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“The Holiness of God”

Sunday evening, November 16, 1958

Message #9 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

I am to speak tonight on the holiness of God and I want to read some passages. Exodus 15, and who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness? Job 15, Behold, He puteth no trust in His saints, yea the heavens are not clean in His sight. Job 25, behold, even to the moon and it shineth not, yea the stars are not pure in His sight. How much less man that is a worm and the son of man which is a worm. Psalm 22, Thou art holy, O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel. Proverbs 9:10, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy is understanding. Isaiah 6:3, One cried unto another and said, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory.

They say that when Leonardo da Vinci painted his famous Last Supper, that he had little difficulty with any of it except the faces. Then he painted the faces in without too much trouble, except one. He did not feel himself worthy to paint the face of Jesus. He held off and kept holding off. Unwilling to approach it, but knowing he must. And then in the impulsive carelessness of despair. He just painted it quickly and let it go. There’s no use he said, I can’t paint Him. In speaking on the holiness of God, I feel very much the same way.

This last week, I rather suffered through this and wondered why today and tonight I was able to get around at all. But I think that same sense of despair is on my heart. There isn’t any use for anybody to try. If it’s an orator, he can play his oratorical harp, but it sounds tinny and unreal. And when he’s through, you’ve listened to music, but you haven’t seen God. I suppose that the hardest thing about God to comprehend is His infinitude. I know that intellectually; that’s the hardest thing to grasp. But you can’t talk about the infinitude of God and not feel yourself a worm. But when you talk about the holiness of God, you have not only the problem of an intellectual grasp, but you have a sense of personal vileness which is almost too much to bear.

Now, the reason for this is that we are fallen beings. We are fallen spiritually, morally, mentally, and physically. We are fallen in all the ways that men can fall, being what they are. And we are all, and each of us, born into a tainted world. We’re born into a tainted world and we learn impurity from our cradles. We nursed it in with our mother’s milk. We breathe it in, the very air. Our education deepens it and our experience confirms it, evil impurities everywhere, and everything is dirty. Even our whitest white is dingy gray and our noblest heroes are soiled heroes, all of them.

So, we learned to excuse and overlook, and not to expect too much. We don’t expect all truth from our teachers. And we don’t expect all faithfulness from our politicians. And we quickly forgive them when they lie to us and vote for them again. And we don’t expect honesty from the merchants. And we don’t expect complete trustworthiness from anybody. And we managed to get along in the world only by passing laws to protect ourselves; from not only the criminal element, but from the best people there are who might in the moment of temptation take advantage of us.

So, fallen man, being born in this kind of world, living here, breathing it in; and gets into his pores, gets into his lungs, into his nerves, into his cells, until he has lost the ability to conceive of the Holy. But I would speak of the holiness of God, or of the Holy, or of the Holy One. We cannot comprehend this; and we certainly cannot define it, because holiness means purity. But that isn’t enough. Purity merely means that it’s unmixed. There’s nothing else in it, but that isn’t enough. We talk of moral excellency, but that is inadequate. For we say to be morally excellent is to excel somebody else in moral character. But, about whom are we speaking when we say that God is morally excellent? He excelled somebody. Who is it that He excels? The angels, the seraphim I suppose?

But that isn’t still enough. We mean rectitude. We mean honor. We mean truth and righteousness. And we mean all of these–uncreated and eternal. God is not now any holier than He ever was, or He, being unchanging and unchangeable, can never become holier than He is and He never was holier than He is and He’ll never be any holier than now. And it means self-existence, for He did not get His holiness from anyone, nor from anywhere. He did not go off into some vast, infinitely distant realm and there absorb His Holiness, but He is Himself the Holiness. He is the Holy. He is the All Holy. He is the Holy One. He is holiness itself, beyond the power of thought to grasp, or of word to express, beyond the power of all praise.

Now, language can’t express the holy, so God resorts to association and suggestion. He cannot say it outright, because He would have to use words that we don’t know the meaning of. And we would then, of course, take the words He used and translate them downward into our terms. If He were to use a word describing His own holiness, we could not understand that word as He uttered it. He would have to translate it down into our unholiness. If He were to tell us how white He is, we would translate it into terms of dingy gray.

So, God cannot tell us by language, so I say He uses association and suggestion by showing how it affects the unholy. Moses at the burning bush, there before the holy, fiery Presence, knelt down, took his shoes from off his feet, hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God. Then, here is this 19th chapter of Exodus, later, where Moses, the Lord said unto him, lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud that the people may hear when I speak with thee and believe thee, forever. And the Lord said to Moses, go unto the people and sanctify them today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes and be ready against the third day, for the third day the Lord will come down in the sight of the people. And thou shall set bounds unto the people round about saying, take heed to yourselves that ye go not up into the Mount or touch the border of it. Whosoever toucheth the Mount shall be surely put to death. There shall not a hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned or shot through, whether it be a beast or man, it shall not live. When the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the Mount. Moses went down and sanctified the people.

You see, he did the best he could. He went down and tried to whiten up a little their dingy gray. And it came to pass on the third day, in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud upon the mount and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud so that all the people trembled. Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with God and they stood at another part of the mount. Mount Sinai was all together under smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire. And the smoke thereof ascended as of the smoke of a furnace and the whole mount quaked greatly. When the voice of the trumpet sounded long and waxed louder and louder, Moses answered God, spake and God answered him by a voice and the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai on the top of the mountain. And the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mountain. Moses went up, and the Lord said unto Moses, go down, charge the people lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze and many of them perish.

Now there was an effort on the part of God, all this trumpet, the sound of the trumpet and the voice of words, and the fire and the smoke and the shaking of the mount. It was an effort for God to say, by suggestion and association what He couldn’t say in words.

Now, there are two words for holy. There are more than two, but there are particularly two words for holy in the old Bible, in the Hebrew Bible. And one word is used almost exclusively of God, the Holy One. It’s rarely used ever of anything or person except God, the Holy One.

In that passage in Proverbs 9:10, the knowledge of the Holy that I read in your hearing, where it says, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the knowledge of the Holy is understanding. This intrigued me. In fact, the book that I’m going to write on the attributes of God, devotionally considered, is to be called The Knowledge of the Holy.

Well, I have been greatly fascinated by this, that it should occur in our Bible, that this word, that we should have it in the abstract, the Holy, rather than the Holy One. And yet, the Jewish Bible says, the knowledge of the Holy One. And in thirty-three of Proverbs, that is the thirtieth chapter, the third verse where he uses also the knowledge of the Holy; it says, the knowledge of the Holy One, or the All Holy. And though the King James translators called this the knowledge of the Holy, they used exactly the same word more than forty times and translated it the Holy One, the Holy One of Israel. So obviously, this is God. And yet, there is a vagueness enough about it that the translators felt free to put this into an abstraction, to make it abstract and call it, the Holy.

Now, there’s another word; and that’s not used of God very often. I think it is not as high a word. It is used of creative things often. It is something that, so to speak, is holy by context or association with this other holy. That is, we hear of holy ground. And when it says, this is holy ground, or holy Sabbath or a holy city or holy habitation or holy people or holy works or holy arm, it’s not the same awesome, awful word that he uses when he says the Holy or the Holy One.

Now, in the New Testament, and I have not read from the New Testament tonight. But in the New Testament, we have a word of course, it’s a Greek word. And we have talked, he talks there about God being holy; be ye holy, for I am holy. And I noticed one thing about that Greek word; it is that a definition of it is, awful thing. Now think of that. Take and set that word “thing” in capital letters, the awful THING. That’s one meaning of the word holy, the Holy One.

Now, let’s talk a little about the Holy One and His creatures. For you see, the presence of this Holy One allows only holy beings. In our humanistic day, our day of watered-down Christianity, our day of sentimental Christianity, that blows its nose loudly and makes God into a poor, weak, weeping old man. In this awful day, that sense of the holy isn’t upon the church. I was just talking with Brother McAfee and talking about Brother Matier being interested in European missions. Somebody else comes interested in the Hebrew who was working with the Jews. Somebody else working with the mountaineers. Somebody else is concerned with memorizing Scripture. Somebody else with foreign missions.

And I said, well, everybody seems to have something that he feels is tremendously important. And maybe it could be that the constant preaching that I do on the person of God, that I too, should be seeing only a part of the great truth, that there’s more. But I said this, if you’re going to be narrow, then I think we ought to be narrow on the right thing. And therefore, if I’m going to emphasize God and the holiness of God, and the awful, unapproachable quality that can be called that awful Thing. That One, that Holy, I say that I am on the right track. It isn’t all, but it’s something we’ve almost lost in our day. The thing is important, depending upon how much we have lost and how much of it we need. And we have lost the sense of the Holy One, almost all together.

Take over in the book of Revelation, that seventh chapter. Look, it says that, the seventh chapter, yes, the angels stood around about the Throne, and about the elders and the four beasts and they fell before the throne on their faces and worshipped God saying: Amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and power and might be unto our God forever and ever. And one of the elders answered saying, what are these which are arrayed in white robes, and whence came they? And I said unto him, sir, thou knowest. He said to me, these are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, are they before the throne of God and serve Him day and night in His temple. And He that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.

Now, there is God. There are people in the presence of God, but they’re there in the presence of God by a technical redemption. You see, what I worry about in this hour, is that we’re technically Christians and we can prove it. We can prove that we are Christians. We are Christians technically. And anybody can flip open a Greek lexicon and show you that you’re a saint. But I’m afraid of that kind of Christianity, because if I haven’t felt the sense of vileness by contrast with that sense of unapproachable and indescribable holiness, I wonder if I have ever been hit hard enough to really repent. And if I don’t repent, I wonder if I can believe. 

Now, we’re told, just believe it brother, just believe it. Now, come on, let me take your name and address here. What’s your name? Yes. What church would you like to go to? We have it all fixed up my brethren. But I’m afraid our fathers knew God in a different manner than that. Bishop Ussher used to go out by the river bank and kneel down by a log and repent his sins all Saturday afternoon, though there probably wasn’t a holier man in the region around about. He felt how unutterably vile he was. He couldn’t stand the dingy gray which was the whitest thing he had, set over against the unapproachable, shining whiteness that was God.

Go to the book of Isaiah and you’ll see the fiery burners there. With twain he covered his feet. There in these creatures before the throne, there wasn’t any of the flippancy that we see now. There wasn’t any of the tendency to try to out-hope hope and be funnier than a clown. There was a sense of Presence and these holy creatures, for they were holy creatures, they covered their feet. Why? They covered their feet in modesty, and they covered their face in worship, and they used their other wings to fly. These were the seraphim. They’re called fiery burners.

Then there’s Ezekiel 1 and 10. And we see there creatures coming out of a fire. Now, God speaks of Himself often as fire. Our God is a consuming fire, it says in Hebrews and in Isaiah 33 these words: Who among us shall dwell with the Devouring Fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings. And this is sometimes used as a text, who of you is going to go to hell? But my brethren, if you will read it in its context, this does not describe the hell. This is not hell at all. And if you will go to almost any of the commentators, they will say this is not hell, because the next passage says that he that hath clean hands and a pure heart and doesn’t lift up his soul unto vanity and answers the question, what is this devouring fire?

What is this everlasting burning? It is not hell, but the Presence of God. Who among us shall dwell in the fiery burning? Do you not know that if you were enabled to do it, fire can dwell with fire. And you can put the iron into the fire and the iron can learn to live with the fire by absorbing the fire and beginning to glow in incandescent brightness in the fire. So, we dwell in the fire. These creatures in Ezekiel came out of the fire having four faces. And they went straight ahead and they let down their wings to worship, and at the word of God’s command, they leaped to do His will; these awesome, holy creatures, about which we know so little and about which we ought to know more.

Then there was God when He spoke to Moses out of the bush. There was the God when He went with them in the pillar of fire. What was God saying? For it says in the 13th, I believe, of Exodus where it says that the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light by day and by night. And He took not away the cloud, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, that He might lead them in all their journeys.

My friends, this was God dwelling there in that awesome fire. It was God dwelling there. And then when the tabernacle was made and the cherubim of gold overshadowed the mercy seat, what was it that came down between the cherubim wings. What was it that only one man could see and he, once a year with blood, did not dare go in? I wonder how many high priests ever looked at the Shekinah? I wonder, that high priest with all the protection of the atoning blood and the commandment of God; when the priest pulled away the veil, the great, heavy veil it took four men to part the great tapestry they pulled apart.

