Of the many metaphors in Scripture used to describe the relationship between God and his people, arguably one of the most intimate and comforting of those doctrines is that of adoption. Though the flower of adoption is most beautifully expressed in the New Testament, the promising seed of the doctrine is surely found in the soil of the Old Testament.
In the book of Exodus, the Lord refers to the nation of Israel as “his people.” Pharoah’s harsh subjugation of the Israelites is not simply wrong as a matter of principle to the Lord, it is something he also addresses personally. Israel is like a child to him—a frail yet beloved infant whom God chose, adopted, and cared for. So affectionate is God toward his people that he refers to Israel not simply as his “people” but also as his “son.” Thus, he says in Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I have called my son.” Matthew 2:15 takes up this language from Hosea 1 to show that while Israel was God’s adopted child, Jesus is God’s Son incarnate, begotten but not made. Just asIsrael went down into Egypt and was brought up by the hand of God, so the Son of God went down into Egypt and was brought up as well. These things preview Jesus Christ’s dying and rising again. His descent into death and being held by death for a time was his entering the spiritual reality to which Egypt pointed. But his triumphant resurrection was an even greater Exodus out of this world into heaven itself.
This beautiful language blossoms in the New Testament when not only is the church referred to as the family of God (i.e., his “bride” in Eph. 5), but even his adopted sons and daughters (John 1:12). As the Son of God has gone before us and on behalf of us, he has now been granted a beautiful, eternal inheritance which includes his family—the church. This is why so many New Testament books refer to the people of God as the family of God. Not only is the church collectively spoken of this way; we too, as individuals, are able to cry out to our God in heaven not simply as our God but even as our “Father” (Rom. 8:15). It was “In love [that] he predestined us for adoption” (Eph. 1:5) so that not only might we become part of his inheritance; being united to him by the work of the Holy Spirit, we now share in that eternal inheritance of the glorified Son as Spirit-filled sons and daughters of God in the gospel (Eph. 1:11). The Spirit of God not only enables us to call out to God as our Father, he also assures us that we belong to God, and that we can never lose our eternal inheritance (Eph. 1:14). Such is the glorious status of the adopted sons and daughters of God.
One of the most beautiful summaries of our blessed adoption is found in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 12 Of Adoption:
All those that are justified, God vouchsafeth, in and for his only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption, by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God, have his name put upon them, receive the Spirit of adoption, have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry, Abba, Father, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by him, as by a father: yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption; and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation.
“Vouchsafeth” is an older term meaning, “to give or grant in a gracious manner.” God has graciously taken us into his family in which we find many blessed rights and privileges, as well as responsibilities. Being adopted means we have, by his grace, both a people and a place to which we belong. One cannot help but love the tender way in which God himself is described as a Father who pities, protects, and provides for his children. This is what a good father does, but our Father in heaven is not just good, he is perfect, and he does all things perfectly well, both for his glory and even for our good. A loving father never un-adopts or “casts off” his children, and neither will our Father in heaven do so to us. We are his, and his promises are ours, and there is nothing sin, sickness, suffering—even Satan—can do to sever our adopted status in the family of God. We did not obtain our adoption by our own merit; nor shall we be able to maintain it by our own merit. It is the work of God in our hearts, uniting us to Christ and maintaining and strengthening that union more and more by the work of God’s Spirit, and through outward and ordinary means of grace (the preaching of God’s word, the sacraments, and prayer).
The doctrine of adoption is precious to our family. Seven years into marriage my wife and I were without children, but not for a lack of desire. We learned after many humbling tests and expensive medical procedures that we would never be able to have children biologically. In God’s providence, when my wife was a child, she survived a ruptured appendix that should have killed her. But instead of ending her life, this event would forever shape her future. Her body dealt with the infection by scarring over parts of her internal organs, making it impossible for her to conceive.
Sometimes God’s “yes” is actually “no.”
I will never forget the day we had our last surgical procedure—our last attempt at fixing what was broken within us. But sometimes God’s “yes” is actually “no.” The doctors rolled her back to her room where I was waiting. He explained very gently that the answer was clear: we were not going to bear children through her womb. While she slept, God and I had something of a wrestling match in that hospital room. All she ever wanted was to be a pastor’s wife—and a mom. I could not understand why God would take something so right from someone who seemed like she would be so good at it. The strange confluence of tears and anger were hard to manage. When she woke up, the answer she was waiting for was rolling down my cheeks. So, we sat there together, silently surrendering our hopes and dreams. As Samuel Rutherford would sometimes say, we were learning to “kiss a striking Lord.”
Sometimes the best way to deal with grief is not to bury it down but to deal with it. Our way of dealing with it may seem a little strange, but I will share it with you. Sometime before this last surgery I had a table made for my wife by an Amish family in Pennsylvania. It had eight chairs. Two for us, and six for the kids we had planned on having. In addition to having six chairs, we had already picked out six names for those six children we were going to have. I have pastored for twenty-three years now and have sadly had to walk beside many people who have lost loved ones, even children. For my wife and me, our way of processing our grief was to put all the names we had picked out on pieces of paper and set them around the table. In our own way, we both greeted and said goodbye to those children that day. In many ways, it was like all our children died at once.
During this painful story, it would be honest to say that the blow made us somewhat numb for a while. Not angry, not cynical, certainly not mad at one another; just numb. But numbness wears off, and hope springs again. Some months later, we began the prospect of adopting. It was not our plan A, but God had a plan, and it was even more beautiful than ours.
