Before the Lord of heaven and earth, human wisdom and power are nothing, so no one can protest if it was the Father's purpose (compare 3:17) to hide these things from the wise (compare 10:26; 13:11; 1 Cor 2:6-10; Job 12:24-25) and reveal them to little children (literally "infants," but applied figuratively in Greek to the helpless in general), the "little ones" (10:42; 18:10; on the revealing, see especially 16:17).

The wise of Jesus' day had careful rules for interpreting the Bible (including many we would now consider wrong); they prided themselves on their knowledge of traditional interpretations and sayings of the wise who had gone before them; they emphasized practical piety. But human tradition is hardly a dependable interpreter of God's Word (15:6-9), and faith built on mere human reason rather than the pure revelation of an unapproachably infinite God is doomed to fail, as the following narrative suggests (12:1-14). Intellectual and spiritual pride defy the fear of God, for we make our own minds and lives, rather than God, the judge, the final arbiter of right and wrong (compare 7:1-5). We should take heed; Jesus' religious contemporaries stressed humility far more than do most of our own (Bonsirven 1964:157-58).