Introduction
Jesus enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God. He experienced the ordinary ups and downs of mortal existence, but he never religiously doubted the certainty of God's watchcare and guidance. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual; it was wholly personal and purely spiritual.
The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true, beautiful, and good. Jesus’ God was at one and the same time “The Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah 10:20) and the living and loving “Father in Heaven” (Matthew 6:9). The concept of God as a Father was not original with Jesus, but he exalted and elevated the idea into a sublime experience by proclaiming that every mortal creature is a child of this Father of love, a son of God. (Matthew 5:45; Luke 6:35)
Jesus did not cling to faith in God as would a struggling soul at war with the universe and at death grips with a hostile and sinful world. He did not resort to faith merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a comfort in threatened despair. Faith was not just an illusory compensation for the unpleasant realities and the sorrows of living.
In the very face of all the natural difficulties and the temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he experienced the tranquillity of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very presence of the heavenly Father. Jesus’ great contribution to the values of human experience was not that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of living faith in God.
