When the angelic hosts descended upon the Bethlehem hillside, announcing, “Glory to God in the highest,” they were not merely heralding a birth—they were revealing heaven’s hierarchy in a single, luminous moment.
The One Set Apart
Jesus, in defending His divinity in John 10:34–35, pointed back to Psalm 82:6: “I said, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.'” His argument was brilliantly simple: if Scripture called fallible human judges “gods” (elohim) because they bore God’s image and carried His word, “how much more is it appropriate for the One whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world” to claim divine sonship and authority?
This is the One set apart—sanctified before entering creation, sent with divine purpose, the perfect Image-Bearer of God.
Angels Attending to Jesus
At Bethlehem’s manger, we see the celestial order on display. Angels—those magnificent created beings—attend to the Son of God. They announce Him, worship Him, and minister to His arrival. Yet these same angels are described in Hebrews 1:14 as “ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.”
Angels also serve us. They attend to Christ, and they attend to all mankind, because we are all made in His image and bear His likeness.
And yet, not all are children of God. In fact, Jesus says many are sons of the devil. We might ask, how can this be?
Humanity occupies a unique position in the heavenly hierarchy—above the angels, below God alone. We are imago Dei, bearers of the divine image, crowned with glory and destined to judge angels (1 Corinthians 6:3). Though we are temporarily made “a little lower than the angels”, God has placed “everything in subjection under [our] feet” (Hebrews 2:7-8).
Between Angels and Jesus
The scene at Bethlehem illuminates this profound truth: between the angels and Jesus, we stand as “gods”—not divine ourselves, but “of God,” created in His image and elevated above all other creatures. The angels who sang over the Christ-child also guard and minister to every child born in His image.
When Jesus later defended calling Himself the Son of God, He was reminding His accusers that Scripture itself acknowledged this unique status of humanity. If mere human judges could be called “elohim” because they bore God’s image and word, how could they object to the One who perfectly embodies both acting in the authority of God?
The angels at Bethlehem understood what Jesus’s opponents did not: they were attending the arrival of the One through whom all image-bearers would be restored to their rightful place—seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, above angels, forever “of God.”
In the manger, heaven’s order was made flesh. And the angels, by attending, acknowledged it.
The Tragic Choice: Sons of the Devil
Yet though all bear God’s image, not all are His children. Jesus said to the religious leaders of His day: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires… When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
How does an image-bearer become a child of the devil—a fallen angel? The answer echoes from Eden. When the serpent whispered, “Did God actually say…?” (Genesis 3:1), humanity faced a choice: believe God’s word or believe the devil’s lie. In choosing to trust the serpent’s deception over God’s clear command, Adam and Eve aligned themselves with the father of lies. They forfeited their inheritance and “exchanged the truth about God for a lie” (Romans 1:25)—trading their place in God’s family for a perverted image of their true identity.
This same choice confronts every person. Scripture draws the line clearly: “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is he who does not love his brother” (1 John 3:10). We were all once “sons of disobedience… carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:2-3). Despite bearing God’s image, we stood outside His family.
The distinction is not about creation but about belief. Bearing God’s image does not make us His children—only faith in His Word does.
“To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).
Those who reject Christ and cling to the devil’s lies remain outside the kingdom. Jesus warned, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven… I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me'” (Matthew 7:21, 23).
The angels attended the One sent to restore us, and now our destiny—seated with Christ above angels as children of God—is the very inheritance for which we were created.
“Bearing God’s image does not make us His children – only faith in His word does”. Thanks for such a clear delineation.