3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8 which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight 9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
11 In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, 12 so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. 13 In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
We are all familiar with the concept of adoption and so we hear Paul speak of our adoption as sons by God and imagine cherubic infants being welcomed into the arms of loving parents. There is nothing wrong with this image and it may indeed tell us something about what God has done. But it is not really the image Paul has in mind here. In the ancient world adoption was normally an adult event. Childhood mortality was high. It was common for a wealthy family to find itself in a position of having no heir. At that point, many would find a reputable second or third son of another family, usually of a lower social stratum, and adopt that person as an adult. We cannot know how prevalent this practice was; there was, after all, no demographic data collected. At the same time, of the first five Roman emperors, Augustus – Nero, four were adopted as adults to become heirs of a childless father.
Roman law was rather specific about something here. When one was adopted, one had to renounce any claim on the inheritance of your birth family. You could not legally be the son of two fathers and inherit from them both as a son. Being adopted meant choosing to become the heir of the new family and formally renouncing the inheritance of the other family. We have a vestige of this in the baptismal service to this day. The baptized candidate is asked to renounce the devil, his works, and all his ways. That line is right out of Roman adoption proceedings.
In the rest of this letter, which we will hear for the next five weeks in church, Paul will be calling us out of darkness and out of the dismal inheritance of this world and its ruler. We have renounced that inheritance of scale-balancing and vengeance taking. We have renounced the inheritance of division and enmity. We have renounced the inheritance which brings us only bitterness, loneliness, and finally death. We have become the heirs of life itself. God has made us his child.