Abba Father — Father Meditations

George MacDonald

This articles is taken from Unspoken Sermons: Series 2, originally published by Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1886, revised somewhat into modern English by Jim Mellis, 2014. George MacDonald was a 19th century theologian and writer whose novels and children’s books were as popular as those of Charles Dickens. C.S. Lewis considered MacDonald to be his ‘spiritual’ father. Read more about George MacDonald.

Abba, Father

‘--the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.’ (Rom.8:15 RV[i])

The hardest, yet gladdest thing in the world is to cry ‘Father!’ from a full heart. I would help whomever I may to call thus upon the Father.

Yet there are things in all forms of the systematic teaching of Christianity to check this outgoing of the heart, and to render it simply impossible with some.

The more delicate the affections, the less easy to satisfy, the readier they are to be dampened and discouraged, yea, to be quite blown aside; Even the suspicion of a cold reception is enough to paralyze them.

Such a cold wind blowing at the gate of heaven is the so-called doctrine of Adoption. But, thank God, it is outside that gate!

When a heart hears and believes, or even half believes, that it is not the child of God by origin—from the first of its being—but may possibly be adopted into his family, its love sinks at once in a cold faint. Where is its real father? And who is this who wants to adopt it?

To myself, in the morning of childhood, this evil doctrine was a mist through which the light came struggling. More mature thought and truer knowledge were required to dissipate this cloud-phantom that was repellant by nature. Yet it does not require either a lot of knowledge or much insight to stand up against its hideousness. It needs only love that will not be denied, and the courage to question that which is but a phantom.

A devout and honest skepticism that is not intimidated by any “authority” is absolutely necessary to the one who would know the liberty wherewith Christ makes people free. Whatever any company of good men thinks or believes is to be approached with respect. But nothing claimed or taught—regardless of who the teachers may be—must come between the individual soul and the spirit of the Father, who is himself the teacher of his children. Indeed, to accept such authority may be to refuse the very thing the (religious)[ii] “authority” would teach—that thing which might remain altogether misunderstood, simply for lack of that natural process of doubt and inquiry which the One who would have us understand intended us to go through.

As ‘no scripture is of private interpretation’ (2 Pet.1:20), so there is no feeling in a human heart which does not exist in some form or degree in every heart. I thus conclude that many must have groaned like I did, under the supposed authority of this doctrine. The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human condition. It is the*[iii] inability, the one central misery. So whatever serves to clear any difficulty out of the way of our ability to recognize the Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life.

‘Is God then not my real Father, ’cries the heart of the child, ’if I need to be adopted by him? Adoption! That can never satisfy me. Who then is my father? Am I not his to begin with? Is God not my very own Father? Is he my Father only in some fashion—by some legal contrivance? Truly much love may lie in adoption. But if I accept it from someone, I then affirm myself to be originally the child of another! The adoption of God would indeed be a blessed thing if someone other than he had given me being! But if he gave me being, then adoption by him does not imply reception, but rather repudiation! “O Father, am I not your child?”’

(To which the theologian responds) ‘No; but he will adopt you. He may not acknowledge you to be* his child, but he will call* you his child and be a father to you.’

‘Alas!’ cries the child, ‘if he is not my real father, he cannot become my father. A father is a father from the beginning. A primary relation cannot be superseded. The consequence might be small where earthly fatherhood is concerned, but with regards to the very origin of my being—alas, if he be only a maker and not a father! Then I am only a machine, and not a child—not human! And it is false to say I was created in his image!

‘It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the Fall. I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time; and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse. I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky. But it avails nothing, either for my heart—or their argument—to say I have fallen and been cast out. Can any repudiation, even that of God, undo the facts of an existent origin? Nor is it merely that he made me. By whose power do I go on living? If he cast me out, as you say, when did I then begin to draw my being from myself—or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and have my being (Acts 17:28)? It cannot be that I am not a creature of God.’

(‘Ah’ you say, ) ‘but creation is not fatherhood.’

‘Creation in the image of God, is!’ And if I am not in the image of God, how can the word of God be of any meaning to me? “He called them gods to whom the word of God came,” says the Master himself (Jn.10:35). To be fit to receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may have been defaced in me, the thing defaced is still his image. Even his defaced image remains an image that yet can hear his word! What actually makes me evil and miserable is that the thing spoiled in me is* the image of the Perfect One. Nothing can be evil but in virtue of a good hypostasis.

