Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Children and the Kingdom of Heaven

Reading in Luke 18.16-17 this morning. As usual when Christ sees a teaching moment, he seizes it. In this case the disciples obviously assumed that Christ couldn't be bothered with little children since he had much more important things to do, like healing the sick and preaching the gospel. Christ demonstrates both compassion and concern for little children as well as teaching the disciples that if one were to enter the kingdom of God, one must do it with child-like faith.

It seems to me that one of the key ingredients of the faith of a child is dependency. The child is dependent upon his parents and doesn't spend a lot of time wondering how or where the next meal is going to come from, that is for parents to worry about, not children. As Thomas Constable puts it:

Obviously infants are not humble in the same sense that adults show humility, but infants are humble in the sense of being totally dependent and unable to provide for themselves. They receive rather than provide, and in those qualities they are good examples of humility.

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