The relationship is between Jesus and the Father. We notice (1) that faith in Jesus presupposes faith in God; (2) that faith in God leads to faith in Jesus; (3) that on the other hand faith in Jesus leads to faith in God; (4) that faith in Jesus is faith in Jesus as standing for God; and (5) that faith in Jesus is faith in God.
1. Faith in Jesus presupposes faith in God.— So Jesus Himself seems to say: “Ye believe in God, believe also in me” (Joh_14:1). The disciples had begun with belief in God. As pious and patriotic Jews they trusted, worshipped, and served Jehovah as the covenant-God of their nation. They accepted, and expected the fulfilment of, the promise of God regarding the Messiah. Even although the fulfilment had not, according to their expectations, corresponded with the promises, yet they had been led by the teaching and influence of Jesus to confess Him as Messiah. Their faith in God had brought them to faith in Him. He had taught them to regard His death as a necessity of the purpose of God; now let them exercise their faith in God in continuing to believe all that He taught them about the will of God regarding Himself. As they had trusted Him as the Messiah sent of God, let them continue their trust even when it was being put to the test of His separation from them. Let them not now abandon their faith in Him, for to that faith they had been led by their faith in God.
Manifestly, every one must believe in God before he can believe in Jesus Christ in any deep sense; for to say that “Jesus is the Son of God” already implies a belief in God. This was clearly true of the Christian converts from among the Jews, who were already worshippers of Jehovah; and it was true also, though to a less extent, of the Greeks, as St. Paul recognized in his famous speech at Athens; and it remains true of the converts from heathendom today. In the mind of all men there is some recognition of a Creator Spirit, with whom they are led to identify the Spirit of Jesus. And so the progress of belief is logically from the first article to the second, from belief in God the Father and Creator to belief in Him whom the Father sent. At the same time, the belief in Jesus at once reacts upon the belief in God. The heathen convert, though he may employ the same word for God as before, has very different thoughts about Him; he is taught to believe that the holiness and lovingkindness of Jesus are the holiness and lovingkindness of the Creator God; and even the pious Jew gained a new insight into what these great qualities meant—the mercy and truth which he had always held to be the attributes of Jehovah. The two beliefs therefore go together. I learn to believe, first, in God the Father, who has made me, and all the world; secondly, in God the Son, who has redeemed me, and all mankind.
2. Faith in God leads to faith in Jesus.—Listen again to Jesus Himself. On one occasion He spoke to a body of Jews as follows: “If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I came forth and am come from God; for neither have I come of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof. But because I say the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convicteth me of sin? If I say truth, why do ye not believe me? He that is of God heareth the words of God: for this cause ye hear them not, because ye are not of God” (Joh_8:42-47).
There our Lord clearly implies that if the Jews had truly believed in God they would have believed in Himself as soon as He appeared before them. So throughout the apostolic writings those who have real faith in God give evidence of this faith by accepting His revelation of Himself in Christ when it is brought before them. They believe it and they act upon it, and so are numbered among those who have justifying faith in Christ.
Moreover, the belief in Jesus to which one is led from belief in God is a real trust and surrender of heart—just what faith in God is. It is a very low and inadequate interpretation of the words (Joh_14:1) “Ye believe in God, believe also in me,” to take them as meaning little more than “Believe in God, believe that He is; believe in Me, believe that I am.” But it is scarcely less so to suppose that the mere assent of the understanding to His teaching is all that Christ asks for. By no means; what He invites us to goes a great deal deeper than that. The essence of it is an act of the will and of the heart, not of the understanding at all. A man may believe in Him as an historical person, may accept all that is said about Him here, and yet not be within sight of the trust in Him which He here speaks of. For the essence of the whole is not the intellectual process of assent to a proposition, but the intensely personal act of yielding up will and heart to a living person. Faith does not grasp a doctrine but a heart. The trust which Christ requires is the bond that unites souls with Him; and the very life of it is entire committal of myself to Him in all my relations and for all my needs, and absolute utter confidence in Him as all-sufficient for everything that I can require. Let us get away from the cold intellectualism of “belief” into the warm atmosphere of “trust,” and we shall understand better than by many volumes, what are the meaning and the sphere and the power and the blessedness of that faith which Christ requires.
