Our Adopted Identity

"Sometimes people will speak of children who've been adopted as prone to having an 'identity crisis' at some point in their lives. This isn't the case for every child, of course, but it does seem that many children who were adopted find themselves asking at some point, 'Who am I?' The Bible reveals, though, that this kind of crisis of identity isn't limited to children who've been adopted. All of us are looking to discover who we really are, whether we were born into loving homes or abandoned at orphanage doors, whether we were born into stable families or born, like our Lord in a stable...

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Imagine for a moment that you're adopting a child. As you meet with the social worker in the last stage of the adoption process, you're told that this twelve-year-old has been in and out of psychotherapy since he was three. He persists in burning things and attempting repeatedly to skin kittens alive. He 'acts out sexually,' the social worker says, although she doesn't really fill you in on what that means. She continues with a little family history. This boy's father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all had histories of violence, ranging from spousal abuse to serial murder. Each of them ended life the same way, death by suicide - each found hanging from a rope of blankets in his respective prison cell.

Think for a minute. Would you want this child? If you did adopt him, wouldn't you keep your eye on him as he played with your other children? Would you watch him nervously as he looks at the butcher knife on the kitchen table? Would you leave the room as he watched a movie on television with your daughter, with the lights out?

Well, he's you. And he's me. That's what the gospel is telling us. Our birth father has fangs. And left to ourselves, we'll show ourselves to be as serpentine as he is.

That's why our sin ought to disturb us. The 'works of the flesh' - jealousy, envy, wrath, lust, hatred, and on and on - ought to alarm us the way a tightness in the chest would alarm a man whose father and grandfather had dropped dead at the age of forty of heart disease. It ought to scare us like forgetting the next-door neighbor's name would scare a woman whose mother was institutionalized on her thirty-fifth birthday for dementia. It's easy to deceive ourselves though. The chest-pains? They're just indigestion. The forgetfulness? It's just because of a hectic schedule. Even this self-deceit shows us our similarity to our reptilian birth father. He, after all 'knows that his time is short' but rages away against God and his Christ anyway (Rev. 12:12).


But the New Testament addresses former Satan-imagers with good news. It's not just that we have a stay of execution, a suspension of doom. It's not simply that those who trust in Christ have found a refuge, a safe place, or a foster home. All those in Christ, Paul argues, have received sonship. We are now 'Abraham's offspring' (Gal. 3:29). Within this household - the tribal family of Abraham - all those who are in Christ have found a home through the adopting power of God."

Adopted For Life- Russell D. Moore

(Pages. 25-26, 29-30)