Equipping The Generations: Adoption Is Bigger Than You Think -- By: Dan Cruver

Journal: Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry
Volume: JDFM 04:1 (Fall 2013)
Article: Equipping The Generations: Adoption Is Bigger Than You Think
Author: Dan Cruver


Equipping The Generations: Adoption Is Bigger Than
You Think1

Dan Cruver

Dan oversees Together for Adoption and provides thought-leadership on the theology of adoption as a team member of ABBA Fund. Before co-founding and directing Together for Adoption, Dan was a college professor of Bible and Theology. He has also served as a pastor of family ministries. Dan co-founded Together for Adoption to equip churches and educate Christians theologically about orphan care and horizontal adoption. Dan regularly writes and speaks about the Gospel and its implications for solutions to the global orphan crisis. He is the editor and primary author of Reclaiming Adoption: Missional Living Through the Rediscovery of Abba Father, Martyrdom: The Final Triumph of Faith (with Scott Anderson) and wrote the foreword to Heirs with Christ: The Puritans on Adoption by Dr. Joel Beeke.

“Adoption is greater than the universe.”

So says John Piper, and as sweeping as the statement may sound, it is absolutely true. Because the eternal communion of our triune God is behind, beneath, beside, and above the universe and is the ultimate reason and cause for our adoption.

The Love Story Of
The Universe

The eternal story of the infinite reciprocal love that the three Persons of the Trinity share with each other sheds the light of the Son on the immense size of our adoption. Pastor and author Gerrit Dawson captures just how this adoption envelops the universe and empowers its inhabitants.

The universe came to be as part of the eternal love story of the Father and the Son. Before the worlds began to be, the Father loved his Son and the Son loved the Father. In a mystery beyond description, this love occurred in the ‘bonds’ of the Holy Spirit. The third person of the Trinity was the personal glue, the love (as Augustine said) that ever flowed within the triune being. Indeed, all things were made out of the overflow of this love between the Father and the Son in the Spirit.

More simply put, the universe came into being out of a great love story. In the virgin’s womb, this love touched down in the midst of our darkened, broken world. The incarnate God showed his sacred face in the infant Jesus so that we could now enter this love. He tasted the sorrow of this world so that we might be taken into the joy of the eternal love of the Father and the Son. (The Blessing Life: A Journey to Unexpected Joy, 92-93)

The Story Behind The Story

The eternal Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — existed forever in the communion of love before time began. But when the three Persons of the Trinity...

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