Revelation of the Fatherhood o f God
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PRACTICAL APPLICATION
2. Perhaps we can answer that question better by going on to ask, in the second place, whether we are r e a l i z i n g i n o u r LIVES ALL THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THIS REVELATION OF THE FATHER-CHARACTER OF GOD IN JESUS CHRIST. For one thing, think how it interprets the mystery and the testing of life. Now life is simply an enigma on the merely theistic hypothesis. We get absolutely no comfort, no light, no illumi nation upon what we know to be the great problem of life from a simple belief in God. It only becomes intelligible to us as we understand God to be our Father in the sense in which Jesus Christ revealed Him. Dr. Babcock used to put it in the simple phrase : “You have got to take one of two interpretations of it. You have got to read your life in the terms of fate, or you have got to read it in the terms of fatherhood.” Once I accept the revelation of God made in Jesus Christ, my life is still a hard problem to me. There are many things in it that are terribly confused and difficult still ; but I begin to get a little light on its deep and impenetrable mysteries. I t was just in this point of view that the writer of the great epistle to the Hebrews thought he had some clue to the mystery of his own life, to the chastening of it, to the hard and burning dis cipline through which he sees we are all passing. It was only when he conceived of himself as being a son of the great Pot ter Who was shaping the clay Himself that the mystery began to clear a little from his pathway. And it was just so, you remember, that Christ got light on the mystery of His life : “Father, not my will, but thine be done.” Only as He remem bered and rested deeply upon the character of God as His Father did those great experiences through which He was passing have full intelligibility to Him. After all, it was no fancy that connected the two great ideas of Isaiah, the living idea of thè fatherhood of God and the meta phorical idea of God as the Potter shaping his clay. I t is only
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