Paper 196 Overview: The Faith of Jesus

Jesus exemplified a sublime and wholehearted faith in God that transcended mere intellectual assent or traditional religious observance, functioning instead as a living personal spiritual relationship with the Universal Father. His faith emerged from the insight born of the activity of his indwelling Thought Adjuster, manifesting not as consolation in adversity but as a transformative spiritual achievement that enabled him to experience tranquility and certainty even amid life's trials and contradictions. Through this triumphant faith, Jesus demonstrated a level of spiritual attainment that made God a living reality in human experience to a degree unprecedented in the universe.

Jesus comprehended God simultaneously as "The Holy One of Israel" and "The living and loving Father in heaven," elevating the concept of divine fatherhood by revealing that every mortal is a child of God's love. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual, but wholly personal and purely spiritual, a sublime experience and profound conviction that provided spiritual anchorage even in the face of apparent defeat and threatening despair. This faith was characterized by its unshakable nature, sweeping away spiritual doubts and destroying conflicting desires in a manner that demonstrated spiritual invincibility and unflinching loyalty to the Father's will.

The faith of Jesus was remarkable for its balance. It was all-consuming and indomitable, yet never fanatical, as it did not override his thoughtful and well-balanced judgment about practical values in everyday situations. The Son of Man achieved magnificent coordination as a unified human personality, a perfectly endowed divine being, and a combined human-divine being functioning on earth as a single personality. His faith visualized all spirit values as found within the kingdom of God, making the achievement of the divine will the central focus of his life and prayer, culminating in his characteristic expression, "Your kingdom come; your will be done." His prayer life was not a religious duty but a sincere expression of spiritual attitude and soul loyalty that produced an unbroken communion with God.

Jesus enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God that remained unshaken throughout the varied experiences of mortal existence. Despite encountering the ordinary fluctuations of human life, he never religiously doubted the certainty of God's watchcare and guidance. His faith originated from the insight produced by the activity of his indwelling Adjuster, the divine presence within him, making it neither traditionally received nor merely intellectual, but wholly personal and purely spiritual in nature. This faith represented the authentic integration of divine presence with human consciousness.

The human Jesus perceived God as simultaneously holy, just, and great, while also recognizing the divine as true, beautiful, and good, focusing these attributes in his mind as "the will of the Father in heaven." While the concept of God as Father was not original to Jesus, he elevated and transformed this idea into a sublime experience by achieving a new revelation of God and by proclaiming that every mortal creature exists as a child of this Father of love, a genuine son of God. This conceptualization fundamentally restructured the relationship between the divine and the human, emphasizing intimate spiritual kinship rather than merely creator-creature dynamics.

Jesus did not approach faith as would a struggling soul at war with the universe or grasping for support amid life's difficulties. His faith was neither a mere consolation amid troubles nor a comforting illusion offsetting the unpleasant realities and sorrows of existence. Rather, he demonstrated the capacity to maintain tranquility and unquestioned trust in God even when confronting the natural difficulties and temporal contradictions inherent in mortal life. He experienced the tremendous thrill of living by faith in the very presence of the heavenly Father. His faith represented not mere belief but a triumphant living experience of actual spirit attainment.

Jesus' most significant contribution to human experience was not presenting new intellectual concepts about the Father in heaven, but rather magnificently demonstrating in human terms a new and higher type of living faith in God. In no other place throughout the vast universe, in the life of any mortal, did God become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth. His faith transcended both intellectual reflection and mystic meditation, being instead a personal spiritual relationship with the Universal Father that was fully validated by the supreme authority of genuine personal experience, making his life the definitive demonstration of faith-based living.

The faith Jesus exhibited was personal, living, original, spontaneous, and purely spiritual, thus making it distinct from reverence for tradition or intellectual belief held as a sacred creed. It manifested as a sublime experience and profound conviction that securely anchored him against doubt, effectively destroying every conflicting desire. Nothing could sever him from his spiritual moorings, as his fervent, sublime, and undaunted faith proved unassailable. Even when facing apparent defeat or experiencing disappointment and threatening despair, Jesus maintained calm presence in divine communion, free from fear and fully conscious of his spiritual invincibility, unfailingly demonstrating unquestioning loyalty to the Father's will even when confronted with the crushing threat of ignominious death.

