…”He is the Creator of our imaginations, our delights, and our interests. Positionally, before God and before the world, we are God’s child by covenant and union.
But also embrace that you are God’s child personally and experientially. Seek to live a life full of wonder, with a propensity to play as hard as you work, and with a ceaseless expectation that God’s goodness will follow you all the days of your life (Ps. 23:6).”
“In Christ, we are God’s children. In the Old Testament, Israel was understood to be God’s child (Ex. 4:22). In the New Testament, John reminds us: “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12–13).
And what a profound metaphor this is that God chose. The child belongs to the parent, and the parent belongs to the child. They are intended to be joined in the most beautiful way: the child nurtured within the parent’s loving care and the parent delighted by the child’s growth.
The Father’s table in the Father’s house is large and inviting; no background or ethnicity precludes anyone from the table who wants to be there. “
Read again the story of God choosing Abraham as the patriarch to establish His family of Promise, and Isaac as the Child of Promise through Abraham and Sarah. It seems clear to me that Abraham and Isaac both had a special and particularly intimate relationship with God….. Each had personal and intimate knowledge of God’s decision as God called each of them in his own generation to be God’s chosen Child to establish the Family of God. Then, with the third generation, Jacob, the one who wrestled (first with his twin brother Esau in the womb, then with the angel of God at Peniel) there was a struggle to establish the succession as the Child of Promise, and with it the coveted blessing of both the earthly Father and the heavenly Father. It is easy to see how coveted the position and blessing of being a Child of God and the bearer of the Promise of the Father’s blessing that would extend to all the nations of the world was …… To become the one who would bear the banner for the family name to the next generation.
But with the third successive generation God did something that, having been done with Abraham didn’t appear to have been necessary with Isaac, the Child whose actual life’s breath on Mount Moriah was continued by God’s merciful reprieve in the testing of Abraham’s and Isaac’s own obedience to honor and trust God completely.
Jacob fought for a blessing, not once but twice….. first through cunning before his earthly father against a brother who was distracted by his physical hunger and which left Jacob in fear and running from his bother most of his life. The second struggle was physical with the patient and divine angel of God whose identity Jacob didn’t seem to know but whom he recognized as a worthy competitor with authority and strength in this struggle and from whom Jacob asked for a blessing. Jacob received a physical reminder of his own limitation in wrestling with God, a limp from a dislocated hip, and a new name, Israel, both of which served as life long reminders that the desire to be the bearer of the blessing and a designated Child of Promise had a cost….obedience and understanding that God’s will is being carried out through the family line of succession. It is often difficult and costly, received not by one’s on cunning or strength, but by God’s will. The name of Israel would become the name of the tribe and then of the nation in this line of chosen successors. When Christ came in continuation of the line of family succession, it would no longer be defined through physical
birth but through spiritual rebirth by grace through faith. Obedience was still the requirement for all who would become Children of God, however.
While all humankind bears the Creator’s image of God and the ability to become Children of God, only those who know Him and who seek Him, knowing that relationship with God means being “family” with God and one another and living in obedience and receiving the blessing of bearing His Name and the family banner….which is love.