Adoption
“For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’”
Definition
Adoption is the distinct act of God’s free grace by which those justified through faith are taken into his family and made his sons and daughters, joint heirs with Christ. It is a legal and relational standing rather than a spiritual rebirth: regeneration is being born again into God’s family, while adoption is the standing of one received into a family he was not born into.
Confessional Definition
The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession gives adoption its own chapter, stating that “all those that are justified, God vouchsafed… 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.”1
Biblical Basis
John identifies adoption’s origin as sheer gift, not natural inheritance: to those who received him, Christ “gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13). Paul grounds it in eternity: “In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Eph. 1:4-5), accomplished “when the fullness of time had come” through the Son’s own sending, “so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4-5). The adopted cry out in the same intimacy Christ himself has with the Father: “you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Rom. 8:15), a Spirit who “bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:16-17). That inheritance is not yet complete: Paul describes believers still “groan[ing] inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23), and Hebrews grounds the Father’s present discipline of his children in the same family relation: “the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Heb. 12:6).
Historical Development
Gill treats adoption as its own blessing rather than a piece of justification: “adoption is a distinct thing from either justification or pardon. A subject may be acquitted by his sovereign from charges laid against him… yet does not become his son; if adopted, and taken into his family, it must be by a distinct and fresh act of royal favour.”2 He traces its Old Testament background to Israel’s own corporate adoption — “to them belonged… the adoption” (Rom. 9:4) — and to the ancient civil practice of adoption among the Egyptians, Hebrews, and Romans, which the New Testament draws on as an analogy for the greater spiritual reality: as one adopted in the civil sense is taken from outside a family into it, given the adopter’s name, and made an heir with no prior legal claim, so those adopted by God are “by nature, children of wrath” who are brought “from the family of the world… into the family of God,” given “a new name” (Rev. 2:17; 1 John 3:1), and made heirs of “an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and eternal” to which they had no natural right.2
Related Doctrines
References
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The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 12, “Of Adoption,” text as reproduced by The Reformed Reader. ↩
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John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VI, chap. 9, “Of Adoption.” ↩ ↩2