Jesus' devotion to fulfilling the Father's will and serving humanity transcended mere mortal decision and human determination, constituting instead a wholehearted consecration to an unreserved bestowal of love. Regardless of the magnificent truth of Michael's sovereignty, we must not remove the human Jesus from his connection with struggling mortals. Jesus ascended to heaven as a man as well as God; he belongs to humanity, and humanity belongs to him. It is most unfortunate that religion itself has sometimes contributed to taking the human Jesus away from those who struggle with mortal existence. We must recognize that Jesus of Nazareth was a genuinely religious man who, through faith, achieved both the knowing and the doing of God's will, establishing himself as the most truly religious individual ever to live on our world.

The time has come to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amid the theological traditions and religious dogmas accumulated over nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must no longer be sacrificed even to the splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service it would be if, through this revelation, the Son of Man could be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and presented as the living Jesus to the church bearing his name and to all other religions. Surely the Christian fellowship should not hesitate to make necessary adjustments in faith and practices to "follow after" the Master in his demonstration of religious devotion to doing the Father's will and consecration to the unselfish service of humanity. Contemporary institutional Christianity must confront whether it fears the exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social respectability and selfish economic maladjustment when considering what radical transformation might occur if the living religion of Jesus were to supplant the theological religion about Jesus.

To "follow Jesus" means personally sharing his religious faith and entering into the spirit of the Master's life of unselfish service for humanity. Among the most valuable forms of human knowledge is understanding what Jesus believed, discovering his ideals, and striving to achieve his exalted life purpose. The common people heard Jesus gladly during his ministry, and they would respond again to presentations of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths were proclaimed anew. People heard him with such receptivity because he embodied authenticity as an unpretentious layman; remarkably, the world's greatest religious teacher was indeed a layman rather than a professional religious leader.

The objective for kingdom believers should not be to literally imitate Jesus' outward life in the flesh, but rather to share his faith, to trust God as he trusted God, and to believe in humanity as he believed in his fellow mortals. Jesus progressed from the nature of man to the consciousness of the nature of God through the conjoint achievement of the faith of his mortal intellect and the actions of his indwelling Adjuster. His realization of divinity progressed through seven stages of faith consciousness, marked by pivotal events in his bestowal experience: the arrival of his Thought Adjuster; the messenger of Immanuel who appeared to him in Jerusalem at age twelve; the manifestations attending his baptism; the experiences on the Mount of Transfiguration; his morontia resurrection; his spirit ascension; and the final embrace of the Paradise Father, conferring unlimited sovereignty of his universe.

A genuine reformation in the Christian church may eventually penetrate deeply enough to recover the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. While it remains possible to preach a religion about Jesus, the essential spiritual challenge is to live the religion of Jesus in daily experience. During the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion focused on the risen and glorified Christ, which Paul subsequently transformed into Christianity—a religion embodying his own theological perspectives and personal experience with Jesus following the Damascus road encounter. This theological evolution shifted emphasis from Jesus' original gospel of the kingdom to a religion centered on the person of Christ.

The New Testament is devoted predominantly not to portraying the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to discussing Paul's religious experience and presenting his personal religious convictions. With the exception of certain portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, plus the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James, the New Testament offers limited insight into Jesus' actual teachings and methods. Even Peter, in his writings, rarely referenced the personal religious life of his Master. While the New Testament stands as an exemplary Christian document, it contains relatively little material that could be characterized as Jesusonian, focusing more on beliefs about Jesus than on the faith that Jesus himself demonstrated and taught.

Jesus' life in the flesh depicted a transcendent religious progression from primitive awe and human reverence through years of personal spiritual communion, culminating in his conscious oneness with the Father. In a single lifetime, Jesus traversed the spiritual journey that humans typically begin on earth but complete only after extensive training in the spirit schools of pre-Paradise realms. He advanced from a purely human consciousness of faith certainties based on personal religious experience to the sublime spiritual heights of positively realizing his divine nature and close partnership with the Universal Father in managing a universe. This extraordinary progression from human dependence, which prompted him to ask, "Why do you call me good? None is good but God," to divine consciousness, which enabled him to ask, "Which one of you convicts me of sin?" was accomplished entirely through mortal achievement, even as he remained the same human Jesus, both Son of Man and Son of God.

