Yes, we are all children of God. Even Satan is a child of God – let me explain:
First, some definitions – when I call God my “Heavenly Father”, I acknowledge that He is the father of my spirit. And, as we are all His spirit children, we lived in Heaven with Him before this earth life began (Jeremiah 1:5 “before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee”).
One of his spirit children was Lucifer – called a “son of the morning” in the scriptures, meaning one of the greatest ones of the heavenly host. The name Lucifer comes from the Latin, and means “light bringer”. Like all of God’s spirit children, he was created perfect – and like all of God’s children, he had free will.
Lucifer’s pride led him to rebel against God – he convinced 1/3 of the spirits in heaven that he would make a better leader - and they fought against Michael and the rest of the heavenly host (Revelation 12:7-9) and lost. As punishment, they were tossed out of heaven and cast down to Earth. And as greater punishment, they were all denied the opportunity to be born into physical bodies (I have no specific scripture to reference here, but it sure makes sense to me with many scriptural references to demons seeking to possess other’s bodies).
From that time forward in the scriptures, Lucifer is referred to as Satan.
Those who sided with God and fought alongside Michael received the privilege of being born in a physical sense and living upon this earth. As a result, we are able to learn the lessons and have the experiences that only physical life can give us – the hard lessons and the easy ones, the wonderful with the bitter. We share with Abraham the right to have seed, to love and nurture children and be part of a family, to be resurrected with a perfected body and someday to rejoin our Father in heaven eternally.
Satan will never have that, and being frustrated in accomplishing his plan of domination, is eternally angry and jealous of all of us. He takes his revenge by trying to ruin God’s plan for us, using lies and deceptions to make evil and destruction seem “fun” and gratifying.
Just like Lucifer, we have free will. We can accept Jesus, we can ignore him, or we can side with Satan who tries to convince us that being and doing good is a straitjacket, and true freedom consists of taking drugs, loving money more than loving your neighbor and licentious living – all things that will end up with us in chains, morally or literally.
And as for John 8:42, “Ye are of your father, the devil…”, it makes sense to me that it means a person who has chosen in this earthly life to side with Satan, and accepted him as his “father” – just as someone who does evil can be called a “devil”.
That’s it. That’s what I believe. We all live our lives and make our choices. We have great times and hard times, obstacles to overcome and hardships to bear as lessons to learn and experiences to have that we could have had no other way except to have a physical life. We are promised that it will all be worth it. We are promised that our eternal reward will far, far exceed anything we could even imagine here on earth.
And we are promised that when this life is over and we receive our perfected physical body, “not a hair on your head will be lost”. I’m really looking forward to that one!