And this man went in trembling, into the Presence. I wonder if he ever dared to look at the fire. I wonder if being a Jew as he was, and worshipping the great God Almighty, the Holy One of Israel, I wonder if there was a high priest, one in twenty, that ever-dared gaze on that Fire. He was not told he couldn’t, but I wonder if anybody ever dared do it. I noticed that the very seraphim covered their faces. Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look upon God. And John fell down when he saw the Savior and had to be raised up again almost from the dead. And every encounter with God has been such that men went flat down and went blind. Paul went blind on Damascus Road. What was the light that blinded them? Was it the cosmic ray coming down from some exploding body or from two colliding galaxies they tell us about? No, no. It was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God that dwells in the bush. The God that dwelt in the Shekinah between the Presence, between the wings of the seraphim.

And what was it that when they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came a sound from heaven as the rushing of a mighty wind, and a fire appeared and sat as a tongue of flame upon each one of them? What did that mean and what could it mean but that God was branding them in their foreheads with His fiery holiness to say, your Mine now. The church was born out of fire, my brethren. She was born out of fire as the creatures in Ezekiel 1 came out of fire. The church was born out of fire, but we have gray ashes today. But we are to be men and women of fire, for that is our origin.

And hear these last words, these words that tell us how God shall someday untune the sky, the heavens and the earth are reserved unto fire. The heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; and the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved. What fire is that? Is that to be the atomic fire, the fire of a hydrogen bomb? Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the scientists. Don’t allow your spiritual perceptions and concepts to be dragged down to Oak Ridge. Don’t think in terms of the scientist. That awesome fire out of which the seraphim moved, and that fire that dwelt between cherubim and that blazing Light that knocked Paul flat. That’s the same fire that shall dissolve the heaven and the earth. The awful presence of that Holy Thing, that awful Thing! Don’t accuse me because I say “Thing,” because I know it’s a Person. He is God, the Holy One of Israel, but there’s something about Him that is awesome and awful, so that one of the definitions, I repeat, of the word that we have in the New Testament is the Awful Thing.

Now, the Holy One and the sinner, the Holy One and the sinner, oh, man, oh, man, sinner man, you’re going to decide when you’ll serve Christ? You’re going to make the decision? You’re going to push God around? You’re going to accept Jesus or not accept Jesus, receive him, or not receiving, obey him or not obey Him? You’re going to go proudly down the aisle, with your chest out? You’re going to lay your head on the pillow tonight with a heartbeat between you and eternity? And you’re telling yourself, I’ll decide this question. I am a man of free will. God isn’t coercing my will. No, no, but I have words for you. Listen, art Thou not from everlasting, O Jehovah, my God, mine Holy One. Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look on iniquity, Habakkuk 1:12,13, art Thou not from everlasting, O Jehovah my God.

But they say now, are your problems too much for you? Jesus will handle your problems. Are you trouble mentally? Jesus will give you mental peace. And do you have trouble getting on in the office? Jesus will help you to get on in the office. All of this is true, but O friends, how far it is from biblical religion. There was God in the midst. And what was it that gathered the people together in the book of Acts? They ministered unto the Lord and fasted and prayed. And there in the awesome Presence they heard the voice of the Holy Ghost say, separate me Barnabas and Saul.

Now, we’re thrown back on our planning and our reasoning and our thinking when the Great and Holy God is in our midst. So, I would recommend that you remember these words: Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil. If you have evil in your life, evil in your heart, evil in your home, evil in your business, evil in your memory unconfessed and unforgiven and uncleansed, remember that it is only by the infinite patience of God that you are not consumed. For our God is a consuming Fire. And it’s written here, holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. Now, look at them come. See them. As they come from everywhere, these teachers with their dingy gray interpretations; pulling this down and explaining it away and saying, see note on such and such, pulling it down and destroying it. But it stands my brother, holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

Now, if you can interpret that neatly and go home without being bothered, I wonder if your eyes have ever gazed upon that Awful Thing. I wonder if you know, have, or do have the knowledge of the Holy. I wonder if that sense of the overwhelming, crushing holiness of God has ever come upon your heart. It was a common thing in other days when God was the center of human worship. When we came to Him and worshiped God, it was common for men to kneel at an altar and shake and tremble and weep and perspire in an agony of conviction, and they expected it in that day. We don’t see it now, because the God we preach is not the everlasting, awful God, mine Holy One, who is of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look upon iniquity. And we use the technical interpretation of justification by faith, and the imputed righteousness of Christ to water our spirit, the wine of our spirituality down until we’re what we are. God help us in this evil hour.

And so, we take into the presence of God this tainted soul. We come into the presence of God with our concept of morality, having learned it from the books, and gotten it from the newspapers, and gotten in school. We come dirty with everything that we have dirty, and our whitest white, dirty, and our churches dirty, and our thoughts dirty. We come to God dirty and do nothing about it. If we came to God dirty, but trembling and shocked and awestruck, and would kneel in His presence and at His feet, and cry like Isaiah, I am undone. I’m a man of unclean lips. Then I’d say, all right, I can understand. But, we skip into His awful Presence. And somebody who is dirty comes with a book “Seven Steps to Salvation” and gives seven verses underlined and gets a fellow out of his problem and out of his trouble.

Dear God, that’s why we’re going down each year. Each year, more Christians, more people going to church, more Christians, more people going to church, more church buildings, more money and less spirituality and less holiness. And we’re forgetting that without holiness, no man shall see God. I tell you this standing here tonight, that I want God to be what God is. And I want God to remain what God is, the impeccably holy, unapproachable, Holy Thing, Holy One, all Holy One. I want him to be and remain the Holy in capital letters. I want Him to be that and I want His heaven to be holy and I want His throne to be holy. And I don’t want Him to change or modify His requirements. Even if it shuts me out, I want something holy left in the universe.

You can join almost any church now. I’ve heard recently of a certain church, well, it’s a Baptist church. They’re not all true Baptist churches. I have preached to some pretty strict Baptist churches, and I am more or less of a Baptist myself, and that, the baptistry back there. But I’ll say this to you brother, that this particular Baptist church and they tell me there are many of them. They say now at the closing hymn, we open the doors of the church; and they can come and anybody can join. A gangster can join. I say never, never, never, never, never! For if they can’t get into heaven, they oughten to get into our churches.

And the problem with us is that we let our churches stay dingy gray instead of pleading for holy whiteness. And as soon as anybody begins to plead, we Christians ought to be holy, somebody comes along and says, now my brother, don’t get excited about this, and don’t become a fanatic. For don’t you understand that God understands our flesh and He knows we’re but dust. Oh, He knows where but dust, but he says, Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil and canst not look upon iniquity. And without holiness, it’s impossible to please God.

Thomas Binney wrote this, I think it’s one of the most awesome, wondrous things ever written. “Eternal Light, Eternal Light, how pure the soul must be. When placed within thy searching sight, it shrinks not but with calm delight, can live and look on Thee, the spirits that surround thy throne can bear the burning bliss. But that is surely theirs alone for they have never, never known a fallen world like this. But how shall I, whose native sphere is dark, whose mind is dim, before the Ineffable appear and on my naked spirit bear the uncreated Being? How shall I, whose native sphere is dark, whose mind is dim, before the Ineffable appear? And on my naked spirit bear the uncreated Being. That fiery Being out of which come the holy burners who sing Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.

How can I bear it? And you don’t know when all your religious helps, all your marked Bibles, all your jolly Christian friends, all your ham eating, sweet potato eating, joke telling banquet, cheery Christians. I eat ham too incidentally. I’m not against ham, but we make banquets and tell jokes and have one-man bands, but one of these times each one of us will be called before the Ineffable to appear, and on our naked spirits bear the uncreated Being. How are we going to do it? There is a way for man to rise to that sublime abode, an offering and a sacrifice, a Holy Spirit’s energies, an Advocate with God. These, these prepare us for the sight of Holiness above. The sons of ignorance and night can dwell with the Eternal Light through the Eternal Love.

I think that’s one of the greatest things ever written by a mortal man. We don’t sing it much. It’s too awful. We’re afraid of it. Spirits that surround thy throne, seraphim, cherubim, angels, archangels, principalities, power, unfallen creatures. They can bear the burning bliss. But that’s because they never, never have known the fallen world like this. But how can I? It isn’t enough for somebody to mark a New Testament and rub my nose in it and try to comfort me. No, I don’t want to be comforted! I don’t want to be comforted. I want to know what it will be like in that hour when I leave my wife and my children and my grandchildren and my good friends and my fifteen-year, warm friend, McAfee and all who’d give blood for me. I’ve got them here in this city that would give blood for me. I can go to cities all over the United States and up in to Canada and they would give blood for me. But there is not a one of them that can help me in that awful hour when I appear before the Ineffable, and the uncreated Being impinges on my naked spirit. Then, I want to know.

Well, we can. There is a way. It’s through the offering and the sacrifice of the Advocate with God. But, don’t take that lightly. Don’t take that lightly, my brother. Conversion used to be a revolutionary, radical, wondrous, terrible, glorious thing. But there’s not much of it left. It’s because we’ve forgotten that God is the Holy One of Israel.

Let’s pray. O God, time is running, flying like a frightened bird. The bird of time is on the wing and has a little way to flutter. The wine of life is oozing, drop by drop, and the leaves of life are falling one by one. And soon before the Ineffable every man must appear to give an account of the deeds done in the body. Let’s pause now for pleas in our prayer and remain in an attitude of prayer. And I’ll finish praying by praying for somebody if they want me to. Who would say Mr. Tozer, I’m troubled to about this and I may have made some sort of religious profession, but oh I want to know that I’m shielded by the Advocate, by the blood. I want to know that by the grace of God and the indwelling Spirit, I can bear the burning bliss. I want God to do something new for me to revive my spirit, to change my dingy gray to white, to make me sick of compromise, weary of this checkered living. Pray for me, Brother Tozer that I might become a holy man, a holy woman indeed, by the blood of the Lamb and the fiery purgation of the Holy Ghost. Pray for me. Who will say, pray for me. When we pray, we’re going to have this understanding with you, that you’re going to do something about this. But you’re not going to say, well, the pastor prayed for me. You’re going to thank God and you don’t expect Him to answer, but you’re going to work with Him in cooperation, surrender, confession, if necessary, restitution, straightening out of your life, determination that you’re going to cooperate with God in all this.

Let’s pray. Father, we pray for these friends who asked us to pray. Dear Father, we pray that Thou through thy Son, Jesus Christ, will help every one of these, that they might drive a stake down and say as Israel said when she crossed the river, this is a marker I crossed here, something really happened. Oh, we pray that this decision made tonight may not be a careless decision, but that it may be a determination that’s as big as life and as strong and deep as all their faith, that they will, they will seek to meet all requirements that they may in that day, rise to that sublime abode that the sons of ignorant in light and night may dwell with the Eternal Light because of Thine eternal love. Grant this. Then for those who didn’t, some who didn’t but should have, O Father, keep upon us a sense of holiness, that we can’t sin and excuse it, but that repentance will be as deep as our lives. This we ask in Christ’s name. Amen.

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“God’s Omnipresence and Immanence”

Sunday evening, November 9, 1958

Message #8 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

I want to read again some verses. There’s so many of them but I’ll just read these. But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Thee, how much less this house that I have builded. Then Acts 17, that was 1 Kings, Acts 17, that they should seek the Lord if happily they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of them. For in Him, we live and move and have our being. And then of course, that Psalm 139, whither shall I go from thy Spirit or whither shall I flee from Thy presence. If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand laid me and thy right hand shall hold me. I read these, I just copied them out on a card there to save turning, flipping pages. There are here and are many, many more like them.

And I begin tonight with the restatement of two tenets of the Christian belief. This is not my idea. And if you haven’t heard it emphasized before, it’s because we preachers are falling down in the preaching of the Word. These two tenets are simply these, that God is omnipresent. That is, that God is everywhere. That God is immanent. That is, that God penetrates everything. They’re standard Christian doctrines and they have been believed back until to the days, even of the Jew.

Now by this all, we mean that God is omnipresent and immanent and is penetrating everything even while He contains all things as I explained last week. The bucket that is sunk in the depths of the ocean, it is full of the ocean and the ocean is in the bucket. But also the bucket is in the ocean surrounded by it. And this is the best illustration I can think of how God dwells in His universe, and yet the universe dwells in God.

Now, I’ve dealt with the fact of remoteness, that distance is unlikeness. And I pointed out that hell is for those unlike God. The moral dissimilarity creates hell, moral dissimilarity. Those moral beings that are morally dissimilar to God, hell is their final place. And those creatures, those beings, moral beings that are morally similar to God, this likeness to God, heaven is their place because they have a nature that belongs there.

