What a comfort it is to be assured that we are all children of God, a truth which Catholics must always affirm. “I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me,” we are divinely told (2 Cor 6:18).
This profound and covenantal truth is, in fact, the greatest and most powerful consolation we can have in this vale of tears (Ps 83:6-7, 13 DRB). God loves us. God creates, sustains and teaches us. God desires, though, that we freely and generously respond to His love with our own love; and we are endowed with the liberty to choose or to repudiate His Way and His Will.
Too rarely are we warned that being children of God is our free choice. We are free to renounce that status by our deeds and declarations. There is a simple way to teach this: we are stronger than God. That is, we may push God away at any time, and He will not resist us. We are called to trust in His divine will, knowing that He will respect our human wills. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, the core of sin consists in our preferring ourselves to God (398). For a time or for all eternity, then, we can refuse our inheritance as children of God. Such refusal is spiritual madness, of course, but history – and our own lives – testify that we are heir to such moral insanity (Eccl 9:3; also see Jer 17:9, Gal 5:19, CCC 1869 and 408).
Being children of God, however, is never license for sinful, immoral or depraved behavior (Rev 21:8, 1 Cor 6:9, Ps 72:27).
By the way, that is one key lesson of Esau’s sale of his birthright for a “mess of pottage” (Jacob’s bean soup), teaching us that Esau was (and we are) prone to the kind of moral myopia which leads to favoring instant gratification (Gen 25:29-34) rather than diligence and patience (James 5:8). How many times have we all been willing to “sell” our sacred birthright of being God’s children for immediate and profane pleasure, power or prestige? Not for nothing are we counseled that “he who trusts in his own mind is a fool” (Prv 28:26; 3:5).
Scripture offers a clear, concise and cogent explanation of this sweeping religious reality, so vividly taught in First John: “Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God’s children” (3:1). Two conditions, however, obtain. First, we must break with sin, trying “to be as pure as Christ”; and, second, we must keep the Commandments:
My children, do not let anyone lead you astray:
to live a holy life is to be holy just as he is holy;
to lead a sinful life is to belong to the devil,
since the devil was a sinner from the beginning. ...
In this way we distinguish the children of God
from the children of the devil. (1 John 3:7-8,10 JB)
The helpful notes about this passage tell readers that, among the expressions John uses to differentiate between our living under the commands of God as opposed to those living under the influence of the devil is John’s reference to our disordered love of the impermanent world: “You must not love this passing world or anything that is in the world. The love of the Father cannot be in any man who loves the world because nothing the world has to offer – the sensual body, the lustful eye, pride in possessions – could ever come from the Father but only from the world” (2:15-16).
In refusing to break with sin and to keep God’s commandments, we decline to be children of God and become children of the devil – that is, the brood of the diabolical, seduced by an impermanent and meretricious world. That is the background of the Thomist traditional understanding of sin as “aversio a Deo, conversio ad creaturam” (“aversion to God and conversion to the creature”).
Sin is loving the wrong person or thing, for the wrong reason, at the wrong time, in the wrong way. There is never any right to do wrong, or to label what is evil “good” or what is morally disordered as “desirable” or “permissible.”
God is essence – that is, the perfectly lovable and loving, eternal, immutable, omniscient and omnipotent creator, but we are existentially always tempted by our concupiscent nature to choose our will over His – to indulge ourselves, to do things “My Way,” as Sinatra once sang. God is paradigm, paragon, pattern, prototype. His divine Son is our model (John 13:15). God’s Way is that to which we must conform ourselves (Rom 12:2; Mt 6:10), and therein is our genuine happiness. When we sin, we deny God’s essence, and we substitute the existential, the ephemeral and the effete for what is objectively and absolutely good and true and beautiful, which is the Mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16).
Sin is always the choice, directly or indirectly, of the transitory over the eternal, the human over the cosmic, and the particular over the general. Such malevolent nominalism, voluntarism and subjectivism – in a simpler word, selfishness – will deprive us of our inheritance as God’s children. In sinning, we renounce the perfection to which we are called and the divine model which we are to emulate: “Do not model yourself on the behavior of the world around you, but let your behavior change, modeled by your new mind. This is the only way to discover the will of God and know what is good, what it is that God wants, what is the perfect thing to do” (Rom 12:2 JB; also see 1 Pt 1:15).
Be careful: when we enthrone ourselves, we dethrone God. Moral autonomy – meaning I do whatever exalts my power, prestige, or pleasure – leads to a society in which a “mass of individuals (are) placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. ... Reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism” (St. John Paul II, “Evangelium vitae,” 20). If you desire the brotherhood of man, do not forsake the Fatherhood of God. Remain His children by knowing, loving and serving Him (John 14:15; 1 John 2:3, 5:1-5).
We hear so much about being children of God. We must, though, hear much more about our duty to be educated in and committed to the faith (CCC 1783-1785): “Then we shall not be children any longer, or tossed one way and another and carried along by every wind of doctrine, at the mercy of all the tricks men play and their cleverness and practicing deceit” (Eph 4:14; Heb 13:9).
In the same way that we can forfeit our salvation by mortal sin (1 John 5:16, 2 Pt 2:20, CCC 1855), so can we relinquish the great gift of being God’s children by renouncing Our Heavenly Father and rejecting His sacred teaching (1 Thess 4:8, 1 Sam 8:7). In the Holy Mass, after the Lamb of God/Agnus Dei, the priest says quietly: “Keep me always faithful to your commandments, and never permit me to be parted from you.” Thus may we always be obedient children of God, advancing “in wisdom, and age, and grace with God and men” (Luke 2:52 DRB).
Deacon James H. Toner is retired from service at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.