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Adoption & Foster Care

Adoption & Foster Care

Adoption and foster care carry both the joy of gaining a family and the grief and complexity that comes before it - whether for the child, the birth family, or the adoptive or foster parents. Scripture uses adoption itself as a central image of the gospel, and Moses and Esther are only two of Scripture's own examples of children raised by families not their own.

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Category
Relationships
Passages
4 key scriptures

Key Chapters

Key Passages

Adoption of Children by Jesus Christ

Ephesians 1:5

Paul describes believers' relationship to God using the language of adoption - the gospel's central relational image is itself an adoption story.

H5aving predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,

A Father of the Fatherless

Psalms 68:5-6

God is described as father to the fatherless and the one who sets the solitary into families, directly naming His concern for children without parents.

A5 father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.

6 God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.

Visit the Fatherless

James 1:27

James defines pure religion partly as caring for orphans in their affliction - a direct call toward fostering and adoption.

P27ure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

Moses Becomes Pharaoh's Grandson

Exodus 2:9-10

Moses himself was raised in Pharaoh's household after being drawn from the river - Scripture's own account of a child adopted across barriers of origin.

A9nd Pharaohโ€™s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it.

10 And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaohโ€™s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.