I have shown that reconciliation with God is secured, or affected by three divine acts. They’re all divine acts: atonement, justification and regeneration. Atonement of course, is the objective work of Christ. It is the thing that He did on a cross. It is the thing He did before any of us now living we’re living. It is something that He did alone in the dark. It’s objective, that is, it’s outside of us. It did not take place inside of anybody. It took place objectively, externally out there on a cross. He did it. The spear went into His side alone, and He suffered. The nails were in His hands and feet. That’s atonement. And that is objective and external to us. And it could have been done without affecting anybody. And it was done, and still there are millions that have died unaffected by it. Because it’s an external act. It’s something that was done outside, an objective act, something done beyond, outside of and not inside of us.

But here is the beauty of it, that this act which He did in the darkness there, makes justification possible. And justification is the second act which God does to bring reconciliation, men and God together, to reconcile man to God. Justification is that which declares the sinner righteous, and that also is external to the man. That is, it doesn’t reach the man. The justified man may be no better off for his justification if that’s all that happened to him. Because justification is a judicial thing. It’s legal, just as a man may stand before a court and be declared innocent of a crime, not guilty of a crime, and yet it doesn’t change the man any. He weighs exactly the same as he weighed before. He is the same height as he was before, the same color of hair and eyes. He has the same relationships. He’s in every way the same man that he was before, but he’s judicially free. He’s declared not guilty before the law. It might have a subjective effect in that when he found it out, he’d rejoice to know that he was declared not guilty. But the work is not done in him, the work is done in the minds of the jurors and before the law, it’s a judicial thing. So, justification is the second act that God performs to get us reconciled with Him. He first gives atonement to make justification possible, then He gives justification, and then the third act, regeneration.

Regeneration of course takes place at the same time justification takes place. When God justifies a man, I said that a man could be justified and not be any better off. That is technically possible to be so, but not actually so. Because, when God justifies a man, He also regenerates the man. So that, nobody ever was justified and not regenerated. But you can think them apart, though actually of course, you cannot separate them. Justification and regeneration are not the same. And again, I’m only giving you the most ordinary, basic Christian theology that everybody ought to know, that justification is not a subjective thing. It’s a judicial thing. But that regeneration takes place within the life of the man, within the heart of the man, it’s a subjective thing. It deals with the man’s nature. It gets inside the man, because Jesus died in the darkness and because God accepted that as atonement for that man’s sin. If that man believes in Christ, God can justify him and declare him righteous, and then regenerate him by imparting to him the nature of God. For it tells us that it is through this, through these promises, that we are partakers of the divine nature. A regenerated man is a man who has partaken of the divine nature, who has a new relation to God which gives him eternal life.

Now, this reunites God and man and it restores some degree of moral likeness to the man. The newest convert, the newest convert that was born again; today, for born again and regenerate are the same expression. The newest convert has a degree of moral likeness to God which gives a measure of compatibility. You see, heaven is a place of complete compatibility. And sin introduces incompatibilities between God and the sinner. There cannot be any compatibility. There cannot be any communion, because sin introduces that quality which throws man and God out of accord with each other. There’s no accord there, no congruity. But when that sinner believes in the blood of atonement, puts his trust in Christ, and is justified in heaven and regenerated on earth, for that’s the only place you get regenerated.

Don’t wait until you die. There’s no place to regenerate after you’re dead. But you’re regenerated, you’re given a measure of the character of God, so that, there is enough of the image restored to the man in regeneration that there can be quite a full measure of compatibility. And that compatibility allows God to draw feelingly near to the man and it makes communion morally consistent.

You see, as I explained at great length last Sunday night, you can’t have communion where there is complete unlikeness. You can’t have it. You go to a creature that has a nature other than yours and you can’t have communion there. You may pet the head of a dog, but you can’t commune with the dog. The dog can’t commune with you, because there’s too great a dissimilarity of nature. So, God cannot commune with a sinner, because there is a violent unlikeness, a dissimilarity making communion impossible.

But it says here in Colossians 3, that ye have put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of Him who created him. That new man within you is the regenerated man, the new man, if you started on your way toward God-likeness. And there was enough of it there even in the new convert, that God, I repeat, can commune without incongruity because He finds some of His image in the man. God can only commune with His own image, remember that. God, being the God He is, can never commune with anything except His own likeness. And where there is no likeness, there can be no fellowship between God and that unlike thing. But where there is restored to that person, a similarity, something of the nature of God, a compatibility, then God begins a communion. And of course, He can commune depending upon the fullness and completeness of that, of that compatibility.

Now, it says, ye have put on the new man, you Christians at Colossi. You have put on the new man, you have, you Christians. These Colossian Christians were not perfect by a long way, but they had put on the new man. The seed was in them. The root of the matter was in their hearts. They were regenerated. So God could commune with His own image in them and see a little bit of His own face there and hold communion with His people. That’s why we can say, Abba, Father.

If I might use a rather grotesque illustration, I might say that the young father who goes to the hospital to see his newborn heir, looks into the glass and there never was a father yet who wasn’t excited, and frightened and bewildered. But there never was a father yet who wasn’t disappointed, because when he looks at that little fellow, his eyes are on over all twenty-five or thirty or fifty in there, and he picks on a pretty one and hopes that’s his.  Then when they turn the thing around and he sees that it isn’t, he’s disappointed. I think little Becky was about the only one who didn’t disappoint; well Stanley was pretty too. But mostly, you know, they’re a mess. And, but there is enough. And when you say, he’s just the image of you, and you’ll never be dead as long as he lives. A father beams you know, but actually it isn’t much of a compliment, the little blob of squirm and suck and giggle and red skin and hair that isn’t there. Well, yet there is a little bit of likeness there. There’s something, there’s a similarity now in a deeper way. A new convert, that fellow that just been born again there, he certainly may not be much like God, but he has something of the resemblance to the Deity. And so God can own him as His and the angels can recognize a family resemblance. Now that’s all settled.

Now my Brother, why then, and this is really the reason the sermon is being preached. Why then, this serious problem among real Christians. This feeling that God is far away, or vice versa, that we are far away from God. It’s hard to rejoice, you know, no matter what, you know, it’s hard to rejoice if you don’t feel, for feeling is rejoicing. And it’s hard to rejoice when you’re suffering from that sense of remoteness. And I’d like to say to you that I believe that most Christians do suffer from a sense of divine remoteness. They know God is with them and they’re sure they’re God’s children, and they can take you to their marked New Testament and prove to you seriously and soberly that they’re justified and regenerated and they belong to God and heaven is going to be their home and Christ is their advocate above. They’ve got the theology they know in their head, but they’re mostly suffering from a sense of remoteness.

To know a thing in your head is one thing, to feel it in your heart is another. And I think that most Christians are trying to be happy without having a sense of the Presence. It’s like having a bright, trying to have a bright day without having the sun. You could say, well now it is 12:15 noon, therefore, the sun is up. Let us rejoice in the sun. Isn’t it beautiful and bright? Let us take it by faith and rejoice that the sun is up, that all is well. The sun is up according to the calendar, the sun should be about there. You can point upward and say the sun is up, but brother, that’s kidding yourself. As long as it’s gloomy and rainy and wet, soggy leaves keep dribbling down and it’s dark, you’re not having a bright day. But when the sun comes out, then you can you can rejoice in the presence of the sun.

Now, most Christians are theological Christians, they know they’re saved, somebody is given them a marked New Testament and it’s proper. We should so they get their theology straight, but they’re trying to be happy without a sense of the Presence. The sense of the Presence is absent, and so that yearning, that yearning, you see is a desire, that yearning to be nearer to God, to have God near to us. It’s found everywhere among God’s people. You will find it in two places; prayers and songs and hymns; you will find it there. If you think that I’m merely spinning this like a spider spins a web out of his stomach. If you think that I am merely spinning this out of my head, go to the next prayer meeting and kneel down with the brethren and listen to them pray. They all pray alike. It’s, O Lord come, O Lord drawn near. O Lord show thyself. Be near to me Lord. And then, if that isn’t enough, sing along with us. And hear us sing come, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing and other such songs. Draw Me Nearer, nearer blessed Lord. Near the Cross my heart can say I am coming near. The yearning to be nearer to God and have God come nearer to us is universal among born-again Christians.

And yet we think of God as coming from across distance to us, when my text declares and Christian theology back to David declares that God is already here now. That God doesn’t dwell in space, and therefore God doesn’t have to do like a rocket or like a ray of light, come from some remote place or start toward some remote place. There is no remote place in God. God contains all remoteness and all distances in His own great Heart. And why then do we feel Him in distance? It’s this dissimilarity in our natures. It’s the unlikeness. We’ve got enough likeness that God can commune with us and call us His children and we can say Abba, Father, but in practical working out of it, the average one of us senses our dissimilarity. And that is why God seems remote.

Now, what I am trying to get across is simply this, that nearness to God is not a geographical or an astronomical thing. It is not a spatial thing having to do with space. It is a spiritual thing having to do with nature. And so, when we pray, God draw me nearer or when we pray, come near. When we pray, come Thou Fount of every blessing. We’re not praying if we’re good theologians for God to come down from some remote distance. We know God’s here now. Jesus said, lo, I am with you alway. And they said, surely God’s in this place. The Lord is here. Jacob said, God’s in this place and I didn’t know it. He didn’t say God came to this place, God is in this place.

Well then you say, then what are we praying for? What we’re praying for is a manifestation of the presence of God, not the Presence, but the manifestation of the Presence. Why don’t we have the manifestation? Because we, we allow, unlikenesses. We allow moral dissimilarity and that sense of absence. Now notice I say, sense of absence is the result of the remaining unlikeness within us. This desire, this yearning to be nearer to God is in fact a yearning to be like Him. It’s the yearning of the ransomed heart to be like God. So there can be perfect communion; so the heart and God can come together in a fellowship that is Divine.

Now, I want to point out some of the points of dissimilarity between God and the Christian. There I have said there is a similarity which makes it compatible for God and proper for God to commune with His children, even the poorest, weakest of His born children, these bairns as the Scots say. But there are dissimilarities and those dissimilarities are such that there isn’t a degree of fellowship that there ought to be. There isn’t that perfection of the sense of God’s presence that we want and yearn for, and pray for, and sing about.

Now, how are we going to know what God is like so that we may know whether we’re like God? The answer is, God is like Christ, for Christ is God. Christ is God manifest to mankind. And so let us look at Jesus. And by looking at our Lord Jesus, we will know what God is like, and then we will know what we have to be like if we’re going to experience the unbroken and continuous Presence of God, a sense of the Presence.

Now, the Presence is here. I can’t say it too often. But it’s the sense of the Presence that’s absent. Just as the man knows the sun is there, even though the clouds are hanging so low you can reach up and touch them. And even though it’s so dark they have to put the lights on. I’ve seen that and you’ve seen that. Even when we know the sun was there in midheaven, they had turned their automobile lights on for safety. I’ve seen that happen and you have because there are, were clouds between. They know the sun’s there, but they don’t feel it nor see it. And so we Christians know God is here. But there is a sense of His absence. As the man feels the sun is gone, never to return and he knows better, and yet he can’t be happy because he can’t see the sun. So, we feel that God is away even when we know that He’s present, and He can’t manifest Himself as He wants to for certain reasons.

Now let’s notice some of the qualities of Jesus. The first one of course is holiness. Our God is holy and our Lord is holy, and we call the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Now, notice how stained and how spotted and how carnal the average Christian is. We allow stains. Months go by without repentance. Years go by without asking for cleansing or taking it. Spots on our garments, and carnality, and unlikenesses within our heart. Then we pray, draw me nearer, nearer blessed Lord. Or we sing, or we pray, come Lord, come to this meeting. Well, the Lord is there. What we’re praying is, O Lord, show thyself, but the Lord cannot, a Holy Lord cannot show Himself in full communion to an unholy Christian. Do you say is it possible to be a Christian and be unholy. It’s possible to be a carnal Christian, to have the seed of God in you, to be regenerated and justified and still be unholy in some of your inner, inner feelings and desires and willingness.

The second is unselfishness. Do you notice that Jesus Christ was completely unselfish and gave Himself, but how self-centered and self-indulgent most Christians are? Even when they’re reading books on revival, they’re still self-centered. Even when they’re praying for revival, they’re still self-indulgent. A revival is, among other things, a sudden manifestation; it’s the breaking of the Son through the clouds. It’s not the coming of the Son. It’s the breaking of the Son through the clouds, and so our selfishness. How much selfishness there is.

