Instead of the tribal God worshipped as the God of
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, He substituted the idea of God, as the
God of all peoples and all races, the God of the Jew and Gentile, of the
Greek and barbarian, of the bond and the free. It was the great apostle
of the Gentiles who at the centre of Greek civilization announced this
fundamental conception of Christianity to the old world:
God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on
all the face of the earth.
This was the sublime idea of the God of a united humanity. The God of
the tribe had given place to the God of the whole world. That conception
was very foreign to the popular religious notions current at the time
of Christ, and it seems still further away from our ideas of the present
day. It is a very narrow and circumscribed view of God to regard Him as
concerned merely for our little insular affairs, to regard Him simply as
a God of the individual or of the home, or even one's nation. He
transcends all these limitations of particular interests and particular
needs. He is not merely our God but the God of all mankind.
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