On a pastoral visit one day, I passed a crisis pregnancy center that advertised adoption services. It took more courage than I can describe to turn around and go into that building. But I did, and there I met some of the most beautiful people I would ever get to know. After some months of classes and background checks, we were approved to adopt—and we waited. Then one day a phone call brought us home from vacation in a flash. A little girl had been born, and we had been picked. On the one-hour drive to go meet her, my wife may have gone through all nine months of pregnancy at once emotionally! We even pulled over and had a great cry together, prayed together, and then pulled into the agency where we would meet our first child—a beautiful little girl—for the first time. It would be hard to overstate how magical that moment was when she was placed in our arms. All those years of wanting to have children (but not), all those humbling tests and expensive procedures, even all those tears ... were swept away into soaring joy. The only thing more beautiful to me than our daughter’s eyes that day was my wife’s eyes.
If the hope we lost the year before felt like death, the joy we were now experiencing was like life from the dead. Her story and ours were ones of brokenness. Yet God took two broken stories and fused them into one beautiful whole. She needed us, and we needed her. Now, she is college bound, a beautiful young lady with a close walk with God and a very promising future—and a big heart for the broken.
Fourteen months later, God would once more add to our family. The day before I preached my goodbye sermon to a church I had planted and pastored, God gave us our first son. His story was complicated and difficult, as was our life at that moment. We were in the midst of a fragile transition, but so was he. He was born with a disability that God granted him—a dynamic that would forever shape his and our lives together. But as time would tell, he was made for us, and we were made for him. He needed a wonderfully patient, perceptive mom who could figure him out, and he needed a dad who was big, strong, and somewhat stubborn. The early years dealing with neurological divergence were not easy, but he has grown into a strong, capable, handsome young man with a bright future (and he loves the fact that he is now bigger than his dad).
Sometimes hard providences seem to roll over us like waves. But so also do God’s kind and gentle providences. Our third son was born badly addicted to heroin, cocaine, and nicotine. That morning, my wife had prayed that God would “give us our William.” We fell in love with that name while reading Ranger’s Apprentice to our older kids (now nine and eleven). The main character in the book is an adopted boy named Will. So, we named our son Will. He goes by William, and he is now seven years old, wonderfully healthy, strong, and almost alarmingly handsome.
Though our quiver was getting full (and we were getting older!), God was not done. We felt we had room in our hearts and lives for one more child, and we prayed regularly for the child to come. Then, one day, while I was doing a funeral for an older woman at church, my wife showed up with her hands shaking like a leaf. My mom lives with us—and I assumed the worst—that something had happened to her. My wife’s shaking hand held a piece of paper in it with four names, two of them girl names. She looked at me and said, “We need to pick one.” Two hours away, a little girl had been born to a mom brave enough to carry her to term, but too weak to care for her daughter. She gave an adoption agency parental rights, and they picked us. We now had four kids: Kirra, Carl, Liam and Liarra.
One of the neat things about adoption is what we call “finalization.” This is the day children become legally yours. Having stood before four different lawyers for each of our children, I have been intrigued by the declaration that “Your child is now entitled to receive from you as though he or she was naturally born to you.” But also (and just as importantly), “You are now also entitled to receive from your child as though she or he were naturally born to you.” Adoption is a two-way street: parents receive from their children, and children receive from their parents. Adopted children, once legally finalized, are no less children in the family than children that are naturally born. They are really and truly part of the family. It is a wonderful privilege for them, and a wonderful privilege for us.
My wife often says that her body needed to be broken so that we could be the family we are…broken pieces together made into a complete picture of love by God. Christ’s body was broken so that we as broken pieces could together be made into the beautiful family of God.
One of the great extensions of being adopted into a Christian family is the blessing of becoming a part of a church family. From the vows taken at a child’s baptism, to conversations at church and in living rooms, adopted children are just as much a part of the church family as any other children. And God uses them to bless our churches, just as he uses our churches to bless our children. I love pastorally reminding the church at a baptism that the children around the room are, in a sense, ‘all of our children.’ We may only drive four kids to church, but there is a room full of kids that very much love and need their extended family. From Sunday School teachers, to pastors and elders, to faithful prayer warriors who quietly lift them up—a church family is a blessed gift to our covenant kids, no matter how they came into the covenant.
Adoption is not only important in the Bible, in the family, and in the church; it also has an important place in church history. In his book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark makes the interesting suggestion that one of the reasons that Christianity spread so quickly and broadly was that when the Romans went through cities murdering, destroying, and pillaging (all in the name of Pax Romana—the “Peace of Rome”), they would often not bother killing infants, but would abandon them on the ‘trash heaps.’ Christians, according to Stark, came in quickly behind the Roman soldiers and would rescue these abandoned children—and raise them. This, according to Stark, aided the rise and spread of Christianity. Hopeless, abandoned children were given life and families and were raised in the arms of the church. To outsiders looking in, it painted the church in bright, beautiful colors as not only having hearts of compassion, but bravely risking their own lives and comfort for the sake of those who bore the image of God. In short, adoption is beautifully evangelistic.
It is arguable that the family has never been more under attack than it is today. Family is important to us because family is important to God. He created us not simply as ‘beings’ but specifically as ‘persons.’ A being simply exists; a person functionally relates. No person was ever designed to live in pure isolation either from God or other human beings. God made us for himself, and he made us for one another. As Saint Augustine said, “You have formed us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in Thee.” I might add to this that we were meant for one another—for family. And the most beautiful family in the world is the church. We are the adopted sons and daughters of God. Jesus gave his life for us that we might find our life in him. He is our faithful elder brother. God is our adoring Father. As many have said, “God is our Father and the church is our mother.” However it is that God has brought us into the body of Christ—the family of God—let us be thankful. For if there is nothing God loves more in this world than his church, there can be no greater form of love and service to God than this: to love his family.