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