gold standard for these doctrines of redemption.

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This is what he says about the connection with these other aspects of salvation.

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He says, Justification means our acceptance with God as righteous and the bestowal of the title of everlasting life.

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Regeneration is the renewing of our hearts after the image of God. But these blessings in themselves, however precious they are, do not indicate what is conferred by the act of adoption.

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In other words, you know, to be declared right by the judge, that's beautiful.

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To be made alive by the God that sees us as dead and sins, that's beautiful.

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But neither of those guarantee a part in the king's family or the judge's family.

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So he goes on to say, By adoption, the redeemed become sons and daughters of the

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Lord God Almighty. They are introduced into and given the privileges of God's family.

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Neither justification nor regeneration expresses precisely that. So they're there in our minds.

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We tend to think of the new birth as being, well, we are born into a family and justification is to be declared right.

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And that is required to be a part of a holy family. But adoption goes beyond these.

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And it's one of those doctrines, you know, when you think about the work of regeneration and justification and of election and sanctification, perseverance, glorification, all these great doctrines of our salvation.

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Some of them are, you know, I think of some of them are like the flagstones, the foundation on which we stand.

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And they tend to be those great objective realities. But they could be kind of viewed in a cold way.

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If it weren't for the others, you know, like adoption, you know, even though that is an objective work, it's familial.

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It's not just a legal activity. It's a legal activity that we are, you know, aware of as humans.

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We have human adoptions. It's a legal activity that speaks not of a judge declaring a man right and this pure justice delivering us from what we deserved.

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But there's more. There's love. There's a tender heartedness here. And when we look at all the aspects of the application of our redemption, it seems to me that God has given us such perfect balance in those metaphors, which are not merely metaphors, but they do give us the balance of objective reality and of the subjective tenderness.

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So I think that holding them together, you know, is always critical. Well, before we look at how the doctrine of union with Christ forms the foundation of adoption into the family of God, let's look at what the scripture says in the

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New Testament about this, just the nature of a spiritual adoption. And there's three passages that kind of jump out.

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There's John chapter one, Galatians four, and Romans eight. So A .C., why don't you read

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John one for us? John chapter one, verses 12 and 13. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God.

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All right. And so in that passage, we'll talk about it, but you have both a new birth mentioned, but also a legal right.

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So there are both mentioned side by side there. In Galatians four, verse six, we read this, because you are sons,

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God has sent forth the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying,

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Abba, father. So there is an essential aspect, something that is given to every adopted child.

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What's Romans eight tell us? For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry,

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Abba, father. The spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.

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And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.

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All right. Well, let's think of some of the fundamental realities that are revealed in these verses. And one is that adoption is, as we mentioned before, distinct from justification and regeneration.

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So it's a distinct work of grace, and yet it is not a separate work of grace.

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It's inseparable from the other aspects. You know, if we think of the covenant of grace, the new covenant, none of these things can be experienced in isolation.

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You know, we can't say, well, I'm forgiven. But then you have no family likeness ever flowing from that forgiveness because you're adopted into his family.

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You can't say I'm adopted and then not be regenerated also. So they're all connected.

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And keeping them connected guards us against a lot of abuses theologically and practically.

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Every single person who is declared right with God because they have come to him through the son has also been adopted by God.

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You mentioned it earlier. There is no such thing as a person who has been newborn and yet they have no family.

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They're just born in isolation somewhere. We are either in the family of Adam or we are in the family of Christ.

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And every forgiven person is in the family of Christ. But also, you know, when you think of the new birth,

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I believe that John Murray points out that as we read here, it is the spirit of Christ who's been given to us.

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And every person who is adopted is also a person who possesses this spirit of Christ.

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And we know that it is the spirit, as John talks about in chapter one, it is by God's spirit that we are born again, not by our willpower, not by anybody else's willpower.

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So those things are kept connected, but they're not confused. They're not intermingled.

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We don't say that my sanctification gives me a right to adoption or that my regeneration makes me a person who has earned a place in God's family.

