A.W. Tozer Talks

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 25, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

“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 13^th, 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.

Tags attributes, Holiness, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 18, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“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.

Tags attributes, Immanence, Omnipresence, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 11, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

For message audio, click the link below:

https://soundcloud.com/tozertalks/tozer-talks-the-omnipresence-of-god

“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.

Tags attributes, Omnipresence, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date April 4, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“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.

Tags attributes, Grace, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 28, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“The Mercy of God”

Sunday evening, October 19, 1958

Message #5 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide neither will he keep His anger forever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. Whereas the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him for He knoweth our frame. He remembereth that we are dust. The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear Him and His righteousness unto children’s children, Psalms 103. Then, in 2 Corinthians, Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort. James 5, ye have heard of the patience of Job and have seen the end of the Lord that the Lord is very pitiful in His tender mercies. 2 Peter 3, The Lord is not slack concerning His promises as some men count slackness, but is long suffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

Now, mercy then is an attribute of God. In the Old Testament, there is a very wonderfully moving declaration of this in Exodus and in 2 Chronicles that one attribute of God is mercy. Moses you remember was up there hiding, and the Lord Jehovah descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the name of Jehovah. And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, Jehovah, Jehovah God, merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. Then, in 2 Chronicles, in the temple it came to pass as the trumpeters and singers were as one; to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord. When they lifted up their voices with the trumpet and cymbals and instruments of music and praised Jehovah saying, for He is good for His mercy endureth forever. It came to pass then as they did that, that the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud for the glory of the Lord had filled the house.

Now we had in those two passages, a setting forth in rather formal style, the declaration that God is merciful. And I should like to say as I have said about the other attributes of the Deity, that mercy is not something God has, but something God is. If mercy was something God had, conceivably God might mislay it, or He might use it up. It might become less or more, but since it is something that God is, then we must remember that it is uncreated. The mercy of God did not come into being. The mercy of God always was in being for mercy is what God is, and God is eternal, and God is infinite.

Now, here’s something that you probably won’t believe until you have checked it, because all our teaching has been on the other side on this. It’s been careless. Nobody has come out and said it, but we’ve gathered it. At least I have, that the Old Testament is a book of severity and law, and the New Testament is a book of tenderness and grace. But my brother, do you know that while both the Old Testament and the New Testament declare the mercy of God, the Old Testament says more than four times as much about mercy as the New? That’s a little bit hard to believe, but it’s true. It can be checked. Anybody who has the proper source books can find out that that is true, that the words mercy and merciful and mercies over four times as often in the Old Testament as they do in the New. So that’s an error about the severe Old Testament and the kind New Testament. It’s a great error, because the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New is one God. He did not change. He is the same God, and being the same God and not changing, He must therefore necessarily be the same in the Old as He is in the New and the same in the New as He is in the Old. Because He is immutable, He doesn’t change. And because He is perfect, He cannot add so that God’s mercy was just as great in the Old Testament as it was and is in the New.

Now a goodness is the source of mercy. And right here, I must apologize for my necessity to use human language to speak of God. You see, language deals with those things that are finite and God is infinite. And when we try to describe God or to talk about God, we’re always breaking our own rules and falling back into the little semantic snares which we don’t want to fall into, but can’t help it.

You see, when I say that one attribute is the source of another, I’m not using the correct language, but I’m putting it so we can get hold of it. If I tried to talk in absolutes, you’d all fall sound asleep. And I couldn’t do it to begin with and wouldn’t do it if I could, because you would all fall sound asleep. But let me say and say it with the understanding that I am talking down to myself, that goodness is the source of mercy. I preached on the goodness of God here two, three or four weeks ago, and God’s infinite goodness is taught throughout the entire Bible. That God, the goodness is that in God which desires the happiness of His creatures. And it is that irresistible, urging God, that urge to bestow blessedness, and that this goodness of God takes pleasure in the pleasure of His people.

I wish I could teach the children of God to know this. We have had this drummed into us so long that we believe that if we’re happy, God is scared and frightened about us, and that He’s never quite pleased if we’re happy. But the true teaching of the word is that God takes pleasure in the pleasure of His people, provided His people take pleasure in God, and that God suffers along with His friends.

Now over here in Isaiah, I will mention the loving kindness of the Lord and the praises of the Lord. That’s Jehovah according to all that the Lord has bestowed on us, and the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which He hath bestowed on them according to His mercies and according to the multitude of His loving kindness. For He said, surely, they are my people. Surely, they’re my people, children that will not lie. So, He was their Savior. In all their affliction, He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them. In His love and His pity, He redeemed them and bear them and carried them all the days of old.

God takes pleasure in the pleasure of His friends and He suffers along with His friends; and He takes no pleasure in the suffering of His enemies. Read this, it says, as I live saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their way and live. The Book of Lamentations tells us more fully than that, that God is not pleased when people suffer. God never looks down and rejoices to see somebody squirm. If God has to punish, God is not pleased with Himself for punishing. I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked saith God.

Now, according to the Old Testament, mercy has certain meanings. It means to stoop in kindness to an inferior, and it means to have pity upon, and it means to be actively compassionate. There used to be a verb that springs out of the word compassion. We don’t use it anymore. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the concept anymore. I think the reason that some words fall into disuse is that the concept they cover falls into disuse. And it is the word compassionate. It is a verb that God actively compassionates suffering men. I like that very, very wonderfully well, actively compassionates. That is that God has compassion. But you know, for God to feel compassion at a distance would be one thing, but for God actively to compassionate people, would be something else.

Let me read again from the Word of God about it here. It says, and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage. And they cried and their cry came up unto God by reason of their bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant. And God looked upon the children of Israel and God had respect unto them. Now that’s the close of the second chapter of Exodus. And the third chapter opens with the burning bush and goes on to the commissioning of Moses to go deliver Israel from Egypt. So, this active compassionate is when God actively compassionates people, He did four things. He heard their groanings, He remembered His covenant, He looked upon their sufferings, and He pitied them. And immediately He came down to help them.

The same thing is true in the New Testament where it is said of our Lord Jesus, that when He saw the multitude that they were a sheep having no Shepherd, He was moved with compassion and said unto the disciples, give ye them unto eat. That is to actively compassionate.

A great many people are very merciful in their beds, very merciful and in their lovely living rooms, very merciful in their 1959 cars, but they never, they have compassion, but they never compassionate. They read something in the newspaper for the moment now that we’re talking about. They read something in the newspaper about somebody that suffering and say, oh, isn’t that terrible, that poor family was burned out, and they’re out on the street with no place to go, and they turn the radio on and they listen to some program. They’re very compassionate for a minute and a half, but they don’t compassionate. That is, they don’t do anything about it. But God’s compassion leads Him to actively compassionate. He did it by sending Moses down to deliver the children of Israel.

Now, I’d like to give you some facts about the mercy of God. And I want you to get a hold of this, and even if it does sound dry to you tonight, I promise you that if you’ll get a hold of it, it will be worth gold and silver and precious jewels to you in the days to come. Here are some facts about the mercy of God. One is that it never began to be. The mercy of God never began to be. I have heard of men who are hard-hearted or careless and then they began to get stirred up, and their mercies began to blossom forth.

