Born Again to a Living Hope
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. - 1 Peter 1:3-4
V.3
Verse 3 basically reads like this when using my Greelingish: "Blessed be the monogenes of the Father and Son!" - The Greek word here is μνογενὴς, which means one of a kind, or something with a relationship to something else that is unique. I could say that our marriage is a monogenes. Other people are married, but no one else is married to you or I. Their status as a married couple might be the same, and they might live almost exactly as we do, but their marriage is not the marriage of Tyler and Sarah Thomas.
Everyone thinks that all people are God's children. It sounds nice and sells stickers, but it's not a Biblical understanding of the relationship between God and mankind. It goes without saying that Jesus is the one and only son of God. They share a monogenes that even the church isn't a part of. People are born hostile towards God, and once they are called to faith do they enter into a relationship with God, but to just call us children of God is a bit of an oversimplification that is worthwhile to fully understand.
ᐖ Hold this thought. I want to elaborate on that relationship a little more, but I need to go into verse 4 and I have one more thing to add related to verse 3.
I always think it's cool when you stumble across a Greek word for a Hebrew word, especially if it has a huge theological impact on the text. The Greek word used for "Lord Jesus Christ" in verse 3 is kyrios, which is a translation of the Hebrew word "Adonai." This isn't rare, in fact kyrios is used 740 times in the New Testament, and always in reference to Jesus. Adonai is a word that both modern day Jews and those of that time would have clearly understood. It is one of the names of God the Father used in the Old Testament, and it implies a plurality of God himself. It makes for one of those confusing situations where you wonder why there are people that aren't Trinitarian. From the Old Testament to the New, God is referred to as Adonai. Then, here in 1 Peter we have it applied to Jesus. When you couple that with the previous word "monogenes," it just seems difficult to try and explain away the fact that Jesus was clearly known as one with God the Father.
V.4
ᐖ Back to that relationship.
Our relationship to God is based on Christ, and it involves that inheritance Peter mentions. When you think about all of the different ways the Bible describes us as children of God, it should be clear that it's not a direct relationship that we can just stumble into after saying a prayer and asking Jesus into our hearts. The New Testament uses words like adoption, heirs, inheritance and others for a reason. It's because we were once enslaved to our sin and hateful towards God. Then, out of nowhere and based on nothing we did, God took us into his family and promised us the same inheritance as his one and only Son. He set us aside and we became one of his many children.
The oversimplification comes in the form of throwing around the phrase "children of God" as if it applies to all of mankind. People like to say things like: "We need to love of those atheists because they're still God's children." or "Well, Jimbo might not love God, but he's still a child of God." - The Bible makes it clear that the only child of God is Jesus Christ, but that some people were chosen to be adopted. Those that are adopted are immediately given an inheritance that we can't even begin to comprehend. Unless we want to say that everyone gets the same eternal inheritance that is being stored in heaven (which is Universalism, and heretical), then we cannot rightly call everyone a child of God.
On the other side of that, we should be filled with joy and happiness knowing that we are beneficiaries of the death of Christ. We should be humble knowing what we deserve, and thankful knowing what we will actually receive.