Adoption (Rora 2003) — Ron Bailey

We'll have just a word of prayer. Lord Jesus, we love Thee, and we come, Lord, with open hearts and want to listen to Your voice beyond all the words, even beyond the sacred page we seek Thee. Speak to us, Lord.

Fulfill the Father's promise that here, in this place of propitiation, You will meet with us and speak with us and equip us, Lord, to serve You aright. Amen. Well, good morning. I hope you're warm enough.

I've had another message from HQ as to say, Humpty Quarters. And I'm still busy decoding it. But the essence of it is that the main strength of opposition had more to do with Humpty's shape than his literary and communication skills.

You can laugh. I've got to go home tonight. I want to thank again the trustees just for the opportunity of having all this time together. It's such a wonderful privilege for a teacher to have a little session like this where you can take your time and go from one thing to another and build on it.

And I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity. And some of you will probably hear some of our voices in your sleep, I would think. You've heard so much of us. I was down here in Rora earlier on in the year at the conference that Rora, with its determination not to be conformed to the world, persisted in calling Whitson.

And we had a conference. And I recall this story of a man who on a hot Sunday afternoon went into a church building where they were preaching. And he came in under a preacher who had a reputation for going on a little bit.

And he didn't know this, of course, and he went down and he sat on the front pew and gently slipped into a sweet, refreshing sleep. And the preacher saw this and it really provoked him. He was determined that no one would sleep while he was preaching.

So he began to kind of get louder and louder and more and more shrill. And other than an occasional twitch from the man on the front row, it hardly seemed to have any effect at all as he got louder and louder.

Suddenly, the force of his voice dislodged a lump of plaster from the roof which fell and buried this man on the front seat. And in triumph the preacher shouted, And so will God smite all sluggards who sleep.

And there was an electrifying silence in the church. And then from under all this rubble they heard a voice which said, Smite me again, Lord, I can still hear him. Praise God. We've been looking at a topic, an overall title, is Having Begun in the Spirit.

Repentance, Justification, and Regeneration

And we're not talking about an academic exercise. We're not talking about logical deductions drawn from proof texts. We are trying to see what the living reality of the work of the Spirit accomplishes in the lives of men and women.

And so far, we've looked at repentance, which I said was a change of direction, and justification, which is a change in legal status, and regeneration, which is a change in nature, and now finally we come to adoption, which is a change in our relationship.

Adam as Federal Head and a Figure of Christ

Just to wind up finally again from yesterday, we were talking about the way in which Adam, as the federal head of our race, did something which opened our race to an invasion from an alien spirit. And something has passed into the human race that the Bible calls the sin and the death.

And it has spread through to every member of that race. It spread not just downwards through the generations, it actually spread sideways into Eve as well, so that she bore the consequences of Adam's sin.

And our human race bears the consequences still. And one of the amazing things that our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, writes to us is this. I was quoting Peter there if you didn't recognize it.

This is Romans chapter 5. And having spoken about Adam and the way in which Adam's spiritual heredity is passed down and touches every member of the human race, Paul then writes this. This is chapter 5 and verse 14.

Nevertheless, death reigned, as the death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression. And then it uses this little phrase, who is the figure of him that was to come.

And we have this extraordinary fact that even in Adam's sin and the way in which it's operating, we have captured something that God wants us to learn from on another plane altogether. He says that Adam is actually a figure of the one who is to come.

Maybe you recall that when Paul writes to the Corinthians in chapter 15, he refers to the second man and recalls him the last Adam. And Jesus, in His work of regeneration in the hearts of men and women, accomplishes the same kind of thing that Adam did.

Regeneration as Reproduction of Ancestral Characteristics

Many years ago, I was trying to find some easy way of explaining what the word regeneration meant. And I just thought, well, I wonder if there's anything in the dictionary which will give me some idea.

And I know that the Greek word for regeneration is palingenesis. So, I thought, well, I'll have a look at the dictionary and just see what it has to say. And I came across one or two interesting words like palindrome, you know, which is a word which is the same backwards and forwards.