Well, it never was so of God. God never lay in lethargy without His compassion, because God, mercy is simply what God is. And it is uncreated and eternal as I have said, it never began to be. It always was. When heaven and earth were yet unmade and the stars were yet unformed, and all that space men are talking about now was only a thought in the mind of God. God was merciful as He is now. And not only did it never begin to be, but the mercy of God has never been any more than it is now. It has never been more.

There are some things they tell us of swirls out yonder that have burnt themselves out. They tell us that there are heavenly bodies that disappeared in a grand explosion so many light years ago, that it will yet be thousands of Earth years before their light stops shining. The light is still coming, the waves are still coming, though the source of those waves have long ceased to be. And there are stars that burn up bright and dim down low again. But the mercy of God has never been any more than it is now, for the simple reason that the mercy of God is infinite and anything that is infinite can’t be less than it is and it can’t be any more than it is. It’s infinite. That means boundless, unlimited; it has no measurements on any side. Because measurements are created things and God is uncreated. Therefore, the mercy of God has never been any more than now. And the mercy of God will never be any less than now.

Don’t imagine that when the Day of Judgment comes, in which is firmly believed, don’t think for a minute that God will turn off His mercy, as the sun goes behind the cloud as you turn off the spigot. Don’t think for a minute that the mercy of God will cease to be. The mercy of God will never be any less than it is now, because the Infinite cannot cease to be infinite. And the perfect cannot admit an imperfection. And again, nothing that occurs can increase the mercy of God or diminish the mercy of God or alter the quality of the mercy of God.

For instance, the cross of Christ when Jesus died on the cross, the mercy of God did not become any greater. It could not become any greater for it was already infinite. You see, we have the mistaken notion, and this isn’t heresy, it isn’t something somebody goes around teaching, but we just get odd motions. We get the idea that God is showing mercy because Jesus died. No, No Brother! Jesus died because God is showing mercy. When Jesus died, it was the mercy of God that gave us Calvary, not Calvary that gave us mercy. If God had not been merciful, there would have been no incarnation, no babe in the manger, no man on a cross and no open tomb. It was the mercy of God that gave us Calvary, not Calvary that roused the mercy of God.

So, keep that in mind that nothing anybody ever did, ever increased the mercy of God in it. God has mercy enough to unfold the whole universe in His heart. And nothing anybody ever did could diminish the mercy of God. A man can walk out from under and away from the mercy of God as Israel did, and as Adam and Eve did for a time, and as the nations of the world have done, as Sodom and Gomorrah did. We can make the mercy of God inoperative toward us by our conduct since we’re free moral agents. But that doesn’t change the power of the Word of God any, the mercy of God and He doesn’t diminish it in the slightest, and it doesn’t alter the quality of it.

And let me say this, and you may wince under this for a little bit, that the intercession of Christ at the right hand of God does not increase the mercy of God toward His people. For if God were not already merciful, there would be no intercession of Christ at the right hand of God. And if God is merciful at all, and He’s infinitely merciful; and it’s impossible for the mediatorship of Jesus at the right hand of the Father to make the mercy of God any more than it is now. It simply cannot be.

Now, in coming home this afternoon from a meeting, I talked with brother Chase and he reminded me of something. I told him I was going to preach on mercy. So, I’d like to add this little thing to my sermon. I wrote it in here so I wouldn’t forget it. It is that no attribute of God is greater than any other one. You know, we think so. Some would say, oh, the love of God. The man Henry Drummond wrote, what did he call his book? The Greatest Thing in the World? The Greatest Thing in the World. Well, yes, if you need love, love is the greatest thing. If you need mercy, mercy is the greatest thing. Here’s the point. Since all the attributes of God are simply God, then it’s impossible that anything in God can be greater than anything else in God. That’s good theology brothers, metaphysics, but it’s good theology, and you can’t change it. And you can’t argue it down, it’s truth; that the love of God is infinite, and the mercy of God is infinite, and the justice of God is infinite. Therefore, one is not greater than the other, but all are the same. And yet, there are attributes of God that can be needed more at various times.

For instance, when the man went along and saw the fellow that had been beaten up by robbers lying there, the most needed attribute at that moment was mercy. He needed somebody to compassionate him. And so, the Good Samaritan got down off his beast and went over and compassionated. He needed him. That’s what he needed at the time. And that’s why the mercy of God is so wonderful to a sinner who comes home. And he wants to write about it and talk about it forever, because it was what he needed so desperately bad at the moment.

So, we sang as we sang in our opening song tonight, amazing grace, how sweet the sound. And yet the grace of God is not any greater than the justice of God or the holiness of God. But for fellows like you and me, it’s what we need the most desperately at the time. It isn’t God that’s different, it’s us that’s different. You go up to heaven and talk to an angel up there and say to the angel, isn’t the mercy of God wonderful? He’ll know that it is, but he won’t understand it the way we do.

Wise Binney said in his great little hymn that these creatures around the throne, they have never, never known a sinful world like this. So they cannot appreciate the love of God as we can quite, and they can’t appreciate the mercy of God as we can. And they talk about the holiness of God. They talk about the judgment of God and the justice of God. And they sing, true and righteous are thy judgments, because they have never known sin and therefore, they are not in need of the mercy that you and I are.

All God’s attributes are equal, because they are simply what God is, and God is equal to Himself always. But when you’re in a jam, you need certain attributes more than others. When I’m in the doctor’s office, I need pity, you know. I want help. And that’s what I want the most. Now I can look up on the wall and see his diplomas and a lot of things, but I just want it to be nice to me, because I’m always scared when I go to a doctor. And we when we come to God, our need determines which of God’s attributes at the moment we will celebrate. And we’ll have a thousand of them to celebrate.

Now, let’s point out something else: how God’s mercy operates. I said two weeks ago tonight, that the judgment of God is God’s justice confronting moral inequity. That the judgment of God is God’s justice confronting iniquity. When the justice of God confronts moral inequity, which is iniquity, then judgment falls. When justice sees iniquity, judgment falls. So I say tonight, that mercy is God’s goodness confronting human guilt and suffering. When the goodness of God confronts human guilt and suffering, God listens, God hears. And the bleating of the lamb comes into His ear and the moment the babe comes into His heart and the cry of Israel comes up to His throne, the goodness of God is confronting human suffering and guilt. And that is mercy, my brethren, that is mercy.

Now, I like to say that all men are recipients of God’s mercy. Let’s remember that. Don’t think for a minute that when you repented and came back from the swine pen to the Father’s house that then mercy began to operate, no. Mercy had operated there all the time. Listen, it says over here, it is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed because His compassions fail not.

So, remember that, if you hadn’t had the mercy of God all the time, withholding, stooping in pity, withholding judgment, you would have perished long ago. Khrushchev in the Kremlin is recipient of the mercy of God. The triple murderer in Bridewell is the recipient of the mercy of God. And the blackest heart that lies in the lowest wallow in this city tonight is a recipient of the mercy of God. Now, that doesn’t mean they’ll be saved. That doesn’t mean that they’ll be converted and finally reach heaven, but it means that God is holding up His justice, because He’s having mercy. He is waiting because a Savior died.

