The Letter to the Hebrews

by T. Austin-Sparks

Chapter 1 - The Adoption as Sons

Reading: Heb. 1:1-2; John 8:36; Rom. 8:15,23,29; 9:4-5; Gal. 4:5; Eph. 1:5-6.

If I were to gather into one fragment of the Word what I feel to be the object of the Lord in our meditation, I think that such a fragment is found in 1 Chronicles 12:32: "And the children of Issachar, men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do...".

That expresses, so far as a fragment can express, what I believe to be the object which the Lord has for His people: men who have understanding, and know what Israel ought to do, so that they are able to teach others also. That is what runs through all these Scriptures and many others which we could add to them, and there is one word which embodies it, the word 'adoption'. That word is used in a phrase which is very significant and full of meaning: "The adoption as sons".

We want to be quite clear as to the New Testament meaning of that, for the New Testament meaning is quite different from our English meaning. When we speak of adoption, or adopting, we provide for the bringing into a family relationship of anyone who has not been born into that family, who is not the direct offspring of the parent. The New Testament meaning will allow of no such idea. The Greek word and the Greek background confines adoption to the family, and no one but a member of the family can be adopted, in the New Testament sense. It represents a point in the growth, the development, of a member of the family, a son, when he is given a position of full responsibility and honour. In the Greek family the son never wore the toga until he came of age, and when he came of age, being given by his father the toga, that was the symbol of his having graduated to the place of responsibility to represent his father, and that day was the day of his adoption. The Greek word itself is a compound word, the first part of which is the commonly occurring word 'huios', son. The word is used scores of times in the Old Testament. The second half of the word is thesis, which means a placing, a position. So that adoption simply means the placing or positioning of a son. There is no question of his being born into the family, but now, after having been born in the family, and having been taught and trained and developed, he is adopted, placed, positioned.

The apostle says that this word means that, in its fullest sense. It is something more than being a child, a born one, it means being a placed one in responsibility.

That is seen to be the Lord's chief desire and object concerning His family, the end which He has in view. The Lord Jesus through suffering was perfected, and then placed, and placed as the model, the image to which the Lord wills to conform every member of the household. That thought concerning the household is not an afterthought, a casual thought, it is not an incidental thought; it is an original and primary thought. "Whom He foreknew..." (that goes back to eternity past) "...then He foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son". That foreordination was before ever Adam was created.

Foreordination or predestination is never in the New Testament related to salvation, it is always related to the purpose of salvation, the object of salvation, what salvation is unto. Salvation is only the initial step, so far as the fallen creation is concerned, toward God's full purpose, and His full purpose is this: conformity to the image of His Son. The full placing will not take place in this life, it is future for all. The great crisis of the placing, as Paul puts it in Romans 8:23, is: "The redemption of our body". That corresponds with 1 Cor. 15:54: "When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption..." when the natural or the soul body shall be changed for a spiritual body. That is the crisis in adoption. Then will come to pass that which is mentioned here again in Romans 8:19: "The manifestation of the sons of God". That manifestation is the placing.

The Greek father, putting the toga upon his son in the day when he attains his majority, brings him forth and presents him, no longer merely as a child, a member of his family, but as one who has come to honour; and so he is manifested in adoption. That lies ahead for the children of God. But there is now a progressive work going on unto that, and that is the thing with which we are occupied. That is the thing with which the New Testament is occupied. When you see what a large proportion of the New Testament is occupied with the children of God, you see that it is because God is never satisfied to have people only saved, and He can never be satisfied to have people who take the attitude that it is enough for people to be saved. That is not according to God's thought. That only represents a fragment. He did give evangelists, but evangelists are not all that He gave. He gave also pastors and teachers, and the co-operation of all is essential to the whole purpose of God, and to leave out either, or to despise either, means to bring about something which does not represent the whole thought of God. It will, therefore, be one-sided, and essentially weak.

Having broadly surveyed that truth, or introduced it, we must recognise the need for sons now in progress, in development. They are necessary to the full purpose of God. They are necessary, not only that God at last may have His thought fulfilled, but they are necessary now in the work of the Lord which is going on through time. The method of God is to lead through leaders, to mature through the matured, to teach through the taught. Multitudes of His people in spiritual infancy will, by His own ordering, by His own arrangement, be dependent upon those who are no longer in infancy. Of course, that is a very obvious thing to say, but it has to take its place in a consideration of this kind. To revert to the passage in 1 Chronicles 12:32: "The men of Issachar were men who had understanding of the times, who knew what Israel ought to do... and all their brethren were at their commandment ('at their mouth')". That represents New Testament order. Men who have understanding, men who have spiritual knowledge, men who, therefore, are able to teach others also. That means all the other things said about representatives of the tribes in 1 Chronicles 12 is a phase, an aspect, a part of the whole, a ministry which is essential. The other tribes gave their quota, their contribution in different ways. The men of Issachar contributed this value to the whole when David was being made king, when David was coming into universal dominion.

