The Gospel & Adoption

Russell D. Moore, Andrew T. Walker

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781433690327
• eBook ISBN: 9781433646546
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Every Christian isn't called to adopt, but everyone is called to care for orphans. The evangelical adoption movement is but one strand in a long cord of Christian care for orphans. While adoption trends have fluctuated over time in different contexts, the Bible has not changed its position. The gospel is decidedly pro-adoption and on the side of the orphan. Yet many obstacles stand in the way of the Christian's mission to provide care to the least of these. So, what now? Editors Russell Moore and Andrew T. Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) assemble leading voices to frame the issues with a gospel-centered perspective. The Gospel for Life series gives every believer a biblically-saturated understanding of the most urgent issues facing our culture today, because the gospel is for all of life.

Chapter

What Are We For?

David Prince

“The first time we visited the church, the most striking thing was the congregational diversity and that some of the families looked like a mini-United Nations. We thought, I have never seen this before, and it is awesome. We knew we had to come back to see what was producing this.” Those are words of a family who had been visiting our church and decided to pursue church membership.

Our church has a strong emphasis on reflecting the gospel through an adoption culture where the entire church is involved in the rescue and care of orphans. The result has been the adoption of children from all over the world and many families in our church who are gloriously diverse.

Our adoption culture strengthens our church in many ways, but it most profoundly transforms how people think about theology, culture, and missions. An adoption culture provides a congregation with a beautiful and visible reflection of the gospel and ought to be understood as the natural consequence of a Christian worldview. Corporate worship in such a context provides a glorious theater displaying the power of the redeeming work of Christ. “Red, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in His sight,” can be visibly witnessed even as it is being sung.

Pure and undefiled religion before our God and Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world. (James 1:27)

As the father of eight children, when I speak at adoption conferences people always ask, “How many are adopted?” The answer is none. My family has not adopted, but we are passionate members of an adoption and orphan care movement and culture. J. I. Packer wrote correctly and succinctly about adoption saying, “the entire Christian life has to be understood in terms of [adoption].”1

Adoption in the Bible is not simply a matter of a few proof texts; it is woven into the fabric of the biblical witness. Paul clarifies that we are not simply to give mental assent to the gospel, but rather we are to conduct our lives “in step with the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14 esv). The practical outworking of physical adoption is inherent to Christianity. It is a nonnegotiable of walking in step with the gospel, and this is true for all Christians, not just those who become adoptive parents.

Adoption Is about Compassionate Dominion, Provision, and Protection

In the beginning, God uniquely instructed man to exercise dominion. The word simply means “to rule.” God represents Himself at the beginning of the Bible as the King of the entire universe, and He declares that He created man in His own image to rule the cosmos under His authority. Man was to be His kingly representative on the earth and subdue it for His glory. The Bible paints a vivid picture of the kingly dominion of His image bearers,

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them male and female. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it [bring it into submission under My authority]. Rule [have dominion over] the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.” (Gen. 1:26–28)

This passage is a picture of man and woman’s absolute dominion over creation under the authority of God. They were both given the responsibility to rule the world under the authority of God, but Genesis 2 clarifies that man was given the unique responsibility to lead in the exercise of dominion. Genesis 2:18 explains that woman is to be man’s “helper” in fulfilling the dominion mandate. The dominion mandate includes man’s responsibility to be a provider through work (Gen. 2:8–15). Man was to make the earth produce so he could provide for other image bearers. It was—it is—a responsibility of protection and leadership.

The Scripture teaches us that woman was created to be man’s helper in this dominion responsibility. The man was charged to work the earth, and the woman was charged to be his helpmate. This is a picture of the spheres of responsibility. Man was called to lead in this effort, to be provider and protector. To those under his care, man helps provide a sense of identity and an inheritance. The command to exercise dominion compels man to say, “You are who I am committed to protect. You are the one for whom I will work and sacrifice. I will help you have a sense of identity under God. I will give you an inheritance because you are those whom God has given me.”

The Fall and Fatherlessness

Immediately, however, we find Adam shirking his responsibility and leading his wife in rebellion. It is easy to miss; we often say, “What do you mean Adam is leading his wife in rebellion? The Bible says she is the one there with the serpent in the garden. He talks to her, and she eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, then she offers it to her husband. What do you mean he leads her into rebellion?” But, who was given the responsibility to lead and protect? Who was given the responsibility to lead in the dominion mandate? If there was to be a snake in the garden, it should have been on the ground with his head crushed, and there should have been a man with a bloody boot reassuring his wife, “I will take care of you.” Yet, this isn’t the case; the scene goes from dominion to rebellion and what we call the fall into sin.

The Fall

In the Fall, everything is twisted and contorted. Genesis 3 explains that Eve listens to the voice of the serpent while Adam, in his passivity, decides to follow rather than lead his wife. We find them listening to the voice of the Evil One over the voice of the King of the universe. The King says, “I will provide for you. You are My image bearers. Do you know what I’ll provide for you? An inheritance of the whole universe; it is yours, rule it under My authority.”

