Over all is God's throne (Matt. 23:22). That idea, it seems to me, lapses somehow from our minds to-day. When Luther had to face the hostility of the Kaiser, the Emperor Charles V., he wrote to one of his friends: "Christ comes and sits at the right hand—not of the Kaiser, for in that case we should have perished long ago—but at the right hand of God. This is a great and incredible thing; but I enjoy it, incredible as it is; some day I mean to die in it. Why should I not live in it?" So Luther wrote—in not quite our modern vein. We hardly calculate on God as a factor; we omit him. Jesus did not. God's rule is over all; and in all our perplexity, doubt, and fear, Jesus reminds us that the first thing is faith in God. The fact is that "Thine is the Kingdom" means peace; it is a joyous reminder. For if he speaks of the Kingdom of God, the King is more than the Kingdom. It is the Kingdom, the rule, of the God whom Jesus teaches us to trust and to love. The Father is supreme. But that has more aspects than one. If our Father is supreme for us, he is supreme over us. Jesus emphasizes the will of God—God's commandment against man's tradition, God's will against man's notions (Mark 7:8). What a source of rest and peace to him is the thought of God's will! When Dante writes: "And His will is our peace," it is the thought of Jesus. And at the same time God's judgements are as real to Jesus' mind. "I will tell you," he says, "whom to fear, God—yes, fear him!" (Luke 12:5). He feels the tenderness and the awfulness of God at once.
In speaking of God, it is noticeable that Jesus chiefly emphasizes God's interest in the individual, as giving the real clue to God's nature. On the whole, there is very little even implied, still less explicit, in the Gospels, about God as the great architect of Nature—hardly anything on the lines familiar to us in the Psalms and in Isaiah—"The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed the dry land" (Psalm 95:5)—"He taketh up the isles as a very little thing" (Isaiah 40:15). There is little of this in the Gospels; yet it is implied in the affair of the storm (Matt. 8:26). The disciples in their anxiety wake him. He does not understand their fear. Whose sea is it? Whose wind is it? Whose children are you? Cannot you trust your Father to control his wind and his sea? Of course it is possible that he said more about God as the Author of Nature than our fragmentary reports give us; but it may be that it is because the emphasis on God's care and love for the individual is hardest to believe, and at the same time best, gives the real value of God, that Jesus uses it so much. Perhaps the Great Artificer is too far away for our minds. He is too busy, we think; and yet, after all, if God is so great, why should he be so busy? If he is a real Father, why should not he be at leisure for his children? He is, says Jesus; a friend has leisure for his friends, and a father for his children; and God, Jesus suggests, always has leisure for you.
The great emphasis with Jesus falls on the love of God. Thus he tells the story of the impossible creditor with two debtors (Luke 7:42). One owed him ten pounds, and the other a hundred. When they had nothing to pay, they both came to him and told him so. The ordinary creditor, at the very best, would say: "Well, I suppose I must put it down as a bad debt." Jesus says that this creditor took up quite another attitude. He smiled and said to his two troubled friends: "Is that all? Don't let anything like that worry you. What is that between you and me?" He forgave them the debt with such a charm ("echarisato"), Jesus says, that they both loved him. One feels that the end of the story must be, that they both paid him and loved him all the more for taking the money. What a delightful story of charm, and friendship and forgiveness! And it is a true picture of God, Jesus would have us believe, of God's forgiveness and the response it wakes in men.