As a part of the universal dominion of the Lord Jesus, His sovereignty, it is essential that there are those in a representative capacity who have knowledge, who have understanding, and who know, and, therefore, upon whose mouth their brethren hang. The Lord needs them now for the progressive realisation of His ultimate will for His whole family. It is not the Lord's will that any one member of His family should always remain a child. It is the Lord's will that every member of the family should come to the adoption. There is nothing whatever in the New Testament to indicate that some are called to maturity and some to immaturity. Foreordination is to maturity, and to fail of that is to fail of God's full purpose. It will not do for anybody to say: "I just prefer to be a simple little child, and all these advanced things are beyond me, I would simply rather not touch them". That is failing altogether to apprehend the mind of the Lord. That strikes the difference between childlikeness and childishness. Those two things are very different. I am perfectly certain that we shall never learn anything, only as we are childlike. I am perfectly certain that we shall never learn anything if we are childish.

It has been true in every part of the age, but it seems to be increasingly true at this time, that the Lord's need is for men of understanding. The family has grown so much, now, and unfortunately with the extending of the family, the strength, and the depth, and the fullness of the family's instruction has not kept pace; so that the Lord today has a very large family, but all too great a proportion of His family are infants when they ought not to be infants. They are in a state of delayed maturity, and one of the most crying needs, if not the need of this present time, is for the Lord's own family to come into a place of sonship in its fuller meaning. That, I think, will become apparent as we go on to define the nature of sonship, but the statement is made with emphasis at the outset, that it is a great and crying need that the Lord's family should grow up and not remain where it is.

There has been a great movement of evangelisation for decades past. There seems now to be needed a great movement toward the maturing of the children of God, and that may explain why, so far as world movements are concerned, great evangelisation activities are not being produced by the Lord. Let me put that another way, that the special emphasis of the Lord just now is not in great world movements of soul-saving. We do not overlook the fact that there is soul-saving going on all the time. That must never stop, and the Lord's blessing will always be there, but this part of the age is not outstandingly characterised by great evangelistic movements with the gathering in of multitudes, such as under Wesley, under Moody and others. But we do notice today that there is considerable movement amongst Christians. The activity is primarily there. The convention movement has sprung up in the last sixty years, and that very fact is significant. And that is increasing and growing. And yet with it all there is immaturity and a growing consciousness of need. That surely speaks of a changed emphasis of the Lord in history. It speaks of the Lord coming out in relation to His ultimate thought to meet His primary need, which is not salvation, but which is the adoption of sons, the perfecting of the sons.

We go on to consider for a little while the nature of these sons. We begin right at the beginning in Galatians 4:6. That, as you notice, corresponds with the passage in Romans 8:15. The spirit of sonship received! In the receiving of the Spirit of His Son we have all the fullness of the meaning of the adoption embodied, crystallized, condensed; and if the movement of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of His Son, the Spirit of sonship in the believer, has free course - the apostle spoke of some as not giving the Word free course in themselves, and then he asked others to pray that as he spoke, the Word would run and have free course - the whole movement of the Spirit is in the direction of our spiritual development unto that adoption of sons. The Lord can never be satisfied with our being saved, and then exclusively turning our attention outward. The Lord, for His ends, must have a commensurate and corresponding inward activity of His Spirit for our spiritual growth, and the tragedy of many is this, that they have become so busy on the outside, so active in Christian work, that they have neglected their own gardens. They themselves have run to seed, have become thin, have not grown. And the tragedy of many others is that they have collected a very great deal of material to give to others, and in their teaching have gone far in excess of their own spiritual growth. Sooner or later in both cases the worker is found to have come short, and breaks down because they could not stand up to the position which they themselves have erected as something outside of themselves. Let me put that another way. It is possible for us to so construct something in work and teaching, by reason of our simply being in the work of the Lord and in the ministry of the Lord, in comparison with which we are as nothing inwardly, spiritually, so that the very thing itself turns round upon us and becomes our breaking. We are not what we have been saying to others, and we cannot out of our own hearts give what we know of the Lord within, and stand up to the demands which we ourselves have created by our own work.

