I’m participating in Tim Challies’ Reading the Classics Together program. The book is Redemption Accomplished and Applied by John Murray, and this week’s reading is the sixth chapter of Part 2: The Order of Application.
In this week’s reading, John Murray focuses on God’s gracious act of adoption. In the application of redemption, it is by our adoption that we become sons and daughters of God.
Adoption is a distinct act, differing from both justification and regeneration, but related to them. The three acts—regeneration, justification, and adoption—always come together. No one is justified who does not become an adopted child of God, and all God’s adopted children have already been born again. Like justification, adoption is a judicial act of God. In it God takes into his family sons and daughters who are also being made like him in their nature, making the renewal of regeneration a prerequisite to adoption. Adoption, Murray says, “is the apex of grace and privilege. … It staggers imagination because of its amazing condescension and love.”
There are scriptural distinctions to be made when thinking about the fatherhood of God. First of all, within the Trinity, the Father is the father of the Son. That is a unique relationship, and no one else shares in this particular father-son relationship. There is also the universal fatherhood of God, in which God is called the father of all people because he created them and provides for them. But more frequently, when scripture speaks of God’s fatherhood in relation to men, it is speaking of the special relationship he has with his people—the fatherhood that comes by redemption and adoption. “God,” Murray reminds us, “becomes the father of his own people by the act of adoption.”
In the last half of this chapter, Murray establishes that it is specifically the first person of the Trinity, God the Father, rather than the Trinity as a whole, who becomes our father in adoption. One text he uses as proof of this is John 20:17 where Jesus says he is going to “my Father and your Father.” The same person who is the Father to the Son is also the Father of the disciples. However, that Christ does not say “our Father” instead of “my Father and your Father” reminds us that our relationship to the Father is different than his own.
How secure this makes us as God’s own children!
Could anything disclose the marvel of adoption or certify the security of its tenure and privelege more effectively than the fact that the Father himself, on account of whom are all things and through whom are all things, who made the captain of salvation perfect through sufferings, becomes by deed of grace the Father of the many sons whom he will bring to glory?