Recently in Books Category

The doctrine of the Trinity is truth for the heart. The spirit of man alone can enter through the veil and penetrate into that Holy of Holies. “Let me seek Thee in longing,” pleaded Anselm, “let me long for Thee in seeking; let me find Thee in love, and love Thee in finding.” Love and faith are at home in the mystery of the Godhead. Let reason kneel in reverence outside. — A. W. Tozer

I believe with chapter 4 Tozer has really gotten started with his book. Chapter 1 tells us why knowing who God is is important. Chapter 2 tells why this is hard. Chapter 3 tell us what it means to study the various attributes of God. That’s all introductory material leading to this chapter which reaches for the heart of who God is and how He has revealed Himself.

The subject of the Trinity is simultaneously the most important and most frequently misrepresented Christian truth. Nearly every Christian-esque cult on earth gets started by getting the Trinity wrong. To quote the Athanasian Creed, “And the catholic [universal] faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.”I include a diagram showing this basic relationship between the parts of the Godhead. God is one divine substance and yet three persons.

The Persons of the Godhead, being one, have one will. They work always together, and never one smallest act is done by one without the instant acquiescence of the other two. Every act of God is accomplished by the Trinity in Unity. Here, of course, we are being driven by necessity to conceive of God in human terms. We are thinking of God by analogy with man, and the result must fall short of ultimate truth; yet if we are to think of God at all, we must do it by adapting creature-thoughts and creature-words to the Creator. It is a real if understandable error to conceive of the Persons of the Godhead as conferring with one another and reaching agreement by interchange of thought as humans do. — A. W. Tozer

Even in trying to understand this about God we will always fail. God has revealed much about who He is, but this aspect of God remains a mystery. If you want me to explain exactly how this works, I can only repeat what has already been said. This is what God is and if you can’t accept that an Infinite, Necessary Being is beyond yours and my own feeble minds to grasp or explain, then you are hopelessly unreachable. We know God is this because this is what He has revealed to us.

Without just copying and pasting all of the chapter here or writing out the Athanasian Creed in whole, I think I’m done. God is one substance and yet three persons. The Father is God. The Son is begotton of the Father and is God. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son and is God. Yet, there are not three gods, but one God. The Father is not created. The Son is not created. The Spirit is not created. The will of the Father always agrees with the will of the Son always agrees with the will of the Spirit.

Amen.

The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question: “What is God like?”

This book is an attempt to answer that question. Yet at the outset I must acknowledge that it cannot be answered except to say that God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody. — A. W. Tozer

As a father, this is something I can say I have experienced to a limited extent from the other end of the spectrum now. One of the interesting facts of childhood is that your parents are like gods, incomprehensible, and totally sovereign. As you grow older, you learn that this is not actually the case, but the knowledge of a three or four year old, this is true enough. Young children only know God in what they see in their earthly father and mother.

From the other side, I know that I have a hard time explaining some things to my son. He’s now four, but he sometimes asks the most extremely difficult questions. For example, he asked me what I do at work. How do I explain taxes, tax collection, payments, credit cards, checks, electronic checks, banking, fees, and all other tidbits? (That’s not even covering the software development aspects.) I didn’t. The conversation was something like this:

Dad: You like to play at the park?
Son: Yes. (delivered with a condescending glare)
Dad: Well, because we own a house near the park, we help pay for all the fun things you play with at the park. That’s called taxes.
Son: That’s silly.
Dad: At work, I help people pay their taxes so that the parks near their houses will be fun to play on.
Son: Can we go play cars now?

I find most of what I do at work nearly incomprehensible and I have a pretty good grasp on this stuff. He’s four and without hope of really understanding any of this for at least a dozen years and probably will never understand it to the depth I have unless he ends up in local government.

The intellect knoweth that it is ignorant of Thee because it knoweth Thou canst not be known, unless the unknowable could be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible attained. — Nicholas of Cusa

God is infinitely more incomprehensible. We have all of eternity to get acquainted and we’ll never finish the task of knowing God as He truly is.

I think Tozer strikes a blow to the heart of human knowledge when he says, “We want a God we can in some measure control.” This is true of virtually every scientific or pursuit of knowledge. We want to take the complex and difficult to understand things and make them simple. Historically, people often did this by using superstition. Now, we make educated guesses, but still make the mistake of thinking we understand complex issues better than we do.

Whether it’s biology or meteorology or anthropology or psychology or paleontology or physics or mathematics or anything else, in most areas of most fields we have just enough knowledge to ask a few interesting questions. Assuming we continue to push our knowledge forward for the next hundred years, or great-grandchildren will be laughing at some of our ridiculous notions just as we can laugh at the fact that 100 years ago people worried that if you drove in a car too fast your face might tear off.

“The God of contemporary Christianity is only slightly superior to the gods of Greece and Rome, if indeed He is not actually inferior to them in that He is weak and helpless while they at least had power.”

In the case of God, most of humanity wants a safe god. He’s like a bigger than life person. He’s cool, he’s nice, he really wants to do whatever we want him to do. He’s not very demanding and he really wants us to have fun. Or whatever idol that is constructed. Most of the gods out there are created in man’s image and not the incomprehensible and terrifying and yet merciful God of the Bible.

In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows Himself not to reason but to faith and love. Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience.

This is really a restatement of Matthew 11:27, “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”

If the Son chooses to reveal himself to you, you will know something about the Father. You will know enough. If the Son does not choose to reveal himself to you, you will know nothing of the Father and nothing of God. This is not a cosed invitation. All are welcome to seek the Son and the revelation He can provide of the Father.

“What is God like?” If by that question we mean “What is God like in Himself?” there is no answer. If we mean “What has God disclosed about Himself that the reverent reason can comprehend?” there is, I believe, an answer both full and satisfying.