The Lord, the Spirit, would keep an even and equalised correspondence between what is going on in us and what is going on through us. The New Testament makes that very clear, and Paul, as the model servant of Christ, will speak continuously in autobiographical terms of his own secret, personal history with the Lord, as being that out of which all his teaching and his work proceeds. You will never find him proceeding beyond what has taken place in his own inner, secret history with God. He, the workman, is the work; he is the ministry. The ministry and the work is not something that he has taken on apart from himself, but he is that. That is the true work of the Holy Spirit. How widespread is the inadequacy on the part of those who are in positions of responsibility in the work of God! A deep, secret history with the Lord is essential to any deepening work in other lives. The deepening of others will only be in accordance with our own depth in God. There will be weakness if we are only giving teaching. What will be the result? It will not be that others will not know things. They will know a lot of things in their heads, but those things have not come with that essential life which comes out of a living spirit. Plenty of people have a lot of teaching, but what about their spiritual position, their ability to take responsibility?

We begin by the Spirit of sonship in us, always striving, working, energising, moving to bring about spiritual development, spiritual increase, with a view to spiritual responsibility. If we are seeking to live in and move in the Spirit, He will arrange that that which is available for our spiritual enrichment is made available to us, and we are brought into touch with it. He will work in all ways to do that, if really we are reaching out to the Lord for all that is in His thought. He will work negatively, as well as positively. That is, He will begin to dry up, to make things which, while they are good in themselves, are standing in the way of something better, to cease to engross us; in some way they will lose their grip of us. It may be that a spiritual experience which we have had, and counted upon very much, will cease to mean anything to us. It may have become something in the way of something more, and because we are always harping upon that thing and see nothing beyond it, we do not move beyond it, and the Lord has to take that out, and cause that to cease to be our supreme blessing, and we seem to lose that, and everything goes with it, in order to make room for something more. So it is that the Spirit of sonship is working in relation to us, unto the full thought of God from the beginning. The nature of sonship begins there.

I wish that we could fully grasp all that is embodied in that statement at the beginning of the Hebrew letter: "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, has at the end of these times (when all that is fragmentary before as to times and manners converges upon one object) spoken unto us IN A SON". Everything now of all the past ages is centred in sonship. Our business is not to learn the fragmentary ways and truths of God, but the inclusiveness of Christ. That brings to sonship. There is a word which we have used many times, and we use it again in this connection as to the nature of sons. It is the word 'intelligence', or 'responsibility'. That speaks of development, growth.

Look at it as it is presented to us in some of these letters of the New Testament. Look at the Roman letter. When you reach Romans 8 you reach the Spirit of sonship, and the adoption of sons. What is the argument right up to Romans 8? In the main it is an argument concerning two dispensations and their peculiar characteristics.

What were the characteristics of the dispensation of the law under Moses? Because of outward commandments, times and systems, it was a dispensation of works. Everything failed to produce the required end. What was that? Spiritual maturity! Israel never came to spiritual maturity under Moses, under the law. To the end they were children. The features of the dispensation of the law, which proved to be the dispensation of delayed maturity and mere childhood (in its bad sense), was that everything was outside of themselves, as a system presented objectively. When you come to Romans 8 the Spirit of adoption is introduced instead, and from that point everything changes as to the dispensation. From that point it is no longer an outward system, an objective order of commandments to be obeyed and outward functions to be performed, and a system of rights and orders and ordinances to be upheld and observed. It is now all inward.

Just keep that for a moment, and pass to the Galatian letter, and there you have the same thing again. It is the argument between law and grace. But do you notice it develops into an argument concerning sonship and the adoption of sons? The sonship side has to do with a new dispensation, when the law, having proved an impossible thing for man to fulfil, Christ has taken upon Him the curse which rests upon all who break the law, and has been made a curse for us, and the law is set aside, because it never brought about spiritual maturity, never attained unto God's thought for man. What is introduced? The Spirit of adoption, within the believer, and now you are on the straightway of God's thought and intention for its realisation.

Pass to the letter to the Hebrews. That whole letter argues that the Old Testament types under Moses and Aaron - the Tabernacle and that whole system - never brought to perfection, completeness. It never represented a coming to maturity and spiritual responsibility. It simply left people just where they were. It was an outward thing, and they were performing that in a mechanical way and it had no corresponding inward spiritual growth. Now you are brought to Christ and the new covenant, which is not upon tables of stone, but: "...on their heart will I write them ...and they shall not teach every man his fellow-citizen, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord; for all shall know Me...". It is a question now of a knowledge of the Lord which is an essential inward knowledge. So that responsibility, sonship, is a matter of that personal, inward knowledge of the Lord which brings about a spiritual competence, where everything has become an inward thing, by reason of the Spirit of adoption having become resident within.

