John 8:39-40 (NIV)
“Abraham is our father,” they answered.
“If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things.”
The Jewish people prided themselves on being children of Abraham. By that they meant that they shared physical descent and were thus a part of the people who had been chosen by God and taken out of the nations to be His own people.
But Jesus was thinking about much more than mere physical descent. In Hebrew and Aramaic, the term “son of” indicates more than genetics; it indicates likeness. Thus, when Jesus called the Pharisees and teachers of the law a “brood of vipers” (literally sons of snakes) (Matthew 23:33), He was referring to shared character, not shared genes.
And there was even an element of this in His own two titles. The title “Son of man” indicates Jesus’ humanity, the characteristics that He shared with all mankind. His title “Son of God” (often abbreviated by Him to simply “the Son”), in addition to pointing to a literal truth, indicated to the people that heard Him use that terminology that His character, mindset, and actions were the same as God’s.
Thus, when the Jews Jesus was teaching and talking to claimed to be sons of Abraham, Jesus saw a horrible contradiction. The character of those people didn’t resemble Abrahams’s character at all! Abraham was a humble man of high character and deep devotion to God, completely submissive to His will. These people, on the other hand, were rebellious, resisting God’s direction, and rejecting His own Son, His chosen Messiah. Thus, Jesus was exactly right in calling their claim to be children of Abraham bogus. The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, but these “children” were far from Abraham in every essential.
Father, this is very interesting, and adds a dimension to our understanding of what the Scripture writers were referring to when they say that we, as Christians, can become “children of God” by faith in in Jesus. It clearly refers to transformation rather than simply status (2 Corinthians 5:17), to re-creation into the image of Jesus (Romans 8:29) so that we actually resemble You just like Jesus did, in character, in holiness, and in our actions. Keep molding and shaping me, Lord, so that I am made worthy to be called a child of God. Amen.