Sermon Tone Analysis

Adoption and God’s Glory

Sonship and God’s Glory

Last week Pastor Andy did a wonderful job of breaking down the blessings of being adopted as God’s sons and daughters.

I want to elaborate just a bit more on the concept of adoption from the perspective of the ancient Roman audience that this letter was addressed to.

In our society, blood relationships are deemed far more binding than relationships formed through the legal process of adoption.

But for the Romans, blood relationships were not as important as they are for us today.

The practice of disowning children and even abandoning unwanted babies after birth was a culturally accepted norm.

The main rationale was that the parents had no control, no way of knowing what kind of child that they were going to get.

In a time before ultrasounds and modern medical technology, everyone was in for a surprise on the day of birth.

And if you were not happy with your child because of their gender, health, physical deformity, an unsightly birthmark, you were free without fear of penalty to abandon that child.

I know that sounds incredibly cold and heartless but in a culture that deified strength, you could not risk investing your time and resources into the weak, even if it was your blood related child.

(If you have ever watched movies like 300 or Gladiator, you know what I mean.)

And although for us its counterintuitive, Roman laws protected adopted children far more than natural children because you could not disown them without a legal reason.

Again the rationale was this was the child that the parents desired because there is no random chance in adoption.

You know exactly what you are getting and so that decision has to be binding.

Obviously this has very important theological ramifications for us as believers because instead of lessening our relationship with God, it’s actually an amplification.

In the mind of Paul, as he is contextualizing the Gospel to the Roman Christians, he is giving all of us the assurance of our salvation, that God will never disown or abandon those whom He has adopted.

But there is even more significance to Paul’s use of the analogy of Roman adoption.

The most celebrated and famous case of adoption was that of Julius Caesaer adopting a relatively obscure young man by the name of Gaius Octavius, who would later become Augustus, arguably the greatest leader of the Roman empire and the ruler at the time of Jesus’ birth.

Among the politically powerful in Rome, adoption became a way of guaranteeing the smooth succession of power.

Augustus would go on to adopt Tiberius, his next successor, and this would become a general tradition.

Understanding the idea of adoption from the Roman perspective negates this sense of being inferior to a natural born child but instead highlights the honor that God wants to bestow upon us.

So when we read that we are the children of God and fellow heirs with Christ, the apostle Paul cannot contain his excitement about the glory that we will one day inherit as the adopted sons and daughters of God.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.

But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

CS Lewis

Sonship and the Renewal of Creation

In effect, what God is doing is He is restoring us to our rightful place in creation and the role of the Holy Spirit is to prepare us to take that place of honor.

If you remember from the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, humanity was given dominion over creation, to take care of it, as a wise and benevolent ruler.

Genesis 2

But once sin entered into the human heart, our right to rule over creation was lost and we now find ourselves in a constant struggle against the forces of nature, the very forces that we were meant to subdue are now ruling over us.

All of human suffering can be traced back to our sin and the loss of our dominion over creation.

The irony shouldn’t be lost on us that even when men think that they have harnessed the power of nature, that power now threatens to destroy us in the form of global warming, mass extinction, natural disasters, and nuclear war.

There is a video that I want to share that captures eloquently the current state of planet earth.

(www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrzbRZn5Ed4)

George Whitefield, the famous Puritan preacher, once asked in a sermon, "Do you know why the dogs bark at you, why the birds screech at you, and why the reptiles hiss at you?" It's because they know that your sin is the source of all of creation's problems."

I don't know if that is true or not but Whitefield's point is that all of God's creatures fulfilled their original design to glorify Him but along came man who decided that living for God's glory was simply not good enough for us and so now we are reaping the consequences of our sin.

It is utterly amazing to me that Paul wrote these things 2000 years ago when there was very little evidence of humanity’s negative impact on creation yet through the Spirit, he saw what was happening: that this beautiful world that was created for us has been subjected to futility and is under the bondage of corruption.