‘No, no! Nothing can make it so that I am not the child of God! If someone were to say, “Look at the animals; God made them yet you do not call them the children of God!” I would answer: “But I am to blame; they are not to blame! I cling fast to my blame because it is the seal of my being his child!” Of two things only I am sure: that God is to the animals “a faithful creator”; and that the sooner I put in force my claim to be a child of God, the better for them—for they too are fallen, though without blame.’

‘But’ (replies the theologian) ‘you are evil; how can you be a child of the Good?’

‘In the same way that an evil son is the child of a good parent!

‘But in the human being you call a good parent,’ (he answers) ‘there yet lay evil; and that accounts for the child being evil.’

‘How can I explain? God may have let me be born through evil channels. But in whatever manner I may have become an unworthy child, I cannot thereby have ceased to be a child of God—his child in the way that a child must ever be the child of the person from whom he comes. Is this not proof enough for this complaint of my heart over the word “adoption”? Is it not the spirit of the true child crying out, Abba, Father?’

‘Yes; but that is the “spirit of adoption”. The text even says so!’

‘Away with your adoption(-theology)! I could not even be adopted if I were not of such a nature—the nature of God—so as to be reached by it. As much as a man might love a dog, can he adopt it? I must be of a certain nature for the word of God to come to me—yea, of the divine nature as one made in his image! I grant it heartily that if I had been left to myself—if God had dropped me and maintained no communication with me—I could never have thus cried, Abba, Father. And I never would have thus cared when they told me that I was not a child of God!

‘Yet he has never repudiated me, and therefore does not desire to adopt me. And, pray tell me, why should it grieve me to be told* I am not a child of God if I am indeed not* his child? If you say, “Because you have learned to love him”, I answer, “Adoption would only satisfy the love of the one who was not someone’s real child yet desires to be his child.” For me, I cannot do without a father, nor can any adoption give me one.’

‘But’ (continues the theologian), ‘what is the good of all you say if the child is such that the father cannot take him to his heart?’

‘Ah, I grant you nothing! That is only so long as the child does not desire to be taken to the father’s heart. But the moment he does, then it is everything to the child’s heart that he should be indeed the child of the One after whom his soul is thirsting. However bad I may be, I am the child of God; and therein lies my blame. Ah, I would not lose my blame, for in my blame lies my hope. It is the pledge of what I am, as well as of what I am not! It is the pledge of what I am meant to be and of what I shall one day be—the child of God in Spirit and in truth.’

‘Then’ (he responds), ‘you dare to say that the apostle Paul is wrong in what he so plainly teaches?’

‘By no means! What I do say is that our English presentation of his teaching is in this point very misleading. It is not for me to judge the learned and good men who have revised the translation of the New Testament—with so much gain to every one whose love of truth is greater than his loving prejudice for accustomed form. I can only say that I wonder at what may have been their reasons for retaining this word adoption. For in the New Testament the word is used only by the apostle Paul.’

Liddell and Scott give the meaning—‘adoption as a son’—as a mere submission to popular theology. They give no reference except to the New Testament. The relation of the word huiothesia to the form thetos, which means ‘taken’ (or rather ‘placed’ as one’s child) seems to be the sole ground for translating it as they did. But a lot of unvarying usage could not justify that translation here in the face of what Paul elsewhere shows that he means by the word! The Greek might indeed have various meanings—though I can find no use of it earlier than Paul—yet the English word adoption can mean but one thing; and that is not what Paul means!

Of two things I am sure: first, that by huiothesia Paul did not intend adoption; and second, that if the Revisers had gone through what I have gone through because of the word—if they had felt it come between God and their hearts as I have felt it—they could not have allowed it to remain in their version.

Once more I say, the word used by Paul does not imply that God adopts children that are not his own. Rather, he implies that God fathers his own a second time—that a second time they are born, this time from above. Thus he will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father. He will have them back into the very bosom from whence they issued—issued that they might learn that they could live nowhere else. He will have them one with himself. It was for the sake of this that, in his Son, he died for them.

Let us look at the passage where he reveals his use of this word. It is in his epistle to the Galatians (4:1-7 RV)

But I say that so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a bondservant, though he is lord of all; but is under guardians and stewards until the term appointed of the father. So we also, when we were children, were held in bondage under the rudiments of the world. But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons [huiothesia]. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father. So that thou art no longer a bondservant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God.