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If we don't keep these things distinct in our mind, the causal order, the connectedness, but distinctness, then what are some of the problems that a person runs into if they don't understand that adoption is not produced by sanctification?

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You know, if you don't keep those distinct in your mind, what do you run into?

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Yeah. So one of the things that we have to keep in mind is something we've talked about along the way in the entire series of Union with Christ, which is the objective and the subjective.

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Objectively, God has adopted us. He has called us His beloved sons and daughters, and nothing can change that.

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That cannot be altered by our performance. So let's just say yesterday I had a bad day, and today

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I had a really good day. God does not look on me or my performance and say, well, you were on your bad day.

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You weren't adopted, right? But today I'm really proud of my son. You're adopted. Yeah.

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I mean, that's the whole point of adoption. You know, it's not just that you've been kind and brought a child who maybe had no family.

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You know, you've brought them into your family, and you give them so many expressions of love.

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But that's not adoption. That's kindness. You know, that's tenderheartedness.

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That's love. But adoption is when you make all of those things legally stable.

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They cannot be altered with the alteration of the child's behavior. God does not unadopt and re -adopt and unadopt.

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And so even human adoption, you know, we go before a judge, and it's made legal, and there's a document.

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And so, you know, the child may come home and feel like, I don't even know if I really belong to this kind of family.

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Why would a person like me be allowed to be a part of a family like this? And then they look, and there's a legal document.

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So it's not just the feelings of the parents. It's not just the feeling of the child. It's not the feeling of the siblings or the feelings of the friends of the family that there is a legal declaration.

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But we know a couple of adopted people who were adopted as children, and because of the difficulties that the adopting family encountered, and they weren't prepared for, they released them from that adoption.

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They reversed it. And they were adopted then by another family who has maintained it.

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And that, of course, is pretty tragic, you know, for the kid, the trauma of being taken into a family and then rejected, so to speak.

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So while human families can reverse a legal document, the divine family, never in Scripture do we read that God then unadopts us, removes us outside of Christ, you know, again condemns us.

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Andrew Davies, our friend from Wales, who has been here a few times to preach, his health doesn't allow him to travel anymore this far,

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Andrew, in a sermon said this, God brought us out of the courtroom and into the family room.

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And that's just such a sweet, simple way of expressing the fullness of our salvation.

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We weren't just declared righteous, and then we, you know, or, you know, right with the law and then released to go back out into life, alienated strangers to the one person that we need to be brought near to, or alienated from the one family that we so desperately desire to be a part of, but God brings us out of the family room into his living room.

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Another thing that we see in the Scriptures that we've just read is that all who are adopted are also given the

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Spirit of God. And that is not just regeneration, but as Romans and as Galatians both mentioned, there is the work of the

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Spirit in what the old writers called the immediate witness of our sonship.

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So it's not just that we are looking at Scriptures and saying we're deducing.

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So these are promises made to sinners. I have hoped in these promises, therefore, because God does not lie,

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I have a right to call him my father. And that is, that's the great foundation, the unshakeable foundation of God's word.

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But then, of course, sometimes there are those nagging questions. I don't look much like a child in God's family.

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So have I lied to myself about embracing God according to the promises?

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Have I really met God at the cross? Has the great transaction occurred?

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And for that question, we have a couple of answers. One is what we find in 1

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John. There are evidences of the work of God in us. These things grow on that new tree.

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There are evidences that you are alive. We've talked about that a lot. Those can be misconstrued.

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So those cannot be the foundation. They're always imperfect. No matter how long we are a part of the family of God in this life, our family likeness will be imperfect.

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And so we can always look at the areas that are still unlike Christ and say, how could

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I even be called an adopted child of God? Therefore, I must not be an adopted child of God.

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So the imperfection of our transformation in this life means that while the transformation is something we can look at and see evidence of God at work, it cannot be the primary hope.

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But then there's this immediacy that the Spirit, not through you deducing from scriptures, but alongside the promises and the evidences of the work of God, the marks of regeneration, there is something beyond that.

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There is the Spirit using those. But then beyond that, there is an immediacy that there is an assurance within the soul given by God that I have a right to call him

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Father. So, you know, when you cry out to him, there's nothing within the soul that says, no, no.

