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uses the term "Messiah," but he gives it a content of his own; it may well have been his own use as well as his life and death which led the early church to find the Messiah in the "suffering servant" passages of Isaiah to which the Jewish rabbis did not think of turning for that purpose. Equally striking is his attitude toward the Old Testament, whether we think of what he chooses, of what he passes by, or of what he definitely sets aside. When we think of the limitations of the apocalyptic thought and writings of his day, it is incredible that he should have been a slavish adherent.

JESUS' FAITH AND ITS CENTER

There is little question as to the central and determining element in Jesus' message; it is his thought of God. As with every great religious leader, it was not a system of doctrines but a faith that Jesus brought, and the whole horizon of that faith is filled with the thought of that God whom he knew in personal fellowship and whom he served in absolute devotion. Formulas lie on the outside of religion. Here is the heart; here is the source of Jesus' independence and power. He is no anxious collector of ideas or interpreter of past prophecies; out of this inner knowledge of God he says: "No one knoweth the Father save the Son." Here is the source of his originality; here he finds the answer to his questions. The painful legalism of his day disappears before the insight which he gains here, that men are simply to be children of their Father in likeness of spirit. Whatever his hope may have borrowed elsewhere in form, here is its vital source and shaping power. Without this God he could have had no such compelling

message of hope; with such a God not merely the ground of hope is given but form as well.

Here, at the center of all faith, there appears most clearly the contrast between Jesus and Jewish apocalypticism. The emphasis of apocalypticism is upon the power of God, that of Jesus is upon his character. For apocalypticism the glory of God is to be found in his majesty and his exaltation above men. All manner of pictures are used to portray that glory, but the figures are physical. Enoch is carried to distant heavens. He pictures walls of crystal, portals blazing with fire, a house of indescribable splendor, a Great Being surrounded by flames of fire so that no one can approach nor even angels enter before him. God is the distant and unapproachable. His titles are taken from Oriental autocracy. The simple name of Jehovah has disappeared; he is Lord of majesty, King of the ages, Holy Great One, and the Great Glory (Enoch 12 to 14). There is no want of reverence with Jesus' thought of God, nor lack of the sense of God's power, but it is the goodness of God that he wishes men to see. And that goodness so far from separating God brings him near to men; God is the searching Shepherd, the waiting Father. Jesus finds God not in the distant heavens, but in these common pictures of human life that tell of love and pity and service. He finds him too in nature, in the glory that decks the flowers, in the care that attends the least of birds. Anyone may find this God who will seek him; anyone may approach him who comes in humility and earnestness. Jesus himself lives in constant fellowship with him and would lead others into that fellowship. "No one knoweth the Father save the Son. . . . Come

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unto me. . Learn of me." And he teaches men to call upon this God not as the Great Glory or as King of the Ages, but very simply as "our Father." Christianity has followed Jesus here, and not merely his word but his spirit. Not in physical splendor nor in sheer power has it found its highest revelation of God, but with Paul it has seen the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS' THOUGHT

OF GOD

The thought of God determines for Jesus the whole spirit and attitude of his life. The apocalyptic temper is usually a compound of hope and anxiety. The living experience of God is not strong enough to sustain it. It rests back upon a world philosophy. It supports itself with computations, with schemes of epochs and ages, with recountal of signs, and predictive programs. As times grow darker the pictures of outward glory and splendor are multiplied in the effort to sustain faith by the appeal to the imagination. The element of conflict is not wanting with Jesus, but the victorious power of his peace is clear. The last terrible experience does not shake his confidence; and the last source of that confidence is always the same, always this God and Father. "Fear not, little flock," he says to his followers; "for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." "Be not therefore anxious;

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your heavenly Father knoweth." And in this trust he himself never wavered: "Abba, Father, . . . . howbeit not what I will but what thou wilt." "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." He is strangely blind to the deeper

realities who does not see that the heart of Jesus' message was in this vision of God, and that here lay his power with men.

It is this thought of God which determines Jesus' attitude toward the world. We have noted the dualism and pessimism of the apocalyptic conception: God is distant, evil has the power, man is hopeless as to this world, and dreams only of the next. The widely different outlook of Jesus is seen in Matt. 6. 25-34 and elsewhere. In Jesus' world not even a sparrow falls without the permission of God, and the least interest of man is his concern. Man need not, therefore, be anxious. The presence of evil Jesus recognized; he saw it indeed more clearly than the apocalyptist, for he discerned where it really lay. He was not indifferent to the ills of hunger and sickness and probably not to that of foreign oppression, but it was the presence of sin that concerned him most. Yet with all this he knew the power of the good. The final victory would come in the new day, but even now God and good were greater than evil; the sick were being healed, and evil spirits driven out, and the sins of men forgiven. Here, as elsewhere, one can get the total difference in atmosphere only by reading at length in the apocalypses.

THE QUESTION OF NATIONALISM

The radical difference from apocalypticism appears again when we consider the elements of nationalism. Theoretically, the elements of nationalism should have disappeared from Jewish apocalypticism as individualism came in. The thoroughgoing apocalyptic scheme looks to the final judgment and award as individual

and ethical. In actual fact, however, the national element remains. The thought still moves about the glory and triumph of Israel, sometimes in connection with the final age, sometimes with the intermediate and earthly kingdom which has survived in modern Adventism. How strong the influence of this Jewish particularism was is seen in the question of Acts 1. 6: "Lord, dost thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" The apocalyptic scheme of history moves about the succession of great political empires with the triumph of Israel at the close. Jesus' fight is not against Rome nor any other empire, but against sin. He looks forward to no kingdom of Israel but to a fellowship of men in which love and righteousness shall rule. His kingdom is not national but broadly human. Whatever he may mean in saying that he was not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, the kingdom he pictures is in no single feature Jewish. He declares that the kingdom is to be taken away from the Jewish nation, that men are to come from the east and the west and the north and the south to enter into the same. But more significant even than such specific utterances is the fact that what he says about entrance into the kingdom and the nature of the children of the kingdom is always moral and spiritual, always has reference to men as men and never to anything that marks the Jew as such. And all this flows inevitably from Jesus' conception of God, joined to the actual experience of Jesus as with mingled sorrow and joy he saw publicans and sinners, Gentiles included, press into the kingdom to which his people were indifferent. As for the spirit of vengeance, dreaming of conquering armies and slaughtered foes and subject peoples

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