So, all of us are recipients of the mercy of God. You say, well then, when I come and am forgiven and cleansed and delivered, isn’t that the mercy of God? Sure. That’s the mercy of God to you. But all the time you were sinning against Him, He was having pity on you. For God is not willing that any should perish, and that it says in Roman’s 2, accounts for the long suffering of God, He’s waiting, God would take this world and squeeze it in His hand as a child might squeeze a robin’s egg and destroy it out of mind forever, except that He’s a merciful God and He hears tears and sees tears and hears groans and sees groans, and with all of His intelligence and His love and mercy, He is conscious of our suffering down here.

So, all men are recipients of the mercy of God, but God has postponed the execution. That is all. When the justice of God confronts human guilt, then there is a sentence of death. But the mercy of God, because that also is an attribute of God not contradicting the other, but working with it, postpones the execution.

Now, mercy cannot cancel apart from atonement. When justice sees iniquity, then there must be judgment. But as I said, last two weeks ago, mercy brought Christ to the cross, and I don’t claim to understand that. I am so happy about the things I do know, And so delightedly happy about the things I don’t know. I don’t know what happened there on that cross exactly. I know He died. I know that God the Mighty Maker died for man the creature’s sin. I know that God turned His back on that Holy, Holy, Holy Man. I know that He gave up the ghost and died. I know that in Heaven was registered atonement for all mankind. I know that. And still, I repeat, I don’t know why and I don’t know what happened. I only know that in the infinite goodness of God and His infinite wisdom, He wrought out a plan whereby the Second Person of the Trinity incarnated as a man could die in order that justice might be satisfied while mercy rescued the man for whom He died.

Ah, my brother, that’s Christian theology, that’s Christian theology. Whatever your denomination, that’s what you want to go to heaven on. You can’t go to heaven on spirituals and choruses and cheap books, but you can go to heaven on the mercy of God in Christ, for that’s what the Bible teaches. Justification means that mercy and justice have collaborated. And when God turns and sees iniquity and then the man of iniquity rushes to the cross, He sees no longer iniquity, but He sees justification. And so, we’re justified by faith.

Now, I’d like to clear up something I said over here, and if you’ve been following me real closely, you’ve been believing everything I said without wondering and checking on me, then I am not doing as much good as I want to do. When I said over here that God takes pleasure in the pleasure of His people and suffers along with His friends, and read the Scripture to show you that He suffers along with these friends. If you’re a good, close-type thinker, immediately you followed me and said, how can a perfect God suffer, because suffering means that somewhere there’s a disorder. There must be a disorder somewhere in order that anybody might suffer. You don’t suffer as long as you have a psychological, mental, and physical order. But when you get out of order, then you suffer.

Now again, I’ll tell you this, as long as it’s declared in the Bible, you take it by faith and say, Father, I believe it. And then because you believe, you try to understand, and if you can understand, then thank God and your little intellect can have a little fun leaping about rejoicing in God. But, if you read it in the Bible, and your intellect can’t understand it, then there’s only one thing to do and that is to look up and say, O Lord God Thou knowest.

There’s an awful lot we don’t know. The trouble with us evangelicals is, we know too much, and we’re too slick and we have too many answers. I’m looking for the fellow who will say, I don’t know, and O Lord God, Thou knowest. There’s your man who is spiritually wise. But when we have all the answers and know it, everything will be, what about this suffering of God? How can God suffer? Suffering would seem to indicate some imperfection. And yet we know that God is perfect. Suffering would seem to indicate some loss or lack and yet we know that God can’t suffer no loss and that He cannot lack, because God is intimately perfect in all His being.

So, I do not know how to explain this. I only know that the Bible declares it. That God suffers with His children, and that in all their affliction He was afflicted. And in His love and in His mercy, He carried them and He made their bed in their sickness. I know this, but I don’t know how. And the great old theologian said, don’t reject the fact because you don’t know the method. Don’t say it isn’t so because I don’t know how it’s so. There’s so much you don’t know how it’s so.

If you come to me after service and ask me the how of things, I’ll ask you twenty-five questions one after the other about yourself, about your body, your mind, your hair, your skin, your eye, your ears. You won’t be able to answer one question, yet you use all those aforementioned things even though you don’t understand them. So I don’t know how God can suffer. That is a mystery I may never know. You know, the Scripture says we’re going to know as we’re known, and we’re known perfectly. So, I suppose it means that within certain limits, we’re going to know perfectly and possibly, we will know.

A lot of hymn writers who should have been cutting the grass at the time, have written some songs and one of them ran something about like this. I wonder why, I wonder why He loved me so. I will love Him. When we pray, I might know why He loved me so. Well, my brother, you will never know that. There’s only one answer to why God loves you and that is because God is love. And there’s only one answer to why God has mercy on you, it’s because God is mercy. And that mercy is an attribute of the Deity. Don’t ask God why, but thank Him for the vast wondrous “how” and the fact of the thing.

I think, brother McAfee, that I’m going to paraphrase a little quatrain written by Faber about this of how God can suffer. I think I’m going to read it like this: how Thou can suffer O My God, and be the God Thou art; is darkness to my intellect, but sunshine to my heart. I don’t know how He does it. But I know that when I’m sick, God is sad; and I know that when I’m miserable, God suffers along with me. And I know that in all my sickness, He will make my bed because His name is goodness and His name is mercy.

I want to talk a little bit now in closing about the nearness of God’s mercy. As a father pitieth his children I read, as a father pitieth his children. Way back right after the first World War when Hoover, that is, Herbert Hoover was, I forget what his technical name was. He was administrator of American aid, I think, for the orphans of Europe that had been dislocated and their parents had been killed and their towns broken up by the war. And the United States, with its big heart, our American people, gave vast sums of money and they appointed Herbert Hoover to go over and administer it; handed out to the people rightly. But they didn’t have too much compared with a number of orphans they had.

So, here’s what I heard or read. A newspaper man saw this and wrote about it. He said he was in one of these places where they were handing out dole to the orphans. And he said a man came in, very thin, large supernaturally, or unnaturally bright eyes and thin cheeks and thin arms and leading a little girl. And she also showed signs of malnutrition, eyes too large and bright, her little abdomen distended. And her thin little leg and arms too small, too thin for her age. And this man led her in. And he said to the person in charge, he said, I would like to bring you my little girl and have you take her and put her on your list. And they said, this is your little girl? Yes. Well, they said we’re awfully sorry, but our rule here is that only full orphans can receive any help. If one of the parents is living, then we can’t take responsibility because we just don’t have enough. There are too many full orphans for us to take a half orphan.

He looked down at his little girl and she looked up questioningly with a big bright, two bright eyes. And then he turned and said, well you know, I can’t work. I’m sick. I have been abused. I’ve been in prison. I’ve been half-starved and now I’m ill and I can’t work. I can barely stagger around. But I brought her down for you to take care of her. And they said, well, we’re sorry. Where’s the mother? Well, the mother’s dead. She was killed in the war. Well, we’re sorry, but there’s nothing we can do, only full orphans. He said, you mean that if I were dead, you’d take care of my little girl and you would feed her and she could live and have clothing and a home? They said yes. Then he reached down and pulled her little skinny body up to himself and hugged her hard and kissed her. And then put her hand in the hand of the man at the desk and said, I’ll arrange that. He walked out of the room and committed suicide.

