Matthew 11:25 At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. 26 Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. 27 “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
The matter which I want to explore here is the pleasure of the Father in revealing ‘these things’ to little children and hiding them from the wise and learned. Why does the Father hide ‘these things’ from the wise and learned? How can we be like little children so as to receive the revelation of God?
God’s good pleasure is related to his salvation of sinners. This is a repeated refrain in the OT. “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me” (2 Samuel 22:20). “In your good pleasure make Zion prosper; build up the walls of Jerusalem” (Psalm 51:18). “But I pray to you, O LORD, in the time of your favour; in your great love, O God, answer me with your sure salvation” (Psalm 69:13). “Remember me, O LORD, when you show favour to your people, come to my aid when you save them” (Psalm 106:4). “His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man; the LORD delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love” (Psalm 147:10-11). “For the LORD takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with salvation” (Psalm 149:4).
In the NT, the delight of the Father is firstly and primarily in his Son, Jesus Christ. This is evident from the baptism of Jesus. “And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased“” (Matthew 3:17). When Jesus heals many people, Matthew states that this is the fulfilment of the passage in Isaiah 42:1-4: “Here is my servant whom I have chosen, the one I love, in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations” (Matt 12:18). Again at the transfiguration the Father expresses his delight in his Son. “While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”” (Matthew 17:5).
The Father’s pleasure is also evident in passages to do with the sonship of believers. “He predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will” (Ephesians 1:5). “And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ” (Ephesians 1:9). “For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Philippians 2:13). God’s desire then is to bring salvation to sinners, because he desires human beings to be his sons in Christ Jesus.
It is the way in which this salvation comes to sinners which is the subject of the saying of Jesus above. The wise and learned are not those who have knowledge of God revealed to them but children. It is the pleasure of the Father to reveal himself to those who are not steeped in their own cleverness. Wisdom is often praised in the Old Testament, because wisdom is something which enables a person to live rightly. But there are passages which speak of wisdom as a hindrance.
The Lord says: “These people come near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. Therefore once more I will astound these people with wonder upon wonder; the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish” (Isa 29:13-14).
This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD (Jer 9:23-24).
The problem with human wisdom is that it overrides what God has revealed. It is not possible for human beings to find God and understand him according to their own cleverness.
Paul makes use of the passage from Isaiah when he writes of the foolishness of the cross.
1 Corinthians 1:18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” 20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.
For those who are steeped in their own cleverness and their own wisdom, the cross does not make sense. Therefore, the cross becomes something secondary to life and irrelevant to theology. In some places the cross has become a mere adjunct to preaching, rather than the centre. It has been reduced to ‘Jesus died on the cross for my sins’ and now I must live my life as best I can. The message of the cross has little impact on the theology of many Christians.
Jesus says that ‘these things’ have been hidden from the wise and learned. The Father does not reveal himself to all of humanity. This is evidenced by the fact that Jesus spoke in parables to the crowds.
Matthew 13:10 The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” 11 He replied, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. 13 This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. 14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. 15 For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’
Knowledge of the Father is given to some and not to others. There are some whose hearts are hard and therefore cannot understand. But there are others who desire to understand the things which God reveals – “many prophets and righteous men longed to see what you see” (v 17). The attitude of the heart is vital here.
The things of God are hidden from those who are full of their own cleverness, but they are revealed to little children. “Little children” means infants or children who are so young that they are not yet speaking. Such children have had no opportunity to build up a body of rational knowledge and self-taught cleverness. They are unable to assimilate the cleverness of worldly wisdom because of their youth. Yet, this saying is probably intended to be understood metaphorically, in which case those to whom God reveals himself would be people who are unschooled in the cleverness of the world, with its clever deductions about what God must be like.
But according to this passage, the one to whom God is revealed is first of all his Son. “All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (v 27). Before the Father chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he has first revealed himself to the Son. The Father knows the Son perfectly and intimately, and the Son in return knows the Father. This must surely be the pattern for knowledge of the Father. The Father knows those who are created in his image and to (some of) these he reveals himself so that those in his image may know him. Both of these activities take place through the Son. The Father knows those who has created in his image through his Son, because all things were made through Christ (Col 1:16). The Father reveals himself to these through the Son, because this can only occur when the Son chooses to reveal the Father.
