Reading: Psalm 8; Ephesians 6:10-20
When you hear all the eloquent speeches and lofty words of all those politicians who with all their eloquence and wittiness try to outwit the other, to seem smarter than the other, to win over the votes of the people: it is a constant quarreling with words, a constant battle to outdo the other with your words. Or if you look at the people around us, constantly complaining, blaming anyone else except themselves for all that goes wrong in their lives, always quarreling about unimportant things, turning molehills into mountains.
Even among Christians, there is so much idle talk, vain words, even sometimes filthy talk. It must put us to shame when our Lord teaches us that God can just as well, or even more, use the children to establish strength and glory. God does not need us, adults, to do His work.
Often the words from the mouths of little children are much stronger and more glorifying to God than all our many words and all our reasoning. It is important that we remember that God made His covenant with the believers and with their children. Children belong to the covenant just as well as adults. And it is also the children whom God calls to glorify His name. And it is the children whom God is using to glorify His name and to establish strength. Satan knows it very well and he fears those words coming from the mouths of little children.
Satan, he is the ultimate enemy about whom David speaks in our text. The enemy and the avenger, they are the seed of Satan being used by Satan to fulfill his plan. But God uses children, little children, to resist and silence these foes. How powerful the words of these children can be!
It is not with earthly weapons that we have to fight. It is not with swords, not with guns and rifles, not with rockets and planes and bombs, that we fight the enemy. The enemy is not a being of flesh and blood. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places, as Paul says in Ephesians 6. And the only weapon that is effective in our fight against this enemy, is the armor of God. The truth girded around your waist, the breastplate of righteousness. The shoes of the preparation of the gospel of peace. The shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. The sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.These are all descriptions of the Word of God and of our faith in which we believe God’s Word.
We must have childlike faith, Christ teaches us. That faith must shield us against all the attacks of Satan. That faith makes us strong. When we grow up and leave our childhood behind, let us then not give up that childlike faith. Let it be that childlike faith, that for God nothing is impossible, that God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, that we cannot always understand God’s doing, but let us trust with childlike reverence and trust, that what God does is good!
David was humbled by the words, the song of a little child. And then, even more, when he looks up at the sky. It is getting darker. And when it was dark in Canaan, then it was really dark in the days of David. They had no electric lights, not the many lampposts and other lights which we have around us during the nights. So when it was dark then millions, even billions of stars were visible. Impossible to count them. And then David says it: when I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him?
That again emphasizes how important it is to humble ourselves. There is nothing in ourselves that makes us worthy of the great honour that God has bestowed upon us, that we are made almost like God, crowned with glory and honour. That we are created in God’s image.