Brethren, I heard that story and I haven’t gotten over it in the last years. The War ended in 1918. That was told in 1918 or early 1919 and still I see that picture. I see the picture of the man who was too sick to work, but who stood in the way of his daughters getting decent food and clothing. He said I’ll take care of that. And he did. That’s mercy as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him. Jesus said, I go out. The Son of Man goes out and He will be delivered into the hands of the Gentiles, and He will be crucified and slain. And Peter said, not so Lord, not so. But Jesus said in effect, here you are, all of you, and if I don’t, you don’t live. So, he went out, not to slay Himself but to put Himself where they could slay Him. Mercy was compassionating in the only way it could at the moment, by dying. So, Christ Jesus, our Lord died there on that cross, for He loved us and pitied us as a father pities his children.

Now there are two things I’d like to say. One of them is that we that have received mercy, must show mercy. And that we must pray that God will help us to show mercy. We have received it; we’ve got to show it. And the second is, that this mercy can only come by atonement, but atonement has been made, that is, it can only operate toward us because of atonement, but atonement has been made.

And now I want to close my little talk with a reading and a little of commenting on a hymn I have here. I’ve never heard it sung and I don’t know that it’s being sung these days. But here’s the way it goes. It is evidently a hymn written around the book of Hebrews or parts of the book of Hebrews. It says, where high the heavenly temple stands, the house of God not made with hands; a great High Priest, our nature wears, the Guardian of mankind appears.

There we have it, my friend. I don’t want to introduce anything unpleasant, but I said to someone today, if the church rests upon the Pope, then the church has no foundation now and won’t have for eighteen or more days. And if priests are as necessary then, I don’t see it. Because I learned that where high the heavenly temple stands, the house of God not made with hands, a Great High Priest our nature wears, the Guardian of mankind appears; they will now ascended it up on high, He bends on Earth, a brother’s eye; partaker of the human name, He knows the frailty of our frame. Our fellow Sufferer now retains, a Fellow feeling of our pain, and still remembers in the skies, His tears, His agonies and cries. In every pang that rends the heart, the Man of Sorrows has a part. He sympathizes with our grief until the Sufferer sends relief. With boldness therefore at the throne, let us make all our sorrows known and ask the aid of Heavenly Power to help us in the evil hour. How wonderful this is my brethren.

How wonderful that our great High Priest who is the guardian of man, wears our nature before the throne of God. If you end up there near the throne and God would allow you to look; for I don’t know how we can look on that awesome sight. But if you were permitted to look, there would be creatures you couldn’t identify. There would be strange creatures there before the throne having four faces and six wings, and with twain they would cover their face, and with twain they would cover their feet, and with twain they would fly. And you would see angels there so strange that Abraham saw and Jacob saw going up and down the ladder. And you wouldn’t be able to identify them quite because you’ve never seen an angel.

And I suppose there are other creatures there. I read about them in Daniel and Revelation that you couldn’t identify quite. But you know, as you drew near the throne, you would recognize one order of being. You would say look, look, look, I recognize this. I’m familiar with this shape, this form. I know this–this is a Man. This is a Man! This has two legs under him. This has two arms. This, this is a Man.

Ah my friend, the Great High Priest our nature wears, and the guardian of mankind appears. And though you might be very much of a stranger among those strange creatures yonder, there would be one Being that you would know. You would say, if I grew up among them, I knew them; I’ve seen them go down the street and come up the street. I’ve seen little ones and big ones and black ones and yellow ones and red ones. I’ve seen them. I know this is a Man. And He would smile down from the throne because though now ascended up on high, He bends on earth a brother’s eye, partaker of the human name, He knows the frailty of our frame. Now don’t pity yourself brother, but don’t be ashamed to go and tell God all about your troubles. He knows all about your troubles.

There’s a little song that says, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. But there’s Somebody that knows alright. And our fellow Sufferer still retains a fellow feeling for our pains and still remembers in the skies, his tears, his agonies and cries. And though He’s now at the right hand of the Father Almighty sitting crowned in glory, waiting, of course, that great Coronation Day that yet is to come. But though He is there, and though they cry all around about Him, worthy is the Lamb, He hasn’t forgotten all of it. He hasn’t forgotten the nails in the hands. He hasn’t forgotten the tears and the agonies and cries; and He knows everything about you. He knows. He knows when the doctor hates to tell you and your friends come and try to be unnaturally encouraging. You know and cheerful and in your deep heart, you’re too smart. You know something’s deeply wrong. And they won’t tell you, but He knows. He knows.

Well, I believe this, with boldness therefore at the throne let us make all our sorrows known and ask the aid of Heavenly Power to help us in the evil hour. The mercy of God is an ocean divine of boundless and fathomless flood. Let’s plunge out into the mercy of God and come to know it. Amen. Amen. You’ve been a very quiet congregation. I haven’t had a peep out of anybody. But I hope you’ll believe what I’ve said, because you’re going to need this mercy. Terribly, terribly bad if you don’t already have it; the mercy of God in Christ Jesus. Amen and Amen. All right.

Tags attributes, Mercy

Messages

Tozer Talks

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“The Justice of God”

Sunday evening, October 5, 1958

Message #4 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

It is tremendously important that we know, that we know what God is like. This God we serve; what kind of God is He? What is He like? The answer to that question is more valuable to you and of greater importance perhaps than any other one question or answer that could be made or given. It was Tersteegen who said, O God, Thou art far other than men have dreamed or taught; unspoken in all language and unpictured in all thoughts. And Watts wrote, Earth from afar hath heard thy fame and worms have learned to list thy name, but oh, the glories of thy mind leave all our soaring thoughts behind.

Tonight, I want to talk about the justice of God. Let me read some scriptures. I just pick out a few, five or six. There are so many of them found in the Bible. Genesis 18, shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? That was Abraham. Deuteronomy 10:17, For the Lord your God is God of Gods and Lord of Lords, a great God; a mighty and a terrible which regardeth not persons nor taketh reward. Psalms 99, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous all together. Psalm 92:15, to show that the Lord is upright; He is my Rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him. Psalm 97, the Lord reigneth: righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne. Isaiah 28, judgment also will I lay to the line and righteousness to the plummet. Revelation 15:5-7, and I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art and wast and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.

Now, I want to talk tonight about God’s justice and tell you that if you know God, you know God who is absolutely and perfectly just. But we’re going to have to define justice a little bit. What do we mean by justice? Well, I’ve looked this up very carefully in order that I might not preach out of my own head, but out of the Scriptures. And I find that justice is indistinguishable from righteousness in the Old Testament. It’s the same word and with slight variations according to whether it’s a verb or a noun or something else, but wherever judgment, justice, just and so on. They’re all the same root word. It means uprightness, rectitude. And to say that God is just or that the justice of God is a fact, is to say that there is uprightness in God, that there is rectitude in God.

