From the Mouths of Children
It happened a few days before Jesus of Nazareth was nailed to a Roman cross at which time He experienced, what remains forever in the history of mankind, the supreme instance of suffering (cf. Warren, Have Atheists Proved There Is No God?, 46). Following His dramatic entrance into Jerusalem, generally called “The Triumphal Entry,” He came to the temple where He taught (Mark 11:17) and healed the blind and the lame (Matthew 21:14).
The children who had come to the temple with their parents were repeating the words that had filled Jerusalem the day before. In the temple they were shouting: “Hosanna to the Son of David” (Matthew 21:15). Hosanna is the Greek form of two Hebrew words that mean “Save now” or “Save, I pray, or beseech.” The words are taken from Psalm 118:25, which prophetically is Messianic. The verbal exclamation of these children was nothing less than their affirmation and defense of Jesus as the Christ—God’s Messiah! When the chief priests and scribes “saw the wonderful things” (Matthew 21:15) Jesus was doing and heard the children shouting Hosanna, they attempted to challenge Jesus with the question: “Do you hear what they are saying?” (Matthew 21:16). Jesus confidently replied, “Yes, have you never read. . . .?” (Matthew 21:16), and He completed His question with a reference to the words of the Psalmist who wrote, “You have established a stronghold from the mouths of children . . . to silence the enemy and the avenger” (Psalm 8:2, CSB). Noetscher’s comment on this text is insightful: “. . . [U]nbiased and uncorrupted minds [of children] recognize God without difficulty from His creation” (qtd. in Leupold 102).
I am reminded of Justin Barrett’s book, Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief, published in 2012. It is a thought-provoking analysis of the proposition that children tend to have a natural inclination to believe in God. Barrett makes a strong case for the conclusion that “children come into the world with a tendency to see order, purpose, and even intentional design behind the natural world, as if everything in the world had a particular function and had been intentionally ordered by someone for that purpose” (10).
The following story concerning a five-year-old boy in Galesburg, IL, in the early 1900s, illustrates what Barrett calls teleological reasoning, which is “natural to children . . . [and] starts early in childhood” (44-45). Ronald was lonely, having moved to a third new town in five years. One day he ventured by himself to the attic of his new house. In that attic he discovered an amazing collection of birds’ eggs and butterflies under glass. This beautiful and fascinating collection had been left behind by the previous tenants of the house. In the weeks following his discovery, this curious first grader found himself escaping to that attic for hours at a time where he was in awe of the amazing collection captivating his attention. In a book published some fifty years later, Ronald Reagan described this childhood experience as one in which he marveled at the colors and textures of the eggs and butterflies and “most especially the fragility—of these objects fascinated my imagination” (Where’s the Rest of Me? 11). He said, “The experience left me a reverence for the handiwork of God that never left me” (An American Life 24). Professor Paul Kengor, author of God and Ronald Reagan, wrote, “The notion of a Creator was etched into the boy’s consciousness” (6).
The etching of the Creator in Reagan’s boyhood was further stroked by the faith of a godly mother (cf. 2 Timothy 1:5; 3:14-15). Through the years it grew, manifesting deep faith in the existence of God, the divine origin of the Bible, and the deity of Jesus Christ that “was not shallow, as his evident appetite for apologetics and theological debate demonstrates” (128).
It is still true, as both the Bible (Psalm 8:1-3; Matthew 21:16) and Barrett’s book imply, that there is a stronghold (bulwark, RSV) for the defense of God that comes “from the mouths of children.” We would be very wise to give deep thought to the implications of this profound truth! Are we doing this?
Charles C. Pugh III
Executive Director