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Why are you pretending? Even if all your sins are in front of you and you think, surely he will reject me.

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He ought to, we feel at times. But you come to him. You look at the scriptures.

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You cry out to him. You're laboring to hope in his faithfulness. And there is that wonderful enabling by God for the believer to know

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I have a right. I remember a young lady in the church.

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So 20 some years ago, she was converted. She was a wife of a young man who was studying for the ministry.

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And she was a very admirable and, you know, serious, hardworking, religious young woman.

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And then she comes under conviction and she was saved. Her husband, when she came back and said,

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I feel, you know, I'm putting words into her mouth. I feel that the Lord has saved me. I've cried out to him.

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He's heard my plea. You know, I'm no longer trusting in my righteousness. He doubted it and said, uh, you know,

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I don't know. You know, how, you know, are you sure? And so she, um, she has a very strong personality.

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So she said to him, fine, you keep the kids. They had three or four little ones at that time. You keep the kids and I'm going back.

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I'm going to go back up to the church tomorrow. I'm going to spend the day, just me and the Lord. And I'm going to ask him to help me to know, yes,

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I'm right. You know, I have hoped in him and she did. And she came back and said, yes,

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I'm his. And she's walked with him ever since. The Lord gives us his promises.

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The Lord gives us the evidences of his work in us. John talks about those. They're imperfect, but they're there.

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But then there's also the work of the spirit. And that is the spirit of adoption that lets us know you are his.

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Well, let's look at how union with Christ is at the root of adoption.

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And the first thing we need to know is that being adopted sons or daughters into the family of God, there is still a very clear distinction between us and the sonship of our

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Lord. And knowing that is the first step to understanding why is union with him the root of adoption?

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So how is there a distinction? Yeah. So I think the first thing that we could talk about in that discussion is looking at how

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Jesus is, he's begotten of the father.

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We're adopted. He is, to use a more theological term, eternally generated of the father.

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We are born again in time and space. So in understanding the son's relationship to the father within the

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Trinity, we know that there's a mystery there that goes beyond us. But the

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Lord has given us human metaphors to help us get a grasp. He is the son.

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So proceeding from, from the, or as, you know, to be more precise, as you mentioned, generated the eternal generation of the son.

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The son is always of the father, not a separate being sharing eternally and equally and simultaneously the fullness of the divine nature with father and spirit.

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There is one divine nature. And yet it is possessed by God as father and the son and the spirit.

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And that's a mystery, but that's a unique relationship. And the use of a human metaphor that this, that Jesus is the son of God, even before he's incarnate, he is the eternal son.

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That metaphor only goes so far before it, it no longer is accurate.

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You know, we don't think obviously there's a great difference between Jesus of Nazareth and the

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Roman or Greek demigods who were the product of a physical relationship between some

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God like Zeus and a female here on earth. And that is not what the scripture says about the

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Lord Jesus Christ. It's a, it's a parody of that. It's, you know, it's the, it's the enemy's twisting of the real, it's a warping.

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So there's a unique relationship there and he is not adopted. You know, you think of the adoption theory that at the end of a life of perfect obedience and sinless sacrificial death,

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God looks at this perfect servant, Jesus of Nazareth, who's a mere man and rewards him with making him a part of the deity by making him part

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God somehow. You know, so he's kind of adopted into the Trinity. We are not adopted into the

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Trinity. We are adopted as children of God as our father.

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And that is rooted in the fact that there is a union between us and the one person whom the

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Bible describes as the only begotten, the uniquely begotten, the unique existing everlasting son of the father.

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Now that brings us to something interesting that John Murray points out in John chapter 20, when

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Jesus is talking to his disciples, he says, he is going, he's going to lead them.

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He's going, he says to my father and your father, but he does not say to our father. And Murray makes the point that Christ does not speak of God, the father as the one who is our father, as if his relationship to the father as son is the same as their relationship to the father as adopted sons.

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So in a sense, in that statement, my father and your father, we find that the reality of being a part of God's family affirmed.