In Psalm 89 it says, justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne. In Psalm 97 it says, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne. Justice and judgment, righteousness and judgment are said to be the habitation of God’s throne, so that justice and righteousness are indistinguishable one from the other. To say that God is just is to say that God is equitable; that He’s morally equal. I don’t want to sound dull, but if you go to the book of Ezekiel, the 18th chapter, you will find God sort of scolding Israel there. He says, in effect, or says pretty literally, you say the way of God is unequal. But He said, Are my ways unequal? No, O house of Israel. It is the house of Israel who has unequal ways.

Now, that word unequal there, simply of course means in equal, in equity. We talk about things being unequal, inequity. And you know that the word inequity and the word iniquity are the same word. You just change the letter, you have iniquity. It means that the iniquitous person is not morally equal. That he is not symmetrical morally; that he’s unequal to himself. And then, the word judgment as we have it so often in the texts that I have read; justice and judgment, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of thy throne.

And what is the judgment of God? It’s the application of justice to a moral situation. I wish you might put down some of these things. I may not say them ever again. But judgment is the application of justice to a moral situation. And it may be favorable or unfavorable. When God judges a man, He brings justice to that man’s life. And He applies justice to the moral situation which that man’s life created. And if the man’s ways are equal, then justice favors the man. If man’s ways are unequal, then of course, it is on the other side, and God sentences the man.

Now, I’d like to pass this on to you and I want you to get this. And I’d like to wake up some of the somnolent cells that lie within your head and say to you that justice is not something that God has. Justice is something that God is. But some grammarian says, no, now wait a minute, just is something that God is. No, justice is something that God is. God is love and just as God is love, justice is something that God is. You sometimes hear it said, justice requires God to do this. And I don’t doubt but what I will sometimes use expressions myself that are semantically improper for the reason that the human language is a tough thing. And when you talk about God, language staggers.

In an effort to describe God, the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New put such pressure on language that words groaned and squeaked under the effort to tell a story. Well, I suppose that even though I’m pointing the error of it out, I might be guilty also of sometimes using the words wrong. But, we must remember that justice is not something that is outside of God to which God must conform. We say justice requires God to do so and so.

My brethren, always remember, nothing ever requires God to do anything. If you have a God that is required to do anything, then you have a weak God who has to bow his neck to some yoke, and yield himself to pressure from the outside. But this is an error in speaking for it postulates a principle of justice that lies outside of God and to which God has to conform. Do you follow me along on that? That if I say justice requires God, justice forces God to do so and so, then I say, I think, well, justice is bigger than God. Justice lies outside of God. And God has to bow and do beacence to justice. But that is to think wrongly my friend, because that means that there is something bigger than God compelling God to do something.

If justice is a principle that required God to obey, there is no such principle in the universe as an abstract justice requiring obedience from gods and men. There is no such principle. If there is, who created it? Where did it come from? You see, there isn’t anything but didn’t come from God. And if it all came from God, then how can we say that there is above God a principle of justice? Who enforces that principle? Who created that principle? If there is such a principle, then that principle is superior to God for only a superior can compel obedience. If there’s anything that can compel God to do anything, then that something is bigger and greater than God; and we’ll have to stop saying Almighty God. We’ll have to sing, not-Almighty God. We’ll have to sing, almost Almighty God. We’ll have to sing mighty God while angels bless thee, but we can’t sing Almighty God while angels bless thee for there is nothing, there’s nothing above that which compels.

Now there’s nothing outside of God that can make God do anything. You’ll have to shake your head I suppose to get this, but there is nothing outside of God that can make God do anything. I wish we could keep that in mind. Unless the church of Christ begins to see this again, what I’m saying to you is the common doctrine of the Puritans. It was the common teaching of the Presbyterians 150 years ago. It was the common teaching of Methodists and all of them, but it has been lost in the shuffle and God has been made into a little God not worthy of being worshipped. Remember that all God’s reasons for doing anything come from within Him. They do not come from without Him. And there is no pressure group that can force God to do anything.

The newspapers are saying that the State Department and the President have had to modify their foreign, whatever they call it, because of public pressure. Well, even the President, sometimes even a king can be forced to do something by public pressure, but there isn’t any pressure that can force God to do anything. If there were, I might get on my knees and worship God, but I’d have my fingers crossed. If there is a God, if our God is a God that will yield to public pressure, that has a principle lying outside of Him to which He must yield, then He cannot be the God, He cannot be God quite. He can be almost God, but not quite God.

You see, I say again, that all God’s reasons for doing anything, lie inside of God. They do not lie outside of God to be brought to bear upon Him. They lie inside of God. That is, they are of what God is. God’s reasons for doing what He does are, they spring out of what God is. Nothing has been added to God and from eternity. And nothing has been removed from God, from eternity. Our God is exactly what He was before there was a created atom. And He will be exactly what He is when the heavens are no more. And He has never changed in any way, because He is the unchanging God.

Now, God being perfect, is incapable of either loss or gain, and He’s incapable of getting larger or being smaller. He’s incapable of knowing more or knowing less. God is just God. And God acts justly from within, not in obedience to some imaginary law. He is the author of all that law and acts like Himself all the time. If we can only get this into our heads. We’ve been lied to and cheated and sold down the river and skinned and fleeced and betrayed and deceived so much by even those that we look up to and respect, that we have come to project our cynicism to the very throne of God. And unknown to us, we have within our minds the feeling that God is like that too.

Let me tell you that God always acts like Himself and that there is no pressure, no archangel, no 10,000 angels with swords, no cherubim or seraphim anywhere that can persuade God to act otherwise than as God. God always act as becomes Him. And He always will. And He had to redeem men within that mighty limitless framework. He could not change. If He changed, then He could not be God, for He would have to go from better to worse or from worse to better, and being God and being perfect, He would not go either direction. He had to remain God. So, the justice of God, the justice of God is sung here by the Holy saints of God. And the theologians, both Jewish and Christian, have declared that God isn’t just God, and they have made the justice of God to be one of His attributes.

Now, if the attribute, one attribute of God is justice, and God will always act that way, not by compulsion from the outside, but because that’s the way He is Himself; And if justice must always prevail. And if it lasts, justice will prevail, for justice, being an attribute of God, and God being the sovereign God who will prevail. If it is true that justice must prevail, and justice will prevail, then where do you and I come in? Where do we come in my friend? That’s the question.

There was an old theologian by the name of Anselm. He has long been put aside, and we don’t read Anselm any more. Many people can go through seminaries and never hear the name of the man at all. But Anselm was one of the great church fathers, the great theologians, the great saints, the great thinkers. He was called a second Augustine. And Anselm, asked God the question; he says, how dost Thou spare the wicked if Thou art just, supremely just? How dost Thou spare the wicked if Thou art just and supremely just?

Now, you know in this day, we have cheapened religion and cheapened salvation. We have cheapened our concept of God to a place where we expect to stumble in whistling and have God take us in. We expect that. We don’t worry about it much. we expect we got a marked New Testament and a tract and we expect to stumble in and up to the pearly gates and bat on the gate and say, well God, I’m here, because we’ve reduced God in our thinking. My Brethren, the old serious theologian asked God the question, how dost Thou spare the wicked? How canst Thou spare a wicked man since Thou art just and supremely just? We’d better get that figured out lest we presumptuously go to the gate of heaven and be turned away.