Why does the Father reveal himself to the Son? The Father begets the Son in eternity and the Son is the exact representation of the Father’s being. But there is more to the question than this. As a human being, Jesus knows the Father. How? According to Psalm 149:4, “The LORD takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with salvation.” And Jesus is the most humble of men. The Son of God humbled himself, even unto a humiliating death (Phil 2:8). In this way Jesus became as a little child, without status, without rights, without pride, and willing to learn what his Father revealed to him. It was not by human wisdom that Jesus lived his life, but by the will of the Father. In the temple at 12 years old, Jesus sought knowledge of God (Luke 2:46-47). In the desert where he was tempted by the devil, he did not answer with human wisdom but with the Word of God. Jesus did not shy away from the cross, because he knew that the scriptures said that the Christ must suffer and die and be raised from the dead (Luke 24:7). The humility of the man Jesus, in contrast to human pride, which goes along with human wisdom and learning, which is the key to his knowledge of the Father.
The corollary (result) of this statement is that Jesus reveals the Father to “little children”. This is evident in the ministry of Jesus. It is not those who have spent their lives studying the Law – the Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees – who follow Jesus, although there are exceptions to this statement. Rather, the main bulk of Jesus’ followers are lepers, the demon-possessed, prostitutes, tax-collectors and unschooled fisherman and political rebels. This statement seems to suggest that no one should study the scriptures, but that is clearly not the case. Jesus knew the Scriptures well and often referred to them to explain his life, ministry, and death and resurrection. The problem lay with the way in which the Scriptures were viewed by the religious elite. A couple of examples should suffice here:
Mark 7:1 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and 2 saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were “unclean,” that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.) 5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with ‘unclean’ hands?” 6 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. 7 They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’
Matthew 23:23 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices– mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law– justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
In order to know the Father it is necessary to follow Jesus, but also to trust like a little child. Unlike, our present culture, infants in Israel in time of Jesus had the lowest possible status. Those with status were the wise and learned, the ones who had the best places in the synagogue and who were given honour at banquets (Matt 23:6). The temptation for these people is to believe that the honour given somehow proves that they have knowledge of God. Yet Jesus says the opposite. God reveals himself to those without status, those without the trappings of honour and fame. It is to the humble that the Father reveals himself through the person of Jesus.
Those who have rejected the knowledge of God available to all have become futile in their thinking (Rom 1:21). When human beings reject what God has revealed they no longer think as people should think. No matter how this may appear to be reasonable and sensible to the godless, it is not in accordance with the good pleasure of God. The result then is that no further understanding of God is given to them. “Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him” (Matthew 13:12). What sort of people should we be, then, if we desire to have increasing revelation of the Father?
Since the revelation of the Father is given only to Jesus and to those to whom Jesus chooses to give it, we must be people who honour Jesus. Honouring Jesus involves putting Jesus at the centre of our thinking, in every aspect of thinking. There are not two kinds of thinking, theological and other, but only the one. Jesus must be central to every area of life in order that we might have knowledge of God the Father in every aspect of life.
If would have increasing knowledge of the Father, we must, like Jesus, be obedient to what we do know. This is not what the wise and learned do, but it more appropriate to infants. What God has revealed of himself must result in obedience. As Jesus continued to obey the Father even to the point of death, so we too must obey without concern for the cost if we want to receive the revelation which the Father gives.
God has hidden himself from the wise and learned. This is a statement about those who glory in their own wisdom and learning, not about the wisdom and learning found in the scripture. If we are to have revelation of the Father, we must seek that revelation in the scripture and in prayer. The passage which begins this article should not be taken as an invitation to laziness, but an invitation to seek after what can be found. The Father reveals himself, but not to those who believe that they already know what there is to know. He reveals himself to those who would hunger for more, and who are humble enough to acknowledge that they do not know without revelation. Seek the revelation of God and he will give it, because he is faithful.