Childlike Faith and Divine Impossibility: A Reflection on 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 and Luke 18:15-17, 26-30
These passages reveal a single urgent reality: the Kingdom requires childlike receptivity to truth, yet such receptivity demands everything you think you possess—and that surrender is humanly impossible without divine intervention.
What You Must Feel and Face
Start with the child. When Christ says the Kingdom belongs to such as these, He’s naming something you’ve lost and must recover: the capacity to receive reality without your defenses up. Children haven’t yet built the fortress of self-protection that you inhabit. They feel their needs honestly. They don’t perform worthiness—they simply receive or don’t receive.
St. Irenaeus reveals this vision of full receptivity: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”[1] Not man performing, not man proving himself worthy—but man fully alive to reality, fully open to receiving divine life. This is what children show you: aliveness without defense, receptivity without calculation.
Paul’s warning in 2 Thessalonians cuts to what you’re avoiding: they did not receive the love of the truth. Not just intellectual assent to facts—love of truth itself. This means facing what truth costs. It means letting reality rearrange your life instead of bending your perception of reality to protect your life as it is.
The rich ruler demonstrates the opposite of childlike receptivity. He approaches Christ performing worthiness: I have kept all the commandments from my youth. When Christ names the one thing blocking him—his wealth, his security, his identity—he walks away sad.
What are you clinging to that you’ve convinced yourself is compatible with following Christ? What have you rationalized as “fine” because facing the truth would require changing your entire life? The ruler’s wealth wasn’t the universal problem—it was his particular fortress, the thing he’d built his identity on, the security blanket he couldn’t let go of.
Paul warns that refusing this honesty opens you to delusion: God sends them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false. When you persistently refuse truth, you lose the capacity to recognize it. Your defenses become so sophisticated that you can’t distinguish between self-protection and wisdom.
The Cosmic Impossibility Made Possible
Peter’s response reveals the cosmic stakes: Lo, we have left everything and followed you! The onlookers ask the right question: Then who can be saved?
Christ’s answer is the hinge point: What is impossible with men is possible with God.
St. Athanasius articulates why this transformation requires divine intervention: “He became human that we might become divine.”[2] The kind of surrender required, the childlike receptivity that can receive truth even when it costs everything, the capacity to let go of the fortresses you’ve spent lifetimes building—this is genuinely impossible through human willpower alone. It requires participation in divine life itself.
The man of lawlessness in Paul’s vision opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. This is the ultimate expression of human autonomy refusing divine reality. It’s the ruler’s sad departure taken to cosmic conclusion—the fortress of self become an absolute claim, the refusal to receive truth hardened into delusion.
But the children being brought to Christ, the disciples who left everything, those who receive the love of the truth—they participate in divine possibility. Their transformation isn’t self-improvement. It’s God making possible what you cannot do: genuine receptivity, honest surrender, choosing love over security.
When Christ promises manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life, He’s not offering transactional payoff. He’s revealing reality’s structure: participation in divine life is infinitely richer than any fortress you build. What you receive isn’t compensation for what you gave up—it’s the discovery that what you were clinging to was poverty compared to what communion with God offers.
This reveals the cosmic reality: the universe is structured for participation in divine life, not for fortress-building. The rich ruler walked away from life itself because he couldn’t let go of what was killing him. The children, in their receptivity, show you the path to actually being alive.
St. Irenaeus illuminates this: “The glory of God gives life; those who see God receive life… It is impossible to live without life, and the actualization of life comes from participation in God.”[1]
What This Reveals About Divine Power
The contrast is stark: the lawless one comes with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception. Divine power works differently—through vulnerability, through children, through impossible surrender made possible.
God doesn’t coerce the ruler. Doesn’t manipulate him. Presents truth clearly and lets him choose. The ruler’s freedom is absolute—including his freedom to walk away sad, still clinging to what’s killing him.
This is how divine love works: it invites, reveals, makes possible—but never violates personhood. The “strong delusion” isn’t God playing tricks. It’s what happens when persistent refusal to receive truth erodes the capacity to recognize it. God respects your choices that completely.
The children show you God’s nature more clearly than mighty works: the Kingdom is received, not achieved. You can’t earn your way in through commandment-keeping or résumé-building. You can only open your hands, let go of what you’re grasping, and receive what’s offered—which is everything.
St. Irenaeus articulates God’s purpose in the Incarnation: “It was for this end that the Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of man, that man, having been taken into the Word, and receiving the adoption, might become the son of God.”[3] The entire movement is God descending to lift you up—not demanding you climb to Him through your own efforts, but making possible what was impossible.
The Ancient Pattern Restored
What the rich ruler couldn’t do mirrors what Second Temple Judaism had largely lost: direct, unmediated receptivity to divine presence. It had become about legal performance, about proving worthiness, about building religious résumés.
The patriarchs knew better. Abraham left everything—family, homeland, security—at God’s word. Not because he’d proved worthy but because he received the invitation with childlike trust. What was impossible (a wandering nomad becoming father of nations) became possible through divine power working in human receptivity.
The children being brought to Christ recover what Adam knew in Eden before the fall: direct access to divine presence without the fortress of self-protection. They don’t perform. They simply are—and in being themselves openly, they’re capable of receiving divine life.
Paul’s warning about the lawless one who takes his seat in the temple of God echoes the corruption that happened when institutional hierarchy replaced royal priesthood, when mediated religion replaced direct encounter.
Christ restores the original pattern: receive like a child, surrender what’s impossible to surrender, discover divine power making possible what you cannot do. This is the ancient religion—older than the Temple, stretching back through the patriarchs to Eden itself.
The Kingdom hasn’t changed its entrance requirements. You’ve just built so many fortresses, developed so many defenses, that childlike receptivity seems impossible. Which it is—for you alone. But God became human precisely so that you might become divine—so that what is impossible with men becomes possible with God.
The Greater Horizon 