CHRISTIAN faith is faith in Jesus. We often forget that that name was common, wholly undistinguished, and borne by very many of our Lord’s contemporaries. It had been borne by the great soldier whom we know as Joshua; and we know that it was the name of one at least of the disciples of our Master. Its disuse after Him, both by Jew and by Christian, is easily intelligible. But though He bore it with special reference to His work of saving His people from their sins, He shared it, as He shared manhood, with many another of the sons of Abraham. Of course “Jesus” is the name that is usually employed in the Gospels. But when we turn to the Epistles, we find that it is comparatively rare for it to stand alone, and that in almost all the instances of its employment by itself, it brings with it the special note of pointing attention to the manhood of our Lord Jesus.
Who does not feel, for example, that when we read “let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of faith,” the fact of our brother Man having trodden the same path, and being the pattern for our patience and perseverance, is tenderly laid upon our hearts? Again, when we read of sympathy as being felt for us by the great High Priest who can be “touched with a feeling of our infirmities, even Jesus,” we cannot but recognize that His humanity is pressed upon our thoughts, as securing to us that we have not only the pity of a God, but the compassion of a Man, who knows by experience the bitterness of our sorrows.
In like manner we read sometimes that “Jesus died for us,” sometimes that “Christ died for us”; and, though the two forms of the statement present the same fact, they present it, so to speak, from a different angle of vision, and suggest to us different thoughts.
When Paul, for example, says to us, “If we believe that Jesus died and rose again,” we cannot but feel that he is pressing on us the thought of the true manhood of that Saviour who, in His death, as in His resurrection, is the Forerunner of them that believe upon Him, and whose death will be the more peaceful, and their rising the more certain, because He, who, “forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, likewise took part of the same,” has thereby destroyed death, and delivered them from its bondage. Nor with less emphasis and strengthening triumphant force do we read that this same Jesus, the Man who bore our nature in its fulness and is kindred to us in flesh and spirit, has risen from the dead, has ascended up on high, and is the Forerunner, who for us, by virtue of His humanity, has entered in thither. Surely the most insensitive ear must catch the music, and the deep significance of the ward which says, “We see not yet all things put under him (i.e. man). But we see Jesus crowned with glory and honour.”
So, then, Christian faith first lays hold of that manhood, realizes the suffering and death as those of a true humanity, recognizes that He bore in His nature “all the ills that flesh is heir to,” and that His human life is a brother’s pattern for ours; that, He having died, death hath no more terrors for, or dominion over, us, and that whither the Man Jesus has gone we sinful men need never fear to enter, or doubt that we shall enter too.
1. When Jesus was on earth He demanded faith in Himself as the condition of receiving blessing from Him. Not only did He demand it, He depended upon it. Even His power of physical healing was limited in this way. He could exercise this power only in proportion to the measure of the faith of the sufferers. In the accounts of miracles of this kind we find the question, “Hast thou faith to be healed?” often asked and generally implied. “According to thy faith be it unto thee,” “Thy faith bath saved thee,” were words with which He accompanied His acts of healing; while with regard to the inhabitants of one district we are told expressly that “he could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief.” We find the same principle asserting itself in an accentuated form when we rise from the level of physical miracles, and consider His method of meeting man’s spiritual needs, Here again we find Him insisting that only those endowed with special qualifications are capable of receiving His teaching,. and making it clear that comparatively few were thus endowed in the degree which He required.
2. This fact, which is so strange at first, is understood the moment we see what faith is. God Himself cannot give us what we are unable to receive. We have only to consider that, for the reception of any spiritual gift or power, a hand to take is as necessary as a hand to bestow; that it is inconsistent with the goodness of God or the freedom of man that the gates of the soul should be forced open from without instead of being thrown open from within; and that even the purest light, though it bring health and healing on its wings, cannot be seen until men open their eyes on it. Faith is the eye of the soul. Faith is the hand of the soul. Is there then anything arbitrary or unreasonable in the invariable and imperative demand for faith? Is it not, rather, inevitable that faith should be the constant condition on which both the reception and the exercise of any spiritual power or grace are made to depend? Once admit that faith is the eye by which we discern and the hand by which we grasp the realities of the invisible and spiritual world, and the demand for faith becomes wholly reasonable to us, because it is grounded in the very constitution of our nature. With that admission once made, it would be as rational to complain that we can enter into the ideal world of poetry and art only by an effort of the imagination, as to complain that we can rise into the spiritual realm and possess ourselves of its wealth only by the ventures and endeavour of a living and active faith.
We find that Christ always gave way to men; He receded or advanced according to the temper they showed. He did not cry, nor lift up, nor use compulsion, but invariably gave place before men’s free will. [Note: A.B. Davidson, Waiting upon God, 176.]
3. Following the Baptist, Jesus set out with the summons, “Repent, and believe the good news,” namely, that “the kingdom of God is at hand”; like Moses, He summoned Israel to accept His mission as from God, and showed “signs” to prove this. As His teaching advanced, it appeared that He required an unparalleled faith in Himself along with His message, that the Kingdom of God He speaks of centres in His person; that, in fact, He is “the word” of God that He brings, He is the light and life whose coming He announces, “the bread from heaven” that He has to give to a famished world. For those “who received him,” who “believed on his name,” faith acquired a scope undreamed of before; it signified the unique attachment which gathered round the person of Jesus—a human trust, in its purity and intensity such as no other man ever awakened, which grew into and identified itself with its possessor’s belief in God, transforming the latter in doing so, and which drew the whole being of the believer into the life and will of his Master. When Thomas hails Jesus as “My Lord, and my God!” he “has believed.” This process is complete in the mind of the slowest disciple. The two faiths, in God and in Jesus, are now welded inseparably; the Son is known through the Father, and the Father through the Son; and Thomas gives affiance to both in one. As Jesus was step by step exalted towards the Divine, in the same degree God came nearer to these men, and their faith in God became richer in content and firmer in grasp.
If the progress of the disciples towards complete faith in Jesus was gradual, they came in due course to the great conviction that He was the Son of God. The stages of this progress are indicated by the various confessions of faith to which the disciples gave utterance. When Andrew first met with Jesus, he confessed his belief that He would prove to be the Messiah for whom men were hoping. Later, Peter said in the name of the twelve, “We have believed and know that thou art the Holy One of God.” After the feeding of the five thousand, and the appearance of the Lord walking upon the sea, the disciples in the boat worshipped Him, saying, “Of a truth thou art the Son of God.” And finally, after months of living and working with Him, the conviction to which they had come was voiced in the great confession of faith, spoken by Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” During these months their knowledge of Him had been deepened and their love for Him strengthened; as His personality exerted its ever-increasing influence upon their minds and hearts, until finally there resulted this climax of faith and this solemn assertion of their full belief in Him as their personal Lord Christ. Thus they began with facts, and their gradual, perhaps unconscious, induction from what they observed led naturally to the most intense spiritual faith.
We find faith in Jesus as it is disclosed in the Gospels to be a Recognition, an Energy, and a Relationship.