Through the Word, that is Jesus and his scripture, you can learn enough of the Father to know God. But this knowledge is never complete. We all must start with the holy terror that is God and move from there to full understanding of his holiness and his mercy. (Provers 1:7)

Cheers.

Why We Must Think Rightly About God

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. — A. W. Tozer

Christians are to be God’s people. Yet, what does that mean? Who’s people? What God? This question is the heart of every true believer and the place where every heresy finds its foundation. Either God is perfect and good and sovereign and holy and loving and defined in the terms given to us in revelation or god is something else. Often these other gods are kind of like God, but some virtue gets over-emphasized. A heretic may love a god of love but avoids the god of wrath whereas another worships a god of justice who is not a god of mercy. Yet, God is who He is and not what we want Him to be.

Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.

The other gods are idols. Whether they are carved or molded or simply gods of the mind, they are still idols. “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” (Romans 1:21) The idols available are legion, but the God of heaven is One. Tozer reminds us of Psalm 50:21, “you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.” God does not suffer idolators and is quite jealous of the worship of himself.

“Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear.” Tozer rightly points us to history. The church and the ancient chronicles of Israel provide us with ample evidence. If you start to take God for granted, if you forget who He is, if you aren’t careful enough in making sure your leadership knows and loves God, corruption and destruction will follow.

The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him - and of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place.

The very purpose of the church is first to glorify God and to do that we must know intimately the One we worship.

Cheers.

It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate. If we would bring back spiritual power to our lives, we must being to think of God more nearly as He is. —- A. W. Tozer, Knowledge of the Holy

A. W. Tozer wrote his book, Knowledge of the Holy, because he saw that the church had abandoned a high view of God. It is a sad thing that in the decades since his writing this situation does not seem to have improved. His words are just as appropriate today as they were when he first penned them. “The low view of God entertained almost universally among Christians is the cause of a hundred lesser evils everywhere among us.”

It astounds me to know that so many who claim to be Christians today have chosen science or psychology or capitalism or some other idol ahead of Christ. A person may profess to believe in the resurrection of Christ and that Christ is the Creator of the universe and yet hesitate to say that the creation was a miraculous event that took only seven days. A person may profess to believe in the Christ who taught that the most fundamental human problems are spiritual and related to sin and yet this person will refuse to confront sins explicitly named int he Bible in his own life. While I cannot judge the hearts of such men and women, these are not acts and behaviors worthy of Christ.

The only way to recoup our spiritual losses is to go back to the cause of them and make such corrections as the truth warrants.

The truth of the Bible is what we should recoup. Our first source of truth, for all Christians, must always be the revelation God has given us. To substitute any other authority, but God Himself, as a rival is idolatry.

I hope by studying this book myself, I will “be encouraged to being the practice of reverent meditation on the being of God.”

Cheers.

I recently started reading John MacArthur’s book, The Jesus You Can’t Ignore. This book focuses upon the confrontations Jesus has with his ideological opponents, the religious establishment of the day. The third chapter covers what is probably the most congenial of these confrontations, which you will find in your Bible in John 3. This tells of the clandestine meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus.

You’ll have to study John 3 in depth or get Dr. MacArthur’s book if you want to look at this in detail, I just want to look at a couple aspects of this meeting. However, I do want to quote John 3 here to let you know exactly what I’m talking about. Here’s John 3:1-21:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

I really would like to discuss the tone of Jesus and how he interacts and comment on these things as MacArthur does, but I think there’s something more important here to point out. Thus, I just want to make two observations regarding this passage.

First…

John 3:16 here is probably the most well-known scripture in the Bible, “For God so loved the world…”, yet it is often unknown that it took place in the context of this conversation with Nicodemus. Jesus was telling this ruler among the ruling council of Jews that the Messiah had come, but that the traditions of the ruling council and of Nicodemus himself and his colleagues, the Pharisees, were failures. They didn’t heed Holy Scripture. They missed the important point.

The point he missed is that it is not enough to act holy. It isn’t even enough to believe that that holiness has its source in God. (Luke 18:9-14) Everyone in the world is condemned from the start. See the subtle play on words in this passage? The Son of God didn’t come to condemn the world because it’s already condemned. The world we live on and the people in it are, by nature, condemned. Left to ourselves we are broken down, dead, and useless. All our attempts to do good are weak and fail to achieve any righteousness.

Second…

The salvation that Jesus brings comes from without and isn’t a matter of your actions. If you think that you’re a relatively good person and that will get you by, you are already condemned. Being good and doing good is not enough to help you in the eyes of God. To gain the salvation Christ offers, you have to realize that it’s not something you can do for yourself. It’s something only he can do for you. Which brings us to the reference to Moses and the serpent—which is the key. Jesus is referring to a story that would have been familiar to nearly every Jew and certainly to Nicodemus.

This story is found in Numbers 21:4-9. In summary, the Jews were on their great exodus from Egypt to Canaan and travel was slow going and the people grumbled. God punished the people for their complaint by sending poisonous snakes among them. The people asked Moses to pray to God for help and God responded by asking Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it upon a pole. Then, whenever someone was bit they would look at the bronze serpent and be healed. Jesus is claiming that he too would be raised up and that anyone who looked to him on the cross would be made righteous.

All it takes to be saved as a Christian is to be born again. All it takes to be born again is to yield yourself to Christ and look upon his cross for salvation. Everything else you need to know will grow out of that simple dependence on the cross. Every believer in Christ knows that this is the rock and foundation of our salvation. We grow in knowledge and understanding, but each of us starts by looking at the cross and each of us keeps on looking throughout the rest of our lives and on into eternity.

Cheers.