I am sick in my own heart, sick about myself and sick about my friends and sick about the preachers in the ministry. How utterly self-centered we can become; live for self, talk loudly about glorifying God, and boast and say this is the glory of God, and yet be self-centered. And how you know you’re self-centered is, if anybody crosses you, your hackles go up. Now, don’t smile about it. It is not funny. It’s serious. That as soon as you’re crossed your hackles go up because you’re self-centered and self-indulgent. How much self-indulgence there is.

Do you know something friends, there is enough money potentially in this audience tonight, not only to keep this church going hilariously, but to double the missionary offering that we make. There’s enough, potentially, if we weren’t so self-indulgent, but we’re self-indulgent. And of course, a perfectly selfless Christ who gave Himself and poured Himself out and had no selfishness, can’t warm up for the Christian heart who’s self-indulgent and self-centered. He loves us. He’s our Shepherd. He’s our advocate above. He pleads our cause there. We are His bethren in Christ and His God, His Father is our Father. But I’m talking about the fellowship, the sweetness that changes some people into saints while they walk on earth in more than a technical sense, then love.

Now, He so loved that He gave all, but how calculating so many of us are, how calculating. I can say, now I can go to this meeting, but I can’t go to this one because the doctor has told me that I’m to do thus and thus, and I must obey doctor’s orders. And we let doctors push us around and tell us what to do. And we’re calculating. We figure it out. We put our spiritual life on a budget and we won’t spend anything for God unless we can justify it in the columns of our budget. What a cheap, carnal way of living. And yet it’s true. We do it. How narrow God’s people are.

The love of the Lord Jesus Christ was a great, passionate, outpoured thing, among other things that caused Him to give Himself completely. It said He please not Himself. Do you remember that beautiful passage? Jesus, even our Lord, pleased not Himself. But, do you know what’s wrong with us. We’re self-pleasers. We live for ourselves. There are people that would have a new car if this church went to pot and we had to close the doors. There are women that would dress in style and with the very best if the mission cause died and every missionary had to be sent home. Yet, we’re saints, we’re born again. We’re believers. We have our marked New Testament, but and maybe we are Christians, but the love we have is a calculating love and narrow love, a love that doesn’t give itself. And so how can He who gave Himself; how can He ever fellowship with us?

Do you want a Bible illustration of this? Let me give it to you. Back in the Song of Solomon, that delicate, gentle, wondrous, beautiful book that Dr. Schofield said, sin has almost deprived us of the ability to kneel before that burning bush. Well, back there you remember, that the Bridegroom who represents Jesus, had given gifts to the Bride, the bride to be. And he was out gathering lilies, taking care of his sheep, out among the lilies, and the dew was falling. And his locks were wet with the dews of the night. He was out there doing what his interest required him to do; what his heart wanted to do. And he came and knocked on her door as much as to say, won’t you come and join me? And she said, How can I? How can I come? I am not dressed for it. I’m dressed for the couch and the home, and even my hand drip with the ointments you’ve given me. I can’t come.

And so, he disappeared. He was still her lover. And he was still wanting and going to marry her. And he did finally, thank God. And it came out all right, but he was out there pouring himself out, and she was in her house admiring herself. And taking long whiffs of the fragrance of the perfumes that he had given her; standing before the mirror and admiring the robes and the jewelry that he had given her. He wanted her and she wanted his jewelry and his perfume. Then finally, she got under conviction about it. And she quickly, hastily dressed, not really for street dress, but she got some clothes on and threw a robe about her and started out looking for her beloved. And she says, where is he? Where is he? And I asked the watchman, where is he? And the watchman beat me He said, “A harlot out on the street on a night like this, go on home,” and he slapped her down. She went on staggering under the blows and couldn’t find him and said, where is he? Where is he? And while she was hunting him, her friend said, what is thy beloved more than another beloved? What’s the matter? Why don’t you go home? What is thy beloved more than another beloved? And then, she burst out into a beautiful song saying my beloved is white and ruddy. Do you remember that passage? She described him from head to foot. He is fairer than 10,000.

Well, you see, he wanted her fellowship. And she was too selfish and self-centered and she stayed in while he was out. And of course, there could be no fellowship while he’s out there doing one thing and she’s selfishly staying in house doing another.

And then there’s kindness. Think how utterly kind our Lord Jesus is. For the love of God is kinder than the measure of man’s mind. The kindness of Jesus and the harshness of us, and the severity and the sharpness, the acerbity, the bitterness, the acidity in so many people’s lives. How can a kind Savior feel perfectly at home with a harsh Christian?

Then there’s forgiveness. He was a forgiving Lord. He is a forgiving Lord and He forgave them while they beat Him. He forgave them while they put Him on a cross. But how hard and vengeful so many of the Lord’s children, how vengeful. You remember things that happened twenty years ago, some of you and you just can’t get over. You can’t. Oh, I have forgiven it all right, but you haven’t. You’re vengeful and He was forgiving. And He proved He was forgiving by dying in blood. You prove that you’re vengeful and hard by many, many proofs, many demonstrations.

Then, think of the zeal of Jesus. The zeal for thine house has eaten me up. Think of the zeal of God. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this. Zeal is a burning fire. Do you know, the most zealous thing I know is fire, O brother. Wherever fire burns, it burns with hot zeal. And the heart of Jesus was like that. But think of the lukewarm Christian, Christians that haven’t been to a prayer meeting for years. And the careless Christian, and the torpid Christian. The torpor that lies over the church of God.

Then the humility of Jesus. Though He was the highest, He came down and acted like the lowest. And though we are the lowest, we are sometimes like the proudest and the most arrogant. How completely unlike Jesus. How unlike God.

Now, you say then, am I justified by being like God? I hope I’ve made it clear. You’re justified by being declared righteous by Almighty God basing His sentence upon the cross of Jesus and the dying of the Savior in the darkness there on the hill. Then, because He made atonement, God justifies. And when He justifies, He regenerates. And you’re saved by justification and regeneration, but regeneration does not perfect the image of God in you. The image of God must continue to grow and come forth and come out. As an artist works on his pictures, at first it’s only an outline and the general confuse, but he knows what’s there and slowly it comes out.

And so, God seems far from us because we’re so unlike God. It isn’t distance. And Horace Bushnell and his friend went out on the hill to pray, talked first and went out and sat and talked about God until slowly, sunset and the stars came out in the darkness settled around while they sat on the grass and talked about God. Then before they left, Bushnell said, Brother, Let us pray before we go. So there in the darkness Bushnell lifted up his heart to God and his friend said afterwards, I pulled my arms in tight around me. I was afraid to reach them out lest I touch God.

I once knelt under an apple tree in a field, several other preachers and a Salvation Army man, Captain Ireland of the Salvation Army. Captain Ireland, we all prayed and then Captain Ireland began to pray. And as he prayed, I suddenly sensed a nearness. There was another One there that hadn’t come out. He’d been there all the time. Am I a God far off? Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD?

So, this sense of the Presence, how can He continually manifest His presence to the proud and arrogant when He was so humble and low? To the lukewarm and the careless when He was so zealous? To the hard and the vengeful when He is so forgiving? To the harsh and the severe, when He is so kind? To the calculating, when His love led Him to die? To the Holy, when we are so stained? How can we have fellowship?

And then the heavenly mindedness of Jesus. Oh, think of that. He was with the Father in the bosom of the Father while He was on earth. He said, the Son of Man who is, not was, in the bosom of the Father. He never left the bosom of the Father while He was on Earth. The only time He left it was in that awful, wrenching agony when God turned away from Him on a cross that He might die for mankind, but never at any other time He was in the bosom of the Father, the other world. He talked about, I came from above, I came down from above, I am from above. I tell you things from above. He lived in the heart of God. And the other world and the world above was the world in which He inhabited, the world in which inhabited. And think how earthly His people are, and how worldly: furniture, TV sets, baseball, football, automobiles, picture windows, split level houses, politics, anything but Heaven and God. And then we want, draw me nearer, nearer.  You’re as near as you can get as far as distance is concerned, but He can’t manifest Himself because there’s a dissimilarity of nature. You’ll have enough of His nature that you’re justified and regenerated, but you haven’t enough to perfect the fellowship. Do you see what I mean? The perfection of the fellowship. Oh, brethren, this is what we need so desperately bad.

Well, there was a man once who followed the Lord afar off. But you know he couldn’t live with it. Some of you have learned to live with it. You’ve gotten older and you’ve learned to live in the twilight and not mind it. You’ve learned to live in the chill and not mind. What can I do for you? How can I help you? I know no way. Peter followed a far off, but he couldn’t stand it. When the Lord turned and looked at him, he went outside and wept bitterly. He wept bitterly. Have you any tears for your unlikeness? Have you any tears for that distance between you and God that you know isn’t there and yet feel is there? You’re not, you’re not in any wise diminishing anything God has already done. You’re grateful and thankful for every blessing and for the goodness, for justification, for the good grace of God on your life, but you can’t escape that sense of remoteness. And many a day is a heavy day because God seems far from him. You know He isn’t, but you feel He is. The reason you feel He is, is that He can’t show His face. You’ve allowed self-indulgence, harshness, vengeful spirit, lukewarmness, pride, worldliness, earthliness to put a cloud over the Face of God.

What are you going to do about it? Would you be willing to do something about it tonight? Maybe I haven’t preached to anybody. I don’t know. Maybe nobody’s heard me tonight. Because I know it’s one thing to talk and it’s quite another thing to be heard, even in the same room. Only the Holy Ghost can give you the illumination that will make the words heard by you. You know the english, you know the grammar, you know the logic, that’s one thing, but it’s another thing to hear in your heart. Then opened He their hearts. Has He opened anybody’s heart here? If He’s opened anybody’s heart, I think that you ought to do something about it. Let us stand please. Let us stand.

Do you know what I think? I think that repentance is called for. Repentance of what? A deed done? No. Repentance of the unlikeness? Repentance of the unholiness in the presence of the Holy? Of the self-indulgence in the presence of the selfless Christ? Of the presence of harshness in the presence of the kind Christ? Of hardness in the presence of the Forgiving Christ? Lukewarmness in the presence of the zealous Christ burning like a fiery flame? The worldliness and earthliness in the presence of the heavenly Christ. I think we ought to repent.

Now I don’t know I say whether I’ve reached you or not. I only know this, there’s a prayer room in here. And while we sing very softly, some number, our brother, would you start. Don’t announce it, just sing something very gently and we’ll join. Just come in here and we’ll have a little prayer meeting. If your heart, has God spoken to your heart? Come on into the place of prayer.

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“The Omnipresence of God”

Sunday evening, November 2, 1958

Message #7 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

Let me read some passages from various parts of the Bible. I am going to speak tonight on God’s omnipresence, but with a particular reason for it which I’ll explain as I go along. 1 Kings, but will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain Thee, how much less this house that I have built. Jeremiah 23, Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off? Acts 17, that they should seek the Lord if happily they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being. Psalm 16, I have set the Lord always before me; because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved. Psalm 139, whither shall I go from thy Spirit or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall Thy hand lead me on, Thy right hand shall hold me.

Now, those are a few texts that certainly don’t exhaust the great wealth of texts dealing with this same topic. But those of you who have been listening to these sermons will know, because you will have noticed that my method of treating scriptural doctrines is a little bit different from the average man, in as much as I go back of everything to God Himself and show that the teachings of the Holy Scriptures have their origin in the nature of God. They are what they are because God is what He is. That these teachings rest upon the character of God and are guaranteed by the changeless attributes of the Lord God Almighty, the Ancient of Days. I have before some years ago preached on the omnipresence of God and I shall only sketch it here to get started.

And I want to explain briefly what omnipresence is and then show what it means in the human experience. And to say that God is omnipresent, and this of course is believed by all churches. I am not introducing anything; this is believed by every church that believes the Bible. It means that God is all present; that God is close to, for that’s what the word means, close to, near to, here. It means that He is close to everywhere. It means that He is near to everything and everyone. It means that He is here, that is, that He is next to you wherever you may be. And if you send up the querulous question, O God, where art Thou? The answer comes back. I am where you are. I am here. I am next to you. I am close to everywhere. That’s what the Bible says.

Now, there’s reason on the side of this as well as Scripture. If we had only reason and not Scripture it would be dubious. If we had Scripture and no reason, we would still believe it. But since we have Scripture to declare it and reason to shout it’s true, I know it’s true, then we may be sure that God is omnipresent. That is, that He’s everywhere. You see, if there were any borders to God; if there was any place where God is not, then that place would mark the confines, the limits of God. And if God had limits, God could not be the infinite God.