Well, the old brother comforted himself and he said this, he said, we see where the river flows, but the spring whence it arises we see not. He knew God could, but he didn’t know how He could. How canst Thou justify a wicked man and still be just he said. We see where the river flows, but whence it arises, we see not.

But, to the question itself, how canst Thou spare the wicked if Thou art just? There are two happy answers and I want to give them tonight. Those two happy answers, one of them is from the being of God as unitary. Now, there’s a word you don’t hear much anymore. You know, we write fiction and we sing choruses and we rock and roll on our way to glory, but brethren, we’ve got to answer some solid questions and we’ve got to know some things if we’re going to be good Christians. And so, the being God, is unitary. Now what does that mean? It means that God is not composed of parts.

Now, you’re not a unitary being. You’re a composed spirit, soul and body. You have memory and forgetfulness. You have attributes which were given you. Some things can be taken away from you and you still can remain. There are whole sections of your brain that can be destroyed, and you can still live on. You can have members cut out by surgery, and you can still live on. You can forget, you can learn, and you can still live on. That’s because you’re not unitary, that is, God made you and made means composed. God put two together; God put you together. He put the torso and a head on top of the torso and legs under the torso. And He put your bloodstream, your blood, the ventricles and veins and arteries and nerves and ligaments and all the rest.

Well, we’re put together like that you see, and you can take an amazing amount of a man away and he’s still there. But you can’t think of God like that, because the being of God is unitary. You see, the Jews always believed in a unitary God. Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is one God. Now Israel was not only saying that there is only one God, that Jews taught the unitary being of God. Then the church teaches so far as the church teaches anything; the church doesn’t teach much of anything now. You can go to church a lifetime and not be a theologian. They ought to load your head down with good thoughts, good theological thoughts in one year. But nowadays, you can go a lifetime and not get much theology.

But saying that God, the being of God is unitary, that there is one God doesn’t mean only that there is only one God, it means that God is one. Do you see the distinction there. We must not think of God as composed of parts working harmoniously, for there are no parts. We must think of God as one. And, that because God is one, God’s attributes never quarrel with each other. Because man is not unitary, but made, because he’s composed. The man may be frustrated, he may be a schizophreniac and part of him may war with another part of him. His justice may war, his sense of justice may war with the sense of mercy.

The judge sits on a bench many a time and is caught between mercy and justice. He doesn’t know which to do. What is that famous saying of the man who said on the eve of war when he had to go out and fight for his country? He said to his fiancé that he loved and plan to marry, He said, I could not, I could not love thee so, if I love not duty more. There’s a man caught between the love of a woman he wanted to stay with and the love of duty that he wanted to discharge his obligation to. Do you see, that’s because man is made of parts. That’s why we have psychiatrists, brothers; just try to get your parts back together. They don’t do it you know. They don’t do it, but they tried to do it. And so, we give them credit for trying to do it. That’s why people go off on their, that’s why they blow their torch, because they have the different parts aren’t working harmoniously. But somebody says, ah, but God’s parts are working harmoniously.

I say again, God has no parts any more than the diamond has parts. Know that God is all one God and everything that God does harmonizes with everything else that God does perfectly, because there are no parts to get out of fix and there are no attributes to face each other and fight it out; but that all God’s attributes are one and together.

To think of God as the evangelist I say sometimes when I preach evangelistic sermons, I fall into the same semantic error. We think of God as presiding over a court of law and the sinner has broken the law of justice. There’s justice out there somewhere outside of God, a justice. And the sinner has sinned against that external justice. And the sinner is put in handcuffs and brought before the bar of God. And God’s mercy wants to forgive the sinner, but justice says, no, he’s broken my laws. He must die. And so, we picture dramatically God sitting cheerfully on His throne passing a sentence of death upon the man that His mercy wants to pardon but can’t because justice won’t allow it.

My brethren, we might just as well be pagans and think about God the way the pagans do. That’s not Christian theology. Never was and never can be. It is erroneous thus to think. For we’re making a man out of God. Thou thinkest said God, that I was all together such a one as thou art; Thou thoughtest I was like thee said God. You thought because your judges sit on a throne or on a bench we call it, and because they, their hearts want to pardon, but the law won’t permit them. And they’re caught in the middle, and they turn ashen white when they sentence a young man.

I’ve been told sometimes judges turn ashen white and clutch the desk before them with a bench before them when they sentence men to die. Something in them isn’t harmonizing. Their mercy isn’t harmonizing with their sense of justice. And justice on the outside standing there as a law says that man shall die while mercy says, please, please spare him. But to think thus of God, my brethren, is to think wrongly of God, because everything that God is, harmonizes with everything else that God is. And everything that God does is one with everything else that God does. I said harmonize there. Really, that’s not a good word, for harmony requires at least two. Harmony requires that there be two, but that they get together and for all the time be one. But there’s nothing like that in God. God just is. When you pray, say our Father which art in heaven. God just is.

Now, I say that the answer to the question, how can God being just yet acquit the wicked? The answer springs from the being of God as unitary. That God’s justice and God’s mercy do not quarrel with each other. The second is, from the effects of Christ’s passion. I want to use that word. I want to continue to use it, the passion of Christ. Passion now means sex lust, but passion, back in the early days meant deep, terrible suffering. It meant deep, terrible suffering. They call Good Friday passion tide. And we talk about the Passion of Christ. It is the suffering Jesus did as He made His priestly offering in His own blood for us.

Now I want you to think a little bit that Jesus Christ is God and that all I’ve said about God, I have been describing Christ. He is unitary. He has taken on Himself the nature of man, but that nature of man is man. But the God, the Eternal Word who was before man was and who created man, is a unitary being, and there’s no dividing of His substance, and so that Holy One suffered. And His suffering in His own blood for us was three things. It was infinite, and all mighty, and perfect.

Now, I’m not using words carelessly. I try not to use words carelessly, because I hate to hear them used carelessly. Infinite, and what does that mean? It means without bound and without limit, shoreless, bottomless, topless, forever and ever without any possible measure or limitation. And so, the suffering of Jesus and the atonement He made on that cross, under that darkening sky, was infinite in its power. That is, what He did there was absolutely infinite. And then, not only infinite, but almighty. It’s possible for good men to almost do something, almost do something.

I was kidded and from the time I was a tiny little boy until my parents died, I was kidded for something I said when I was a child. We were walking down the winding lane on the farm back in the state of Pennsylvania one evening just at sundown. And that’s the time the rabbits come out. My father had a gun and we were looking for rabbits. And I let out a little boyish yell and my father said, what’s the matter? And I said, I almost saw a rabbit. And I know that I never heard the last of that. I almost saw a rabbit.

Well, to almost see something, to almost do something, to almost be something is the fix people get in because they’re people. But Almighty God, never is almost anything. God is always exactly what He is. He is the Almighty One. And when He died on a cross, Isaac Watts says, God, the Mighty Maker died for man the creatures sin. And when God the Almighty Maker died, all the power there is was in that atonement.

My friend, you never can overstate the efficaciousness of the atonement. You never can exaggerate the power of the cross. And then, not only infinite and almighty, but perfect–perfect. That means the atonement in Jesus Christ’s blood is perfect. There isn’t anything that can be added to it. It’s spotless, it’s impeccable, it’s flawless. It is perfect as God is perfect.

