(4) Jesus the Great Religious Teacher. Thc whole life of a real teacher teaches. The teach ing of Jesus is not alone the words which he spoke; it is also the deeds which Ile did, and the crample of his own life. Indeed, one attestation of the truth of his utterances is the beauty of the life _which shows that truth in concrete realiza tion. Jesus was recognized by the most receptive minds of his own day to be the great religious teacher (Matt. vii:29: Mark i:27; Luke xxiv: ig) whose coming was to fulfill the ideal hopes of centuries (Luke xxiv:zt ; John vi 15). It was not his words only that gave them this belief; it was their embodiment in his acts and their illustration in his character. Jesus was sent by God to deliver a divine message to man, a message of life. He. revealed religions truth which was. to be not only accepted, but lived. The living of truth means the expression of it in .one's words, in one's deeds, in one's per sonality. Jesus not only told men what this divine truth was, but he showed in his own life what it was to live divine truth. Jesus therefore became and continues to .be the source of re ligious belief and practice. He has made known to men that which they practically need to know about God, man, duty, existence; and has shown them how to realize these•things in themselves.
Teaching is not an end in itself ; it is a means to an end. Jesns' teaching was a means for getting God's will done in men individually and collectively. God has a great purpose for the world; we exist as a part of that purpose; we can assist in the realization of that purpose; such assistance con,ists in living as God would have us live. Jesus came to tell us, and by example to show us, how God would have us live; to make known to us God's love which forgives our fail ure and patiently awaits our complete success in doing his will; and to proclaim the freely given divine power which is available and suffi cient for those whose supreme purpose is set toward realizing God's will in themselves. This was Jesus' mission; all that Ile did, all that Ile said, all that he was, belonged to this message. His words announced these truths, his acts embodied them, his character illustrated them. The events of his public ministry were determined by the attitude of the Jews toward him. He was rejected and crucified because the message which he brought, and which he unwaveringly taught. was distasteful to the religious leaders of his nation. He sacrificcd himself that men might have the truth of religion.
If, therefore, we wish to know what the re ligious teaching of Jesus is, we must get the knowledge from hint. The essence of Christianity is what Jesus taught, freed from the applications and elaborations of subsequent centuries. He came to make life intelligible and duty clear. His presentation of religious truths was divinely wise. He could omit nothing that was of primary importance. The relation of these truths to each other he perfectly arranged. And thus we have in his Galilean teaching, which was given to untrammeled and receptive minds, the universal presentation of the Gospel. Then can we know• what this Galilean teaching was? Yes. God's providence has preserved it in our gospels. Can we trust these records to give us a true account of his teaching? Yes. The reasons for this
trust are given above. We can confidently main tain, on historical grounds, that the gospels report to us with substantial accuracy what Jesus did and said and was. In them we get clear back to Jesus, and learn immediately from and of him. The gospel records have been transmitted to us by the first generation of Christians, and con tain the apostolic accounts of Jesus' deeds and words. We see him through their eyes, to a certain degree; but there is every reason to think that in the main they saw hint clearly and cor rectly. While the gospels give only excerpts of what he said and did, those sayings and acts have come down to us which most fully and perfectly show his teaching- and his life. We of course recognize that the details of the inciderts and the ipsissima vcrba of the sayings have been imperfectly preserved. Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and our records of his utterances are only in Greek, so that in every case allowance must be made for translation. Minor variation is everywhere present in the parallel accounts of originally identical incidents or sayings. Bin these things are unimportant. What we do need is assurance that the facts of Jesus' life and the ideas of Jesus' teaching are contained in our gospel records. And this assurance we have. not on a priori. but on strictly historical grounds.
When we endeavor to ascertain from the gos pels what the teaching of Jesus was, we find that he centers it all about what Ile terms the Kingdom of God. This term he derives from his contem poraries, but the content of it he has to modifv greatly. The Jews were right in believing in God's kingdom, bin his kingdom was different from that which they had conceived it to be. In both views the Kingdom of God meant the realiza tion of God's will in man individually and col lectively. The difference lay in the conception of what God's will for man is. To the Jews. it meant visible glorification of Israel, temporal power, material blessings; to Jesus it meant. the reign of reverence, truth, righteousness, altruism. He set forth clearly and fully what human duty is toward God and toward man. It is to trust and revere God as a Father who loves and cares for his children, to live in dependence upon and communion with him, to lead righteous lives, to be and do good, to love and serve one's fellow men. That is, each must himself do perfectly God's will, and must as far as possible, secure that it be done by others. The outcome of this individual living according to the highest prin ciples of being will be a transformed humanity, a perfected Kingdom of God. Jesus proclaimed this message to men, and exhorted them to accept it and live it. He asserted this to be the divine truth which God had given him to teach to men, in his office as Messiah. This, he taught, was God's answer to the question: What is life, and how shall I live it? It was a very simple and practical religion as Jesus gave it. He ex pressed it in language unequaled for clearness, beauty and strength, he embodied it in deeds of kindness and sympathy, he illustrated it in his own matchless character and life. Jesus' teach ing is the heart of the Bible, the essence of Christianity, the norm of that which is true and useful in religion.