And that's my astonishment. I actually found in my Oxford concise dictionary the Greek word palingenesis which is used in a particular way by atheistic evolutionists and I'm not going to go into that.

But it was interesting when you looked at the definition because according to their definition, the word regeneration means an exact reproduction of ancestral characteristics. And I was on my chair shouting and cheering.

That's exactly what I mean by regeneration. I don't mean something added to or something begun. I mean an exact reproduction of ancestral characteristics. I mean the life that was poured out is the life that is received.

I mean the life and the kind of seed that fell into the ground and died is exactly the same kind of life which is reproduced in those who are under that new head. All men in the whole world, no matter how old or young, are either in Adam or in Christ.

And those two statements are mutually exclusive. You are in Christ or you are in Adam. And there's no man's land in between. Now, those are strong statements to begin with. But I told you I believe in Christian perfection.

I believe in instant sanctification. In fact, I don't believe it's possible to have progressive sanctification. I'll explain it to you, shall I? Some years ago, about 12 years or so, I suppose, I was in Ireland visiting the Murphys in Limerick and I was entertained by them and I do mean entertained.

It was a wonderful time. I remember sitting at the meal table on one occasion and they had a daughter who at that time was about nine years of age. We were talking and her mum had gone out to get the second course or something like that and I just said to the daughter, I said, your mum's a good cook, isn't she?

And she said, yes, but I don't like her salmonella pudding. Fortunately, I'd never tasted the salmonella pudding. But I can remember on one occasion we were sitting there and John at that time I think was working as an electrician and he was out on a job so he wasn't around when the evening meal was served but they were expecting him about half an hour.

And the meal that was served, if I remember rightly, was a shepherd's pie and they brought it onto the table and it was hot and steaming and wonderful smells and tastes. You could just imagine it. And the first thing that Brida did was she took kind of a cake slice thing and she cut out a big section of this shepherd's pie and she put it on a plate and she put another plate on the top of it and said to her daughter, put it in the oven, that's for your dad.

And I said, do you know that that is a perfect definition of sanctification? That is exactly what the word means. It means to cut something out, a section from something and set it apart exclusively for an entirely different purpose.

That is what sanctification means. Now if you understand what it means, you'll understand that there cannot possibly be such thing as progressive sanctification. Let me give you a different illustration to make the point.

I think still when Jewish marriages take place, they use a form of words which has in it something like and I sanctify you to myself by the law of Moses or something like that they say. So in a Jewish wedding service, they have this sense of the two people being sanctified to each other.

What it means of course is that from that point in time they will belong exclusively to one another. Now I don't want to be offensive but you imagine what would happen if someone would say well let's start off on the basis of 10 and then see if we can add to it as we go on.

I mean it would be obscene, wouldn't it? How can you cut something out of the whole and set it apart exclusively for God and then say it's progressive? What the trouble we're having of course is that it's back to the gospel according to Humpty Dumpty.

We're using the wrong words. What we should be talking about is progressive glorification. There are certain things that are progressive and you've got a little list of them in the Bible. For example, it speaks about faith being progressive.

We go from faith to faith. It talks about grace being progressive. You go from grace to grace. It talks about glory being progressive. You go from glory to glory. But you don't go from sanctification to sanctification because sanctification is 100 otherwise it isn't sanctification.

Adoption and the Spirit in Romans 8

The exact reproduction of ancestral characteristics. But that's regeneration. Our topic now for this morning is adoption. If you go to Romans chapter... Well, we'll go to chapter 8. I'm not avoiding chapter 6 and 7.

Chapters 6 and 7 are really two wonderful illustrations of the truth that you'll find in chapter 5. And in fact, if you want to do it, not now, but if at some point you read straight from the end of chapter 5 into the beginning of chapter 8 and miss out just for a moment or two chapters 6 and 7, you will see how wonderfully the argument flows through.

Chapter 6 and chapter 7 are a huge parenthesis of illustrations where Paul is making a particular point from two different angles. But this is what it says in chapter 8. Chapter 8, of course, is the chapter of the Spirit.

