Are all God's children, children of God?

(ISRAEL TODAY)

By Brian Hennessy

In my last article I quoted Pope Francis’s belief that the devotees of any religion can be considered “children of God.” However, I focused mainly on the ramifications of that belief, which says it doesn’t matter what name we call God, or how we serve Him. And I tried to show how the Bible utterly rejects that understanding.

Nevertheless, it is true God created everyone on earth. So in the broadest sense of the term it could be said we are all “children of God.”  But when we look in the Bible we find the term defined in far narrower terms. Paul writes:  “It is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise who are regarded as descendants” (Rom. 9:8).

Clearly, the term “children of God” cannot be applied to everyone in the world. Or to all the followers of the world’s religions. But is limited to a certain group of people known as “the children of promise.”

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Well, who are these blessed people? If we keep reading in Romans 9 we find out. It is those who by their divinely ordained birth are the fulfillment of a promise made specifically to one man – Abraham. “For this is a word of promise: At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son” (v. 9). That promised son, of course, arrived right on time and was named Isaac. He became the first miraculous child of promise. And from then on, only his descendants would be reckoned “children of God”.

However, Paul then goes on to show that not even all of Isaac’s descendants would automatically qualify as children of God!

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