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WHO PAYS THE LEGAL FEES WHEN GOD ADOPTS?

Do you want to adopt a kid? The first step - before painting the nursery - is to get out your VISA card. Maybe even take out a home equity loan. Adoption is an expensive proposition. Is there similarly a price God has to pay before He can rightfully take us home to live with Him?

Back in December of 2001, it was a lively “community chat” hosted by the Reader’s Digest on the Internet. Based on their article, “The 5.2 Million Dollar Man,” the question was: Should society spend that kind of money to keep a person alive. Sixty-nine-year-old Slim Watson, diagnosed with a rare disease similar to hemophilia, was running through IV bags filled with clotting factor and burning up $30,000 every four hours. Doctors finally decided he had something called “acquired factor VIII inhibitor.” Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, had successfully treated other patients for between $50,000 and $1.2 million, so they decided to proceed. They needed a medicine called HycateC, which was derived from the blood of pigs and imported from England. Cost? $1000 per vial. NovoSeven, made in Denmark, ran $6700 per vial. A nurse misplaced just one syringe of it one day, which led to a rather frantic search.

And after all of that expense and pain and paperwork, Mr. Watson died anyway. Medicare covered some, the man’s insurance covered some. The hospital took a bath to the tune of $800,000; they went ahead because they just didn’t feel they had any choice; they couldn’t simply let Slim Watson die.

Well, friend, these past two weeks we’ve been spiritually focusing more on the happy front end of life than the back. THE PERFECT ADOPTION has been our topic, and Paul writes in Ephesians 1:5:

“In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with His pleasure and will.”

But what expenses — let’s continue by asking the question again — are incurred in adopting a baby? If you’ve ever gone through it, you know there are so many hoops to jump through you can hardly get to the end of it all. There was a wrenching story on the Internet, going back to 1996 and printed in the Bangkok Post, about AIDS babies in Thailand. One of our staff members has actually been right to Agape Home for Babies in Chiang Mai; he held some of the little HIV-infected infants in his arms . . . and it tore him up. “I wanted to fill out the paperwork and bring one home right that minute,” he admitted later. A Canadian lady named Avis Rideout is the director and she describes the difficulty in finding families to adopt children who are sure to be gone in a few years, and who will need a complicated regimen of medications before that slow, sad drive to the cemetery. A mother of four, Avis has already adopted an infected three-year-old girl named Nikki, and was thinking — at the time the article was written — of adopting a seven-month-old boy too.

“I am not thinking ahead,” she said to reporter Jennifer Sharples, “to when they get seriously sick. I only see all the pleasure they bring us now and want to make them as happy as possible.”

Well, it makes for tough reading, and you can just envision the many hurdles that are in the way if a family from the United States or Canada wanted to adopt such a baby. There would be legal fees to pay. Citizenship paperwork to be filled out. Medical expenses. Proof of gainful employment. And of course, you are adopting someone who carries a fatal disease within their fragile bodies. You can’t just pick out a favorite kid and fly out of Don Muang Airport and then live happily ever after.

I bring this up for a good reason. Is there likewise a barrier, a roadblock, in the way when a loving Father up in heaven looks down and wants to adopt you or me? Can He just swoop up anyone with a cute face or a good Sunday school attendance record and say, “I want that kid. He’s now Mine”?

For the third week in a row now, let me very gratefully recommend to you this tremendous Christian book entitled Knowing God, by Dr. James Packer, Professor of Theology at Regent College in Vancouver. After describing some of the incredible benefits of being adopted into God’s family, he then moves into a second area of thought, and makes a very bold suggestion.

“Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words,” he writes, “my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.”

Notice: not just adoption, but “adoption through propitiation.” Well, that takes us quickly to our dictionaries or, in the case of Dr. Packer’s book, to the previous chapter where he writes at length about what exactly “propitiation” means. Are you familiar with the expression? If you’re not careful, it immediately brings to mind the idea that God is angry with us because we’re sinners, but somehow, the death of Jesus on the cross cooled Him off and melted His anger, and so now He is willing to love us. And adopt us. Hence the expression: adoption through propitiation.

Now, friend, this is a biblical truth we have to treat with very humble caution. We’re going to spend a few minutes right now fleshing out this teaching, and many thanks again to Dr. Packer, whose material we will cite. But I’m going to agree with him 100% in saying this: The wrath of God — properly understood — is indeed a barrier to our being adopted. Just as a benevolent couple flying over to Bangkok might find all sorts of health officials and government busybodies and immigration authorities waiting at the door to the orphanage, saying, “Jodt tee nee, krahp,” which means, “Hold it right there, Mister,” so the fact that we are lost sinners, that we have a death sentence hanging over us is a barrier to our being adopted by God. As things stand, at the tree where Adam and Eve plunged the world into sin, we are simply not eligible for adoption. Because of the wrath of God.

“Since we have now been justified by [Jesus’] blood,” Paul writes in Romans 5, “how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through Him!”

But what is this “wrath of God” which looms as a barrier to our being adopted? Does God have a short fuse which prevents Him from loving and forgiving Adam and Eve and their wayward descendants?

“It is NOT the capricious, arbitrary, bad-tempered and conceited anger which pagans attribute to their gods,” Packer observes. “It is not the sinful, resentful, malicious, infantile anger which we find among humans.” (Don’t we all know that kind?) “It is a function of that holiness which is expressed in the demands of God’s moral law.” He then quotes from I Peter 1:16: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

The reality of this universe, according to the Bible, is that God is holy and His kingdom is equally holy. And He simply cannot be a righteous Judge and adopt willfully unholy children. That would be an immoral act by a moral God. It can’t happen. What’s more, it would forever leave the universe lurching in doubt about whether or not sin is truly deadly. Lucifer says no, God says yes. But if God perpetuates the question by blindly adopting us and ignoring the growing AIDS of sin, His kingdom will collapse from within. That’s really what His “wrath” is all about. He loves us; He wants to save or adopt us, but to do so will jeopardize the entire project.

So the reality is that God solves this agonizing dilemma Himself.

“Propitiation is the work of God Himself,” writes Packer. “In paganism, man propitiates his gods, and religion becomes a form of commercialism and, indeed, of bribery. In Christianity, however, God propitiates His wrath by His own action.”

He sent forth His own Son, write both Paul and John. The gift of His own Son, the death of His own Son on the Cross, sweeps away all of the roadblocks. The wages of sin is death. All right — Jesus paid it. Sin is a deadly cancer. All right — Jesus demonstrated that, and so, unwittingly, did Lucifer, when he killed the holy Son of God.

Here’s a bit more from Dr. Packer’s comments on the matter:

“The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of His unkind Father by offering Himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message — it is a sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian, idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son and so in reality falls back into polytheism, asking us to believe in two different gods. But the Bible rules this out absolutely by insisting that it was God Himself who took the initiative in quenching His own wrath against those whom, despite their ill-desert, He loved and had chosen to save.”

And nothing is clearer in the Bible than the fact that this propitiation happened because of Calvary, which, again, was God’s own idea and God’s own agonizingly personal gift. Galatians 4:5 tells us:

“God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.”

Notice again that propitiation and Calvary immediately take us to adoption. Because of propitiation, we can become not just sons, and daughters, but sons and daughters WITH FULL RIGHTS.

So, yes, there are some up-front fees when you adopt. Someone once said, and oh how true:

“Calvary constitutes the most expensive price ever paid for anything.”