The Spirit is conspicuous by His absence in chapter 7. You can draw your own conclusions from that. Here's chapter 8. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus freed me. That's Aorist tense. Freed me. It means it's done, finished. Freed me from the law of sin and death. And then he goes on to say several things.

But if you come down to verse 11, it says this. But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall also make alive your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwells in you.

Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh to live after the flesh, for if you live after the flesh, you shall die. But if you through the Spirit put to death the deeds of the body, you shall live.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God. For you have not received the Spirit of bondage again to fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. We are going to talk about adoption. And I want to remind you again that we are doing something which is, in essence, artificial.

We are taking Bible truths and we are separating them out so that we can consider them. But you must put all these things back together again. If you force me, you might say, well, do you believe that regeneration and this adoption are perfectly synchronized?

Well, there may be a split second between them. Because in one sense, the Spirit of adoption is confirming what has been accomplished. But it's only a moment, it's only a split second. But for the purposes of what we are doing now, I want to identify it separately so that we can see some of the wonders of what God is telling us here.

Verse 14, it says, As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. Now, please forgive me for putting it this way around, but this verse should not be read backwards. You should not read it so that it says, Those who are the sons of God are led by the Spirit of God.

That is not what the verse says. What the verse says is, Those who are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. In other words, if someone is being led as a continual process of life by the Spirit of God, that is evidence that that person is a child of God.

This is saying nothing at all about our rights and our privileges and what we may expect from God. It's simply stating a matter of fact. Those who are led by the Spirit of God, they are the children of God.

And then it goes on to say this, You have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. And if you are using different versions of the Bible, you may have a different word for adoption.

The Greek word for adoption has right at the beginning of it, the word son. So, different translators have tried to capture that idea and your Bible version may speak of sonship or the placing of a son or something like that.

Adoption in Roman Law and Ancient Society

But it's unfortunate now that we actually have the word adoption. Because the word adoption brings to our mind immediately the kind of adoption that we are familiar with in everyday life, usually in the UK.

Here's a little bit of irrelevant information for you. Adoption only came on to the UK statute books in 1928. So, before that there was no adoption even in the UK. Before that there were guardians and wards of court and that kind of stuff.

The reason I'm saying this is for a very simple reason. Whenever we think of adoption, almost inevitably, we think of babies. We think of orphans. We think of the security and the welfare of this vulnerable creature.

And that was really why the adoption laws were brought into the UK. They brought in on the heels of the First World War when there were numbers of illegitimate babies and orphans and they were trying to kind of tidy things up.

But when the Bible speaks of adoption, it doesn't have babies in mind at all. It doesn't have orphans in mind at all. Do you remember from your history, if you read kind of some bits of history, that Julius Caesar, before he died, adopted his nephew.

His nephew was a man that we know now as Augustus. He adopted him. Now, when he adopted Augustus, Augustus was a full-grown man. And the reason he adopted him was not for Augustus' welfare, but for the continuation of Julius Caesar's will.

This is why adoption took place in ancient times. The main focus of attention was not the welfare of the person who was being adopted. The main focus of attention was the continuation of the purposes of the will of the direction of the person who was doing the adopting.

Maybe that's a strange idea to you. But that's the truth of it. And we have in the Bible several ideas which give this sense of the son carrying on the will of the father. It's a great company, father and son.

In Reading we have a removal firm called Father and Daughters. It's an interesting title. But in Bible terms, it's son. It always has to be son. Last night I was listening to Les speaking and it's been a tremendous thrill to share the preaching of the Word of God with the different brothers here for this week.

It's a little bit nerve-wracking at times because they begin to speak and you think, oh that's good. And then you think, oh just a minute, they're going to say everything I want to say. He didn't say quite everything I want to say.

The Double Portion and the Supreme Heir

But you know this whole picture of the double portion? As well as everything else that Les said last night, the double portion was a way in ancient times that God identified, that a man identified his supreme heir.

The one who was going to be responsible for carrying on the will of the father into the next generation. So that for example, if I had been living in Old Testament times, we had a family of seven children.

