Predestined to Adoption

What I want for you dear reader is that you would be blown away by the Father’s love. I want for you to be so saturated with loving truth, so filled with the knowledge of His will, that if a friend called you at 3:00 a.m. and asked, “Who is God?”, you would instantly respond, “my Father!”

It seems to me as I listen to Christians talk and pray, scan the books we read and sing the songs we sing, that the Father is sort of the forgotten member of the Trinity. With so much recent interest in the Holy Spirit and so much proper focus on Jesus as our Lord and Savior, it almost seems the Father has slipped into the shadows. It’s time to celebrate Him by retelling what He has done for His children. In this series of articles, we are highlighting ten loving acts of the Father.

Last week, we saw that the Father has loved us from all eternity. Like the children of Israel in Egyptian slavery, even before our coming to faith in Christ, God had already, from the days of old, set His love upon us. Our second loving act is closely related – our Father predestined us to adoption. The verse reads like this: “In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:5-6).

“In love He predestined us to adoption” contains three of the greatest concepts in all Christianity. First is love. God is love and we love Him because He first loved us. His great motivation for our predestination is love, our highest good at Christ’s expense. Love for those dead in sins. Love for those who do not merit salvation but actually merit damnation. Love for the unlovely, unloving, fallen and polluted. Love for His enemies, even those walking the way of the world, under the sway of the Devil, rebellious children of wrath, whether Jew or Gentile (cf. Eph. 2:1-3).

Next is the heavy weight theological word predestination, which means to predetermine, fore-ordain or decide beforehand (from Abbot-Smith Manual Greek Lexicon of the NT).
The word is derived from pro, meaning before and horizo, meaning to mark off by boundaries, to determine. Combined then yields the meaning to mark off by boundaries beforehand, to determine before or to pre-determine. This glorious word is used six times in the New Testament:

• Once of the death of Christ by the hand of man (Acts 4:28);
• Once of the hidden wisdom of the gospel “predestined before the ages to our glory (I Cor. 2:7);
• And four times of individual sinners predestined to salvation (Romans 8:29, 30; Eph. 1:5, 11)

In one of the great mysteries of all revealed truth, God’s predestination of us to adoption doesn’t make us robots or puppets on a string. Nor does it remove responsibility to repent and believe when we hear the gospel. Nor does it mean that we as Christians need to run around wondering who might be predestined. We can’t know. The secret things belong to God.

Rather, this is a “family secret” that believers discover after their salvation as they read and study the Word of God closely. And what we discover is that this is a personal, positive, loving act of our heavenly Father that guaranteed our adoption in time as sons and daughters of God.

Before we had done anything good or bad, right or wrong, He decided for His own purposes and “according to the kind intention of His will” that He would adopt us into His family and grant us a seat at the table. Think of it! He committed to be our Father in eternity past, even before He became our Father in time.

“Predestined to adoption” then is the highest act of love with the purest motive possible because it was completely undeserved and unearned – we didn’t even exist – and because it was based on the good pleasure of His will, not on anything in us or from us (thank God!), all designed to magnify the glory of His grace.

The third great concept here is adoption. But since we are attempting to walk through these ten acts in a chronological fashion, it will have to wait.

These first two are unique in that they are both in eternity past. From here on out, the remaining eight are those done in time. I can’t wait to share them with you.

I close with the first stanza and refrain of a hymn we sing often in our church, written by Daniel Whittle. These words resonate in my heart every time we sing them.

“I know not why God’s wondrous grace to me He hath made known,
Nor why, unworthy, Christ in love redeemed me for His own.
But “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve committed unto Him against that day.”

-Pastor Chris
Kerrville Bible Church