3. Faith in Jesus leads to faith in God.—We have seen that our Lord’s disciples began with faith in God, and that because they had faith in God they came to have faith in Him. Did this continue to be the order of their faith? Or had Jesus Himself become more surely and fully the object of their faith than God Himself? Had the acquired relation become a more potent influence than the inherited? Was it now easier for them to trust Jesus than God Himself? Had He made God more real, attractive, and authoritative for them than He had been before? If so, then the argument implied in Jesus’ call would be this: God’s purpose for Me may seem mysterious for you. You may not be able to understand why I should suffer and die; but do not doubt, or distrust God; for I do not doubt or distrust. If you still trust Me, trust the God I trust. If you still believe Me the Messiah, believe that even in death God is fulfilling His purpose in the Messiah. This is the more probable view, for Jesus offers Himself to His disciples as the true and living Way to the Father, and affirms that God is seen in Him. He assumes, accordingly, that the teaching and the training of His disciples have not been in vain, but that they have such a faith in Him as can be made the basis of their faith in God as, in spite of all present contrary appearances, ordering all things well for Him. He requires them to trust God’s providence even when that involves, as He has Himself taught them, betrayal by one disciple, denial by another, and His separation from them all.
This is the way with the apostles in their writings. One of the first efforts at definition of a Christian is that implied in. St. Peter’s words (1Pe_1:21): “Ye who through him do believe in God.” The faith conveyed by Jesus is no mere abstract truth separable from Himself, as the truth of the law of gravitation is separable from Newton. We are able to understand and use the laws of nature while totally ignorant of those to whose research and genius our knowledge of them is due, but the highest and purest faith in God can be attained in no way but one; it comes through a believing response to the person of Jesus Christ. It is what we see in Jesus that inspires a triumphant certainty of God. All great saints in the past, all who at this hour enjoy the peace of reconciliation and are labouring with buoyant energy at the tasks of the Divine Kingdom, are evidences and illustrations of this. The apostle’s two-edged word is only a transcript of experience: “Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.” Apart from Jesus men may know much of God—of His wisdom, His power, His sublimity, even His benevolence; but of His Fatherhood, with all the loving-kindness to the sinful embraced in that great name, they can know nothing.
There can be no doubt as to what is the order of faith for most men today. There may be some thinkers who are led to Christianity by way of theism; but most men whose faith is not an inheritance, but an achievement, have come to God because they were first drawn to Christ. Not a few men today must begin with the Synoptic Gospels and the human Jesus. As a man studies, meditates on, becomes absorbed in, and comes under the influence of, this literary testimony, the historical reality of Jesus as truest Teacher, best Example, most loving Friend, lays hold of him. As he companions with Jesus, he discovers not only more of His truth and grace, but also more about himself, his sinfulness, weakness, and unworthiness. Slowly yet surely he comes to feel that he needs, and that Jesus is, more than Teacher, Example, Friend; and only one word can express what that is, even Saviour. As Saviour, who leads him not only to self-discovery, but even to self-recovery, He as Lord claims the life that He has saved. But in this contact with Jesus there is an immediate and intimate contact with God. It is God’s truth that He teaches, God’s grace that He imparts, God’s forgiveness that He pronounces. As He lives, moves, and has His being in God as Father, the man who trusts and yields himself to Him as Saviour and Lord finds, and cannot but find, God’s Fatherhood for himself in Him. When the believer in Jesus realizes what forgiveness means for himself and what it must mean for God, it is likely that he will begin to see a meaning in the Cross of Jesus which he never saw before. As he continues to live the Christian life, and the Saviour and the Lord comes more near, and becomes more dear to him, the historical reality becomes a spiritual presence, for his dealings in his soul’s salvation are not with the dead but with the living; and thus the Resurrection becomes credible. It is true that there is endless variety in Christian experience, and not every man’s path to God through Christ will in all details correspond with that which has just been sketched: but more or less the experience described is typical; and it is in some such wise that faith in Jesus leads to faith in God.
