What’s so special about Jesus, anyway? Aren’t we ALL God’s children?!

The phrase “all God's children” feels generous, and in one sense it is true — every person is made by God and bears his image. But the Bible uses the word “children” in two different senses, and the whole argument turns on which one is meant.

1. Scripture does call all people God's offspring. Paul quotes a pagan poet approvingly: “In him we live and move and have our being… for we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28). So the Bible is not stingy about the Creator-creature relationship. Everything that exists depends on God moment by moment, and that dependence is universal.

2. Creation gives every person enormous dignity. Every human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), which is why Christian ethics has insisted on the worth of the slave, the unborn, the disabled, and the enemy. Nothing in the Christian answer denies this. If anything, it grounds it more firmly than the alternative does.

3. But “children of God” is a relationship, not a birthright. John writes, “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). The verb matters. You do not become what you already are. The New Testament treats sonship as something received, not something everyone automatically possesses.

4. The New Testament language is adoption. Paul says God “predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:5). Adoption is the deliberate, costly act of bringing an outsider into a family — not a biological given. That is a strange image to choose if the point were merely that God made everyone.

5. Jesus is Son in a different category. He is called the only Son (John 3:16), the one who was with the Father before the world existed (John 17:5). Christians become children by grace; he is Son by nature. The difference is not one of degree, the way a good man is closer to God than a bad one. It is a difference in kind, and the New Testament is consistent about it.

6. Sin is why a relationship has to be restored. If everyone were already a child of God in the full sense, there would be nothing to reconcile. But Paul says we were enemies who needed to be reconciled to God (Romans 5:10), and that those far off had to be brought near (Ephesians 2:13). The whole shape of the gospel assumes a rupture, not just a misunderstanding.

7. The Spirit is the evidence of adoption. “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). This is a lived relationship, not a bare fact about your origin. It is the difference between being descended from a man and actually knowing him as your father.

8. Become something is not the same as being something. If everyone is already a child of God in the full sense, then the incarnation, the cross, and the resurrection are all solutions to a problem that did not exist. The objection, taken seriously, makes the central events of Christianity unnecessary. That is a high price to pay for a slogan.

9. Uniqueness is not contempt. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). That is a claim about who he is, not a ranking of cultures or a license to despise anyone. And note that the objector's own view is exclusive too: “all religions lead to God” is a claim that excludes the one that says they do not.

Everyone is made by God and bears his image; that is the ground of human dignity and the reason Christians should treat no one with contempt. But being made by God and being adopted into his family are two different things, and the New Testament keeps them apart on purpose.

Sources: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; John Lennox; Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods.

Related challenges:
• Did Jesus really claim to be God, or did His followers just say that about Him? Might not Dan Brown have been on to something?
• It should be called Paulianity – for centuries Christians have presented the ideas of Paul as the teachings of Jesus, and that’s a mistake. It was all Paul’s INTERPRETATION. Check the data.
• Jesus is a borrowed myth dressed up like a Jew. He never existed, period. There is zero SUFFICIENT evidence that Jesus ever existed? Zero. It’s all a terrible hoax for the church to control the masses.