If we do not definitely set our minds to assimilate the ideas of Jesus, we shall make too little of the heart of God. With Jesus this is the central and crucial reality. He emphasizes the generosity of God. God makes his sun rise on the good and on the bad; he sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). God's flowers are just as beautiful in the bad man's garden. God knows what his child needs, and gives it, whether it is a very good child or a very bad one. The Father is the same great wise Friend in either case. The peacemakers are recognized as the children of God, because of their family likeness to God (Matt. 5:9). They come among people, and find them in discord with one another, and their presence stills that; or they come into a man's life, when it is all in disorder and pain, and they bring peace there. They may not quite know it, but they do these things almost without meaning to do them. And Jesus says that this is a family likeness by which men know they are God's children. But it is not every teacher, pagan or Christian, who lays such stress on God's gift of peace, or is so sure of it. He uses Hosea's great saying about God—"I will have mercy and not sacrifice" (Hosea 6:6), as giving the truth about God. Matthew represents him as quoting it twice (Matt. 9:13, 12:7); and we can well believe that he found in it the real spirit of God and often referred to it. His own heart has taken him to the tenderest of the utterances of the Old Testament spoken by the most suffering of the Prophets. "Love your enemies," he says (Matt. 5:44); yes, for then you will be the real children of God. Or he speaks of the great patience of God, how God gives every man all the time and all the chance that he needs—sometimes, he half suggests, even a little more. Look at the parable of the fig tree, how the gardener pleads for the tree, begs and obtains another chance for it (Luke 13:8); that is like God, says Jesus.
It is easy enough to talk in a vague way about the love of God. But the love of God implies surely the individual; love has little content indeed if its object is merely a collective noun, an abstract, a concept. But that God loves individual men is very difficult for us to believe in earnest. The real crux comes when the question rises in a man's own heart, "Does God love me?" Jesus says that he does, but it is very hard to believe, except in the company of Jesus and under his influence. Jesus throughout asserts and reasserts the value of the individual to God. Look, for example, at the picture he draws, when he tells of the recovery of the Lost Sheep, and brings out the analogy. At the end of the Book of Job (ch. 38) the poet carries his reader back to the first sight of a world new-made, and tells how God, like the real artist and creator—we might not have thought of all this, but the poet did—loves his work so much that he must have his friends sharing it with him. He calls them; he shows them the world he has made—"the beauty, and the wonder, and the power," as Browning says. The poet tells us that what followed was that "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." The sight was so good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily. Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of "joy in heaven in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth"? We can believe in such joy when God made the world; but can we believe that there was the same joy in the presence of God yesterday when a coolie gave his heart to God? Jesus does. That is the central thing, it seems to me, in his teaching about God—that God cares for the individual to an extent far beyond anything we could think possible. If we can wrestle with that central thought and assimilate it, or, as the old divines said, "appropriate" it, make it our own, the rest of the Gospel is easy. But one can never manage it except with the help, and in the company, of Jesus.
Jesus goes a step further, and believes in the possibility of a man loving God and God enjoying that too. If he speaks of prayer, must we not think he means that God wants it as much as his child can want it? How much is involved in the name "Father," which Jesus so uniformly gives to God? Something less than the word carries in the case of a human father, or more? What is the attitude of a father to his child? Jesus, as we have seen, uses this illustration to bring out God's care for the actual needs of his children. But is that all? What is the innermost thing in a father's relation to his children? Surely something more than the bird's instinct to feed her young, or to gather them under her wings (Luke 13:34). Is not one of the most real features of parenthood enjoyment of the child? Do not men and women frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with big things? Is there not a charm, as says one of the Christian Fathers (Minucius Felix), about the "half-words" that a child uses, as he learns to talk and wrestles with a grown-up vocabulary? About the extraordinary pictures he will draw of ships or cows—the quaint stories he will invent—the odd ways in which his gratitude and his affection express themselves? Is it a real fatherhood where such things do not appeal? Jesus' language about God, his whole attitude to God, implies throughout that God is as real a Father as anybody, and it suggests that God loves his children the more because they are real; because they are not very clever; because they do make such queer and imperfect prayers; because, in short, they need him; and because they fill a place in his heart.
