existence of God to the Jews would have been a mere waste of words; for
that faith was the very foundation of their national life. Nor did
Christ speak about the "attributes" of God. Again that was not His way.
He chose to speak in the concrete rather than in the abstract, and,
therefore, instead of defining God, He shows us how He acts. In parable,
in story, and in His own life He sets God before us, that so we may
learn what He is, and how He feels toward us.

Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the Old Testament. To
understand, therefore, the true significance of His teaching about God,
we must first of all put ourselves at the point of view of a devout Jew
of His day, and see how far he had been brought by that earlier
revelation which Christ took up and carried to completion. What, then,
did the Jews know of God before Christ came?

They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one God." It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn.
Centuries had passed before the nation had been purged of its
idolatries. But the cleansing fires had done their work at last, and
perhaps the world has never seen sterner monotheists than were the
Pharisees of the time of Christ.[10] And He whom thus they worshipped as
Sovereign they knew also to be holy: "The Holy One of Israel," "exalted
in righteousness." True, Pharisaism had degraded the lofty conceptions
of the great Hebrew prophets; it had taught men to think of God as
caring more for the tithing of mint, and anise, and cumin than for the
weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, making
morality merely an affair of ceremonies, instead of the concern of the
heart and the life. But, however Jewish teachers might blind themselves
and deceive their disciples, the Jewish Scriptures still remained to
testify of God and righteousness, and of the claims which a righteous