Some theologians call the infinitude of God His immensity. But immensity is not quite a big enough word. Immensity simply means that whatever you’re talking about is hugely, vastly, large. But infinitude means not only that it’s hugely, vastly, large, in fact, it doesn’t mean that at all. It means that there isn’t any way to say that God is large. It means that there are no limits to God anywhere, and that if there were limits to God and God were very hugely, vastly large, then we could say that He was immense. But since He is infinite, then we can only say that God has not size at all, and you can’t move or measure God in any direction, that God is infinite and perfect. If there was any place that God was not in any line, we could say God comes to here, but doesn’t go beyond that. Then of course, we would not have an infinite God, but a finite God. And whatever is finite, wherever you have finitude, you have creaturehood. You wouldn’t have God; you’d have something else.

Now, actually, God is equally near to all parts of His universe. You see, we think rightly about God and spiritual things only when we rule out space all together; when we rule out the space concept. I listen every Saturday night at 9:30 to this Professor Posen who lectures on space. And it’s been quite interesting. He was going last night to give the great theory, the latest theory by Einstein. And I eagerly turned it on. I was lying down, eagerly turned it on, and woke up just when he was finished. I fell right off to sleep. That’s the first time I’ve done that. I must have been unusually tired. But he talks a lot about space and about all it having to do with the worlds out yonder. But you know, when we think about God in spiritual things, we think correctly only when we rule out the space concept all together. Because God being infinite, does not dwell in space. He swallows up all space.

Now, the Scripture says, do not I feel heaven and earth, and that sounds as if God was contained in heaven and earth. But actually, God fills heaven and earth just as the ocean fills a bucket which has been submerged in it a mile down. The bucket is full of the ocean, but the ocean surrounds the bucket in all directions. So, when God says, I fill heaven and earth, He does. Are not the heaven and earth submerged in God and all space is. And He says, the heaven of heavens cannot contain me. You see, God is not contained–God contains. And there is the difference. God is not contained, God contains. In Him, we live and move and have our being.

Now, we talk about God being close to us or far from us. And the problem that I’ll speak about tonight, and tomorrow night is the problem of distance, the problem of God being far away. And you see, we don’t think right, because we think geographically or astronomically. We think in light years, or we think in meters or inches or miles or leagues or something else, when actually we’re thinking about God as being spatial. that is, as dwelling in space, which He does not, but contains space, so that space is in God, and we never have any problem about God being anywhere. For the fact is, as the text say, that God is everywhere.

I believe what God says, and leave those who do not believe with the problems. It says if I ascend up to heaven, Thou art there. If I make my bed in Hell, behold Thou art there. Now, don’t ask me to explain it. But let’s remember, John Wesley said, don’t reject it because you can’t understand it. If a man made his bed in hell, the omnipresence of God requires that wherever there is anything, the presence of God must be. But why is it that the world thinks of God as being infinitely remote far beyond the farthest star?

We used to sing a little song when I was a boy, “far away beyond the starlit sky,” and we have placed God somewhere far out beyond the starlit sky. Now why? And when the world prays as a rule, they pray without any sense of God’s nearness at all. Always, God is somewhere else, always God is far away. Why is this? Well, this is the reason: that in spiritual things, closeness and likeness are the same thing. Remoteness means dissimilarity. Now, please get that, for if you don’t get that you’ll have missed most everything that I want to say tonight; that when it comes to personality, when it comes to spirits, when it comes to that which is not material, then distance doesn’t mean one lonely thing in all the wide world. That is why Jesus could go to the right hand of God the Father and still say to people on earth, I am with you always, because Jesus Christ as God, and God being Spirit, can be instantaneously everywhere at the same time, and there is no problem there. But, where men are shut off from God, not because God is spatially far from them, not because He is remote like a far galaxy or star, but because there’s a dissimilarity in nature. And when you see, when we think, we project our own human concepts up into spiritual things. And one of the problems of a Bible teacher is to break that down though I haven’t heard very many Bible teachers try to do it.

And one of the problems of the Holy Ghost, if He has any problems, is to get His people so spiritualized that they no longer think in material concepts. We project our human concepts upward or outward. For instance, your friends are the ones who are the nearest to you. And the closer a friend it is, the nearer that person’s likely to be. But your enemy wants to put as much space between you and him as possible. And so everything else being equal, that enemy gets as far away as he can. So we tend to think of our friends as being near to us and our enemies as being far from us. My friend comes to me and I to him and we chat in intimate conversation, we’re friends. But the enemy stays away, and stays away as far as he can.

Now, that’s a human concept and it has to do with material things. Everybody’s glad his enemy is a mile away and he’d be more comfortable if he was two miles away, or three or ten, or on some other continent. As the world sees it, the farther away our enemy is, why the better off you are. Because you think in spatial terms, that is s-p-a-t-i-a-l terms. He’s way off there and your friend close.

Now, that isn’t the way we think when we think about God. It isn’t the way we should think, because there isn’t any place you could go and not find God. You take that 139th Psalm from which I read tonight. Why, that Psalm tells us plainly enough that there isn’t any place where you can go that God isn’t. He says, I say surely the darkness shall cover me, why even the night shall be light about me. Yea, darkness hidest not from Thee, but the night shineth as the day. And the darkness and the light are both the light to Thee. There isn’t anywhere that we can go because God knoweth our down sitting and uprising and understands our thoughts are far off. We do not have the problem of distance or remoteness when we come to God. For what makes this a Christian assembly is that God is here. What makes this a Christian assembly? God is here.

So, two creatures may be in the same room and yet be millions of miles apart. For instance, an ape and an angel; if it were possible to get an angel and an ape in the same room, the same room size of this choir room here, where half of the choir assembles. If you could get an ape and an angel in there, there would be no compatibility. There would be no communion. There would be no understanding. There would be no friendship. There would be only distance, because the shining angel and the slobbering, chippering ape would be infinitely, to use the word infinitely carelessly, infinitely removed from each other, even though they were in the same room. They’re far, far distant. For you see, when we come to human or when it comes to spirit, when we come to anything that is intellectual or spiritual or of the soul, space and matter and weight and time have no meaning it all. That is why I can stand and smile at all the space boys and all those who tell us that if you took a foot rule and started and shooting it like an arrow, and speed it up to 186,000 miles a second, it would lose its length and would not have any length at all, it would be length-less. Did you know that? Well, he knows it now, that is, that’s what they tell us that’s what would happen.

Well, that’s supposed to stun you and knock you for a loop. And you’re supposed to walk around dizzy and quit praying. I don’t brother, because I don’t think in spatial terms, and I don’t think in material terms, nor in speed or distance, because God being spirit is right here. And He’ll never be any farther away and He can’t get any nearer than He is right now. But you see, the reason that there’s that sense of faraway-ness, that sense that God is remote, is the dissimilarity between moral characters. God and man are dissimilar now. God made man in His image, but man sinned and so became unlike God in his moral nature. And because he’s unlike God, communion is broken. Just as two men, enemies, hate each other. They’re enemies and they’re separated and apart even though they’re for the moment forced to be together. Two brothers who hate each other may come to the funeral of their father and yet they will stand at that coffin and be miles apart, because there is dissimilarity within them; there’s alienation there.

And that is exactly what the Bible calls it. That moral incompatibility between God and man. That’s remoteness. That’s what gives that sense of distance. God is not far away, as I have explained, but He seems to be far away spatially, because He is far away in character. He’s unlike men because man had sinned and God is holy. And the Bible has for this moral incompatibility, this spiritual unlikeness between man and God, the Bible has a word. It’s the word alienation.

Now, let me read to you what it is that gives to the world that sense of God being far away beyond the starlit sky. You who were dead in trespasses and sins wherein in time past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom also we had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And were by nature the children of wrath even as others. Then in the fourth chapter, we read, I say therefore and testify that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness.

Now, let’s take our Lord Jesus Christ who is God incarnated and is in character all that God is perfectly all together, exactly what God is. Could this describe Jesus, walking in the vanity of his mind? No, that describes the sinner, the alienated sinner. Having his understanding darkened, did that describe, does that describe the glorious Son of God? The ignorant with ignorance in him, blind in his heart, past feeling, given over to lasciviousness, walking in uncleanness and greediness. Does that describe Jesus? It describes exactly the opposite of Jesus. It shows that this sinner, this sinner, wherever he is, Roman, Greek, whatever he is, this sinner is so dissimilar to God that the distance is a distance of character. It is not a spatial distance, it’s not a distance of space. God is not, say, 186,000 miles or light years away from a sinner. He is not one inch away from the sinner. He is yet far from the sinner.

Am I contradicting myself? No, not at all. Since God contains all space, and being omnipresent according to all theologians of every denomination, anywhere. Since God is omnipresent, close to, next to, here, anywhere, everywhere here, then the distance is that of character and not that of space. So that when the sinner prays, O God save me and forgive me for Jesus’ sake, he does not call God down from his high Imperium. But God is there, there, there! And he knows in that moment he can know that God is there.

But you say it’s dissimilarity of character that makes the difference. Suppose there was a very, very godly man and a very licensious, abandoned, evil man and they were forced, they were forced, neither one of them would bend an inch. The holy man would not bend an inch toward sin and the sinner would not even allow the holy man to talk to him. But they were forced to sit together on a journey, what could they talk about? They’d have to find some common ground, and it might be the landscape or the pretty tree there or something. But they could never have fellowship. They might if the sinner would be listening to the urge and appeal of the good man. But as long as the sinner shut himself off and said, you can’t talk to me about God, now keep still, there’d be no communion. They would be miles apart even though they were the same nationality, approximately the same age and traveling in the same vehicle. They would still be miles apart.

So it is with God and man. God is away from man and man is away from God. And that’s why the world searches after God, if happily they might find Him, but don’t find Him because God and man are dissimilar in their moral natures. God is one thing in perfect holiness, man is another in perfect iniquity, and the two can never meet. And that’s why God seems so far away. Look at that man, Adam. When Adam sinned, he ran and hid himself from the presence of God.

And I heard a Jewish rabbi talking the other night on the radio while he was introducing some Jewish hymns which I like to hear, some of the old Jewish hymns. And he said that once a Jewish rabbi had been in jail. He was a very godly man and he was in jail. And he said that his jailer had been interested in the old man who prayed a lot and read his Bible a lot. And he said he went to the rabbi and said, Rabbi, I’ve got a question I’d like to ask you, a theological question out of your own Bible. It said about God knowing everything. Do you believe God knows everything? Oh, certainly said the rabbi. Well, how is it then that it says that God said, Adam, where art thou? If God knew where he was, why did he ask? Well, the rabbi said, Son, that’s not hard. He said, God said, Adam, where art thou, not that He didn’t know where Adam was, but Adam didn’t know where he was and he said, the question was asked of Adam, Adam, you don’t know where you are. Adam, where are you, He said, because Adam was lost, not God. And God knew well where Adam was, but Adam didn’t know where he was, yet His Adam didn’t know where Adam was.

Adam was alienated from God and I think the old Rabbi had the explanation alright. God knew where he was. God said, I will go down now and see. That didn’t mean that God was coming down to get information like a newspaper man. The great God knows everything in one instant perfect act. And yet He comes down among us and acts like us and said, I’ll go down and see. And there was Jonah. When Jonah refused to obey God and broke off and alienated his heart, he got in his ship and went out from the presence of God. Why? He thought he could get away from God; how foolish of a Jew. How foolish of a Jew who’d been reading the Old Testament to think that he could get away from God.

Then there was Peter. When Peter sinned, you know, Peter knelt down and said, depart from me, get away from me, I’m a sinful man, O Lord. It is the heart that puts distance between us and God. It is not stars and satellites and moons. We must not think of God as being thus far away, for the reason that God does not dwell in space. And the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, but He contains the heaven of heavens. And therefore, God is just as near to you now, nearer than you are to yourself, nearer than your thoughts, but the sinner yet is far from God. He isn’t far from God, and yet he’s far from God.

What do I mean? I mean that God is not away like a Roman god upon on a holy mountain, as far away two miles, ten miles, 100 miles, 1000 miles away. No, God is not away that way, but God is far away in another way. He’s far away in his holy unlikeness to everything sinful. He’s far away in the sense of alienation and enmity. And the natural man is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be and it cannot please God. He cannot please God, and God and man are alienated. This is the terrible woe of the world. This terrible word, alienation. Not alienation or distance in space, but moral dissimilarity. And that’s why there’s got to be a place to put those who refuse to be like God or become like God, because God, God cannot in His holy heaven, for heaven is a place as well as a state. God cannot in His holy heaven have beings that are morally dissimilar to Himself. We must be must be like Him to enter there and then we shall see Him and shall be like Him, says the Holy Ghost, according to 1 John 1:3.

