Why You Cannot "Become" a Child of God
We live in a deeply fractured world, obsessed with drawing lines in the sand. "Us" versus "them." The righteous versus the unrighteous. The insiders versus the outsiders.
But the most tragic line ever drawn isn’t political or national - it is religious.
For decades, modern Western theology has peddled a transactional, contract-based gospel. It tells a story where humanity is born orphaned, hostile, or worse, fundamentally belonging to the devil. According to this narrative, you are an outsider until you perform an act of human will: you walk down an aisle, say a specific prayer, and "give your life to Jesus." Only then, we are told, does the legal paperwork go through and God becomes your Father...
But this gets the entire cosmos backward.
It turns our faith into the saviour, rather than Christ. The explosive, beautiful reality preserved by the Early Church - and echoed by voices like Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance, and C. Baxter Kruger - is far more radical: You don’t choose your way into the family. God’s Fatherhood is not a reward for your correct behaviour or your correct beliefs.
All are God’s children. Bar none.
The Creator Owns the DNA
The idea that some people are fundamentally "children of the devil" relies on a severe misunderstanding of reality. For someone to be ontologically (in their very being) a child of the devil, the devil would have to be a creator.
But the enemy has no power to create life, sustain life, or knit a soul together in a mother’s womb. Satan owns no property, creates no substance, and has no children. He only has captives.
When Jesus confronted the religious leaders in John 8:44, saying, "You belong to your father, the devil," Western readers mistakenly view this through a modern biological or legal lens. But in the Ancient Near East, "sonship" was a metaphor for apprenticeship and mimicry. If you apprenticed under a builder, you were a "son of building."
Jesus was not redefining their human origin; He was exposing their current alignment. He was saying, "You are mimicking the Accuser. You are operating out of a satanic system of scapegoating, judgment, and exclusion, rather than the Father’s system of grace." It was a fierce critique of their allegiance, not a cancellation of their identity.
"Giving your life to Jesus" is not the moment you convince God to adopt you. It is the moment you wake up from spiritual amnesia and realise you were never an orphan to begin with.
The Alienation is in Our Minds, not our Identity
Modern teaching says God is alienated from us until Christ changes His mind. But Paul turns this on its head in Colossians 1:21: "And you, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled." The hostility, the distance, and the orphan spirit were entirely our illusion.
Some common Objections:But John 1:12 says 'to all who did receive him... he gave the right to become children of God.'
The Western lens reads the word "become" as a transition from 0% child to 100% child. But the Greek word used here is ginomai, which means to enter into a new state of manifestation, to blossom, or to experience a reality.
Think of a seed. An acorn is already ontologically an oak tree in its design, but it has to "become" what it is in experience. Receiving Christ is the awakening that allows your true identity to blossom into actual lived reality. You are stepping into the functional inheritance of a sonship that was already yours in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4).
"If everyone is already a child, what was the point of the Cross?"
The Cross was not a transactional bribe paid to a wrathful God to make Him love us. The Cross was the ultimate jailbreak.
As George Macdonald and David Bentley Hart remind us, Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection were God plunging into the depths of human blindness, death, and ruin to drag His children back into the light. If anyone is permanently left behind, or if anyone belongs inherently to darkness, then evil has won a permanent victory over a piece of God's creation. True victory means the devil is left with nothing - because everything, and everyone, belongs to the Father.
The Ultimate Jailbreak
The gospel is not an invitation to become something you aren't; it is the explosive good news of who you already are in Christ.
Jesus did not arrive on earth to set up an adoption agency for strangers. He came to reclaim His own flesh and blood. Our mission to the world is not to go around telling people they are broken, wretched outsiders who need to say a prayer to get God to love them.
Our mission is to look into the eyes of every human being we meet - no matter how lost, how broken, or how deceived - and tell them the truth:
"You have a Father who has never stopped looking for you. You belong at the table. It’s time to come home."