In those hours on the cross, Jesus would perform the greatest act in human history, accomplishing salvation through the atonement that only He as the God-man could offer (1 Peter 2:24). Part of God’s redemptive plan was for Jesus to be humiliated, a humiliation that involved the nakedness that David predicted in Psalm 22:18. The redemption alluded to was fulfilled in the redemption accomplished.

Good teachers teach in three parts: they tell you what they’re going to teach you, teach it to you, and then remind you what they just taught you (and why it’s important). These three views of a topic—forward looking, in the present, and backward—are critical for mastering any subject. The Bible, with God as master-teacher, does the same thing. The Old Testament tells what redemption will look like when it comes. The Gospels tell what God did through Jesus Christ to accomplish redemption. And in the rest of the New Testament, God details the intricacies of the redemption already accomplished and how He applies it to the church. In this way, the Bible tells of redemption alluded to, redemption accomplished, and redemption applied.
Consider how this schema plays out in Psalm 22:18, wherein David writes, “They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.” Here we have a redemption allusion. How do we know? First, we don’t have any biblical evidence of lot-casting enemies taking David’s clothing. This could be just an example of poetic metaphor employed by David to describe a particularly difficult situation he experienced.
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Reporter Julia Duin suggests that churches somehow conned families into adopting children without warning them about the challenges they might encounter. “Parents,” she writes, “now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren’t there for them now.” In particular, she says, parents weren’t prepared for the mental-health issues that the children in their care might have.

For some, churches are always the problem. Despite decades of efforts to recruit, train, and support families to foster and adopt children who have been neglected, abused, or abandoned, churches still get the blame when things go wrong. Some of these attacks are drearily predictable. Writers like Kathryn Joyce have made careers out of suggesting that Christians are engaged in child-trafficking, and that the only reason they want to take in orphans is to gain more adherents for the faith. But the most recent attack on churches—in the form of a feature-length article in Newsweek—is perhaps the most absurd yet.
Reporter Julia Duin suggests that churches somehow conned families into adopting children without warning them about the challenges they might encounter. “Parents,” she writes, “now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren’t there for them now.” In particular, she says, parents weren’t prepared for the mental-health issues that the children in their care might have.
This is a story that might have been written a quarter of a century ago, when Americans faced the aftermath of a rise in international adoptions. Christians had been adopting children from places like Romania, where they had endured neglect in institutions and had developed severe attachment disorders as a result. Just two years ago, in fact, The Atlantic ran a moving piece on the subject, describing a child named Izidor who was adopted from a Romanian institution at the age of 11 in 1991. He was never able to adapt to live in the home of the San Diego family who took him in. Ultimately, his violent outbursts and their inability to afford a psychiatric hospital for him led him to move out at the age of 18. As he told the author, “I’m not a person who can be intimate. It’s hard on a person’s parents, because they show you love and you can’t return it.” In the mid-to-late 1990s, the news was full of stories about such damaged adopted children. Indeed, more than one parent tried to send their child back.
So troubling were these experiences that child-development experts developed a program about 20 years ago to help kids who had experienced this trauma to learn how to function in a family. Foster parents and child-welfare systems around the country now use Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) to help children adopted internationally and from foster care.
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James acknowledges that he no longer belongs to himself. He is owned by God; he is now the property of Jesus Christ, his new master. But this was not always the case. Even though James and his brothers daily witnessed the sinlessness of Jesus, as well as his miracles (such as turning water into wine, John 2:12), they did not believe in him as Messiah. It appears that none of them did until after Jesus was crucified, buried, and risen.

Name-dropping is a popular way to impress others—even among Christians. To casually mention our association or loose acquaintance with a prominent person may immediately enlarge our perceived worth or influence in the eyes of those whose respect we crave. But James, the half-brother of Jesus himself, doesn’t succumb to that temptation. Instead, he calls himself “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.
James 1:1
Scripture informs us that James was one of at least six half-siblings of Jesus, the biological children of Joseph and Mary (Matt. 13:54-56). Though a half-brother, James was a blood relative of Jesus Christ just the same. Yet, never does James drop his half-brother’s name but instead introduces himself merely as “a servant of God.” He does not endorse himself as “James, the blood brother of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah; chief leader and spokesperson of the church in Jerusalem; defender of the gospel of grace; called an apostle by Paul himself” even though all of that is true (Acts 15:13, 19; Gal. 1:19; 2:9). On the contrary, James works hard not to draw attention to himself.
The term servant is best translated “slave,” which is the literal meaning of the Greek word doulos and “indicates full subjection to the authority of another.”[1] By referring to himself as such, James acknowledges that he no longer belongs to himself.
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