What happens? Genesis 3:6, “Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” They were essentially asserting, “I will establish my own identity. I will define what is good and live my life in light of what I define as good. The inheritance that I provide will be greater than what You provide. Thanks, God, but no thanks.”

For the man’s failed leadership in exercising dominion, God declares,

And He said to Adam, “Because you listened to your wife’s voice and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’: The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow.” (Gen. 3:17–19)

Understand what is happening. The whole cosmos was to be subdued under the authority of God; man’s responsibility was to lead and create an entire civilization that sought its identity in God and received the inheritance God would provide. But, now even the ground is raging against the dominion of man; even the ground is thwarting man’s ability to provide for himself and others. The whole world was thrown into chaos. Now, as a further consequence, there is the desire of a wife to rule over her husband and the desire of man to be oppressive rather than lead and care for his wife. All of these things are thrown into churning and rebellion. In this rebellion against God, there is the loss of both identity and inheritance.

Man is created in the image of God, but now the image is marred. The man and the woman are no longer recognized as God’s own people. They have gone their own way and no longer have the blessing of the inheritance of an eternal kingdom. Having defiantly said, “I will produce my own kingdom,” they experienced the loss of inheritance, but they also suffer the loss of identity. There is now sin, rebellion, murder, and deceit in the world. Identity no longer is found in God but in self-referential rebellion, which the Bible goes on to picture as slavery and bondage.

Fatherlessness

In other words, the fall into sin resulted in fatherlessness, because identity and inheritance is what a father is to provide. That is why the Bible keeps talking again and again about the horror of fatherlessness. There are constant biblical admonitions in this fallen world to care for the fatherless, to nurture the fatherless, and not to forsake the fatherless. It simply does not talk about the motherless in the same way. Why? Because it is easier to be motherless? No! It is awful, painful, and tragic; but in the biblical world, identity and inheritance came primarily from the father. To be motherless was to be pitied and to know the deepest pain, anguish, and agony, but it was not to be completely stripped of your ability to take care of yourself and to have future inheritance obliterated.

The father gave identity to the family, and as its leader he protected, provided, and said, “I will give my children an inheritance. It is yours because you are my children.” To be fatherless is to have all the security for the future stripped away. The Bible says that man, in his rebellion, ended up no longer able to look to God and say, “Father.” He had no identity; he had no inheritance—and this was not just true for Adam and Eve. It is true for every one of us if left to ourselves.

In other words—as a result of the Fall, the entire world became a spiritual orphanage, all of humanity in rebellion against God. We grope around in this world with the determination, “I will provide it for myself. I will go my own way. I will make a name for myself,” and we find fallen man building towers to the heavens in order to build a name for himself, but it is an identity and an inheritance that would one day be swept away. But, God the Father would not leave man fatherless. God would graciously provide the answer to a world without an identity or inheritance.

We Are for Recovering a New Identity in Christ

Immediately after the fall into sin, there was a promise ultimately of adoption. Genesis 3:15 declares, “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.” It was foretold that there would be mighty blows, but only one blow would be fatal. This is the promise of the coming seed born of woman. The Bible keeps tracing the line that leads to that promised Son who would fulfill the gospel promise.

All the way through redemptive history, God is at work preserving that line. He kept raising up deliverers and saviors, all of whom pointed ahead to the one who was to come. Men like Abraham, Moses, and David were deliverers who have all kinds of flaws and failings, but they kept crushing the head of what represented the enemy of God. They remind us that there was another one coming who would crush the head of the serpent, fully and finally.

The Bible follows this line all the way to the Rescuer, the Deliverer, the Man, Christ Jesus. The Bible is very specific to point out that He is the Son of God who would come and reign and rule with a rod of iron, establishing dominion (Ps. 2:7–9). Hebrews 1:5 declares, about the one who was promised to come, “You are My Son.” Why does it say that? Why is the Bible so clear that He is the promised Son? Because as the Son, He bore the identity of the Father. In fact, the Bible goes on to say, He was “the exact expression of His nature” (Heb. 1:3). He was the image bearer. You want to see the Father? Look at the Son. “The one who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). He is the image bearer. The identity of the Father was clearly seen in the person of the Son, and it was the Son who would receive the inheritance of the Father.

How, in a fallen world of rebellion where identity and inheritance have been lost by sinners, can they ever be reclaimed? God sent His Son to establish perfect dominion. His Son always perfectly obeyed. His Son rec...

Table of contents

• Series Preface
• Chapter 1: What Are We For? (David Prince)
• Chapter 2: What Does the Gospel Say? (Russell Moore)
• Chapter 3: How Should the Christian Live? (Randy Stinson)
• Chapter 4: How Should the Church Engage? (Jedd Medefind)
• Chapter 5: What Does the Culture Say? (Jim Daly and Kelly Rosati)
• Additional Reading