Revelation of the Fatherhood of God 227 His own life, and He conceived this to be a great practical moral truth, that was to save men from those errors of judg ment, of act and of character about which a man has no sure guarantee under a mere monotheistic faith. IN RELATION TO OUR RELIGIOUS FAITH 1. I think we might just as well now go right to the heart of the thing by considering, first of all, t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p o f TH IS REVELATION THAT' JESUS CHRIST MADE OF THE FATHER- CHARACTER OF GOD IN HIMSELF TO OUR OWN RELIGIOUS FA ITH . We begin our Christian creed with the declaration, “1 believe in God the Father Almighty.” I believe that no man can say those words sincerely and honestly, with an intellectual under standing of what he is saying, who is not saying them with his feet solidly resting on the evangelical conviction; for we know practically nothing about God as Father except what we learn from the revelation of God as Father in Jesus Christ. Men say sometimes that the idea of God as Father was in the Old Testament, and there is a sense doubtless in which we can find it there: a patriotic sense for one thing, a poetic sense for another thing. The' Hebrews thought of God as the Father, the national Father of Israel. Now and then there is some splendid burst in the prophets that contains that idea, as when Jeremiah, crying out for God, .says, “I am a Father to Israel, and Ephraim is my first born.” Or when Israel is itself crying out through Isaiah, "Jehovah is our Father. He is the potter and we are the clay.” But in each sense it is a sort of nationalistic concep tion of God as the Father of the whole people Israel. And even wheii the note comes out poetically, it is patriotic still. Turn some time to the 103rd Psalm, where there is the best expression of it, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth. them that fear him,” and even there it is the national cry. Or turn to the 89th Psalm, and there, too, it is national and patriotic: “And he shall cry unto me, Jehovah,
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