We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his Gospel of God and man needing each other and finding each other—his "good news," as he calls it. He bases all on his faith in what has been called "Man's incurable religious instinct"—that instinct in the human heart that must have God—and in God's response to that instinct which he himself implanted, and which is no accident found here and missing there, but a genuine God-given characteristic of every man, whatever his temperament or his range in emotions may be, his swiftness or slowness of mind. The repeated parables of seed and leaven—the parables of vitality—again and again suggest his faith in his message, his conviction that God must have man and man must have God—that, as St. Augustine puts it, "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart knows no rest till it rests in Thee" (Conf., i. 1). That is the essence of the Gospel.
How this union of the soul with God comes about, Jesus does not directly say, but there are many hints in his teaching that bear upon it. "The Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observation," he said (Luke 17:20). Religious truth is not reached by "quick turns of self-applauding intellect," nor by demonstrations. It comes another way. The quiet familiarity with the deep true things of life, till on a sudden they are transfigured in the light of God, and truth is a new and glowing thing, independent of arguments and the strange evidence of thaumaturgy—this is the normal way; and Jesus holds by it. The great people, men of law and learning, want more; they want something to substantiate God's messages from without. If Jesus comes to them with a word from God, can he not prove its authenticity preferably with "a sign from the sky" (Mark 8:11)? For the signs he gives, and the evidence he suggests, are unsatisfactory. "And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, `Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given unto this generation.' So he left them and went up into the ship again and went away." That scene is drawn from life.
But why no sign? In the parallel passage we read: "`The wicked generation and adulterous seeketh a sign, but there shall no sign be given it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah'; so he left them and departed" (Matt. 16:4). The real explanation of this reference to Jonah is given by Luke (11:32), and missed or misdeveloped in Matthew (Matt. 12:40). Nineveh recognized instinctively the inherent truth of Jonah's message, and repented. Truth is its own evidence—like leaven in the meal, like seed in the field, it does its work, and its life reveals it. God is known that way. When the chief priests demand of Jesus to be told plainly what is his authority (Mark 11:27), he carries the matter a stage further: Was the baptism of John, he asks, from heaven, i.e. from God, or was it of men? Does God make His message clear, does He properly authenticate Himself? And the uneasy weighing of alternatives, summarized by the evangelist, leads to the answer that they could not tell whence it was; and Jesus rejoins that he has nothing to say to them about his authority. He had taken what we might call an easy case—where it was evident that God had spoken; and this was all they made of it—they "could not tell." It was plain, then, either that these men did not recognize the obvious message of God ("the word of God came upon John," Luke 3:9,), or that, if they did recognize it, they thought it did not matter. For the insincere and the trivial there is no message from God, no truth of God—how should there be?
If we pursue this line of thought, we can see how, in Jesus' opinion, a man may be sure of God and of God's word for him. If a man be candid with himself, if he face the common facts of life with seriousness and in the doing of duty, perplexities vanish. Such a man is prepared for the Great Fact, by faithfulness to the little facts, and then God dawns on him in them. This is put directly in the Fourth Gospel (7:17), and in parable in the Synoptists. The leaven works, till the whole is leavened; the uneasy process is over and the result achieved. Or, it comes more quietly still—the seed grows while the farmer sleeps and rises, night and day; the blade springs up and the ear forms on the blade, the seed grows in the ear; and the end is reached and God's Kingdom is a reality. Or, the knowledge of God comes like a lightning flash—sudden, illuminative, decisive. "The Son reveals" God to the simple, Jesus said (Matt. 11:27). The Son of Man may be a disputable figure—"Whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him" (Matt. 12:32)—but there is no forgiveness in this world, or in any possible real world where God counts at all, for the refusal of the spirit of Truth. So he taught, and all history shows he was right—the refusal of truth is fatal. "Jesus," wrote Matthew Arnold, "never touches theory, but bases himself invariably upon experience." It is to experience that Jesus goes to authenticate his message. The real facts of life lead you to God, as the red sky, and the south wind, teach you to foretell the weather (Matt. 16:2; Luke 12:55).