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We are able to call God father because of being connected to Jesus and what he's done, but we are not calling

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God our father in the same way that the son is. There is still something distinct. Now, when we were talking about this off camera, you brought up Matthew chapter six.

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And so when you, when you read that, what comes to mind? How Jesus teaches his disciples and us today to address the living and true

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God as our father. Yeah. And so it's easy to mistake that. Yeah.

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It's easy to say, well, he said our father there. So he's teaching us, look, pray like I do pray to our father, but that's not what that's meaning.

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And we know because there are aspects of that prayer, particularly the aspect of asking for forgiveness of sin, as we are willing to forgive others the debt against us.

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Christ could never pray that prayer. That's not his prayer. That's the model prayer for his followers.

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You know, Christ's prayer. We could think of John chapter 17, the high priestly prayer.

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We couldn't pray that in the way he prays it. And he can't pray Matthew six and the way we pray it.

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So when he says our, it cannot, we understand mean his prayer and our prayer, but he instructs us.

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You all, all of you followers together may say God, our father horizontally,

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God, the father of all believers, hallowed be your name. Yeah.

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Just, just something that, you know, an unusual way that the Lord speaks to help give both the reality of adoption into God's family and the distinctness between our adoption and his um, generation, his, the, his being the only begotten.

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Well, let's think of some of the implications for a believer's life. Um, when you think about that, and we'll talk a little bit more about this next week, because we want to look at what

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John Owen says in his little book, communion with God. He has a wonderful section on what it means to be adopted.

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It means you're taking out of a certain family and all that that included and placed into a new family and all that that includes.

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So we're going to save a lot of that for next week. But just to kind of bring this to a close, when you think about adoption,

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AC, what do you think of as the privileges that you enjoy as an adopted child of God?

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The first thing that comes to my mind is the fact, like the fact, this is objective reality.

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Jesus of Nazareth is my elder brother, and he is not ashamed to call me his brother.

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So nothing can, that's unalterable. That cannot be changed. Okay. So that, that sounds great.

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But what if a person says, well, where'd you get that from? Calvin, Spurgeon, you know, Mueller, where'd you get it from?

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Hebrews chapter two. Yeah. What a passage for both he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all from one father.

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So the Lord Jesus who sets us apart and we who are set apart, same father, for which reason he is not ashamed to call them brethren, which is just too astonishing.

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You know, I mean, really, if it weren't written on the pages of the Bible, it doesn't matter what preacher said. I think this is an implication of adoption.

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We would say, well, I think you've gone too far. Yeah. And then there's all the things that a son would expect.

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You have access to God, not only as a subject in his kingdom, you're no longer part of another kingdom that's at war with him.

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You're in his kingdom now. And so as a subject of his kingdom, by his doing, he's the one that sent his son to you and brought you from a kingdom of darkness into a kingdom of light.

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So it's his doing that made you part of his kingdom. It's his promises that say that you might approach his throne, a throne of mercy and grace, but there's something more with adoption.

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I'm not just coming to a king that is promised to be merciful and gracious to me as I come to him through the finished work of his son.

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But he has also told me I'm his child. And you think of that, that adds a whole different layer to how you think of God, especially you think of prayer.

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How do I think of him and what I'm doing right now? Do I think of him only as a perfect being who knows everything?

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And I'm not even sure why I'm praying because he already knows the answers and he doesn't need advice. Or a gracious being,

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I'm coming to him because I'm needy. And he told me I could come and he's a king that provides for his kingdom. Or do you go beyond all of that and say, there's so much that could be said, but on top of all of it, he has called me his son, his daughter.

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And so I come and nobody in the courts of heaven has a right to look at us.

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No archangel, no other believer could look at us and say, why are you coming again?

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Because we are the son or the daughter of the king. Just so many things, provision, protection.

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But again, all of it with a tenderness that doesn't come from just thinking of the other metaphors.

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Yeah, I mean, that immediately brings to mind my two -year -old son and how he approaches me 3 a .m.

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this morning. He wakes up and he comes to me and he says, dad, I need water.

