CHAPTER I I I GOD IN CHRIST THE ONLY REVELATION OF THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD BY ROBERT E. SPEER “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God. And these things will they do, because they have not known the Father nor me.” (John 16 : 2 , 3 .) These words suggest to us that it is not enough for a man just to believe in God. Everything depends on what kind of a god it is in whom he believes. It is a rather striking and sur prising comparison at first that our Lord institutes here be tween a mere belief in God and the possibly horrible moral consequences, on the one hand, and a knowledge of God in Christ and its sure moral effects, on the other. And the les son would seem to be the inadequacy of any religious faith that does not recognize the revelation of the Father in Jesus Christ and that does not know Jesus Christ as God. It is a little hard for us to take such a great thought as this into our lives, and yet our Lord puts it in unmistakable clearness: on the one hand, the moral inadequacy of a mere belief in God; on the other hand, the moral and spiritual adequacy of a recognition of God as Father exposed in Christ as God. TH E ISM NOT SU FF IC IEN T In the former of these two verses our Lord makes the first of these two points unmistakably clear. He saw no ade quate guarantee of moral rectitude and justice in a mere theis- tic faith. He suffered in His own death the possibly bitter fruits of a mere theistic faith. The men who put Him to death were ardent believers in God, and they thought they
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