So we had three boys and four daughters. And if I had died in Old Testament times and my estate had been divided up according to Old Testament usage, what would have happened was this. You count the number of sons and it's three.

So then you see what my inheritance is and you divide it into three plus one. So that makes four. Then to the youngest son you give one portion. To the next son you give one portion. And to the eldest son you give a double portion.

And four sisters and his mother to look after. Because the double portion was not to make the eldest son rich. It was to equip him to carry out his father's will for those who are now his responsibility.

And that's part of the idea of adoption. Now if it makes you feel good to think of God cuddling you as a little baby, an orphan, that's a good picture too. That's Ezekiel's picture. That's fine. But when the Bible uses the word adoption, that's not what it has in mind.

It has in mind the idea of full mature sons who have gone through all the trials and tribulations and fatal illnesses of youth and are now able to be trusted with the responsibility of carrying on the father's will into the next generation.

Amazing, isn't it? In fact, when someone was adopted into a family in Roman times, they really did become part of that family. Often they were already in a family. They have this unique way in Roman history where officially only one man in a Roman family or extended family would have full legal status in the law.

And that man then, all his family would really be his and under his absolute rule and authority. All his children, all the people who spread out for him, they would all be his. There was only the one man.

It's a kind of a system that is, and I don't mean to be offensive when I say this, it's a kind of a system that is still reflected now in the papacy and the mafia. It's a pattern where El Papa, the father, is the head of the family.

And the family must obey the will of the father. And ultimate loyalty is to the family and to the father's will. And that is the prime morality. So, whether that is murder or deceit or anything else, that is not the prime sin.

The prime sin would be to disobey the will of the father and to break the bonds with the family. Now, that's Roman. That's the Roman picture. What happened in these days was you'd have somebody, maybe someone like Augustus whose parents were still alive, if I remember rightly, and Julius Caesar wants Augustus to be his successor.

He wants him to be his heir. So, he adopts Augustus Caesar so that when Julius is no longer around, Augustus can carry on the same policy, the same direction, so that he can do what he was supposed to do.

One of the famous emperors, Hadrian, the man who built the wall, not personally, I don't suppose, but the man who had the wall built, and he used to say that adopted sons are far better than natural sons.

He said, with natural sons, you never know what you're getting. But with an adopted son, you know exactly what you're getting. So, this is the picture. An adopted son was someone who was being moved into position to bear responsibility.

Yes, he would become part of the new family. He would be part of the family line. He would actually be fitted into the family tree. He would have all the joys, the privileges, and he would have all the responsibilities of the family too.

That would be part of the pattern. And here Paul says, we've not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but we've received the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father. I'm saying all this, of course, because Paul was writing to Romans.

It's good to remember who a letter is written to when you read it. It helps you understand it. You wouldn't understand any of my letters from Humpty Dumpty. But to my understanding, well, ish. It's important to know who wrote it and who it was written to.

Paul writes to the Romans and you know in chapter 7 he says, I speak to those who know law. And we won't stray into chapter 7 or we shall be here for a long, long time. So, it's adoption. It's this pattern of life.

Public Sonship and Guardianship

The Romans had a sort of a private notion of adoption, but then there was a public declaration of it. And the public declaration was very similar to something else the Romans did. When a young Roman boy was about 12 or 14, he was publicly acknowledged to be his father's son.

They were taken to the forum, sort of a town all in the middle of the market, and publicly the father would say, this is my son. And from that time there were dramatic changes in the young man's life.

There were outward changes that you could see. He lost the mini toga and ended up with the maxi toga from that point in time. Up until that point in time, he had been, listen to this, we shall come back to it, up until that time, he had been under guardians and tutors.

Up until that time. Up until that time, there were people who were specially employed to make sure that he didn't go astray. Roman boys had their own personal moral policeman. He was often a Greek, as the case might be.

He wasn't a teacher. He wasn't intended to teach. He was actually intended to keep this young man out of trouble. In fact, there are kind of pictures of this particular person, these guardians, paedagogos, the word is, taking their charges to school and they have them by the ear or they have a little whip in their hands just to make sure that they are not distracted by the things that little boys are always distracted by.

