What did Jesus believe about God?

The short answer

Jesus believed God is a Father who loves us and knows what we need before we ask. He prayed to God as Father, even on his worst night, and he taught his friends to begin their own prayers with “Our Father.”

What the record says

When his friends asked how to pray, Jesus gave them a short prayer. It opens with two words:

Pray like this: “Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

Matthew 6:9 to 13

Just before it, he told them they didn’t need many words, “for your Father knows what things you need, before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8).

He pointed to the birds to show how much the Father cares:

See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they?

Matthew 6:26

In the garden on his last night, scared of what was coming, he still prayed to God as his father. Mark keeps the Aramaic word he used:

Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire.

Mark 14:36

And on the morning he rose, he sent Mary Magdalene to his friends with a message: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17). His Father was their Father too.

How Son of Man tells it

Son of Man is a novel. It imagines the years the Gospels skip. In the novel he goes by Yeshua, the name his family would have called him. In chapter eight, “The Firstborn,” his father Joseph has just died, and Yeshua, still a boy, now leads the family’s evening prayers. The old words sit dead in the children’s mouths. He tells them to talk to God like someone who is listening. Then he gives them a way to begin. “Our Father,” he says. “Who is in heaven.” His brother James, standing in the doorway, answers that their father left. Yeshua looks at him.

“That one left,” he said. “This one stayed.”

James sits down. By October the words have settled. His little brother Simon still races through the prayer, but sometimes now he slows down, as if he means to be heard.