THE COVENANT VISION

MINISTRY.

P.O. Box V192.
Mount Druitt Village.
N.S.W. 2770. AUSTRALIA.
Phone: 02-9833-3925. Fax: 02-9833-4397.

E-Mail: fdowsett@idx.com.au

Senior Pastor and Co-Founder:

FRANK W. DOWSETT. J.P.


The Heritage
of
Israel.


By Frank W. Dowsett.


Part Two.

The Adoption.

We continue with our study of our great heritage as stated by Paul in Romans 9:1-5;
 

“I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost,
That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.
For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh:
Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises;
Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.”
We have previously made mention of the complete commitment shown, not only by the apostle Paul, but by other prophets and servants of God, particularly Moses, in the excercise of the ministry to which God had appointed them.  Why should they have done this?  It would have been very much easier to have gone along with the crowd, as so many alleged servants of God do today, and made life a lot easier for themselves.  But they realised, and were totally motivated by, one important factor which does not appear to come under too much consideration these days.  They knew, without any hesitation or doubt, that the Lord Whom they worshipped and served was totally and irrevocably committed to what He had promised in regards to His Israel people!  They had read, and had accepted the statements by the prophets; statements such as;
 
 “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”                                                                                                      (Numbers 23:19).
“For I am the LORD, I change not;
therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.”                                        (Malachi 3:6).
     Isn’t it time for those who serve God to accept the plain fact that if the God whom they serve is so committed to carrying out His clearly stated and defined plans and purposes, then they should certainly be no less committed to faithfully proclaiming this fact?  Or is this too much to expect?
     How many people today are totally motivated to the same, or even a similar degree of concern for God’s true Israel people as was shown by Paul?   He says in Romans 10:1;
 
“Brethren, my hearts desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved.”
 But why should he be so concerned?  Why didn’t he express this concern in relation to every other nation and people of the world?  Why just pick on Israel?  What was so special about them?”  You see, Paul was not ignorant in regards to God’s plans and purposes, nor of the manner in which God intended to accomplish them.  He did what all too many of his successors have failed to do.  He recognised the fact that God had a set priority in all that He had planned.  We fail to recognise this fact to our own peril when it concerns our understanding of The Great Plan that the Lord God of Israel has set in motion for the restitution of all things as spoken of by the prophets since the world began.
     This priority required that the people whom He had chosen to be His witnesses as to Who He really was, and whom He had chosen to be the vessel through which He was to bring final blessing to all the families and nations of the world, should be firstly brought into a position of righteousness and perfection themselves.  You don’t have much luck selling your product, if the only example you display of that product is worse than that which is already accepted and in general use.  I lived for many years in New Guinea.  There were missionaries everywhere.  They were trying very hard to introduce what was generally seen by the local people as a white man’s religion.  But when they saw how many of these white men behaved, it gave them no desire at all to change their ways.  You see, the example just wasn’t there.  This is not to denigrate in any way the excellent work done by so many dedicated missionaries in so many other ways.  But they failed to see that it was the white people who were in the greatest need of change.  We needed to set the example.  We didn’t, and the work of God struggled and suffered.
     I am personally convinced that one of the main reasons why we don’t have the same degree of dedication to our cause as Paul showed, is that we have no pride in, let alone knowledge of, our true origins.  And this, of course, is the culmination of the plan which has been operating for centuries, controlled by the proponents and organisers of the One World Order, a philosophy which denigrates our past, with all its lessons and benefits, and substitutes for it the uncertainties of a God-less future.  We must get back to the same frame of mind as the apostle Paul, and proudly proclaim our heritage in similar manner as he did;
 