There are many things in our records I cannot understand.
But one thing for me is certain, whenever I contemplate Him, and especially when I contemplate His cross, I am made conscious within of what to me is God. This is experience; theories can wait,. The fact that I believe this all came through a life truly human and natural gives me a different sense of what “human” and “natural” really mean. I have a strong conviction that Jesus would have this effect upon all others if we could let them see Him. I do not want a theory to explain Jesus. I agree rather with the apostolic theology, that He is the clue to myself and the universe and God. If Jesus is not this, that is, if He is not primarily a Gospel, all other discussion is wasted. It is the practical value of Jesus that we want to recover—that would be true theologizing. [Note: W. E. Orchard, Problems and Perplexities, 59.]
4. Faith. in Jesus signifies that Jesus stands for God.—It is plain in the Gospels that the belief of those who approached Jesus with any degree of faith was, that He stood before them as in some very special sense a Representative of God; that the attributes and purposes of God were in some very special way made manifest in Him. This at least they were persuaded of before they learned from His own lips the most exact truth concerning His Nature and His Mission; and it was this persuasion—involving, as of course it did, a subsequent readiness to listen to whatever He might teach them — that sufficiently constituted the faith which He commended.
Jesus was to them at first, perhaps, simply man. But as their knowledge of Him widened, and deepened, and cleared, the very endeavour to understand Him, to make a unity of their thoughts about Him, led them on to conclusions about Him that caused the spirit to thrill with awe and wonder, and yet with joy. They became aware of something mysterious and transcendent in Him, something which was to the human lineaments of the character what the thought is to the word. Behind and through Jesus they discerned God, and that vision it is which causes the strange thrill and glow of their later writings.
Consider what this discovery must have meant to these men. They had lived on terms of daily intimacy with Jesus. He knew each of them as a friend, had often named them by name, had intertwined Himself in the most intimate fashion with their lives. The growing conviction that “God was in Christ,” which acquired articulate and conscious form only after His death, but which was implicit in the later stages of their human fellowship with Him, must have come with heart-shaking power into their human intimacy. We can imagine what it would be- to any one among us if God in articulate thunder named him by name. But Such a summons, astounding as it would be, could touch only one moment of his life. It would be a poor thing compared with the discovery that God was incarnate in his dearest friend, for that discovery would teach the soul along the whole range of their common intercourse. That would be an incomparably richer thing than the most beautiful system of religious truth about God and about duty. Above all, it would have an individualizing force about it that would make an altogether new life in God possible to him.
Here is the witness of an educated man, who had long ceased to be a Christian in the conventional usage of the term. He is writing freely to one who had been more than a friend for Christ’s sake, and it is fair to give his words, because death is no longer a mystery to him. “Half-unconsciously I hummed the tune rather than the words of the famous hymn [ When, I survey the wondrous Cross]; as I did so there appeared before me, not a vision of Christ’s person, but of the meaning of the glorious crown of thorns He wore. The King of Heaven, the Prince of Peace, is a man—He took not upon Him the nature of angels. That would have been easy but futile. It would not have linked Him with us closely enough. So my vision told me. He must needs suffer for us. . . . And if suffering, and forgiveness, and love of our fellows, and general self-forgetfulness be what is required of every one of us, how greatly we all stand in need of His atonement. That was the lasting impression of my vision: but subsidiary, there was another. I felt, for a moment, a sense of divine spectatorship, as if there was but God in the world besides me; and God, all-seeing, all-understanding, with whom no words were necessary.” [Note: W. A. L. Elmslie, Studies in Life from Jewish Proverbs, 277.]
Throughout the Fourth Gospel we find the true or highest faith represented as that which by a purely spiritual act takes Christ, as the manifestation of God, into the soul without waiting for conviction by sensible signs. [Note: T. H. Green, The Witness of God, 52.]
