How To Become A Child of God

Jesus is the only Son of God. John 3 .16 tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, the monoyenesh, meaning only born. He is the only born. Jesus is particular as the only Son, and God is particular as the Father of the only Son,.

A common misconception that is often thrown out as the defense mechanism of a convicted conscience when we are out preaching on the street is this, we are all God's children. This assertion is used to quiet the convicted conscience because it assumes that if we are in fact all God's children, then God must be for us all.

God must be in favor of us all, no matter how we think about Him, no matter how we live before Him, no matter what we do in His name. It assumes that all will be all right for everybody because surely God would not judge His own children too severely.

Surely God would not cast His own children into hell. Indeed, He would not. But the plain teaching of Scripture is that not everyone is a child of God. Taking biblical categories into consideration, ontologically speaking, that is naturally God is the Father of one.

He is the Father of the Son, the monoyenesh, the only born, the only Son. He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This renders the statement, we are all God's children, simply untrue. Jesus is the Son of the Father by nature, and by nature the Bible says that sinners are children of wrath, disobedience, and the devil.

You will notice that our text not only praises the particularity of the relation as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but the God and Father, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself says in John 20, 17, He says, Go to my brethren and say to them, I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.

Of course, also on the cross, Jesus cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? How do we explain this? Well, it simply means that God is His Father according to His divine nature. He is the eternal Son of the Father, and He is the God of our Lord Jesus Christ according to His human nature.

Christ became a human being and thus could acknowledge God as His God, and so He was truly God and truly man. Now contemplating the particularity of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ ought to move our hearts to bless Him.

But look again at John 20, 17, or listen, what does Jesus, the only Son, say to His disciples? He says, Go to my brethren, my brethren, which leads us to our second observation under this heading, our particularity by extension.

Jesus is the Son of the Father by nature, but because He took on human flesh and became a human being like ourselves and lived for us as a man and died in the place of men and rose from the dead for men, we too may be counted as sons of God in Him, not by nature like Him, eternally generated, but by extension in Him, being united to Him by faith.

And how, how does this new particularity of ours come about? Without doubt, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ causes us to be born again. He unites us to the only born, and so we become His brethren.