“I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.”                                  (Romans 11: 1)
     Paul succeeded, not just because he was an Israelite, but because he was not afraid to declare the fact.  Perhaps there is a lesson in this for modern preachers, many of whom seem to be more preoccupied with their own success and popularity than the overall welfare of the nation.
     As a matter of fact, we could go further than this and declare that it was this knowledge that made him realise the im-portance of the specific calling which God had placed upon him.  He clearly stated that  “I am an apostle of the Gentiles.” The “gentiles” in the New Testament, with very rare exceptions, referred to the house of Israel in dispersion, who had become so mixed in with the other nations that they were reckoned to be Gentiles, or non-Israelites. Every epistle which Paul wrote was addressed, not to heathen non-Israel people as presently taught, but to heathenised Israelites!  We know this because of his constant usage, throughout every one of his epistles, of the word “brethren”.  The Greek word which he used was ‘adelphos’ meaning. “people of the same racial origin”, and as we have already stated, he referred to all these people throughout every one of his epistles, as people of the same racial origin as himself!
     I want you to notice this fact.  That everything that Paul now states is based on his identification of those to whom he is writing.  He refers to them as, “my kinsmen according to the flesh who are Israelites.” This message is addressed specifically to those people who were the kinsmen of Paul, the Israelites, and if we don’t understand what he is saying in these next few verses we are never going to see the vision of what we are supposed to be doing here in the first place. His very first statement to these people is,
“To whom pertaineth the adoption?”

     Whilst the word “pertaineth” was not in the original Greek text, it is printed in italics in most Bibles to give the sense of the passage. It indicates that “the adoption” applies, or pertains, to the Israelites.  Now what is this “adoption” of which the apostle speaks?
     I suppose that firstly we should define the meaning of the word.  The word adoption means “to be placed as a son”. When you adopt someone, by bringing a child of other parentage into the family, you place that person in the position of your own child. That’s the whole purpose of adoption. Many people can’t have babies themselves, they can’t have a family, and so they adopt a baby who through varying circumstances don’t have parents.  For instance, many parents don’t even want them. That young child becomes then, by law, a child of that adoptive family. They become legally a son or daughter of those parents. And this is exactly what we’re talking about here.  We, as Israelites, have been adopted by God as full members of His family.  We have been given the position of “sons of God”. We are not just a nation of God.  We are not just a people of God. We are, as Israelites, sons of God, and that constitutes a very great difference. We can be a nation, we can be a people, and that is a great thing. But how many people realise that despite the fact of being a nation and a people, we have a far higher calling under God, insofar that He has adopted us, or brought us to Himself and He has said ‘you are not only a people, you are my sons’.
 But we must, I believe, resolve the question as to how it became necessary for God to “adopt” us as a people.
     Genesis chapter two clearly reveals that the time came when God decided to “form” a particular man, or Adam.  This word ‘form’ means to make out of something already in existence.  As opposed to this, the Adam of chapter one of Genesis was “created”, meaning, made out of nothing.  They are totally different words.  Whilst the word “Adam” used in both instances means the same thing, the Adam of chapter one was created from nothing, whilst the Adam of chapter two was formed out of existing material, that is, the dust of the earth.  It is interesting to note that the Septuagint Translation of the Old Testament, in Genesis chapter one uses the word Adam, but in chapter two, uses the phrase “the Adam”, the translators realising that there was a difference.  (Emphasis added).  When we look at our Lord’s genealogy as recorded in Luke chapter three we find the list commencing with “Joseph, which was the son of  Heli” - verse 23 - and concluding in verse 38 with, “Adam, which was the son of God”.
     So it is apparent that this Adam held the position of a “son of God”.  Now obviously something must have gone horribly wrong, otherwise why would God, at some time in the future, find it necessary to “adopt” those who were already His sons?   The descendants of Adam developed into the people called Israel, and at the time of their captivity in Egypt, God still referred to them as His sons.  We read in Exodus 4:22-23;
 

