Yes.
Ye are the children of the LORD your God. Deuteronomy 14:1 All of you are children of the most High. Psalm 82:6 Ye are the sons of the living God. Hosea 1:10 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. Matthew 5:48 Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Matthew 6:9, Luke 11:2 Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. John 20:17 We are the offspring of God. Acts 17:29
Cited passages
You are the children of Yahweh your God. You shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.
I said, “You are gods, all of you are sons of the Most High.
Yet the number of the children of Israel will be as the sand of the sea, which can’t be measured or counted; and it will come to pass that, in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’
Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The question pits universal-sounding sonship language—Deuteronomy 14:1 ("ye are the children of the LORD your God"), Psalm 82:6 ("all of you are children of the most High"), Hosea 1:10, the Lord's Prayer, John 20:17, Acts 17:29 ("we are the offspring of God")—against Galatians 3:26, "ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus," which implies that without that faith one is not. Either everyone is already God's child by creation and covenant, or only believers are God's children by faith.
The standard apologetic harmonization distinguishes two senses of divine sonship: a creation sense (every human is God's offspring as a created being, Acts 17:29) and a covenant/adoptive sense (some are God's children as heirs adopted into the family). Deuteronomy and the Psalms operate in the first; Paul in Galatians 3:26 in the second; the categories address different relationships and do not conflict. N. T. Wright develops this in Paul and the Faithfulness of God, and James Scott's Adoption as Sons of God gives the granular case for *huiothesia* as a Pauline-specific adoptive category distinct from generic creation-sonship. This is one of the stronger harmonizations in the corpus because it tracks a real distinction in usage. Acts 17:29 in the Areopagus speech invokes explicitly Stoic creation language—"we are God's offspring" (*tou gar kai genos esmen*) quoting the poet Aratus's Phaenomena—a manifestly different mode of sonship than Galatians intends. Dunn's BNTC Galatians and Betz's Hermeneia Galatians both read 3:26 within a specific argumentative thread about Abrahamic descent and incorporation into the people of God through Christ, not a denial that all humans are creatures of God.
The tension is not fully neutralized, however, because the canon deploys more than two senses, with unstable referents. Psalm 82:6 in its original setting is not fictive-kinship language at all: it is a divine-council scene in which Yahweh judges the lesser *elohim* and calls them "sons of the Most High," which Smith and others read as residual Israelite polytheism. When John 10:34 has Jesus cite the verse against blasphemy charges, He reapplies it to humans, expanding the reach of "sons of God" yet again. Across the canon the phrase therefore denotes divine-council members, all Israel, faithful Israel, all humanity as creatures, and specifically those with faith in Christ—no single stable referent.
More pointedly, Deuteronomy 14:1's "children of the LORD your God" is addressed to all Israel by virtue of corporate covenant membership, not by individual faith, whereas Galatians 3:26 makes sonship contingent on faith in Christ and thereby excludes anyone outside that faith—including unbelieving ethnic Israel. Paul's argument *requires* redefining who counts as God's children, which is precisely why Romans 9-11 grows so labored, distinguishing "children of the flesh" from "children of the promise" (Rom 9:8) and wrestling with the standing of ethnic Israel. Caroline Johnson Hodge's If Sons, Then Heirs shows how Paul reconstructs kinship and ethnicity around Christ rather than around birth. Fitzmyer's commentary on Acts confirms the creation-sonship register of the Areopagus speech.
The creation-sense/adoptive-sense distinction is theologically clean and dissolves the bluntest form of the contradiction. But it does not erase that Paul reframed the covenant relationship in a way the older texts did not anticipate, narrowing corporate-covenantal sonship to faith-defined sonship.
Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable by recognizing distinct senses of sonship, with a genuine residual tension over which sense is authoritative for membership in God's people.
Sources for this reading