The Spirit of Adoption
When I started this sermon, I thought that it was going to be the easiest and fastest. Instead, it turned out to be the hardest, slowest, longest, and most involved sermon ever. There is so much going on with the Spirit of Adoption that we, as Gentiles, take for granted.
Since the beginning, the Israelites were the first and only people who actually worshiped the one true God instead of Baal, the sun god that all the rest of humanity was worshiping. That is why God chose the Israelites for His people. Accordingly, salvation is the heritage of the Israelite or Jew. The Baal-worshiping Gentiles were doomed never to know about salvation.
However, God, in His infinite mercy and grace, sent His only Son into the world that He made, to be persecuted, prosecuted, and executed by the very creatures that He created, in order to redeem them and give them everlasting life. God accomplished this by blinding the Jews to the King that they were expecting. With the Jews thus rejecting their King and His salvation, God then temporarily grafted the Gentiles into the Jews’ “Tree of Life” that they might be given the easiest opportunity based on grace for salvation that even the Jews never experienced when they had been working for it for thousands of years.
God then followed up on this salvation by grace by giving the Gentiles a Bible, His word in print that all men everywhere would learn what they needed to know in order to receive everlasting life.
But man’s subtle enemy that he unwittingly allies with and worships—Satan—secretly seeks to destroy the life-changing word of God, first by outright burning and then by corrupting it with many “versions.”
Because Gentiles glorify “knowledge” as a marker of (counterfeit) godliness (Ge 3:5), it was easy for Satan to guide them into rejecting God’s word and replacing it with “the originals” that no man on earth has ever seen in this generation. Undeterred, these “Bible scholars” continually “update” their “versions” with supposedly new revelations from the unseen “originals.”
As Gentile churches fall into apostasy, the “fullness of the Gentiles” will be complete, the Age of Grace will be over, and works (avoiding the “mark”) will determine salvation once again as the Jews will no longer be spiritually blind.
Many Gentile churches and religions are stealing the promises that God gave His people, the Jews, but the Age of Tribulations will prove them wrong as usurpers, as they will find themselves in bondage to the end-world anti-Christ. Then they will forever regret rejecting the word of God when it held the knowledge of everlasting life for them.