The family of God has an unusual genesis. It has a Father like other families but it also has another member who made the family possible: a big brother. In the family of God everyone has a big brother and the big brother is Jesus. He is the “oldest” of the siblings because He is the first of the newly designed humans, the first of the new Adams. He was the first to live an ideal human life and he did this is order to blaze a new trail for the rest of us to follow. The power he had to be the first ideal human is available to us too.
When we first believe we receive a new self that is like Jesus’ pure human self but it is an infant new self. God’s goal was to choose people “to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom. 8:29 NLT). Now Jesus promises that “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matt. 12:50 ESV). If this doesn’t blow your mind then it is not registering with you. It should seem too fantastic!
“we are blood relatives of Jesus”
How can Jesus be our brother? Like biological relatives we are blood relatives of Jesus. We are all related to Jesus through his shed blood and through the “spiritual blood” that we share with him. Jesus’ perfect human nature is the spiritual blood and spiritual DNA that now courses through our spirit. This is why Scripture also says that “you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it” (I Cor. 12:27 NIV) and Christ “is the head” and “from him the whole body…grows and builds itself up in love” (Eph. 4:15-16 NIV).
All this flows from the fact that we and Jesus have the same Father. This is the bombshell revelation about God that Jesus brought to us, that through Jesus God chose us to be his children and He will be our Father. Unlike us, Jesus is also divine but he did not depend on his divinity to live his human life, instead God the Son emptied himself of his divine rights and lived the life that we all have the potential to live. Now God the Father unites us all together in one loving family.