Now, the bliss of all moral creatures is the presence of God. Our fathers called it the vision beatific. The presence of God is the bliss of all moral creatures. Just as the shining of the sun is the bliss of all creatures that love the sun. All the creatures that love the sun come out and come to the surface and fly or crawl or swim when the sun returns. So, the presence of that Holy God is the bliss of all moral creatures. And it is the absence of it is, the terror and the grief and the sorrow of all fallen creatures. But you know, I am not talking about God’s presence, but God’s manifest presence. You see, there’s a vast difference between God’s presence and God’s manifest presence.

The presence of God is even in hell, the Holy Ghost says in the 139th Psalm, but the manifest presence of God is only in heaven and where good souls are. So therefore, a man can walk around on the earth and be so close to God that he could whisper and God will hear his whisper and yet have such a sense of alienation and remoteness that he’ll go to the river and commit suicide thinking there’s no God in the universe anywhere.

This accounts for man’s busy activities, you see; that it counts for practically all of the entertainment there is in the world, that accounts for it, people. People do all sorts of things because they invent every sort of instrument and every sort of entertainment, because they can’t live with themselves knowing they’re alienated from God. And knowing that there is a moral dissimilarity, knowing that there is a moral dissimilarity that shall forever and forever keep a sense of all but infinite remoteness between their soul and the God who is their life and their sunshine. And hell, if there were no fire in hell and no worm that never dieth, hell would be hell enough, because moral creatures are cut-off forever from the sunshine of God’s face.

And if there were no golden streets and no jasper walls and no angels and no harps and no living creatures and no elders and no sea of glass, heaven would be heaven enough, because we shall see His face and His name shall be on our foreheads. It is the presence of God, the manifest, conscious presence of God that makes heaven heaven. And it is the refusal of God ever to manifest His presence in hell or on earth or anywhere where men are not good men, or not wanting to be good men, that makes hell what it is and makes the world what it is.

If God could only manifest Himself to men on the earth, all over the earth, every night club would be empty or would turn into a happy prayer meeting. And every house of ill fame would be emptied in five minutes. And everyone with deep repentance and sorrow of heart would be down on their knees before God asking for forgiveness and weeping tears of happiness, because it is the presence of God that gives bliss to moral creatures and the absence of God that brings everlasting woe to moral creatures.

Well, you see, men want a bright day without the Son. They deny the Son and still want a bright day. So they invent every kind of light imaginable and whirl all kinds of roman candles over their heads to get a little light. And we call that entertainment. And we call that the theater and all the rest. Well, that helps people to forget that they are without God. But now somebody says, but Mr. Tozer, if man’s nature is dissimilar to God’s and that’s the remoteness, that’s the gulf fixed, that’s the everlasting, unbridgeable gulf, and the Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots. And the man born in sin can’t get out of it, and that God will never change and man can’t change himself, how then can God and the human race ever come together?

Oh, the answer is my friend, that the dissimilarities can be reconciled only by One who is both God and man; the dissimilarity can be reconciled. The man cannot educate himself into a likeness of God and he cannot cultivate himself into a likeness of God. He can begin to go to art galleries and read Shakespeare and visit the opening nights at the opera and begin to drop his “r”s and open his “a”s and sound very, very, very cultured. And when it’s all over, he’s still inwardly what he was before, walking in the vanity of his mind, blinded by the ignorance that is within him, cut off from the life of God without hope and without God in the world. Man can’t right himself. Religions have tried it. Philosophies have tried it. School systems have tried it. Police try it. And we try everywhere to bring a similarity that God will recognize so that instead of our having that far sense of infinite remoteness, we can say, surely God’s in this place. But we can’t get it. We can’t, we can’t. Religions can’t. How can it be done?

Oh, my brother, it says in 2 Corinthians 5, God was in Christ reconciling. God was in Christ reconciling. Now, how can God reconcile the dissimilar nature of man to His own? You see, reconciliation can be done in two ways. Reconciliation can be accomplished by the two parties who are alienated, compromising and thus getting together. If this man and I had four propositions that were keeping us apart, we might get together and pray and say, now brother, I’d say, Brother Knight, I don’t want to be out of friendship with you and therefore, I’ll make a concession on this. And he’d say, well, alright then, I’ll make a concession on this. Well, I’d say, all right, then I’ll make one on this. And he’d say, I’ll make one on this. And so, by his moving over this way, halfway, and my moving this way, halfway, we’d be reconciled.

But how can God say to the sinner, I’ll move over halfway? You’re blind and I’ll move over and be half blind. And you move over and be half blind. You’re dead and I’ll move over and be half dead and you move over and be half dead and thus by God coming halfway and compromising Himself, He and man could be reconciled. To do that God would have to void his Godhead and cease to be God. And I’d rather go to hell than go to a heaven presided over by a God who would compromise with sin. And I believe every true man and woman would, for we want God to be the Holy God that He is, and remain the Holy God that He is.

So, God can never say I’ll go halfway. You come halfway over and I’ll come halfway over. It didn’t work that way and it doesn’t work that way. The Father stayed at home and the Prodigal came all the way back. The Prodigal and his Father did not meet halfway to the far country. The boy came clear back where he belonged. And so, the sinner, in his repentance, comes all the way back to God and God doesn’t move from His holy position of infinite holiness, righteousness, and loveliness, world without end.

God never compromises and comes halfway down. God stays the God that He is. This is the God we adore, our faithful, unchangeable Friend, who’s love is as great as His power and knows neither limit nor end. And we don’t want God to compromise. We don’t want God to wink at our iniquity. We want God to do something about it. What did He do about it? He came down and became flesh and became both God and man, sin accepted, in order that by His death He might remove everything out of the way so that now, man can come back. Before, he couldn’t come back or he couldn’t come back if Christ had not come and died. But now because He came and died, He removed every moral obstacle out of the way so man can come home.

And now Peter, approaching it from another direction, says in 2 Peter 1:4, that God has left us the promises of the Gospel, that by these we might be partakers of the divine nature. What does that mean? It means that when the sinner comes home, repents and believes on Christ savingly, that God implants in the heart of that previous sinner, some of His own nature and then, the nature of God in God and the nature of God in the sinner are no longer dissimilar, but now they are one. And the sinner’s home and the dissimilarities are gone and the unlikeness removed. And the nature of God in man makes it morally proper that man and God should have fellowship. God without compromising Himself in any way, now receives the returning sinner. He puts a deposit of His own nature and life in that sinner. My friend, don’t you see, that’s what the new birth is! Don’t you see it’s not joining. Don’t you see it’s not being baptized? Don’t you see, it’s not quitting this or that bad habit, though everybody will quit their bad habits, but it’s an implantation of divine life.

Now, let me go back to my own rather awkward illustration, grotesque illustration I will admit, but if it gets an idea across, I don’t want to apologize. Let’s go back to this ape and this angel that are out in the side room. They’re staring at each other, the ape and the angel. There’s no getting them together. How could you do it? If the great God Almighty could take from the angel, that glorious, celestial nature that is his, and deposit it in the ape, the ape would leap to his feet and shake hands with the angel and call him by name, because similarity would instantly be there. But, as long as one has the nature of an ape and the other of an angel, there can be nothing but everlasting dissimilarity.

And so, the world with all of its money and all of its culture and all of its education and all of its science and all of its philosophy, is still a moral ape! And the Bible has said so and the Holy God cannot compromise Himself to fellowship and neither can that man understand God for the natural man cannot understand God and there can be no fellowship. But God moved in Christ and died on a cross and so, took the obstacles away, I repeat, and now by the New Birth He gives some of His own delightful divine nature to the sinner. And the sinner looks up and says, Abba, Father for the first time in his life. Now, he’s converted.

Do you know, that’s what happened to Jacob. Everybody will admit the Jacob was converted there at the ladder and was filled with the Holy Ghost, or whatever you want to call it there at Jabbok, two works of grace there for Jacob. And you that don’t believe in it, will have a hard time explaining Jacob. But anyway, here was Jacob. Well, he was an old sinner who was crooked and he had a name Jacob which meant he was a planner, he was crooked. And Jacob was there, oh, how does it go. And Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Heron. And he lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night because the sun did set. And he took of the stones of that place and put them for his pillows and lay down in that place to sleep. And while he slept, he saw a ladder set up on the earth. And God was above it and the angels ascending or descending upon it, and God and Jacob met. And Jacob believed in his God, and he woke and you know what he said? He said, this is the gate of heaven and I didn’t know it. It was the gate of heaven when he lay down. And it wasn’t any more the gate of heaven when you awoke. But he said, I didn’t know it. The presence of God had been there all the time. But now, by a work of God, he got the conscious presence of God.

And that’s why a sinner who is soundly converted, soundly born anew, who has a conscious transplantation of the divine nature into his heart in faith in Jesus Christ, why, he’s likely to be explosively happy. He says with Jacob, why this is the gate of heaven. God’s in this place and I didn’t know it. What’s been restored to him? Not the presence of God, but the conscious presence of God.

What makes heaven heaven? The unhindered, unsullied presence of God. What makes hell hell? The absence of a consciousness of the presence of God. That’s the difference between a prayer meeting and a dance hall. The omnipresent God fills heaven and earth, contains heaven and earth and is present everywhere. But in the prayer meeting, some little old lady kneels and says, O Jesus, were two or three are gathered, I am there in the midst–God is there. In the dance hall, they would be embarrassed if the presence of God were to be manifest. That’s why conversions are such milk and water things these days; such poor, shoddy, ragged things these days. How we pick them out of their shell. How we try by rubbing their nose in red letter texts to make them think they’re converted. They have not had an implantation of the Divine Life. There’s no similarity, and therefore God and man do not meet in the bush. But wherever God and man meet, there’s the joyous rebound of the human spirit. Similarity is restored and instead of God being a million light years away, the man can hardly believe his own heart when he cries, oh, God’s in this place and I didn’t know it.

Ah, for some of the old conversions again. I’ve not seen too many of that kind, but I’ve seen a few conversions where a man would kneel and burst of tears and agony, confess his sins to God, believe on Jesus Christ and get to his feet with a light on his face and walk around shaking hands with everybody keeping back the tears the best he could, and smiling through the tears, he couldn’t keep back. What, what did that? What did that was not only the conscious taking away of sin, but the conscious presence of God revealed to the heart inside. That’s the joy of conversion, my brethren, not bringing God from some distant star, but knowing God by a change of nature.

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“The Grace of God”

Sunday evening, October 26, 1958

Message #6 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

Tonight, I want to talk on grace as one of the attributes of God. It’s too big for any man to handle, but we’re leaning on the Blessed Spirit, so I want to read some verses merely, merely texts. They’re all found all through the Bible, but I’ll just select this many. Genesis 6, but Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Exodus 33, The Lord said to Moses, thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name. Proverbs 3, surely God scorneth the scorner, but He giveth grace unto the lowly. John 1, And of His fullness of all we received and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Romans 3, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Romans 5, for if through the offence of one, many be dead, much more the grace of God and the gift of grace which is by one Man, Jesus Christ. By one man Jesus Christ, the gift of grace hath abounded under many. Ephesians 1, to the praise of the glory of His grace wherein He hath made us accepted in the beloved. In Whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sin, according to the riches of His grace. 1 Peter 5, but the God of all grace. To Him, be glory and dominion forever and ever. Now, I just read a few verses there that I copied out on a card here, so I wouldn’t have to flip from one page to another in order that you might see that this is taught both in the Old and the New Testament.

Now, grace is an attribute of God. Let me repeat patiently, little here and little there, line upon line and precept upon precept, that an attribute is something God is, not something God has. Grace is therefore something God is. And it is near to, but it is not the same as mercy. It is almost the same as mercy, but it is not quite the same. And just as mercy flows out of the goodness of God, so grace flows out of the goodness of God. Mercy is God’s goodness confronting human guilt. Now, we dealt with that last week that mercy is the goodness of God confronting human guilt, whereas grace is the goodness of God and confronting human demerit.