The gospel accounts offer varied perspectives on Jesus' spiritual journey: Mark, Matthew, and Luke preserve elements of the human Jesus engaged in the superb struggle to ascertain and fulfill the divine will, while John presents the triumphant Jesus walking the earth in full consciousness of his divinity. The fundamental mistake in studying the Master's life has been conceptualizing him as either entirely human or exclusively divine, when throughout his earthly sojourn and beyond, he remained authentically both. Paul's Christianity ensured the adoration of the divine Christ but largely obscured the struggling and valiant human Jesus of Galilee who, through personal religious faith and the heroism of his indwelling Adjuster, ascended from humanity to divinity, thereby establishing a new and living pathway for all mortals to follow in their spiritual progression. The early Christian movement systematically moved away from the human portrayal of Jesus toward exaltation of the risen Christ, the glorified and soon-returning Lord Jesus Christ.

Personal spiritual religious experience functions as an efficient solvent for most mortal difficulties, serving as an effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all human problems. While religion does not eliminate or destroy human troubles, it dissolves, absorbs, illuminates, and transcends them, unifying the personality for effective adjustment to all life's requirements. Religious faith, the positive guidance of the indwelling divine presence, enables the God-knowing individual to bridge the gulf between intellectual logic recognizing the Universal First Cause as It and the soul's positive affirmations that this First Cause is He, the personal heavenly Father revealed in Jesus' gospel and experienced in human salvation. This bridging function demonstrates religion's supreme value in integrating intellectual understanding with spiritual insight.

The universe comprises three fundamental elements of reality: fact, idea, and relation, which religious consciousness identifies as science, philosophy, and truth respectively. Philosophy would conceptualize these activities as reason, wisdom, and faith, corresponding to physical, intellectual, and spiritual reality. We commonly designate these realities as thing, meaning, and value in our attempts to comprehend the structure of existence. The progressive comprehension of reality constitutes an approach toward God, as finding God and experiencing identity with reality delivers the experience of self-completion and wholeness. This totality of experience represents the full realization of God and the culmination of the divine-knowing journey.

The comprehensive summation of human life manifests when a person is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and justified by religious faith. Physical certainty emerges from the logic of science, moral certainty from philosophical wisdom, and spiritual certainty from the truth of genuine religious experience. These three paths to certainty complement rather than contradict one another when properly integrated in human consciousness. The human mind can achieve high levels of spiritual insight and corresponding awareness of divine values because it is not entirely material in nature; a spirit nucleus, the Adjuster of divine presence, exists within each human mind, manifesting through three distinct evidences.

The first evidence of spirit indwelling is humanitarian fellowship—love. While the purely animal mind may exhibit gregarious behavior for self-protection, only the spirit-indwelt intellect demonstrates unselfish altruism and unconditional love toward others. The second evidence is interpretation of the universe—wisdom. Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the universe is fundamentally friendly to the individual, perceiving cosmic purpose rather than chaos. The third evidence is spiritual evaluation of life—worship. Only the spirit-indwelt person can realize the divine presence and seek to attain fuller experience of this foretaste of divinity. These three manifestations collectively demonstrate spiritual consciousness beyond material existence.

The human mind does not create real values, nor does human experience independently yield universe insight. Regarding insight, recognition of moral values, and discernment of spiritual meanings, the human mind is limited to discovering, recognizing, interpreting, and choosing among values already present in reality. Moral values become intellectual possessions through three basic judgments of the mortal mind: self-judgment (moral choice), social-judgment (ethical choice), and God-judgment (religious choice). Human progress occurs through a technique of conjoint revelational evolution, wherein divine lovers, interpreters, and evaluators cooperate with human consciousness in spiritual advancement.

Moral evaluation with religious meaning, spiritual insight, represents the individual's choice between good and evil, truth and error, material and spiritual, human and divine, time and eternity. Human survival largely depends on consecrating the human will to choosing those values selected by the spirit-value sorter, the indwelling interpreter and unifier. Personal religious experience encompasses two phases: discovery in the human mind and revelation by the indwelling divine spirit. Through oversophistication or irreligious conduct, individuals or generations may temporarily suspend efforts to discover the indwelling God or fail to progress in divine revelation. However, such spiritual non-progression cannot persist indefinitely because of the Thought Adjusters' presence and influence.

The profound experience of divine indwelling transcends materialistic scientific investigation. Spiritual joy cannot be examined under a microscope, love cannot be weighed in a balance, moral values cannot be measured, and the quality of spiritual worship defies quantification. Historical religious traditions have emphasized different aspects of spiritual experience: the Hebrews developed a religion of moral sublimity; the Greeks created a religion of beauty; Paul and his associates established a religion of faith, hope, and charity. Jesus, however, revealed and exemplified a religion of love, characterized by security in the Father's love and the joy of sharing this love in service to the human brotherhood. This religion represents the supreme integration of truth, beauty, and goodness in human experience.

When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God.