CHILDLIKE ONE
In Matthew 18:2, Jesus makes this statement: “Truly I say to you, that unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven.”
I often think about the sheer audacity of Jesus ripping through the religious system of His day despite no schooling, training, or credibility. It must have infuriated those with childhood dreams of becoming a great religious scholar one day. There was no greater prestige in Jewish culture, and Jesus concluded that the system to get there was not a relevant one. A system we know all too well in today’s church culture; knowledge, understanding, learning, experience, and mentorship. Jesus ignored the safety net of a system that had sustained the old covenant for centuries. He walks onto the scene, and decimates the systems of the earth with His own systems.
To the dismay of the religious zealots around Him, Jesus began to teach the ways of His world. Blessed are the broken hearted, you serve money or you serve God, to be last is to be first… and countless more. Amidst all of these, the one that I want to talk about today might be one of the most difficult to understand.
Childlikeness is the entry point into His world
In retrospect, I can’t even begin to imagine the insult this was to those who spent their entire lives memorizing, learning, and studying the law. Everything they dreamed about, worked up to, and pursued in the name of passion for God, was utterly dismantled by this one singular sentence. Many of the people who heard this statement must have stood awestruck, unsure if it could have been some kind of lesson that wasn’t literal. Jesus did not paint a parable with this one, however. He meant every word. What does this mean about the nature of God?
Hebrews gives us insight into something that may help to piece this together for us. Hebrews 1:9 says in reference to Jesus, “Your God, has anointed You with the oil of gladness more than Your companions.” This is one of the most overlooked verses in the Bible, but what it implies is earth shattering. Jesus Himself was the happiest person amidst His peers! He was filled with joy! I can imagine that He was likely really fun to be around. Probably funny, and could I even venture to say… childlike?
I have heard my fair share of preachers walk me through what this means for the church and the body. However, I have seldom heard many preachers talk about what a statement like this might mean for God Himself. One of the prevailing themes of the new testament epistles is this noble pursuit of Christlikeness. In other words, we are called to actually become more and more like Jesus. I have to wonder that if the entrance point to the invisible world of God begins with our childlikeness, that maybe our capacity to be childlike is directly related to our capacity to experience His world. Maybe this means as we grow to become mature LIKE Christ, we are actually becoming MORE childlike. It’s a staggering thought, but this could mean God Himself just might be the shining pinnacle of childlikeness.
This means so many things at one time. Not only does it re-conceptualize curiosity and wonder as fruits of maturity, but it means that the One with access to infinite knowledge somehow remains childlike. Childlikeness then, can no longer be associated with the absence of knowledge. It seems more likely, that it is the presence of innocence.
God Himself is the most childlike of all, not because He is naive, but because He is essence of unadulterated purity. He has no sin in Him, and therefore, is the standard definition for what innocence even means in the first place. Maybe it’s time for us to stop being so much like those who believed that what they knew, learned, and studied, made them more like God. Maybe Jesus wanted to highlight something about Himself; that His own nature is not reflected in striving to learn knowledge about Him, but rather in having fun with Him. As C.S. Lewis so beautifully said, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
Maybe God Himself wants a people full of wonder, who are more open to learning from Him directly, instead of a “learned” people who have learned about Him from a distance. It seems after all of this, that closeness might be His ultimate priority after all. I want to invite you to explore what childlikeness means when you think about connecting to God. Who knows, it could even be the key to experiencing the breakthrough you’ve been praying for!