So the question, how dost Thou spare the wicked if though art just is answered from the effective of Christ’s Passion? And that Passion, that holy suffering there, and that resurrection from the dead, cancels our sins and abrogates our sentence. Now, where did we get that sentence and how did we get that sentence? We got that sentence by the application of justice to a moral situation. You see, no matter how nice and refined and lovely you think you are, you’re a moral situation; you have been, you still are, you will be.

And when justice confronted you, that is when God confronted you, God’s justice confronted a moral situation and found you unequal; found you not just, but unequal; found that your ways were not equal, found inequity, found iniquity. And because He found iniquity there, God sentenced you to die. Everybody in Chicago has been or is under sentence of death. I wonder how people can be so jolly under sentence of death; how so careless under sentence of death. For the soul that sinneth it shall die.

When justice confronts a moral situation, which is a man or woman or a young person, or anybody morally responsible, then either it justifies that person, if that person corresponds to the justice of God, or it condemned that person, if that person is unequal and has inequity, iniquity in him. That’s how we got that sentence. And let me point out to you My friends, that when the justice of God, that is, when God in His justice, sentences the sinner to die, He does not quarrel with the mercy of God. He does not quarrel with the kindness of God. He does not quarrel with God’s compassion or pity, for they’re all attributes of a unitary God, and they cannot quarrel with each other. All the attributes of God concur in a man’s death sentence. Remember that. And the very angels in heaven cried out and said, worthy art Thou, true and righteous art Thou, because Thou hath judged, Almighty God. True and righteous are thy judgments.

So that you’ll never find in heaven a group of holy beings finding fault with the way God conducts his foreign policy. In Washington, you will find people who are not pleased with the way Eisenhower and Foster Dulles are conducting theirs. But God Almighty is conducting His world and every moral creature says true and righteous are thy judgments. For Thou art justice and justice and judgment are the habitation of Thy throne. So that when God sentences a man to die, mercy concurs and pity concurs and compassion concurs and wisdom concurs, and power, everything that’s intelligent in God concurs in the sentence.

But oh, my brethren, through the mystery of atonement, I wonder if I’ve ever known myself the wonder, the wonder of it? Through the mystery of atonement, the soul that avails itself of that atonement. The soul that throws itself out on that atonement, for that soul, the moral situation has changed. God has not changed. You see, Jesus Christ did not die to change God. Jesus Christ died to change a moral situation. When God’s justice confronts an unprotected sinner, that justice sentences him to die; and all of God concurs in the sentence.

But when Christ, who is God, went on to the tree and died there in infinite agony, in a plethora of suffering, in a fullness of agony; when this great God died there, He suffered more than they are suffering in hell. He suffered all that they could suffer in hell. The agony of God for everything that God does, He does what all of God is, so that when God suffered for you, my brother, God suffered to change your moral situation. And the man who throws himself out on the mercy of God, has had the moral situation change. God doesn’t wink and say, well, we’ll excuse this fellow. He’s made his decision; we’ll forgive him. He’s going into the prayer room, we’ll pardon him. He’s going to join the church, we’ll overlook it. No, no, when God looks at an atoned for sinner, He doesn’t see the same moral situation that He sees when He looks at a sinner who still loves his sin. When God looks at a sinner who still loves his sin and rejects the mystery of atonement, justice condemns him to die.

When God looks at a sinner who has accepted the blood of everlasting covenant, justice sentences him to live, and God is just in doing both things. And when God justifies a sinner, everything in God is on the sinner’s side. All the attributes of God are on the sinner’s side. It isn’t that mercy is pleading for the sinner and justice is trying to beat him to death as we preach here sometimes make it, but all of God does all that God does. So when God looks at a sinner, I repeat, and sees him there unatoned for, at least he won’t accept the atonement and doesn’t apply to him the moral situation is such that justice says you must die. When God looks at the atoned for sinner who in faith knows he’s atoned for and has accepted it, justice says you must live. And the unjust sinner can no more go to heaven than the justified sinner can go to hell. Oh, brethren, why are we so still? Where are we so quiet? We ought to rejoice and thank God with all our might.

Now, I have said that justice is on the side of the returning sinner and somebody wants a verse. They want me to be reasoning here: they want a verse for it. All right, I’ll give it to you, 1 John 1:9, If we confess our sins, say it with me, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just. Do what? And cleanses from all unrighteousness. He is faithful and what? Just! Justice is over on our side now, because the mystery of the agony of God on the Cross has changed our moral situation.

So, justice looks and sees equality, not inequity, and we’re justified. That’s what justification means. Do I believe in justification by faith? Oh, my brother, do I believe in it! David believed in it and wrote it into the 32nd Psalm. It was later quoted by one of the prophets. It was picked up by Paul and written into Galatians and Romans. It was lost for a while and relegated to the dustbin and then brought out again to the forefront and taught by Luther, then the Moravians and the Wesley’s and the Presbyterians–justification by faith, and we stand on it today. And when we talk about it, it isn’t just text you manipulate, you know.

Oh, the text manipulators, God bless them. They had better tack or knit. But, we manipulate texts. That’s no way to look at it. We ought to see who God is and see why these things are true. We’re justified by faith because the agony of God on a cross changed the moral situation. We’re that moral situation. It didn’t change God at all. The idea that the angry scowl went off of the face of God and He began grudgingly to smile. It’s a pagan concept and not Christian.

So remember, that God is one. And not only is there only one God, that one God is unitary, one with Himself, indivisible. The mercy of God is simply God being merciful and the justice of God is simply God being just. And the love of God is simply God loving. The compassion of God is simply God being compassionate. It’s not something that runs out of God, it is something God is; all the three persons of the Trinity are.

Well, old Anselm, my old friend. He’s got a third argument. I’ve given you two. How God can be just and He is just and still justify a sinner? He had another argument. I’ll give it to you. He said, compassion flows from goodness and goodness without justice is not goodness. He said, you couldn’t be good and not be just. Is that right? And I preached last Sunday night about the goodness of God. And if God is good, He has to be just. And if God is just, then he has to be just. And he says this, when God punishes the wicked, it is a just thing to do, because it consists with the wicked man’s desserts. But when God pardons a wicked man, it’s a just thing to do, because it consists with God’s nature.

So, we have God: the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost always acting like God. Your wife may get up grouchy. Your best friend may turn a cold face on you. In the White House next election, we will have a change of course. And we may have a change to a great deal worse or better. We can get better or worse down here. The situation in the Far East, at least for seven days, we won’t have war. Very good. We’ve called it off, for seven days. Very good. Things change, but always God is the same. As always and always and always, God acts like God. And God does always according to His attributes of love and mercy and justice.

Aren’t you glad you’re not going to sneak into Heaven through a cellar window? Aren’t you glad that you’re not going to get in like some preachers get degrees? You know, pay $25 for them somewhere in a college degree factory. Aren’t you glad that you’re not going to get into heaven by God’s oversight. God is so busy with His world, so busy and you sneak in. You’re there a 1000 years before God sees you. Or you were a member of a church that God said, well that’s a pretty good church. Just take them in. And so, you went up and went in and when the Lord came. And then later on when they begin to look around, they found the rotten spots and maybe you’ll be thrown out.

