Why Are We "Children of God"?

Why does the Bible say that we can become "children of God"?

There's a number of angles one can take on that question and perhaps I'll revisit those later. Today I want to discuss why it is "children" of God, and not some other word that implies adulthood.

In this world, childhood is a temporary state. Parents are often reminded "the days are long but the years are short", that your children will not be children forever.

The Bible never suggests that for those who choose to become Children of God that the status as "children" ever ends. We seem to be children forever.

Why is that?

We have a hard time visualizing Heaven from our current perspective. Many of us worry that it could become boring because we might run out of things to do or something if we live forever. I think that is not the case, because we will be growing forever. We will not run out of "things to do" because we will ourselves be growing. We will become capable of doing even more things as we grow, and those new things will always out pace our growth.

(I put quotes around "things to do" because that isn't the right way to think about it, but that's also a topic for another day.)

So if we grow forever, when do we catch up to God?

Never. We never catch up to God. He is infinite. Finite beings can never catch up to infinity by the accumulation of finite growth in finite time.

That means that in relation to God, we will forever be His children.

In the current world we associate childhood with necessary restrictions, limitations of responsibility, and certain barriers that we can not overcome until we are "adults" by the standards of our culture. There is particularly in our modern world an uncomfortable stretch of years where our bodies say that we are ready to be adults but our cultures and the requirements of the modern world say we are not ready to be full "adults".

Once we transition to "adult", there is no further growth we culturally recognize. There are very few rights that a culture only accords to people once they are 40 years old. It's pretty much just the one transition to "adulthood" and that's it.

These sorts of concepts will not apply to this sort of childhood. The time will come when the followers of Christ are far more "adult" than any current adult. All the positive qualities of adulthood - responsibility, control, ability, authority - all will be had in inconceivably greater quantities compared to anyone alive today. The negative aspects that we associate with the word "child" will not apply.

But we will forever be "children" of God, because compared to Him, we will still be just beginning to grow.