“And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn:
And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.”
     The problem was, that as a result of Adam’s fall, this ‘sonship’ now only applied on an earthly or human level, whereas it had originally applied on a much higher and spiritual level whilst their original parents, Adam  and Eve were in their original sinless state.  This situation had to be rectified and restored to its original intent, otherwise Israel would not be able to fully and finally accomplish the very purpose for which they were formed in the first place, that of being God’s witness to the fact that He was indeed the only true God, and that of becoming a blessing to all the families and nations of the earth.   Through continued disobedience and sin, they finally became “not My people” as we read in Hosea 1:9;
 
“Then said God, Call his name Loammi: for ye are not my people,
and I will not be your God.”
     But God had no intention of allowing this state of affairs to continue indefinitely.  In the very next verse of Hosea He says;
“Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.”
     Having cast His people away from Himself, and for a time disowning them, He now makes provision whereby He can “adopt” them back into His family as His sons, and rightful heirs!
     How did He do this?  Simply by the expedient of ‘redeeming’ them.  To ‘redeem’ means ‘to buy back something which you originally owned”.  You can buy or purchase anything that belongs to someone else, but you can only ‘redeem’ what was originally yours.  This redemptive act applied not only to the “Husband-wife” relationship between Jehovah and Israel, but also to their “Father-son” relationship.  This was achieved by the death of the husband/father, an act which legally allowed Him both to again become espoused to His former wife, and also to adopt His former children back as family members.
     I am convinced that the failure of our religious leaders to recognise these facts has been the major factor in our failure as a nation, and as individuals, to properly serve our Lord God in the manner  and to the extent that He originally intended for us!
     We must realise that God has given us a real authority and a real commitment.  We have been adopted as sons, and I’m absolutely certain that the Lord God of Israel is not a bit pleased with the fact that we have consistently refused to properly exercise this authority and commitment to His Glory, and for the benefit of mankind generally.
     The fact of our “adoption” is mentioned only five times within the writings of the New Testament, and we will now examine each of these in order to understand at least something of what God intends for us.

1. Romans 8:15;
 

“For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”
     Here we have the wonderful revelation that having been adopted, we can now call Jehovah God our father, as a result of which we no longer need to live in the bondage of fear.

2. Romans 8:23.
 

“And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”
     We also find that having been “adopted” into the position of “sons of God”, we find ourselves ‘groaning’, meaning ‘sighing in distress’, for the time when our bodies are brought back to their original state of perfection.  In fact, the state to which they will be restored will be far better than the original, as it will no longer be subject to death.  So this brings us into a state of expectancy which causes us to become virtually impatient as to what is going to happen to us.

3. Romans 9:4.
 

“Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises.”
 This verse is self explanatory, being the subject of our overall study.

4. Galatians 4:5.
 

“To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”
     Here we have another aspect of our “adoption.”  We were once, both as a nation and as individuals, indeed under the curse of the law, whereby we were separated from our God by our sinfulness.  As adopted sons of God, we are now redeemed, or bought back from this curse.

5. Ephesians 1:5.
 

“Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.”
     And finally, we find that this adoption is not some “quick-fix” arrangement by God.  It is something which He pre-determined to happen.  It was always an integral part of His great plan and purpose.  But it was not only predestined to happen as an official act, but constituted a real pleasure for God Himself.  Why?  Because in doing this He was restoring and reconstituting His family unit, which had always been His great desire.

         And in doing this, He enabled His people to enter into their full inheritance, as so wonderfully stated in Romans 8:16-17;
 

“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.”
     We must ask ourselves, “Why has the Lord planned this on our behalf?”  In our present condition we are most disobedient sons.  But God’s Word will most certainly be fulfilled just as He declared.  We read in Amos 2:3;
“You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.”
     Doesn’t the Word tell us that “whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth?”  He never made these wonderful promises and statements to the other nations of the world.  He had to first of all chastise those who were to be His heirs -  His adopted sons  -  in order to bring them to the perfection that was required in order that they should show forth His glory.

To Israel Pertaineth the Adoption.

(To be continued).
  

Please for quick link to next article in this Series.