Luke records these words of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke 10:21, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, because this was Your good pleasure.”
Christ applies this to the message of the gospel that the seventy have brought to Israel. The wise rejected the gospel. The simple believed it. But even among those simple persons who hear the gospel and believe, Christ’s words ring true. The simple, those who approach with a child-like faith have an easier time understanding the basic truths of scripture than the wise.
There are thousands of simple Christians who over the last two thousand years have opened their Bibles to Genesis 1 and have gloried over the work that God did there in that passage. Unless their leaders had taught them differently they had no reason to question the glory that is revealed in that passage. Right there, in the very first words of scripture, God proclaimed the mighty works that he had done. The simplest fool had access to the knowledge of these great works. We rejoice and praise God that he has given this faith to these infants.
But God hides this truth from the wise. Even the wisest Christians such as Augustine had a hard time simply accepting the propositions that Genesis 1 proclaims. Today, wise men such as N.T. Wright, Robert Godfrey, and Kevin Vanhoozer have the same difficulty. This is amazing since it is hidden in plain sight, in a very simple record. The words God gives are easily accessible. They are hard to understand relative to our ability to qualify and quantify what God is actually doing. It’s hard to understand what God is doing scientifically. They are not hard to understand in the sense that Genesis 1 is full of clear propositions that refer to specific works of God.
This is truly amazing. God gives simple Christians a better understanding of Genesis 1 than the wisest Christians of our age.