How could the Revisers choose this last reading, ‘an heir through God,’ and keep the word adoption? From the passage it is as plain as Paul could make it, that, by the word translated adoption, he means the raising of a father’s own child from the condition of tutelage and subjection to others—a state which, he says, is no better than that of a slave—to the position and rights of a son (see Gal.4:5 NIV). None but a child could become a son. The idea is a spiritual coming of age! Only when the child is an adult is he fully a son!

The thing holds in the earthly relationship. How many children of good parents—good children in the main too—never know those parents. How many never feel towards them as children might, until they are grown up and have left the house—until, perhaps, they are parents themselves, or are parted from them by death! To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or a daughter.* The ‘childship’ is the lower condition of the upward process toward sonship. ‘Childship’ is the soil out of which the true sonship shall grow, and the latter is impossible without the former. God cannot be content, any more than earthly parents, to have only children; he must have such sons and daughters[iv] as are of his soul, of his Spirit, of his love—not merely in the sense that he loves them and that they love him, but in the sense that they love as he loves.

For this he does not adopt* them! Rather, he dies to give them himself and thereby to raise his own to his heart. He gives them birth from above so that they are born again out of himself and into himself—for he is the one and the all. His children are not his real, true sons and daughters until they think like him, feel with him, judge as he judges—until they are at home with him, and are without fear before him because he and they: mean the same thing, love the same things and seek the same ends.

It is for this that we are created. This is the one goal of our being, and it includes all other ends whatever. To make people believe that God has cast them off—repudiated them, said they are not or never were his children—can only come of unbelief and not of faith. For all the time he is spending himself to make us the children he designed and foreordained us to be—(adult) children who would take him for their Father! He is our Father all the time, for he is true. But until we respond with the full truth of (adult) children, he cannot let out to us all that is ‘father’ in him. If we are not fully his children it is not because he is not our Father. That we must become his sons and daughters is because we are his children. Nothing will satisfy him, or do for us, but that we be one with our Father. What else would do? How else should life ever be something that is good? Because we are the children of God, we must become the sons (and daughters) of God.

Alas, there may be those among my readers for whom the word ‘Father’ brings no cheer, now dawn—in whose heart this word rouses no tremble of even a vanished emotion. It is hardly likely to be their fault, though as children we seldom love up to the measure of reason, though we often offend—and the conduct of some children is inexplicable to the parent who loves them. Yet if the parent has been but ordinarily kind, even the son who has grown up a worthless man will now and then feel, in his better moments, some dim reflex of ‘childship’. He will feel some faintly pleasant or some slightly sorrowful remembrance of the father around whose neck his arms had sometimes clung. In my own childhood and boyhood, my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even from sharp pain itself.

Therefore, I say to a son or daughter who has no pleasure in the name “Father”: ‘You must rather interpret the word by all that you have missed in life. Every time some person might have been to you a refuge from the wind, a hiding place from the storm, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land (Isa.32:2), that was a time when a father might have been a father indeed. Happy yet are you if you have found such a refuge in a man or woman. Thus far have you known a shadow of the perfect one; you have seen the back of the only man—the perfect Son of the perfect Father (Jn.14:9). All that human tenderness can give or desire in the nearness and readiness of love, must also be infinitely more true of the perfect Father; for he is the One who made all fatherhood (Eph.3:14-15). He is the Father of all the fathers of the earth—especially of those who have truly shown a father-heart.’

This Father would make to himself sons and daughters indeed, that is: such sons and daughters as shall be his sons and daughters not merely by having come from* his heart, but by having returned to* his heart—children by virtue of being such as their true source, such as choose to be what he is. He will have them share in his being and nature: strong in the way he cares for strength; tender and gracious as he is tender and gracious; angry when and in the way he is angry. Even in the small matter of power, he will have them able to do whatever could be done by his Son, Jesus—who was the life of the perfect man, whose works were those of perfected humanity. Everything must at length be subject to man as it was to The Man (Heb.2:5-11; Ps.8:4-6). When God can do what he will with a man, the man may do what he will with the world. He may walk on the sea like his Lord, and the deadliest thing will not be able to hurt him. He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater than these shall he do (Jn.14:12).

…God, whose pleasure brought Man into being, stands away As it were, a handbreadth off, to give Room for the newly-made man to live.[v]

He has made us, but we have to be. All things were made through the Word, but that which was made in the Word was life, and that life is the light of men (Jn.1:4). Those who live by this light, that is, live as Jesus lived—by obedience to the Father—have a share in their own making. The light becomes life in them; and they are, in their lower way, alive with the life that was first born in Jesus—and through him has been born in them. By obedience they become one with the godhead: As many as received him, to them gave the power to become the sons of God (Jn.1:12). He does not make the sons of God, but he gives them power to become* the sons of God. Through choosing for, and obeying the truth, a human being becomes the true son (or daughter) of the Father of lights.

