Does God's Adoption Minimize the Need for Holiness? | Clip from Salvation in Full Color: Adoption

The Legal Reality of Adoption and the Family Likeness of Believers

Yeah, so the legal nature of this, I think, makes that very clear. Your sons are your sons now, legally. And that's been declared a legal reality. And when they disobey you, it grieves you. And they may be disciplined, or they may really please you with their behavior as you see them trying to respond in childlike ways, showing love to, you know, to others.

And so you're pleased. But whether they're having bad days, and you're having a bad day, or whether they're having good days, they are your sons. And I think that great application of that for us is there is a solid foundation to our understanding of our relationship with God, much like the idea of covenant.

We have a relationship with God, but it is established in a covenant contract. So I think, you know, the benefit of that is, though my faith goes up and down, I know that there is a legal, in a sense, a legal construct here.

There's a document here in God's mind that says, I can't be removed. One thing that people might ask is, well, if you say that God delights in us and is satisfied with us as we are, you know, you think, just as I am without one plea, okay, because of Christ's finished work, would that remove the greatest motivator to holiness?

I have to be holy because I want God to keep loving me. What would you say to that?

I would say no, because the Father's love is the great motivator. And it's not the fact that He loves me that removes the motivation. It adds the motivation.

Yeah.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments, Christ says. But we read in 1 John, we only love Him because He first loved us. So there is that wonderful dynamic and unbreakable connection between our awareness of God's love for us and our love stirred toward Him and our love being demonstrated in obedience and not just sentiment.

Regeneration, Sanctification, and Justification as Distinct Changes

When we think of the legal and moral changes that happen, so if a person says, I am a child of God, immediately we might think, well, do you mean like you are in the family of God or do you mean like you are being molded into the image of that family?

You have a family likeness. I mean, because both of those are biblical, but there are different words the Bible uses.

For those.

And that's why we feel that it's okay to discuss them separately. When we think of the moral changes, your boys becoming more and more like their brothers and sister, more like you and Elizabeth, that change, you know, in the spiritual realm, that's described by regeneration, that's accomplished by regeneration and sanctification.

Those are the moral changes. I am being made differently within. I am thinking and desiring differently. The legal change of adoption is more akin to justification. God has done something on my behalf that I did not contribute to.

Something for me, Christ for me, resulted in a great declaration. They are right with me, justified, and they are my family. As a friend of ours has said, Andrew Davis, in a sermon at Christ Church once said, in God dealing with us like this, we are brought out of the courtroom into the family room.

And that's just a really simple way of seeing it.

God's Motives in Adopting His Children

Another point that Tenet makes that's worth taking some time to discuss is the differences in motives between God's adopting, a motive for God adopting, and the motives that humans often have for adopting.

In one, we often see a selfishness or self-serving reasons, but not so in God.

Yeah, so basic reasons for adoption. One often is that a couple is not able to conceive, and so they want to have children, so they take the route of adoption, which is a very good thing. I mean, we're not saying that that's a bad motive, but is that a motive that is in some way a mirror of God's motives?

And the answer is certainly not. There is always the temptation when we think of love from our perspective, because our love is almost always motivated by something lovely. I think that's a lovely thing, that's a lovely person, so I love it.

I value it for a certain reason. But with the unconditional love of God, it is just so hard for us to believe that this immense lavishness, that this extraordinary redemptive plan that spans from eternity past to eternity future, that that is solely to give and give and give that we might see what kind of a God He is.

He is not adopting because He's lonely. He did not create because He was lonely. So what Tenet says basically is this, none of these choices take adoption, for example. This was not chosen by God because He lacked.

It was chosen because of the overflow of this infinite, you know, perfection in God. And He delighted to express it in this way. So it's not that He doesn't have children and He wants children.

Another possibility, sometimes a grandparent ends up raising a child because their child is not able to raise the grandchild. And so it's not that they wanted more children as much as responsibility thrust upon them.

And no one is forcing God's hand either. He has freely chosen to adopt.

God Adopted His Enemies, Not the Deserving

Yeah, if you view the work of God in salvation as in any measure somewhat thrust upon Him, like, well, you're obligated, you created us and look at the mess we're in. So don't you owe us a little help?

Well, no, as we're going to talk about later, when we look at what the Bible says about those that are adopted, one of the things the Bible says is that we were all in the camp of His.

Enemy.

And this is an infinitely pure God. It's not an emotional thing. It's that there is no claim that we could place upon God having rejected Him and our representative Adam. Another way that human adoption is often, not always, but often very different than divine adoption is that sometimes we might have kind of...

So we have a desire to adopt and we do it maybe for mercy or maybe because we can't.

Have children.

So we would like to have children in our family. But sometimes, even with our most noble motives, there may be kind of an unspoken list of preferences where we say, there are certain things in children that I like and I appreciate.

And there are some things I don't want. I mean, oftentimes, adoption agencies have a hard time getting older children adopted because people say, well, I would really prefer an infant. Well, so your preferences, you know, why?

And so there are these unspoken reasons. And so this is more attractive to me. But when we speak of God choosing to adopt His enemies through the wonderful work of Christ, every one of them were ugly children, broken, diseased, you know, children that didn't even want to be adopted, that were obnoxious.

And you know, we must not think that God chose to be merciful and to adopt me because there was something about me that was a little more attractive than Joe over here.

Yeah.

One of the reasons I think sometimes people want a smaller child, perhaps, rather than an older child, they think they're avoiding some problems. You know, you inherit whatever problems that child has if they're older.

The Exceeding Display of God's Love in Adoption

But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. God demonstrates His love this way. So He didn't avoid any of the problems.

Yeah, really, just quite an opposite there. Another point we wanted to emphasize was the display of God's love is particularly seen here that He calls it the exceeding display. And He gives a number of points, but let's just use two of them to contrast the adopter and the adopted.

Now, I didn't run through all those when we introduced it. So let me just kind of run through those and then we can talk about it. He talks about the adopter God, the person who adopts. He is the King of majesty.

And He says, now think about that. No one can approach Him. No angel, no man, no woman. And yet He is the adopter. He is sovereign. He could have created a completely new unstained race, but instead He desires to adopt from a ruined family, from Adam's fallen race.

He is self-sufficient, infinitely self-sufficient, satisfied and happy in Himself. And no child He adopts is ever adding to Him. God is not being benefited by us. He is just and holy. How can a God that cannot look on sin with pleasure seek out with infinite love the sinner to make that person His family?

So that was God's love, a description of it. But then think about the persons that He loves, the character of the persons He loves. We are a people that Tennant describes as being frail, incapable of doing anything to earn a spot in this family.

We've already talked about parents, you know, kind of choosing this child rather than that child because of what we see in that child. But God doesn't do that, and we can't put ourselves forward and say, oh God, look at me, you know, and kind of like Little Orphan Annie, you know, song and dance to try to say me.

We're poor.

We have, you know, we don't bring riches with us or anything else to contribute. We are deformed. There's no outward beauty. We're diseased. And we have an active animosity toward God. We're described as His enemies, and these are the people that He sets His love upon and adopts.

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