I talked about justice and I said, that when justice confronts a moral situation, it pronounces death. There’s stern disapprobation where there is blame and divine disapproval to the point of execration where God must stand against the man because the man stands with his sin, then justice must judge. But still the goodness of God yearns to bestow blessedness and that is a grace, the goodness of God yearning to bestow blessedness even to those who do not deserve it, but who have a specific demerit. There’s a difference between no merit and demerit. No merit simply is a negative thing. It’s vacuity, but demerit is a positive thing. It means that there is not only no merit there, but that there is the opposite of merit.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about grace and mentioned some facts about it. That it is God’s good pleasure and it flows of course out of the goodness of God. And it is what God is like. If you were to meet God, you’d find that this is what God is like. I have said over and over again over the years, that one of the big problems of the church, one of our great losses is the loss of the proper concept of what God is like, and that if we could restore that again, and we could have an army of preachers going up and down the land preaching about God, what God is like, and the pastors and teachers would begin again to tell the people what God is like, it would put strength and foundation under our faith again.

Now, grace is that in God which brings into favor. I’m actually staying very close to the Hebrew and Greek definition when I’m saying this, that it is that in God which brings into favor one justly in disfavor. And grace and favor incidentally, are used interchangeably in the English Bible, not always, but very often. I said last week that there was four times as much said about mercy in the Old Testament as in the New. And I think I may have jarred some of you by saying it because usually we’re taught the opposite. But actually, there’s four times as much said about mercy in the Old Testament as there is in the New. But strangely and wonderfully, there’s more than three times as much said about grace in the New Testament as in the Old.

Now, I read to you that law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Christ is the channel through which grace flows. And it’s possible to misunderstand this and a great many people have. Never underestimate the ability of good people to misunderstand. And we have misunderstood and we have made it to mean that Moses knew only law and Christ knows only grace. This is the typical teaching of the hour, but it is not the teaching of our fathers. You will not find it in John Bunyan, or Henry Scougal, or any of the Puritans. You will not find it even in Calvin. You will not find it among the great revivals and church fathers and reformers.

The doctrine that Moses knew only law and Christ knew only grace so to read it is to misunderstand it altogether. To think that because the law was given by Moses, God gave the law through Moses that therefore, Moses knew no grace is to misread or fail to read that passage; that before the flood, Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Now remember that’s Genesis 6. Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord before there was any law given. And after the law was given, and Moses had been on the Mount forty days and forty nights, and God had reached down out of the fire and storm, and with His finger had chiseled the ten words on the tables of stone. It says, thou hast found grace in my sight and I know thee by name. God did not deal with Moses on the basis of law. He dealt with Moses on the basis of grace. And Moses knew it and said, If I’ve found grace in thy sight, well then do so and so Father or Lord. He called Him Jehovah.

Now, how could it be otherwise, my brethren. How could it be that God should act only in law in the Old Testament and only in grace in the New if God doesn’t change. If immutability is an attribute of God, then God must always act like Himself. I’ve said this many times, and I wish we could get a hold of it. That God always acts like Himself.

I was talking to Brother McAffee in the study just before the service began, that prodigal son story where it said that after he had spent all and he went out there among the swine, he came to himself. And I said, what a beautiful idiom, as if God understood that the man hadn’t been himself, but now, through the wisdom taught him by sin, the wisdom taught him by loss and homesickness, he comes to himself. You don’t find people always the same, but you find God always the same. God must always act like himself, and He never varies from Himself. Grace doesn’t ebb and flow like the tide, it doesn’t come like the weather, a great surge of hot grace, and then we get no grace at all. God must always act like Himself. And He must act like Himself before the flood and after the flood and when the law was given an after the law was given. God must always act like Himself. And since Grace is an attribute of God, it is that which God is and which cannot be removed from God and yet have God remain God.

So, there was always grace in the heart of God, and there isn’t any more grace now than there ever was. And there will never be any more grace than there is now. If we could only see that grace is infinite and therefore it neither ebbs nor flows. It doesn’t grow nor diminish. It doesn’t die nor be born. It is what God is and God is of course, unchangeable and eternal.

Now, here are two important truths that I want you to get. And I want you to take it and the next time you hear a professor or a preacher say otherwise, go to him and remind him of this. One of them is that no one was ever saved, no one is now saved, and no one will ever be saved except by grace. Now get that in your mind my brethren.  I was quite surprised to learn here only within the last couple of weeks, that this was believed by Robertson McQuilkin, and taught by Robertson McQuilkin, the very justly famous expositor and teacher who founded Ben Lippen and Columbia Bible College.

Well, this is the fact that nobody was ever saved except by grace; before Moses, nobody was ever, except by grace. During Moses’ time nobody was ever saved except by grace. After Moses and before the cross, and after the cross, and since the cross, and during all this dispensation, during any dispensation, anywhere, anytime, since Abel offered his first lamb before God on a smoking altar, nobody was ever saved in any other way than by grace. Ah, my brother, if we could only get a hold of that.

And then the second thing is, that grace always comes by Jesus Christ, that grace always came by Jesus Christ. Law, the law was given by Moses, but grace came by Jesus Christ. But it didn’t mean and is not to be understood that before Jesus was born of Mary, there was no grace, because God dealt in grace with mankind looking forward to the Incarnation and death of Jesus. Before Christ came and now since He’s come and gone to the Father’s right hand, God looks back upon the cross as we look back upon the cross. Everybody from Abel on was saved by looking forward to the cross. Grace came by Jesus Christ. And everybody that’s been saved since the cross, is saved by looking back at the cross. Grace always comes by Jesus Christ. It didn’t come at His birth, but it came in God’s ancient scheme.

I was trying to think up a word that I could use and I remembered Finney’s words. He talked about the Christian scheme. Now the word scheme has gotten into bad company. When we think of it rather, it has connotations that are not pleasant. But, even a hundred years ago, it was a good pure word. It meant a carefully wrought plan. And so, the old writers could talk about God’s redemptive scheme, God’s redemptive plan carefully wrought and thought out and wrought out. And so, grace came according to God’s ancient plan in Christ Jesus. And no grace was ever administered to anybody except by and through and in Jesus Christ. When yet Adam and Eve had no children, God’s spared Adam and Eve by grace. And when they had their two boys, one offered a lamb and thus said I look forward to the Lamb of God; he accepted the grace of Christ Jesus 4,000 years before He was born. And God gave His witness that he was justified.

So, grace did not come when Christ was born in a manger. It did not come when Christ was baptized or anointed of the Spirit. It did not come when He died on a cross. It did not come when He rose from the dead. It did not come when He went to the Father’s right hand. Grace came from the ancient beginnings through Jesus Christ the Eternal Son and was manifest on the cross of Calvary in fiery blood and tears and sweat and death. But it had always been operated from the beginning. If God had not operated in grace, He would have swept the human race away. He would have crushed Adam and Eve under His heel in awful judgment, for they had it coming. But because God was a God of grace, and because He had already an eternity plan, the plan of grace and the Lamb of God had been slain before the foundation of the world. There was no embarrassment in the Divine scheme. And God didn’t have to back out and say, I’m sorry, but I have mixed things up here. He simply went right on.

I heard a great Southern preacher one time, remind and talking about the work of God as being a wheel spinning on a hub. And he said, when Adam spun off of the wheel and went rolling down, he said, God put Christ on and He’s been on there spinning ever since. That’s a rather odd illustration, but the first Adam slipped away and the second Adam already was there. And anything God has ever done for anybody, of all of His grace have all we received. And grace for grace so that God’s grace is for everybody, and everybody receives in some degree God’s grace. Everybody receives in some degree God’s grace, the lowest woman in the world, the most sinful, bloody man in the world, a Judas, a Hitler. If it hadn’t been that God was gracious, they would have been cut off and slain along with you and me and all the rest.

For I wonder after all, if there’s too much difference in us sinners. When a woman sweeps up a house, and somes dirty, blacksome gray, some different colored, but it’s all dirt and it all goes before the broom. And when God looks at humanity, He sees some that are very white, but they’re dirt, and He sees some that are very black and they’re dirt. And He sees some that are morally speckled and it’s all dirt and it all goes before the moral broom.

So, the grace of God is operated toward everybody; now, not the saving grace of God. Remember, there’s a difference. When the grace of God becomes operative through faith in Jesus Christ, then there is the new birth. But the grace of God nevertheless holds back any judgment that would come until God in His kindness has given every man a chance to repent.

Now, grace is God’s goodness I said. It is the kindness of God’s heart, the goodwill, the cordial benevolence. It is what God is like. And I would like to tell you and keep telling you, where it’s very hard for us poor, bound creatures to remember it, that God is like that all the time, gracious. God is kind all the time. God is filled with goodwill and cordiality and benevolence all the time, all the time. All through, God is like that. You’ll never run into a stratum in God that’s hard. You’ll always find God gracious all through, and always and all times and toward all peoples forever. You will never run into any meanness in God. Never any resentment or rancor or ill will for there’s nothing there. God has no ill will toward any being.

God is a God of utter kindness and cordiality and goodwill and benevolence. And yet all of these, remember, work in perfect harmony with God’s justice and God’s judgment. For I believe in hell and I believe in judgment, but I also believe that those whom God must reject because of their impenitence, yet there will be grace. God will still feel gracious toward all of His universe, for He’s God and He can’t do anything else.

Now, grace is infinite I have said and I don’t want you to strain to understand infinitude. I had the temerity to preach on infinitude a few times and wonderful as it seems, I got along all right, at least I got along all right preaching on infinitude–the limitlessness of God. God’s grace is infinite. But I say let’s not strain to try to understand it. Let’s try to measure it against ourselves, not against God. God never measures anything in Himself against anything else in Himself. That is, God never measures His grace, against His justice or His mercy against His love, because God is all one. But God measures His grace against our sin. Grace has abounded under many, said Romans 5. Grace has abounded under many, said Ephesians 1, the riches of His grace. And says Romans 5 again, where sin abounded, grace does much more abound.

Now, when God says much more abound, I told you quite a while ago that God has no degrees. Man has degrees. We give men their IQs. It is one of the worst things you can do. I think I told you that I had, when I was in the army, I had an IQ test and I rated very high and I’ve had a lifetime to try to keep from remembering that. And to keep very humble before God you know, because whenever get thinking about it, hmm, I rated up among the top 4% in all of the army. And of course, you know what that does to you? Do you know what it does to you? And you have to keep humbling and God has to keep chastening you to keep down.

We vary in our IQ. Some people’s IQ drags along behind and some are way up there. One of my grandchildren, he’s got an IQ so high that he’s a pest, and my wife and I worry a little bit as good grandparents should over that boy. He’s all right. He wants to be normal, but his parents can’t forget his high IQ.

Well, he may turn out to be a very, very good truck driver later on. But he’s got a high IQ. Higher or lower, some have very great kindness. Some are not so kind. But there’s nothing in God that can compare itself with anything else in God. What God is, God is. But when we measure it against ourselves, when it says grace does much more abound means not that grace does much more abound than anything else in God, but it means that grace much more abounds than anything in us. So that no matter what, how much sin a man has done, literally and truly, grace abounds unto that man.

Old John Bunyan wrote his life story and do you remember what he called it? I think it is one of the finest titles ever given to a book. It was a little too long. Now they don’t give them such long titles, but he called it, “Grace Abounding Toward the Chiefest Sinner.” That was his title, “Grace Abounding Toward the Chiefest Sinner.” Well nowadays we would have just shortened it to “Grace Abounding.”

Do you know, nobody ever reminds or remembers that it said, grace abounding toward the chief of sinners, Now, John Bunyan honestly believed that he was the man who had the least right to the grace of God. Nobody that anybody ever had any right but he felt his sinfulness–grace abounded. So, for us who stand under the disapprobation of God; who by sin lie under sentence, under the sentence of God’s eternal, everlasting displeasure, and banishment.

Grace then, is an incomprehensively immense and overwhelming plenitude of kindness and goodness, and if we could only remember it my brother. If we could only get a hold of it, we wouldn’t have to be played with and fooled with so much and entertained so much. If we can only walk around remembering that the grace of God toward us who have nothing, but demerit. It’s an incomprehensively immense attribute, so vast, so huge, so overwhelming that nobody can ever grasp it or hope to understand it. And it is the lovingkindness of God toward the people.

Would God have put up with us this long if He had not had this in Him. If God had had only a limited amount of grace. Well, if He had had only a limited amount of grace, He wouldn’t have been God. If He’d had only a limited amount of anything, He wouldn’t have been God because God to be God, must have an infinite, not amount because amount means a measure; and you can’t measure God in any direction. God dwells in no dimension and can’t be measured in any way. Measures belong to human beings. Measures belong to the stars. Distances I’ve pointed out is the way heavenly bodies account for the distance they are, the space they occupy, their relation to other heavenly bodies. The moon 250,000 miles away, the sun, 93 million miles away, and all that kind of thing.

