Our Spiritual Adoption was Not God’s ‘Plan B’
UPDATE: Never before has one of my blog posts generated so many angry comments, which I have chosen not to publish. So, please let me clarify my purpose in passing on this quotation. The point of this quote from J. Stephen Yuille is to show that man commonly views earthly adoption as an afterthought. However, that is not true in spiritual adoption.
Having never experienced earthly adoption for myself, that is, I was raised by my natural parents, I do not know personally the sense of abandonment and rejection that some who were given up for adoption feel. My prayer for those who live with this reality is that you may find the immeasurable love and acceptance of God in Jesus Christ and be adopted by Him.
What I chiefly desired to accomplish in this post was to encourage Christians concerning their spiritual adoption by the heavenly Father. When God redeems us from the slave-market of sin and the family of the devil it is the fulfillment of something that He planned long ago. In other words, God’s spiritual adoption of us as His children, through faith alone in Jesus Christ, was not Plan B because Plan A failed. We were not an afterthought to Him! Therefore, in commenting on Ephesians 1:5, Yuille writes,
Regrettably, many people tend to view the adoption of a child as an afterthought: “Oh, you couldn’t have your own children, so you decided to settle for adoption.” Having adopted, I would never describe it as ‘settling.’ I would never refer to it as an ‘afterthought.’ In terms of God’s adoption of us, he definitely wasn’t settling. God didn’t create the world in the hope that he would have natural children—only to discover that he had a bunch of little rebels on his hands. He didn’t throw his hands into the hair (anthropomorphism intended), crying, “Oh no, what will I do now? What are my options? I suppose I could always adopt!” No. God ‘predestined’ us for adoption. He did so before the foundation of the world. That necessarily means his adoption of us isn’t plan B, but plan A. Moreover, it means that his adoption of us is the revelation of his eternal will.