It is enough to read with understanding the passage I have quoted from his epistle to the Galatians to see that the word adoption does not in the least fit Paul’s idea, or suit the things he says. While we but obey the law God has laid upon us, without knowing the heart of the Father from whence the law comes, we are but slaves—not necessarily ignoble slaves, yet still slaves. But when we come to think with him—when the mind of the son is as the mind of the Father and the action of the son the same as that of the Father—then is the son of the Father. Then are we the sons (and daughters) of God. And in both passages—this, and that from Romans, which I placed at the head of this sermon—we find the same phrase: Abba, Father. This shows, if proof were needed, that he uses the word huiothesia in the same sense in both places. Nothing that needs consideration at all can be plainer than what the sense of that word is for Paul.

Let us glance at the other passages in which he uses this word. Since he alone of the writers of the New Testament uses it, he may—for all I know—have made it to have his own meaning. One of these other passages is in the same eighth chapter of the epistle to the Romans. This I will save for last. Another is in the following chapter, the fourth verse. Here, he speaks of the huiothesia, literally the son-placing (that is, the placing of sons in the true place of sons), as belonging to the Jews.

On this I have but to remark that ‘whose is the huiothesia' cannot mean either: that they had already received it; or that it belonged to the Jews more than to those of other nations. It can only mean that as the elder brother-nation they had a foremost claim to it; and that they would naturally receive it first.[vi] It can also mean that in their best men (and women), they had always been nearest to it, for it must be worked out first in such as had received the preparation necessary—the Jews. And of the Jews was the Son, who came bringing the huiothesia, the sonship, to all. So theirs was the huiothesia, just as theirs was the gospel. It was to the Jew first, then to the Greek—though many a non-Jew would come to have it before many a Jew. Those and only those who out of a true heart cry, Abba, Father, (like Jesus did, Mk.14:36) are the sons and daughters of God.

Paul also uses the word in his epistle to the Ephesians, the first chapter, the fifth verse. The authorized version (KJV) says: ‘Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself’; while the Revised (RV) says: ‘Having foreordained us unto the adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself’. And I see little reason to choose between them. Neither gives the meaning of Paul. If there is anything gained by the addition of the words ‘of children’ in the one case, and ‘as sons’ in the other, the advantage ends up on the minus-side. For whatever the advantage of choosing the one over the other, both phrases are still made to serve the wrong interpretation of huiothesia as ‘adoption’.

Children we are; true sons (and daughters) we could never be, save through The Son. He “brothers” us. He takes us to the knees of the Father, and beholding his face we grow sons indeed. Never could we have known the heart of the Father, nor felt it possible to love him as sons (or daughters) but for him who cast himself into the gulf that yawned between us. In and through him we were foreordained to the son-ship—a sonship that we could never reach without him, even if we had never sinned. We should have only been little children loving the Father, yet children far from the sonhood that understands and adores.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. (Rom.8:14 & 9)

Indeed if we do not have each other’s spirits, we do not belong to each other. There is no unity (with Jesus and the Father) without having the same Spirit. There is but one Spirit—that of truth.

It remains to note yet one more passage.

Never in anything he wrote was it Paul’s intention to contribute towards a system of theology. This is easy to show, for one sign of the fact is that he does not hesitate to use the word huiothesia (which he himself has perhaps made) in different and apparently opposing senses. His meanings, though, are by no means contradictory since each occasion gives life to the other. His ideas are so large that they tax his utterance, and make him strain the use of words. But there is no danger of misunderstanding them to the honest heart (which he alone regards), though still today: ‘the ignorant and unsteadfast wrest (distort) them’ (2 Pet.3:16 RV).

At one time Paul speaks of the sonship as being the possession of the Israelite, at another time as belonging to the one who has learned to cry Abba, Father. Yet in the passage that I now consider last (Rom.8:18-25), he speaks of the huiothesia as yet to come—and* as if it had to do with our bodily and not our spiritual condition. This use of the word, however, though not the same use as we find anywhere else, is nevertheless entirely consistent with his other uses of it.

