The Spirit Of AdoptionSample

It will help you, I think, to understand the nature of adoption because you're probably saying to yourself, “Well, adoption, you know, is kind of a second-class deal.” You know, we read in the newspapers about the people who adopt kids and then put them on a plane and ship them back to the country from where they were adopted because they don't want them.

Or you may have read in the Indian news media recently of a very prominent businessman who publicly denounced his adopted son because of various reasons which he cited. And to add to all this confusion and fear, we hear people say this all the time: “You never know what you're going to get, you know, you can go through the legal deal and you can adopt a child but you can't change a child's heart.  So you get what you get. And it may not work out very well and adopted children may turn out to be a disaster and a terror in the home, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, because you can't really control what they are in the inside. You can do all the legal work on the outside.”

You need to understand that the way the Bible talks about adoption is so complete and so comprehensive that it shuts out all those criticisms, and I'll explain that to you. In the 1st century, if you were adopted, that didn't make you a second-class child, that made you a first-class child. And this is basic, okay? In all honesty, when you have babies in your family, you get what you get. Right? You might look at one kid and say, “Wow, we could use a little more brain power there. We could use a little less rebellion there. We could use a little patience there. But we got what we got.” And I talk to enough parents to know that if they had been given a list of what they wanted, they might have been happy to put it in if they knew it would get the results they could expect. And that's why, actually, today people who go to those banks and buy sperm want sort of a genetic profile because they want to orchestrate the kind of kid they're going to have—they want to sort of manage that. But I mean reality is you get what you get. And that's okay because you understand that—you love those children.

But in the ancient world, if you adopted somebody, you were adopting a son, in most cases. It wasn't rescuing kids from the street; they didn't adopt kids off the street as a rescue operation. You adopted a son because you found somebody who exceeded in capability than the ones that you had. This is first-class stuff. An adopted son was deliberately chosen by an adopting father to perpetuate his name and inherit his estate. 

This might be how you dealt with a delinquent. You just adopted a noble young man to become your son. In no way was that adopted son inferior. On occasions it might have been a daughter, but for the most part it was a son because they were the ones to whom the estate and responsibility passed.  This would be typical. You chose this son because of his superior ability to represent the family, to manage the family's future, and to inherit the family's estate. 

This adopted son may well have been the apple of his father's eye, the joy of his father's heart. He may have received the best of his father's affection and education more so than a born son and may have even demonstrated his father's virtue and his father's training more perfectly than the others. 

The whole point of the picture is to say this: You've been adopted. That's a divine choice. Not because before you were adopted you were so noble that God couldn't continue to keep His kingdom in motion without you. By sovereign, divine choice, God preferred you and He preferred me. Free, voluntary election. It's an amazing thing.

Remember: YOU WERE ADOPTED BY DIVINE CHOICE!