Stuart was a mouse. He was also an orphan. His
distinguished place in the orphanage left him passed over for adoption so many
times that he wondered if anyone would ever want him. When the Littles came
looking for a child to adopt, they had not expected to adopt a mouse, so it
took some consideration before they decided that they would indeed take on this
interesting relationship. According to the children’s story, it was a decision
they never regretted.
Monte Vigh was a sinner. His sin had so separated him from
his heavenly Father that he was a sinful orphan living in a world of sinful
orphans. One day he heard that there was a Father in heaven who loved him, and
a Savior who came into the world to redeem him. He began to understand this
good news that God wanted to save him out of his sin, and into the experience
of adoption as a son of God. It sounded both weird and wonderful at the same
time.
However, unlike Stuart and the Littles, the adoption of Monte
Vigh was not something God considered after he somehow met me at some strange
and wonderful moment in time. God never had the experience of seeing me for the
first time, gathering information about my sinful condition, feeling pity and
mercy for what I was going through, and deciding that he could handle having me
as one of this children after all. No, it was much different from that.
The fact is that my adoption as a son of God was settled in
the heart and mind of God before the beginning of time. However it was for the
divine mind to consider thoughts that were not bound to space, time, and
matter, and come to a decision to make man, and to secure someone like me as
his son, it was all thought-through and settled before God began the grand work
of creation.
Today I was once again led into the wonderful experience of
meditating on this revelation of God, “In
love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ”.[1] Giving time to ponder these words from the mouth
of God moved me with the wonder of realizing that, before the foundation of the
world, in whatever way God’s thoughts in eternity were measured before there
was time, God knew that the only way he could have sons was through adoption.
When I replay the history of the world, beginning with the
creation of all things by the Word of God,[2] and consider our Lord Jesus bending down to gather
together dust to form into a human body,[3] and I realize that, the whole time he was forming
this dirt into the most magnificent of his creations, he knew that he would be
bound to die for this man’s sins, I am reduced to childlike wonder that knows
it is treading barefooted on holy ground.
The wonder that fills my heart is the realization that God
knew, before time began, that he could only have sons if he adopted them. Even
though “The earth is
the LORD's
and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1), he would not have sons through the rights of
ownership. All of us, like sheep, would go astray,[4]
and give ourselves over to “the prince of
the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of
disobedience,”[5]and
God would have to pay for that which belonged to him.
However,
when my childlike heart discovers that God had made a decision before the
beginning of time that he would adopt me as a son, I am overwhelmed with the
love that this expresses. God never expected to have me as a son through my
obedience to his perfect will. He never expected that I would come to him
through the perfect keeping of the Ten Commandments. He never expected that I
would maintain some kind of childhood innocence all the way through
adolescence, teen development, young adulthood, and into old age.
When
God thought about the creature he would make as the only one that was in his
own image and likeness, and he decided to pattern this final creature after the
likeness of his only Son, and he made a decision about the destiny of these
creatures he had chosen, his decision encompassed all that Satan and sin would
do to the human race, and so he settled on adoption as the only way he would
have the sons he chose. And, have them he would!
The
bottom line is that, when God began creating, he already knew that the final
creature, the final act of creation, would not remain in love relationship with
him. He already knew that this creature would violate his holiness more
profoundly than even Lucifer, for this creature was the only one made in God’s
own image and likeness. He knew that he would lose every one of these creatures
he had made to reproduce after the man-kind.
And
so, because “he chose us in him before
the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him,”[6]and
because the red dragon would lure the very first man into sin and make us
sinners who were no longer holy, who could now be blamed with sin, God
compensated for the power of sin, death, hell, and the grave, and predestined
that he would have sons through adoption.
When
our hearts give all our attention to this thought that, before even the first
molecule of matter came to exist in the first dimensions of space in that first
moment of time, God had already determined that the creature he had chosen to
be holy and blameless in his sight would only become so if he adopted them as
his sons, then our wonder grows even more wonderfully as we realize that God
created man knowing the cost of salvation.
It
was before the beginning of time that God knew what is now settled in history,
that “In him we have redemption through
his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches
of his grace.”[7]
When God chose that he would have this creature that was holy and blameless
before him, and he knew that creation alone would not accomplish this because
of our fall into sin, and so he decided that he would adopt his chosen ones as
sons, he already knew that the means of getting us out of sin and into sonship
would be the work of redemption.
God
knew that this redemption would be through the blood of his Son. He knew that
his Son would need to become human flesh in order to have blood to shed. He knew
that his Son, the glorious blueprint for the highest of God’s creation, would
be despised and rejected of the very men that the Son of God had created.[8] He
would be so mistreated by men that people would think he was under the judgment
of God.[9]
Somehow,
this calls my heart to stand in wonder of the fact that, everything we see of
the grand plan of redemption, from God promising Adam and Eve that the
offspring of the woman would crush the red dragon under foot,[10]
through the law given to Moses to provide a guardian to lead us to Christ,[11]
through the Son of God, the Creator of the world, entering into the world he
had made through the dusty body of his greatest creature, and what Jesus then
did to suffer and die for our sins, was all the work of redemption in Jesus’
blood that was absolutely required in order for God to adopt as sons those he
had chosen to be holy and blameless in his sight.
And,
God thought this through, and his Son lovingly gave his Amen to the divine plan
of the Father, before they took their first step in creating space, time, and
matter.
As
my elder brother, Martin Lloyd Jones, once said, “Out of wonder worship is born,”
so God has blessed this morning with the gift of feeling such wonder-filled
thoughts, along with the invitation to a day filled with the joy of worship.
© 2014 Monte Vigh ~
Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise
noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible,
English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway
Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)
[1]
Ephesians 1:4,5
[2]
Genesis 1 (NOTE: God’s work of creation is absolutely NOT falsified by the
evolutionary religion!)
[3]
Genesis 3 (the real, eye-witness account of the origin of the human race); John
1:1-3; Colossians 1:15-17
[4]
Isaiah 53:6
[5]
Genesis 3; Ephesians 2:2
[6]
Ephesians 1:4
[7]
Ephesians 1:7
[8]
Isaiah 53:3
[9]
Isaiah 53:4
[10]
Genesis 3:15
[11]
Exodus 20; Galatians 3:24
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