And not only so, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for adoption, the redemption of our body. (Rom.8:23 RV)

It is not at all difficult to discern that the ideas in this—as well as in his main use of huiothesia—are necessarily associated and more than consistent. The putting of a son in his true and foreordained place has outward* implications as well as inward* reality. The outward depends on the inward; it arises from it and reveals it. When the child whose condition under tutors has passed away and he has taken his position as a son, he would naturally change his dress and modes of life. When God’s children cease to be slaves—doing right from law and duty—and become his sons doing right from the essential love of God and their neighbor, they too must change the garment of their slavery for the robes of liberty. They must lay aside the ‘body of this death’, and appear in bodies like that of Christ—the One with whom they inherit from the Father.

But many children who have learned to cry Abba, Father, are yet far from the liberty of the sons of God. Sons they are, and no longer children, yet they groan as being still in bondage. Plainly the apostle has no thought of (fully) working out an idea, for with burning heart he is writing a letter. Nevertheless, he gives more than sufficient lines for us to work out his idea, and this is how it takes clear shape.

We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be sons—the moment we begin to cry Father. But as the world must be redeemed in a few people to begin with, so the soul is redeemed to begin with, in a few of its thoughts and wants and ways. It takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption. Shall it have taken millions of years to bring the world up to the point where a few of its inhabitants shall desire God, shall than the creature of this new birth be perfected in a day? Indeed the divine process may now go forward at ten times the speed because the new factor is developed of human beings co-working (with God)—for the sake of which the whole previous array of means and forces existed. But its (final) end is yet far below the horizon of our vision.

The apostle speaks at one time of the thing as to come, at another time as done—when it is but commenced. Such are the ways of our thoughts. A man’s heart may leap for joy the moment when amidst the sea-waves a strong hand has laid hold of the hair of his head. He may cry aloud, ‘I am saved’. While he may be safe, he is not yet saved since this is far from a sufficient salvation. Even so we are sons when we begin to cry Father, but we are far from perfected* sons. So long as there is in us the least taint of distrust, the least lingering of hate or fear, we have not received the sonship. Nor have we such life in us as raised the body of Jesus; and we have not yet ‘attained the resurrection of the dead’. When Paul uses this word in Philippians 3:10-12, I think he means the same thing as here (Rom.8:23) where puts the sonship in apposition with the redemption of the body.

Until our outward condition is that of royal sons and divine sons—so long as the garments of our souls and these mortal bodies are mean, stained, torn and dragged; so long as we groan under sickness and weakness and weariness, old age, forgetfulness, and all heavy things; so long as we have not yet received the sonship in full—we are but getting ready to creep from our chrysalis one day and spread the great heaven-storming wings of the psyches of God. We groan being burdened. We groan waiting for the sonship, that is, the redemption of the body, or the uplifting of the body to be a fit house and revelation of the indwelling Spirit—to be like that of Christ, a fit temple and revelation of the deeper indwelling God. For we shall always need bodies to manifest and reveal us to each other—bodies, then, that fit the soul with absolute truth of presentment and revelation.

Hence ‘the revealing of the sons of God’ spoken of in Rom.8:19 is the same thing as ‘the redemption of the body’ in 8:23. The body is redeemed when it is made fit for the sons (and daughters) of God. Then it is a revelation of them—the thing it was meant for, and the thing it more or less imperfectly always was. Such it shall be, when truth is strong enough in the sons (and daughters) of God to make it so—for it is the soul that makes the body. When we are the sons of God in heart and soul, then shall we be the sons of God in body too: ‘We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1 Jn.3:2).

I care little to speculate on the kind of body this is. Two things only I will say, as needful to be believed, concerning it. First, it will be a body to show the same self as before; but second, it will be a body to show the being truly—that is, without the defects and imperfections of the former bodily revelation. Even through their corporeal presence we shall then know our own infinitely better, and we shall find in them endlessly more delight than before. These things we must believe, or we will be distrusting the Father of our spirits. Till this redemption of the body arrives, the huiothesia is not worked out completely; it is only in process. Nor can it come but by our ‘working out’ this salvation that he is working in us (Phil.2:12-13).

This redemption of the body—its deliverance from all that is amiss, awry, unfinished, weak, worn out, all that prevents the revelation of the sons of God—is called by the apostle the huiothesia : the sonship in full manifestation, certainly not the adoption. It is the slave that is still left in the sons and daughters of God that has betrayed them into even permitting the word adoption to mislead them!

