The Regents Who Were Made Last

Paul's theology of adoption, familiar as devotional language about being loved as God's children, is doing something more specific and more startling than comfort alone when read against the backdrop above:

"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God... For you did not receive the spirit of slavery leading again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself bears witness to our spirit that we are God's children. And if children, then heirs (namely, heirs of God and also fellow heirs with Christ)."

— Romans 8:14–17 (NET)

This is not merely emotional comfort, though it is certainly that. It is a formal statement of appointment: believers are named heirs, co-heirs with Christ, of an inheritance Romans 8 goes on to describe in cosmic terms — the whole creation waiting, groaning, for the sons of God to be revealed. Paul makes the same appointment explicit in a different letter, correcting a church so preoccupied with petty lawsuits that it had lost sight of what it was actually destined for:

"Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you not competent to settle trivial suits? Do you not know that we will judge angels?"

— 1 Corinthians 6:2–3 (NET)

Paul deploys this as an assumed baseline — "do you not know?" — the language of settled theology, not speculation. The redeemed, human beings made from dust and breath, will judge the very order of created beings who shouted for joy at the earth's foundation and watched every civilization in human history rise and fall — beings whose own existence, on the ordinary scientific reckoning of the universe's age, long predates the first human being who ever drew breath. (The Appendix has more to say about how staggering that gap actually is, and where this book's own speculation about it does and does not go.) Not one of those beings received what Genesis 2:7 describes God breathing into the man He formed from the dust. Not one of them was ever the subject of the Incarnation. And yet 1 Corinthians 6:3 says plainly that they will answer to those who were made last, made from dirt, made — as Revelation puts it in language echoing Psalm 82's own vindicated remnant — into a kingdom that will reign:

"You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals because you were killed, and at the cost of your own blood you have purchased for God persons from every tribe, language, people, and nation. You have appointed them as a kingdom and priests to serve our God, and they will reign on the earth."

— Revelation 5:9–10 (NET)

This is what theosis means, concretely, cosmically: not a private mystical experience, but the restoration of a vacated regency — humanity being conformed, over the course of an entire lifetime and beyond it, toward a genuine, appointed governing destiny that the fallen council members forfeited and that Christ, the Last Adam, has secured on behalf of everyone united to Him by faith.