I received this question...

My dad left home when I was 10. Am I an illegitimate child?

I will answer.

I love the way Paul addresses Christians at the opening of the letter to the Ephesians emphasizing the 'family' aspect of being a part of God's family. I will highlight a few of the words to help make my point...

Ephesians 1:4-14
...for He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight. In love 5 He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ for Himself, according to His favor and will, 6 to the praise of His glorious grace that He favored us with in the Beloved. ... 10 for the administration) of the days of fulfillment-to bring everything together in the Messiah, both things in heaven and things on earth in Him. 11 In Him we were also made His inheritance, predestined according to the purpose of the One who works out everything in agreement with the decision of His will, 12 so that we who had already put our hope in the Messiah might bring praise to His glory. 13 In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation-in Him when you believed-were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. 14 He is the down payment of our inheritance, for the redemption of the possession, to the praise of His glory. (HCSB)

Notice the combining of the legal ideas of being a part of God's family... inheritance, redemption, adopted... and the overriding truth that this was, and we are, a part of God's purposed will... even before the foundation of the world!

I have a hard time regarding some one as illegitimate, or a bastard, that the New Testament teaches their life was planned by God before the world was even created.

The idea of being a bastard in the scripture has a rather unique meaning.

Deut. 23:2 "No one of illegitimate birth may enter the Lord's assembly; none of his descendants, even to the tenth generation, may enter the Lord's assembly." (HCSB)

In the Old Testament a bastard was the offspring of a Jew with a non-Jew, therefore, most of us would be considered bastards by an Old Testament standard.... at best! Jews were forbidden to even speak with bastards or they would be ceremonially unclean.

We see Jesus assaulting this prejudice in John 4 with His encountering the woman at the well. She was a Samaritan, who the Jews disdained as bastards because the Samaritans were in fact cross-breeds of the Jews left behind during the Babylonian captivity and the other tribes left in Palestine. Jesus talked with her, taught her... Jesus drank from her cup. The result... she and most of her village accepted Him as the Messiah.

I think we should be very careful about how we label people that Jesus died for, esp. this label of illegitimate/bastard.

We do find the word used once in the New Testament in Hebrews 12:8:

"But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons." (KJV)

Here the reference is to a spiritual condition, not a physical condition of birthed circumstances.

In summary, do we believe that God is the author of life? Do we believe that humans are created in the image and likeness of God? Do we believe Ephesians chapter one, that God predestined every Christian before the world was even created?

In Christ's Kingdom there are no bastards. Every child of God is a planned child... a wanted child.

xtnyoda, shalomed