That is very simple, and very familiar, but necessary to lead us to a somewhat more explicit defining and explaining. What is to be the outworking of this? What is to be the effect? That all the Lord's children, who are moving with the Lord toward His end, should come steadily, but surely, increasingly, to the place where we do not depend upon things or people outside of ourselves for knowing the Lord, the Lord's mind, the Lord's way. That must be covered and safeguarded and I will do that in a moment, but there is this side to clearly recognise. It is our own appropriation of Christ for whatever the need may be, as over against our simply collapsing into the arms of someone else spiritually, or some organised system, to carry our weight. That may be very nice, but that is one of the greatest curses of the people of God. That means that everything is outside of yourself, and you get no spiritual development.

We know quite well that a child does, and rightly does, in the time of difficulty and trouble run to a parent or someone more mature to get them out of the difficulty. That is all right for an infant, but there comes a time when the Lord requires us to be able to stand on our own feet and see that in Christ there is provision for every need. Our business is not to run round to find someone to get us out of our difficulty, but to stand in the Lord, and prove Him for ourselves, discover that provision that is in Him for every need; and so, as things arise, to definitely take that position. Weakness will at once make us look round for a stronger Christian; immaturity will immediately cause us to say: "If only there were someone here who has been this way before me." We have looked round at people who have gone through the fire and said: "If only we could have a talk with them, what a help it would be." The Lord does not allow it, and makes it impossible so often. Why? Because He is our resource, and He is seeking to train us unto the adoption. The Lord does so often place us in situations where no one can help us, and where He brings no one to our help. Very often He forbids us any resource here on earth, and those whom we might look to as being the ones who surely would be able to help us, are not giving it to us. The Lord is shutting us up to Himself. There is great gain to us along that line. There is going to be great gain to His whole family. That means that we shall be of the company of Issachar. Before long in a greater measure, we shall have understanding and know what Israel ought to do, and others will profit by that knowledge.

I said I must safeguard my statement, lest anyone should think that such a position does rule out fellowship. The Lord is equally emphatic about fellowship, that is, against mere independent action in the flesh. The Lord has bound His people together, and does require that they should profit by one another's knowledge of Him. But we have got to recognise both as being essential, and both being of God, but this is where the breakdown between them will come. If we make a fellowship to take the place of the Lord to carry us and take responsibility for us in any way, we have violated the very object of that fellowship. We shall have the good of that fellowship by the Holy Spirit as we ourselves are going on strongly with the Lord, walking with Him and knowing Him. Of course, in immaturity there is the gain, the advantage, the blessing of being taught by those who have already been taught, but we can never get their experience by what they say. What is given to us through teaching is not simply to put us into a position of having a mental knowledge of truths and principles; it is only to put us into a position of putting them to the test and working them out. A lot of people go off and begin to talk about things, and they think they know, but presently they are brought into a position where they question those very things, and then the one who said them is brought into suspicion as to whether he or she was speaking the truth, simply because a mental apprehension was made of those things. My urge upon you is, with whatever you hear of spiritual truth, to go away to the Lord with that and say: "Lord, I have heard that; as far as I can I see it, I have an understanding of it; it looks clear. But I have got to be made that before it can be of real value."

This is true as to other forms of fellowship life, not only in the teaching. In the prayer life and in other forms of fellowship also, it all works on the same principle. Are you going to do a thing because someone who has greater experience than you tells you that you should do it? If you do, you are in a false position. No one ought to take that position of authority, to tell another what they should do. You may be counselled, advised, but, so far as one understands and knows, this is the way the Lord would lead, that you must open your heart and your mind in that direction, to see if that is in the way. There may be a good deal of background behind a suggestion, and it might be quite all right to say that if you take that course you will not go wrong, but if it means that the individual will be taken right off their feet and caused to do something because someone else has said it, they are put into a false position at once. Get all that can be got from fellowship, counsel, co-operation, but at the same time maintain your life in God strongly. I am quite sure that Barnabas and Paul would not have been in the strong position that they were in, when the assembly at Antioch sent them out under the instructions of the Holy Spirit, if they themselves had not been personally walking with the Lord, so that they could say: "That only corroborates all that the Lord has been saying to me". These men had already had dealings with God in their hearts. They had to wait for the assembly's corroboration, but it was not an official appointing to work in an official way.

These two sides have to be watched, and they all relate to spiritual intelligence.