Jesus entered the Temple and began to drive out all the people buying and selling animals for sacrifice. He knocked over the tables of the money changers and the chairs of those selling doves. He said to them, “The Scriptures declare, ‘My Temple will be called a house of prayer,’ but you have turned it into a den of thieves!”
The blind and the lame came to him in the Temple, and he healed them. The leading priests and the teachers of religious law saw these wonderful miracles and heard even the children in the Temple shouting, “Praise God for the Son of David.”
But the leaders were indignant. They asked Jesus, “Do you hear what these children are saying?”
“Yes,” Jesus replied. “Haven’t you ever read the Scriptures? For they say, ‘You have taught children and infants to give you praise.’” Matthew 21:12-16
We are all quite familiar with the account of Jesus driving off all the merchants buying and selling within the temple grounds. This is an account where for most of the time, we learned of Jesus’ indignation with regards to the degradation of the religiosity of the Jewish temple, to a greed driven machinery that is so far away from the heart of God.
After Jesus healed the blind and lame there, the children, in their innocence, praised God with much shouting. The corrupted leaders were not pleased, and even questioned Jesus. And our main focus here was Jesus’ reply:
‘Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have perfected praise’?”
Matthew 21:16 (NKJV)
You see, Jesus quoted a portion of scripture from Psalms 8:2 which reads:
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.
But there is an obvious divine twist here. In New International Version (NIV), it reads:
you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.
So if we line them up on the same term, Jesus has revealed the key here:
-> give You (God) praise -> You (God) have ordained (or give) strength -> You (God) silence the enemy and the avenger
So you see, the revelation is that if we praise and worship God, even when with our handicap, even when we are faced with difficult and surmounting circumstances, and with a bleak-black vision or future; God will give us the strength to persevere and He will see to it to silence the enemy and avenger; our enemy, our avenger.
The weaker we are or the bigger the problem we face, the more we need to praise and worship God; because through it comes our bigger help and our bigger stronghold, and our bigger defense from our Lord!! The final silence of our enemy and avenger will be oh-so-sweet.
King David 