To make sure that they came to the teacher. Let me read you a little bit from the letter to the Galatians. See, it's Paul here speaking specifically from a Jewish background. If you read these passages of scriptures carefully, sometimes it's good to read them out loud and slowly and then you might just notice changes with your ear that you haven't noticed with your eyes.

The Law as a Tutor Until the Promise

When Paul is talking here, chapter 3, and he's talking about the law, in verse 9 he says, we asked this question one of the days earlier, wherefore then serveth the law? It was added, because of transgressions, until the seed should come to whom the promise was made.

And it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator. Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid. For if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.

But the scripture has concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe. But before faith came, we were kept under the law. Can you hear this? This is a man from a Jewish background.

Before faith came, we were under the law. He's not speaking as a Gentile. He's speaking with someone with a Jewish background. Before the law came, before faith came, we were under the law. Shut up. Closed in.

Up to the faith which should afterwards be revealed. Wherefore the law was our, personal pronoun again, the law was our child conductor to bring us to Christ. Did you know that was what the purpose of the law was?

It was to take these Jewish children by the ear and make sure they came into the presence of the one who would teach them. That's what its purpose was. To make sure they didn't go astray. To hem them in.

If you've ever seen the way that they hem in sheep and cattle when they're trying to get them from one place and they narrow them right down into a single file, that was the purpose of the law. To narrow them right in, to bring them right down so there was only one possible way in which they can go and it would have brought them straight to the feet of Christ.

That was the purpose of the law. The law, he says, verse 24, was our child conductor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. But faith having come, we, we Jews, who are now Christians, we are no longer under a child conductor.

And then notice what happens here in verse 26. For ye, did you notice that switch? He's been speaking about we, we, we. And then suddenly, almost without any warning, he suddenly says, you. He's making a point to these Christians in the Galatian churches.

You know the story, I guess, behind this. That Paul had visited these different locations and seen people come to Christ and had seen the churches built up. And then he heard to his horror that people had followed in his tracks telling these new converts that although it was okay to begin your Christian experience, your relationship with God by faith, if you wanted to maintain it, if you wanted to grow up and really become mature, then you were going to have to keep the law.

And he was horrified. Several things happened, one of which was this letter to the Galatians. Which he writes. And what he's saying now to these Galatians who predominantly do not have a Jewish background, he speaks of himself, he says, the law was our child conductor.

We were under the law. The law shut us in until faith came. Do you remember we sang, I think, yesterday morning, impart the living faith. And it's why I've chosen to call the title of this series Having Begun in the Spirit.

And here, Paul speaks about faith coming. In 1748, on the 24th of May, and round about 8 o 'clock at night, a young clergyman made his way to a meeting. His name was John Wesley. Earlier on that year, he had returned from Georgia.

John Wesley and the Coming of Faith

A broken, disappointed man. He had gone out as a young clergyman, convinced that he could change the colonists and convert the natives and discovered that he himself needed to be converted. He met up with a group of people who had a living faith in God and he was greatly challenged by them.

He came back to the UK and from about the march of that year, he became intellectually convinced of the truth of justification by faith and of the reality that he saw of experienced faith and life in the Scriptures.

But from March to May, he laboured with the conviction that it was right, but that he wasn't into it. He didn't have, as he said, faith. He knew it was right, he knew it was true, but he hadn't received the gift of faith.

For him, faith had not come. And in his journal, he tells us that he went along to this meeting and he's very precise about it, as Wesley always was. That's why they called them the Methodists, because they were so methodical.

He was from a background where as a young undergraduate at university, he and others had formed a club where they had tried to order their lives by a fierce legalism and which their mockers called the Holy Club.

People always confuse legalism and holiness. They always think that people who keep lots of laws are going to be holy. And that's one of the things that Paul wants to make it very plain is not the case.

What happened as a result of these people is that they just became more and more aware of their own inadequacy. And at this particular time, the 24th of May 1748, someone was reading, would you believe, the preface, Luther's preface, to Luther's commentary on the book of Romans.

