PAPER 196
The Faith Of Jesus
P2087:1, 196:0.1
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 the outgrowth
of the insight born of the activity of the divine presence, his indwelling
Adjuster. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual; it was
wholly personal and purely spiritual.
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The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true,
beautiful, and good. All these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind
as the "will of the Father in heaven." Jesus' God was at one and the same
time "The Holy One of Israel" and "The living and loving Father in heaven."
The concept of God as a Father was not original with Jesus, but he exalted
and elevated the idea into a sublime experience by achieving a new revelation
of God and by proclaiming that every mortal creature is a child of this Father
of love, a son of God.
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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. And this triumphant faith was a living experience of actual
spirit attainment. 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. Never on all the worlds of this universe,
in the life of any one mortal, did God ever become such a living reality
as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth.
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In the Master's life on Urantia, this and all other worlds of the local creation
discover a new and higher type of religion, religion based on personal spiritual
relations with the Universal Father and wholly validated by the supreme authority
of genuine personal experience. This living faith of Jesus was more than an
intellectual reflection, and it was not a mystic meditation.
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Theology may fix, formulate, define, and dogmatize faith, but in the human
life of Jesus faith was personal, living, original, spontaneous, and purely
spiritual. This faith was not reverence for tradition nor a mere intellectual
belief which he held as a sacred creed, but rather a sublime experience and
a profound conviction which securely held him. His faith was so real
and all-encompassing that it absolutely swept away any spiritual doubts and
effectively destroyed every conflicting desire. Nothing was able to tear him
away from the spiritual
anchorage of this fervent, sublime, and undaunted
faith. Even in the face of apparent defeat or in the
throes of disappointment
and threatening despair, he calmly stood in the divine presence free from
fear and fully conscious of spiritual invincibility. Jesus enjoyed the invigorating
assurance of the possession of unflinching faith, and in each of life's trying
situations he unfailingly exhibited an unquestioning loyalty to the Father's
will. And this superb faith was undaunted even by the cruel and crushing threat
of an ignominious death.
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In a religious genius, strong spiritual faith so many times leads directly
to disastrous fanaticism, to exaggeration of the religious ego, but it was
not so with Jesus. He was not unfavorably affected in his practical life by
his extraordinary faith and spirit attainment because this spiritual exaltation
was a wholly unconscious and spontaneous soul expression of his personal experience
with God.
P2088:2, 196:0.7
The
all-consuming and indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical,
for it never attempted to run away with his well-balanced intellectual judgments
concerning the proportional values of practical and commonplace social, economic,
and moral life situations. The Son of Man was a splendidly unified human personality;
he was a perfectly endowed divine being; he was also magnificently co-ordinated
as a combined human and divine being functioning on earth as a single personality.
Always did the Master co-ordinate the faith of the soul with the
wisdom-
appraisals
of seasoned experience. Personal faith, spiritual hope, and moral devotion
were always correlated in a matchless religious unity of harmonious association
with the keen realization of the reality and sacredness of all human loyalties
-- personal honor, family love, religious obligation, social duty, and economic
necessity.
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The faith of Jesus visualized all spirit values as being found in the kingdom
of God; therefore he said, "Seek first the kingdom of heaven." Jesus saw in
the advanced and ideal fellowship of the kingdom the achievement and fulfillment
of the "will of God." The very heart of the prayer which he taught his disciples
was, "Your kingdom come; your will be done." Having thus conceived of the
kingdom as comprising the will of God, he devoted himself to the cause of
its realization with amazing self-forgetfulness and unbounded enthusiasm.
But in all his intense mission and throughout his extraordinary life there
never appeared the fury of the fanatic nor the superficial
frothiness of the
religious egotist.
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The Master's entire life was consistently conditioned by this living faith,
this sublime religious experience. This spiritual attitude wholly dominated
his thinking and feeling, his believing and praying, his teaching and preaching.
This personal faith of a son in the certainty and security of the guidance
and protection of the heavenly Father imparted to his unique life a profound
endowment of spiritual reality. And yet, despite this very deep consciousness
of close relationship with divinity, this Galilean, God's Galilean, when addressed
as Good Teacher, instantly replied, "Why do you call me good?" When we stand
confronted by such splendid self-forgetfulness, we begin to understand how
the Universal Father found it possible so fully to manifest himself to him
and reveal himself through him to the mortals of the realms.
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Jesus brought to God, as a man of the realm, the greatest of all offerings:
the consecration and dedication of his own will to the majestic service of
doing the divine will. Jesus always and consistently interpreted religion
wholly in terms of the Father's will. When you study the career of the Master,
as concerns prayer or any other feature of the religious life, look not so
much for what he taught as for what he did. Jesus never prayed as a religious
duty. To him prayer was a sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration
of soul loyalty, a recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving,
an avoidance of emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation
of
intellection, an ennoblement of desire, a vindication of moral decision,
an enrichment of thought, an
invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration
of impulse, a clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a transcendental
surrender of will, a sublime assertion of confidence, a revelation of courage,
the proclamation of discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation
of consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and the mighty
mobilization of the combined soul powers to withstand all human tendencies
toward selfishness, evil, and sin. He lived just such a life of prayerful
consecration to the doing of his Father's will and ended his life triumphantly
with just such a prayer. The secret of his unparalleled religious life was
this consciousness of the presence of God; and he attained it by intelligent
prayer and sincere worship -- unbroken communion with God -- and not by leadings,
voices, visions, or extraordinary religious practices.
P2089:1, 196:0.11
In the earthly life of Jesus, religion was a living experience, a direct and
personal movement from spiritual reverence to practical righteousness. The
faith of Jesus bore the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit. His faith
was not immature and credulous like that of a child, but in many ways it did
resemble the unsuspecting trust of the child mind. Jesus trusted God much
as the child trusts a parent. He had a profound confidence in the universe
-- just such a trust as the child has in its parental environment. Jesus'
wholehearted faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe very much resembled
the child's trust in the security of its earthly surroundings. He depended
on the heavenly Father as a child leans upon its earthly parent, and his fervent
faith never for one moment doubted the certainty of the heavenly Father's
overcare. He was not disturbed seriously by fears, doubts, and skepticism.
Unbelief did not inhibit the free and original expression of his life. He
combined the stalwart and intelligent courage of a full-grown man with the
sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child. His faith grew to such
heights of trust that it was devoid of fear.
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The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child's trust. His faith was so
absolute and undoubting that it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow
beings and to the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the
divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the assurance
of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating pretense in his religious
experience. In this giant intellect of the full-grown man the faith of the
child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious consciousness.
It is not strange that he once said, "Except you become as a little child,
you shall not enter the kingdom." Notwithstanding that Jesus' faith was childlike,
it was in no sense childish.
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Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe
with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence
accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father.
The Master desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent
faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe
what he believed, but also to believe as he believed. This is
the full significance of his one supreme requirement, "Follow me."
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Jesus' earthly life was devoted to one great purpose -- doing the Father's
will, living the human life religiously and by faith. The faith of Jesus was
trusting, like that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He
made robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold disappointments,
resolutely surmounted extraordinary difficulties, and unflinchingly confronted
the stern requirements of duty. It required a strong will and an unfailing
confidence to believe what Jesus believed and as he believed.