5. Faith in Jesus is faith in God.—In the New Testament Jesus stands in the focus of religion; from first to last He is the object of that mingled trust, awe, and love which we call worship. It does not occur to any of the apostolic writers that this is a fact requiring either explanation or apology. We see mot a trace of embarrassment; at each point they are speaking directly out of experience and striving to convey the same new sense of Christ to others. It is obvious that the spirit of Jesus dominates their spirits, modifying belief, re-shaping ideals and enthusiasms, making new the soul’s environment, transmuting the flow of conscious thought, laying on the will an unseen constraint to that service which is perfect freedom. To this more than human influence they respond with an intensity which has no reserves. They rest on Jesus only for all that can be called salvation. Their monotheism is a passion which repels idolatry as the one unpardonable sin; yet in face of this they put their whole faith in Jesus Christ. Some one has observed that a high Christology has often been accompanied by a weak sense of God, but the implicit censure, however relevant to certain historic sentimental-isms, is inapposite to the New Testament.
Religion, as religion, is theocentric to the core; and the irresistible impulse of which the apostles were conscious to give Jesus the central place in religion was for them the final ethical proof that He could not be lower than the highest Godhead. As source of pardon, as giver of new life, as medium and vehicle of a presence of God beyond which the mind can never go, He conveyed to them the powers of the higher world; and if the traditional concept of the Divine was incapable of making room for the creative and unparalleled content of His person, it must perforce be deepened and widened. It was at least certain that He who made the Father known must have come forth from the Father’s life.
This, then, is the all but incredible, but wholly inevitable, conclusion to which we are brought—that Jesus means God. As reason cannot receive Jesus as a demi-god, and as religion cannot regard Him as merely an intermediary revelation, we, who say unalterably that He is more than a man, must go on to say: “and the Word was God.”
The faith of the Christian is the old faith of Abraham and Habakkuk, the faith in the Lord Jehovah only now made manifest in a new and completer manner, in a more intimate relation to, human life, and with a more winning appeal to the human heart. [Note: C. Gore, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 24.]
The Godhead shines through Christ, but He is not a mere transparent medium. It is Himself that He is showing us when He is showing us God. “He that hath seen Me hath seen”—not the light that streams through Me—but “hath seen, in Me, the Father.” And because He is Himself Divine and the Divine Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah, or a Paul and in them recognize the eradiation of the Divinity that imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget Christ in order to see God more clearly, but to behold Him is to behold God. [Note: A. Maclaren, The Holy of Holies, 7.]
The character of Jesus is the character of Almighty God, the holiness of Jesus the holiness of God, the wrath of Jesus the wrath of God, the compassion of Jesus the compassion of God, the Cross of Jesus the revelation of the sorrow and self-sacrificing love with which the sin of man fills the heart of the Eternal. [Note: R. Law, The Emotions of Jesus, 11.]
The Spirit of the Age spoke on a certain day:
“Rise up, my child, and cast thy early faith away.”
I rose to go; my freedom seemed complete;
In vain! Once more, O Lord, behold me at Thy feet.
Thou art the very life that beats within my heart:
I have no power to choose: from Thee I cannot part.
O Light of all the world that gladdened weary eyes!
Didst Thou to darkness sink, never again to rise?
O Voice more sweet than men had known on earth before
Has Thy strange music died to silence evermore?
O Death through which we dreamed of gain in utter loss!
Was it indeed defeat, that passion of the Cross?
Then—Brother, Master, King! I take my part with Thee,
And where Thou art, O Lord, there let Thy servant be.
The awful unknown Power that in the darkness lies,
Thou saidst could be revealed through Thee to mortal eyes;
And what though earth and sea His glory do proclaim;
Though in the stars is writ that great and dreadful name—
Yea—hear me, Son of Man—with tears my eyes are dim;
I cannot read the word which draws me close to Him.
I say it after Thee with faltering voice and weak:
“Father of Jesus Christ”—this is the God I seek.
And can it be that Thou mistookst that name divine?
Then let me share Thy dream, my error be like Thine.
On Thee I lean my soul, bewildered, tempest-tost;
If Thou canst fail, for me then everything is lost.
For triumph, for defeat, I lean my soul on Thee:
Yes, where Thou art, O Lord, there let Thy servant be. [Note: The Life of Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff, 349.]