Well, that’s these heavenly bodies accounting to our intelligence for where they are, but God never accounts to anybody for anything He is. God’s immensity, God’s infinitude must mean that the grace of God must always be immeasurably full. When we sing the grace of God, Amazing Grace, Amazing Grace wrote this man. Why, of course, it’s amazing. How can we stand and gaze at the fullness of the grace of God. Do you see, there are two ways to think about the grace of God; there’s to look at yourself and see how sinful you were and say God’s grace must be oceanic. It must be vast. It must be huge as the space to forgive such a sinner as I am. That’s one way, and that’s a good way. And then probably that’s the most popular way. But there’s another way to think of the grace of God too, and that’s to think of the grace of God being the way God is, so that always it remains the way God is. That’s God being like God.

And when God shows grace to a sinner, He isn’t being dramatic. He’s acting like God and He’ll never act any other way but like God. On the other hand, when that man that justice has condemned, when that man turns his back on the grace of God in Christ and refuses to allow himself to be rescued, then the time comes when God must judge the man. And when God judges the man, He acts like Himself in judging the man. When God shows love to the human race, He acts like Himself. When God shows judgment to the angels that kept not their first estate, He acts like Himself. Always God acts in conformity with the fullness of His own holy, perfect, symmetrical nature. And remember that God always feels this overwhelming plenitude of goodness, and He feels it in harmony with all His other attributes. I’d like to repeat there’s no frustration in God. I’d like to repeat that the evangelists and the pastor’s effort to explain; you know, we use metaphors.

I picked up a little book today called, The Book of God by Spinoza. Now, I don’t follow Spinoza fully, but I get help from lots of men I wouldn’t go across the street with. But nevertheless, they do say some things sometimes and we get help from a lot of people and he talks about the infinitude of God, this man, the infinitude of God. Well, God is infinite and God always remains God and never changes, and this the man believed.

Now, everything that God is, He is, I say, in complete harmony and that there is never any frustration in Him. But all this He bestows in His Eternal Son. You see, a lot of people have talked about the goodness of God and then they’ve gotten sentimental about it. And they have said, God is too good to punish anybody. He is too good to banish anybody. And so, they have ruled out hell. One man preached a sermon called, “The Damnable Doctrine of Damnation.” And so, he damned the doctrine of damnation. Well, you see, his concept of God wasn’t adequate. A man who has an adequate conception of God, will not only believe in the love of God, but he’ll believe in the holiness of God. He’ll not only believe in the mercy of God, but he’ll believe in the justice of God.

And when you see the Everlasting God in His holy, perfect union; when you see the one God acting in judgment, you know that the man who chooses evil must never dwell in the presence of this Holy God. But a lot of people have gone so far and they write books, and tired and lovesick women read them, and then they write poetry, and pretty soon everybody gets to believing that God is so kind and loving and gentle.

Well, God is so kind that infinity won’t measure it. And God is so loving that He is immeasurably loving, but God is also holy and just. You have got to keep that in mind. That the grace of God comes only through Jesus Christ and is channeled only through Jesus Christ; for the Second Person of the Trinity brought, opened the channel and grace flows through. It flowed through from the day that Adam sinned all through Old Testament times and it never flows any other way. So, let’s not write dreamy poetry about the goodness of our Heavenly Father who is love, love is God and God is love and love is all and all is God and everything will be okay. That’s the summation of a lot of teaching these days, but it’s false teaching my friends.

If I want to know this immeasurable grace; if I want to know this overwhelming, this astounding kindness of God, I have to step under the shadow of the cross. I must come where God releases grace. I must either have looked forward to it or I must look back at it. I must look one way or the other to that cross where Jesus died, the grace flowed out of His wounded side. And the grace that flowed there had saved Abel, and the grace that flowed there saves you.

So, we must remember that always, no man cometh unto the Father but by Me, said our Lord Jesus Christ. And Peter said that there is no name given under Heaven among men whereby we must be saved, except the name of Jesus Christ. The reason for that is, of course, that Jesus Christ is God. The law could come by Moses, and only law could come by Moses, but grace came by Jesus Christ, and it came from the beginning. It could come only by Jesus Christ because there was nobody else that was God who could die. Nobody else could take on him flesh and still be the infinite God. And when Jesus walked around on earth and patted the heads of babies, forgave harlots, and blessed mankind, He was simply God acting like God in a given situation, that’s all, just acting like God. And everything that God does, He acts like Himself. If you can only remember it and keep it in your heart; put it down somewhere and remember it.

But, this one act of Jesus, this one act, this divine act, this human act, it couldn’t have been a divine act alone, for it had to be for man. It couldn’t have been a human act alone, for only God could save. So, it was a human act and a divine act. It was a historic act, a once done act, done there in the darkness on the tree. That once done act hidden there; that secret act in darkness, once done and never repeated. Owned and accepted by God the Father Almighty, who raised Him from the dead the third day and took Him to His own right hand. So, let’s not degrade ourselves by vulgarizing the atonement.

Over the last generation or two generations, popular men, and they’re good men and they’ve won some to Christ and I thank God for everybody that’s been won. But you know, even while you’re winning men to Christ, even winning them in great numbers, you can be so misreading and laying wrong emphasis that you start a trend that is bad. And over the last two generations, evangelists have commercialized the atonement. And they’ve given us the doctrine of paying of a price. I believe He paid the price alright. And I can sing Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe, but I hope I know what I mean. When we simplify it and illustrate it and we vulgarize the atonement, my brethren, I do not know how He did it. I can only stand as Ezekiel stood in the valley of dry bones and raise my head to God and say, O Lord God, Thou knowest.

Back there when the Prophet said that He would come and give Himself a ransom for many, they didn’t know quite what they were writing about, Peter said. And even angels that watched the pen, the quill pen write over the old-fashioned paper, the story of the coming Messiah, looking over the shoulders of the prophets, as they wrote, the angels desired to look into it. Not even the sharp-eyed angels around the throne of God know how He did it. In secret, there in the dark, He did a once done act never done before and never done again. An historic act, finished, done and completed. And because He did that, the grace of God flows to all men.

Oh my friend, let’s remember that angels and prophets and even Paul said without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness manifest, that God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached among the Gentiles, believed on in the world and received up into heaven. And this mightiest mind, many say, many serious minded, worthy scholars are ready to say that Paul’s mind was the greatest that ever was known in the human race, except of course, for the perfect mind of Christ.

But this mighty mind never tried to understand it. He said, great is the mystery of godliness, and that’s all. We’re saved by His blood, but how are we saved by His blood? We are alive by His death, but why are we alive by His death? Atonement was made in His death, but how was atonement made in His death? Let’s not vulgarize it by trying to understand it. But let’s stand and gaze at the cross and say, O Lord God, Thou knowest, worthy is the Lamb that was slain. And the angels enviest, if angels can be envious, look upon us ransomed sinners and desire to look into it. But God says to the angels, the spirits burning there before the throne can bear, can bear the burning bliss, but they have never, never known a sinful world like this.

So, God says, go help my people. Go help my people. He sends them out to be ministering spirits to them who shall be heirs of salvation, but He never explains to them. And I doubt whether there’s an angel or archangel anywhere in heaven that understands what happened there on that cross. We know He died. We know because He died, we don’t have to. We know that He rose from the dead, and because He rose from the dead, we’ll rise from the dead who believe on Him. We know He went to the right hand of God and sat down in perfect approval amidst the acclamations of the heavenly multitude. And we know that because He did, we’ll go there with Him. But why God shut up in secret of His own great heart forever. And we can only say, worthy is the Lamb.

Well, let’s not try to understand, let’s just believe. Do you know Brother McAfee that it was 100 years before the church ever began to talk about and try to explain atonement, 100 years? The fathers never tried. Paul never tried to explain it. Peter never tried. The fathers, early fathers never tried. It was only when Greek influence came in and men began to try to think their way through and then they gave us explanations. And I appreciate those explanations. But I, for my part, stand and gaze on Him and say, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know how He did it nor what it all means, any more than a two-year-old baby stands gazing into her mother’s face and says, Mother, how did I get here? And the mother smiles and says you’ll know later and doesn’t try to explain to a two-year-old intellect. But I think that God, when we say, O God, how is it?, I do not believe that God will say you’ll know later. I think He will say, believe on my Son. For what is of the earth, He lets us know, but what is of Heaven, He holds in his own great heart. And what He won’t tell the angels, maybe He won’t tell us.

Oh, the wonder of it; the awesomeness of it. Can we preach too much about it? Can we sing too much about it? Can we pray too much? Can we insist on it too much? Well, maybe we should cease to strain to understand. And we should just hear the story in five minutes. The story of grace told by the Lord of all grace and the Fountain of all mercy, believed in by the simple-hearted. A certain man had two sons and one of them said to his father, Father, divide the portion that is mine with me. And the father divided the portion and when he had received it, he went into a foreign country. There he did live riotously. And when he had spent all, a great famine game in that land. And this ungrateful boy who had demanded his share before his father’s death, thus had violated one of the tenderest conventions of human society, now goes and ask for a job feeding hogs and he was a Jew. Things got worse and worse and then he had nothing. And finally, he had to push a hog away and eat some of the husks. And those who fed the hogs wouldn’t give him any. They said, let it alone, this is for the pigs. He managed to stay alive. Then one day he got to thinking, that’s when he came to himself you remember. He’d been somebody else, but now he comes to himself. That’s repentance. And he thinks about home, about father. And he knew that that father hadn’t changed. And that’s what Jesus was trying to tell us. The father hadn’t changed.

Oh, a long time ago, I won’t say how many, but it’s a great many years ago; and I was in my earliest twenties. I had heard the prodigal son was a backslider. But I didn’t read it in the fifteenth of Luke. He couldn’t be a backslider and fit all the circumstances. I’d heard he was a sinner. But I couldn’t hear God say of a sinner, this my son was dead and is alive again. It didn’t fit the circumstances. So, I went to God, and I said, God, will you show me. Then, I went to a place all by myself. I used to spend days and praying all alone. And I went there, and suddenly there flashed over me the understanding. And I have never had reason to doubt that this was God teaching me His Bible. I never heard anybody else say this, and I haven’t made a lot of it, but God said to my heart, the prodigal son is neither a backslider nor a sinner. The prodigal son is the human race. The human race that went out to the pigsty to the far country in Adam, and came back in Christ, my Son. For if you’ll notice, there were two other parables there, the parable of the lost sheep and the parable of the lost coin. The sheep that wandered away was the part of the human race that will be saved. And when he comes back, he’s the part of the human race that will be one that’s redeemed, and that will accept redemption.

So, these, all these, all these of every race and color around the world that have come back, they’ve all come back in Christ. And they’ve all come back in the person of that prodigal, all that’s the redeemed human race coming back. And do you know what they found the Father to be like? They found He hadn’t been changed at all. Insults, wronged, his neighbors pitted him and they said, oh, isn’t that terrible the way that boy treated his poor old Dad. And his father was humiliated and shamed and sorry and grieved and heartbroken. But when the boy came back, he hadn’t changed at all. And Jesus was saying to us, you went away in Adam, but you’re coming back in Christ. And when you come back, you’ll find the Father hasn’t changed. He’s the same Father that He was when you all went out every man to his own way. And when you come back in Jesus Christ, you’ll find Him exactly the same as you left Him, unchanged. That’s the story of the prodigal son. He ran and threw his arms around him and welcomed him, put a robe on him and a ring, and said, this my son was dead, and he’s alive again.

This is the grace of God my friends. Isn’t it worth believing in, preaching, teaching, singing about, while the world stands? If you’re out of the grace of God tonight, you know where grace is. Turn your eyes upon Jesus, and there’s the grace of God flowing free for you, all the grace you need. The great kindness of God in Christ Jesus. If you set your teeth against Him, the grace of God might as well not exist for you and Christ might as well not have died. But, if you yield to Him and come home, then all the overwhelming, incomprehensible plenitude of goodness and kindness in the great illimitable reaches of God’s nature are on your side. And even justice, as I said before, is on the side of the returning sinner. He’s faithful and just to forgive us our sin. And all the infinite attributes of God rejoice together when a man believes in the grace of God and returns home. Let us pray.

Father, we pray for all of us. We pray that thou will sweep away our self-righteousness, even any little traces of the ragged traces of self-righteousness that may be left, sweep them away, and save us from ourselves. Let grace abound from Calvary and teach us that it is not by grace and something else, but grace alone, thy goodness, thy kindness in Christ Jesus. This we ask in the name of the Lord who loves us. Amen.