Take heed that ye despise not. — The words remind us of what we are apt to forget in the wider range of the preceding verses. The child was still there, perhaps still folded in the arms of Jesus, still the object of His care, even while He spake of the wider offences that “must needs come” upon the world at large. Looking to the frequency with which our Lord’s words were addressed to the thoughts of His hearers, it seems likely that the faces of some at least of the disciples betrayed, as they looked on the child, some touch of half-contemptuous wonder, that called for this prompt rebuke. The words have, however, as interpreted by what follows, a wider range, and include among the “little ones,” the child-like as well as children — all, indeed, whom Christ came to save.
In heaven their angels. — The words distinctly recognise the belief in guardian angels, entrusted each with a definite and special work. That guardianship is asserted in general terms in Psalms 34:7; Psalms 91:11; Hebrews 1:14, and elsewhere. What is added to the general fact here is, that those who have the guardianship of the little ones assigned to them are among the most noble of the heavenly host, and are as the angels of the Presence, who, like Gabriel, stand before the face of God, and rejoice in the beatific vision (Luke 1:19). The words “I say unto you” clothe what follows with the character of a new truth, as they do the like utterances of Luke 15:7; Luke 15:10. Whatever difficulties may connect themselves with the whole range of questions connected with the ministry of angels, they lie outside the work of the interpreter. There can be no question that our Lord adopts as His own the belief in the reality of that ministry, and this at a time when the Sadducees, as a leading sect, were calling it in question (Acts 23:8). The words are indirectly important as a witness to the fact that the Lord Jesus, while He proclaimed the universal Fatherhood of God as it had never been proclaimed before, also (almost, as it were, unconsciously, and when the assertion of the claim was not in view) claims a sonship nearer and higher than could have been claimed by any child of man.