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Now, what would it be like if a subject came to a king in the middle of the night and said, hey, king, hey, hey.

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And he wakes the king, the king of all people up out of his dead sleep. Well, that king is going to blow a gasket thinking, go to somebody else.

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I'm the king. I've got better things to deal with. More important things to deal with than meeting your felt needs.

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But when you think about the relationship of a father, and I think specifically about how my two -year -old son came to me this morning, he said, dad,

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I need water. Well, as groggy as I was, it didn't stop me from getting up, getting him a cup of water, making sure he had what he needed, and putting him back to bed with the assurance that he was going to sleep and be comforted.

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But the point of that is, my son knows me as his dad, as his father.

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There was no hesitation to wake up and with his felt need, come to me and ask freely, because he knows what he will receive.

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Yeah, and that's not a name it, claim it attitude that because I'm the child of a king, I can boss the king around.

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You know, there is still that wonderful, in the sense of full of wonder, distance between us and God.

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You know, you think of Malachi chapter one, where he talks about obligations that Israel has toward God.

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As a people, even in the more limited nature of the old covenant blessings,

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Israel is called a son of God. It's an unfaithful son so often, but they have privileges that no other people in the earth had.

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And they come to him because they are Abraham's offspring. And they're allowed to talk to him in a way that the nations don't.

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And God points out that while he is a father to them, a king to them, they do owe him the fear, the reverence, the respect, the wholehearted seriousness, you know, what

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Piper calls blood earnestness. There ought to be a weighty joy.

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I'm coming to him as my father, but my father is not a normal father. He is the infinite one who called all things into existence.

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He crushed his son under the ocean, the boundless ocean of wrath that belonged to me.

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And he will judge the nations. He will make all things right.

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He will make all things new. He will love me with an infinite love forever and make me a trophy of his grace.

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He is not the kind of being I take lightly and say, by the way, dad, I want this.

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When we think of being in that wonderful relationship with God, the Bible does often speak about the obligations.

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Isaiah chapter one, you know, uh, the people of Israel at that time are, they've been in a long stretch of idolatry.

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And Isaiah is warning again and again, he's not the first generation after generation of idolatry.

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And Isaiah, God gives him this message. You're like a son that I have had to discipline.

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And I have disciplined you on every part of the body. I mean, you know, I spanked you and I can't spank you there anymore.

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I spanked you, you know, here, I spanked you here. I disciplined you in every way that I can lovingly discipline you.

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And you are still unresponsive. You're like rebellious children that can't be helped.

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Um, you think of the, the obligation of Israel, what

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God said through Amos of all the nations, you're the only nation that I have known and has known me.

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And therefore the sin of Israel is a far greater thing than the sin of the

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Ammonites or the Philistines, even though their sins on, you know, on paper, so to speak, look worse.

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Uh, Paul, second Corinthians chapter six, where God says, why are you being to the

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Corinthians through Paul? Paul's quoting the old Testament. Why are you being unequally yoked?

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Why, as a believer, are you going back to the world and making these close connections with people who love the world and the way the world does things?

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You know, obviously we're in the world, but we're not to be of the world. And you're making connections, which are going to cause you to compromise.

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So, you know, he talks about marriage, et cetera. And then the promises and the warnings are there.

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You know, he gives these old Testament quotes. And one of them, God says to the people come out from among them, right?

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Don't touch what's unclean. So in the heart, be separate, be separated unto me. Even though you still live in the world,

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I will be your God. You will be my people. I will be a father to you.

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You'll be sons and daughters to me. So there's that wonderful promise. And then the very next verse, chapter seven of second

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Corinthians, verse one, therefore having these promises, Paul presses the

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Corinthian church with all of its compromise, purify yourself outwardly and inwardly, get rid of the external and the internal compromises.

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You are children of this new father. Well, next week, we're going to look at what

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John Owen says about the extraordinary privileges of being adopted.

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And he divides them into two fundamental categories, what we don't have that was so bitter because we've been taken out of the family of Adam and what we do have, which is so sweet because we've been put into the family of Christ.