O see how the whole utterance hangs together, read from the 18^th to the 25^th verses in Romans 8—especially noticing the 19th verse:

…for in earnest expectation the creation waiteth for the revealing—the ‘out-shining’ (literal Greek)—of the sons of God.

When the sons of God demonstrate, with the character, as they are taking the appearance and the place that belong to their sonship—when they sit with the Son of God on the throne of their Father—then they shall be in potency of fact the lords of the lower creation and the bestowers of liberty and peace upon it. Then shall the creation—which has been subjected to futility for their sakes—find its freedom in their freedom, its gladness in their sonship. The animals will glory to serve them and will rejoice to come to them for help. Let the heartless scoff and the unjust despise! But the heart that cries Abba, Father, cries as well to the God of the sparrow and the oxen. Hope can never go too far in hoping for what that God will do for the creation that now groans and travails in pain because our higher birth is delayed. ‘Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?’ (Gen.18:25) Shall my heart be more compassionate than his?

If to any reader my interpretation be unsatisfactory, I pray that he not spend his strength in disputing my faith, but in making sure of his own progress on the way to freedom and sonship. Only to the child of God is true judgment possible. Were it otherwise, what would it avail to prove this one or that one right or wrong? Right opinion on the most momentous questions will not deliver anyone. There is no cure for any ill in me or about me except to become the son of God I was born to be. Until I am such—until Christ is born in me, until I am revealed a son of God (Gal.1:15-16; Rom.8:19)—pain and trouble will endure. And may God grant that they may do so! Call this presumption, and I can only widen my assertion. Until you yourself are the son (or daughter) of God you were born to be, you will never find life a good thing. If I presume this for myself, I also presume it for you.

Thus have both Jesus Christ and his love-slave Paul represented God—as a Father perfect in love, grand in self-forgetfulness, supreme in righteousness, devoted to the lives he has spoken into being. I will not believe less of the Father than I can conceive of the glory according to the words he has given me—according to the radiation of his glory in the face of his Son. For ‘he is the express image’ of the Father (Heb.1:3), by which we—his imperfect images—are to be read and understood in him. Though imperfect, we have yet perfection enough to be written out towards the perfect.

According to the grand theory of the apostle, then, it comes to this. The world exists for our education; it is the nursery of God’s children that is served by troubled slaves—troubled because the children are themselves slaves and not even good children. Beyond its own will or knowledge, the whole creation works for the development of the children of God into the sons (and daughters) of God. When at last the children have arisen and gone to their Father—and when they are clothed in the best robe, with a ring on their hands and shoes on their feet (Lk.15:18-22), shining out at length in their natural and predestined sonship—then shall the mountains and the hills break forth before them into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Then shall the wolf dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid and the calf, the young lion together with the fatted calf, and a little child shall lead them (Is.55:12; 11:6).

Then shall the fables of a golden age—which faith invented and unbelief threw into the past—unfold their essential reality; and the tale of paradise will prove itself a truth by becoming a fact. Then shall every ideal show itself a necessity; aspiration shall put forth yet longer wings even though it is satisfied; and hunger after righteousness shall know itself blessed. Then shall we know what was in the Shepherd’s mind when he said, ‘I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly’ (Jn.10:10).

NOTES

[i] MacDonald takes his New Testament quotations from the Revised Version (of the 17^th century KJV) that was first published in 1881. (I have added italics to all scripture quotations to set these off from any other writings being cited by MacDonald - JKM)

[ii] In some places, I have added words or phrases like this in parentheses, to enhance MacDonald’s meaning, especially in his dialogue with the theological proponents of the doctrine of Adoption.

[iii] Where words in italics are followed by an *, the italics have been added by me for emphasis, to help bring out MacDonald’s meaning.

[iv] By speaking of daughters as well as sons in this paragraph, MacDonald shows that he has a gender-free concept of adult ‘sonship’, along the lines of 2 Cor.6:18—even though he does not always mention daughters alongside every mention of sons.

[v] From ‘Christmas-eve and Easter-day’, 289-290, The Poems of Robert Browning, Vol.3, 1847-1861 (available on the internet).

[vi] In Romans 9-11 Paul shows that his brother (and sister)’ Jews who as yet have refused to receive the huiothesia, nevertheless still have a claim on it (9:1-4; 11:11-31); and he goes on to show that a ‘remnant’ of Jews who did believe (9:22-24,27; 11:1-5) became indeed the first nation to receive it (see also Eph.1:11-14).