Can you imagine a more kind of vigorous sermon? I can just imagine Keith Kelly doing that in one of his missions. But the amazing thing is that as John Wesley heard it, you'll know this language, he said, my heart was strangely warmed.

And I felt I did believe. Even I. Faith had come. Faith had come. He had been intellectually converted. He had been, if you like, an evangelical for three months. But he didn't know the Lord. Faith had to come.

And if you want to do some studying, I would suggest that you keep digging and digging and go from one level to another. What I would recommend that you do is buy, queue up at Derrick's bookstall and buy all the works of John Wesley and trace your way through to May 1748 and see what happened in the weeks before and see what Wesley means by faith.

He does not mean believism. He does not mean mental ascent. He means total dependence as a gift of God. There's a wonderful story. This is a true story told about a Frenchman, Blondin. Blondel. Brilliant acrobat and tightrope walker who about a century and a half ago stretched a tightrope across Niagara Falls from America to Canada and then gathered an enormous crowd with these amazing exploits where he was going backwards and forwards and he did extraordinary things.

He took the tyres off a bicycle and rode across. He actually took a small spirit stove and fried an omelette in the middle. He took his manager across on one occasion. On another occasion, he went across with a wheelbarrow full with two sacks of potatoes.

It really was extraordinary. And on one occasion when he'd taken these potatoes across in his wheelbarrow, he addressed the crowd and he said, Do you believe I could carry a man across in the wheelbarrow?

And they said, Yes! And he said, Can I have a volunteer? And there was dead silence. Oh, they all gave mental ascent but no one was willing to put their lives into his hands. It's possible to be evangelical, to give mental ascent to all the truths of the Bible.

But faith is putting yourself in someone else's hands. It's total commitment. It's all your eggs in one basket. It's absolute reliance upon Jesus Christ. And John Wesley, having heard Luther's preface to Romans, and you should read that as well and see what Luther thought about faith.

And you'll see that Luther is talking about a faith that smites the old man and puts the new man in its place. It's a very full definition of faith. Not like the ones that you're likely to get in other places.

Anyway, I just want to make this point. There's a point in the personal experience of John Wesley when faith came. And there must be a time in your experience too when faith comes. It's not just a question of you forcing yourself to believe it and giving nodding assent to all the truths.

But faith comes and it becomes a discovery as it was for Wesley. And he says, I felt I did believe. Even I. You know that little hymn we sing, I do believe. I will believe. I love the order of it. It's almost as though I do believe comes as a surprising discovery.

I do. I do. And I will. God has given me something. I do and I'm going to use it. That's the connection between the gift of God and our personal responsibility in exercising faith. God gives it and you must use it.

God does something that you can say, I do. And then you must say, I will. That's the pattern of it. Well, Paul says here, before faith came, he says, we were under the law. We were under these child conductors who hedged us in and hemmed us about and only allowed us to go in one direction.

Sonship, Inheritance, and Faith in Galatians

But then he says in verse 26, but you are all, and this is a little tragedy here in the AV because in Tyndale's version it says, you are sons. It's not talking about children. That's actually quite a different Bible picture.

He's talking about sons. You, he says to these Gentiles, who have never had a Jewish childhood under the law, who have never been hemmed in by this custodian, he says, you are sons. And then he begins to open this thing out and he says outrageous things.

Paul says quite a few outrageous things from a Jewish background in Galatians. One of the things that he says is this, is that the entire Jewish experience, the whole Old Covenant from Sinai up to the death of Christ upon the cross was a period of childhood.

Great men, but a period of childhood. It was a time when they were under laws and rules and regulations. But then he says this, let me read you going on into chapter 4. He says here, I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, differs nothing from a servant, though he be Lord of all.

He's going to make a point now that Jewish people in a sense, the people from the Old Covenant, were children. And they needed to come to a point of maturity to enter into their full inheritance. When he speaks about the Gentiles, he won't call them children, he'll call them slaves.

But he says they too come to this same sonship. So from childhood they come to sonship and from slavery they come to sonship. And the whole point that Paul wants to make in the letter to the Galatians is that baby Christians do not need to go through a period under law.