SPIRIT OF ADOPTION

In our reading today, the idea of obligation is linked to that of liberty. Once, we were slaves to the flesh, but now that Christ’s Spirit indwells us we are no longer debtors to the flesh but to the Spirit, vv. 12-13. Our situation has been transformed from bondage to sonship and liberty; ‘as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God’. The state of anxiety under sin gives way to the enjoyment of love, confidence, and obedience that is the happy portion of members of the divine family.

The Spirit is here characterized as the ‘Spirit of adoption’ or ‘sonship’. The Spirit awakens and confirms the experience of sonship within us, v. 16. The emphasis is on the dignity of the relationship of sonship. ‘In the first century AD an adopted son was a son deliberately chosen by the adoptive father to perpetuate his name and inherit his estate; he was no whit inferior in status to a son born in the ordinary course of nature, and might well enjoy the father’s affection more fully and reproduce the father’s character more worthily’, F. F. Bruce.

It is by that same Spirit of sonship that we are moved to cry ‘Abba Father’. ‘Abba’ was not used by the Jews to address God, but was used poignantly by our Lord in Gethsemane, Mark 14. 36. Its use by our Lord ‘pointed to a unique relationship to God, and holy intimacy which is now shared with His people’, C. E. B. Cranfield. What a privilege to have access by one Spirit to the Father, Eph. 2. 18! As H. C. G. Moule put it, ‘The knowledge of the Father as our Father because the Father of the Son is among the greatest treasures of grace’.

In Roman law, a witness was necessary to the fact of adoption. The Spirit of sonship bears testimony with our own spirit to the glorious fact of our sonship. What filial loyalty, obedience, confidence, holy intimacy and fellowship should result!

Moreover our present experience of sonship is bright with future promise. As sons we are also heirs of God, v. 17, and enjoy the prospect of the transformation of our bodies from the present conditions of humiliation into the glorious liberty of the children of God, v. 23. Already the Spirit of sonship is our Father’s assurance to us of coming glory.