There was a picture one time of a man who appeared, do you remember without a robe? And after he got in, they said, what is he doing here? And they threw him out. Bound him hand and foot and lugged him out and threw him into outer darkness. But there will be nothing like that in God’s kingdom, because God, the All-wise One, knows all that can be known and He knows everybody and knows you. And God the All-just One, will never permit the unequal man in there. Why walk ye along with two unequal legs said Elijah. That’s unequal, inequal, inequity, iniquity. And the man who’s iniquitous will never get in–never. All of this cheap talk about St. Peter giving us an exam, you know, to see if it’s all right; it is all nonsense.

The Great God Almighty, who’s always one with Himself, looks at the moral situation, and He either sees death or life; and all of God is on the side of death or life. If it’s iniquity, inequity, unatoned, uncleansed, unprotected, sinner in his sin, there’s only one answer and all of God says death and hell. But if he beats his breast and says, God have mercy on me a sinner and takes the benefits of the infinite agony of God on a cross, God looks on that moral situation and says life, and all of hell can’t drag that man down; just as all of heaven can’t pull that man up. Oh, the wonder and the mystery and the glory of the being of God.

Tags attributes, Justice, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 14, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“God’s Goodness”

Sunday evening, September 28, 1958

Message #3 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

Colossians 3:1-3

I want to talk on God’s goodness as it relates to us His redeemed people. And let me read some verses, just almost at random. I’ve jotted them down here. Not quite at random, almost. Psalm 119:68, “Thou art good and doeth good.” Isaiah 63:7, “I will mention the loving kindness of the Lord and the praises of the Lord according to all that the LORD hath bestowed upon us, and the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which He hath bestowed on them according to His mercies; and according to the multitude of His loving kindnesses.”

And then, “How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God, how great is the sum of them. For the Lord will again rejoice over thee for good.” That’s Deuteronomy 39. As He rejoiced over thy father, Psalm 36:7, excellent is thy loving kindness O God, therefore, the children of men put their trust under the shadow of Thy wing. Psalm 34, Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. And remember now, in no instance here, is he talking about morality. This is not saying God is holy, though God is holy, infinitely so. This is something else. And Jesus said, “If you then being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give good things to them that asketh? A father gives good gifts to his children out of His good heart. And how much more will the Father.

So tonight, I speak about God’s goodness. And I have over thirty years here spoken twice before on the subject; always dealing and treating it differently. But now, it is most important that we know this about God. It’s most important that we know what kind of God God is. What is God like is the question that must be answered if we’re going to be any kind of Christians at all. What is God like? What kind of God is God? Now, don’t take that for granted and say, I already know. No, you don’t; and don’t say well, we Christians know. Let me remind you my friend, that no tribe or nation has ever risen above its religion.

There are those that say religion is something grafted on a man; and that is the result of man’s weaknesses, a superstition or something else. But let me tell you that history will show that no tribe or nation has ever risen morally above its religion. If it had a debased religion, it was a debased people. And if it was anything but a debased people, you will find its religion, though not Christianity nor Judaism, nevertheless was relatively high in the scale of non-revealed religions. And remember that no religion has ever risen above its conception of God. Remember that, that no religion anywhere has ever risen above its conception of God.

If the heathen believe that God is a tricky, sulky, nasty, deceitful God, their religion will build itself around that concept. And they will try to be sneaky with God and act the way God acts. If they believe on the other hand, that God is one God, that He is a high and pure noble God, even though they’re not redeemed, their religion will tend to follow their concept of God upward, even though it’s a pagan religion and does not carry redemption. But that would be something what I’ve said up to now for the students to think about.

But we all ought to remember this, that Christianity at any given time, Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending upon her concept of God. And I insist upon this and I’ve said it many times. I insist upon it that the basic trouble with the church today is her unworthy conception of God. Now that is at the bottom of it. I talk with the learned men and spiritual men, and evangelists and godly people all over the country, and they’re all saying the same thing. And we’re at least agreeing to it when I said that the trouble with the church is that our conception of God has been greatly lowered.

The heathen says, take your cowboy God and go home. And we get angry and say, oh, they’re vile heathen. No, they’re not vile heathen. They may be vile heathen, but that’s not why they say that. They can’t respect our cowboy God. And since Evangelicalism has gone overboard to cowboy religion, and where it hasn’t, even its conception of God is unworthy of Him. And the result is that our religion is little, because our God is little. Our religion is weak, because our God is weak. Our religion is ignoble because the God we serve is ignoble. I mean by that that we do not see Him as He is.

The Psalmist said, Oh, magnify the Lord. Now, magnify may mean one of two things. Magnify may mean, make it look bigger than it is. Or, it may mean, see it as big as it is. And that’s what magnify means as the Psalmist used it. If you want to examine, say, a very small amount of matter, you put it under a microscope and you magnify it. That is, you make it look bigger than it is. But it’s impossible to make God look bigger than He is.

When we say magnify the Lord, we mean, try to see God somewhere nearly as big as He is. And this is what I want to do in my preaching. This is what by His help I have dedicated myself to do. If I preach to many or few, and I could if I wanted to do it, preach to many. That is, they do come here and there in conferences and other places where men go, and I’d be no different. But I choose deliberately, I want to instruct a people.

Now, this church will only be as great as its conception of God and you as an individual Christian will be successful or a failure depending upon what you think of God. So, you see, my friends, it’s critically important that we have a knowledge of the Holy One. It’s critically important that we know what kind of God God is and what God is like; and of course, we can know from the Scriptures. That’s where we go to get our information, not all of it. We can know from nature too. The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth His handiwork. But while the pen of nature writes rather, without too much clearness, the Word of God is very, very clear. And I shall be preaching, as I trust my previous sermons also were out of the Word of God.

Now, it is very important that we know that God is good. It is critically important that we know this. And when we read here that God is good and doeth good and that His loving kindness is over all His works and all of these passages of Scripture. If you want to do it, you take your concordance, if you’ve got a good one, and run down the words, “good” or the word “lovingkindness,” or such passages, such words as that, and see how much it has to say about it in the Old Testament as well as the New that God is kind-hearted.

Now, let’s get this straight. God is kindhearted, and God is gracious, and God is good natured, and that God is benevolent in intention. The intention of God is benevolent. And let us remember that God is cordial. And you’ll find that now in Hebrew. You will find that the cordiality of the Great God, you know, we only think we believe really, we only think we’re believers. We are in a sense, and I trust we are sufficiently to be saved and justified before His grace. But we don’t believe as intensely and as intimately as we should. If we did, we would believe that God is a cordial God, that He is gracious and that His intentions are kind, that they’re benevolent. That God never thinks any bad thoughts about anybody. And He never had any bad thought about anybody.

Now all this that I have said, that God is good, that God is kind-hearted, that He is amiable, that He is cordial and gracious and of benevolent intention. All this He is infinitely. Now why do I say that? Because infinitude is an attribute of God, and it’s impossible for God to be anything and not be completely, infinitely what it is. It’s possible for the sun to be bright, but not infinitely bright. It doesn’t have all the light there is. It’s possible for the mountain to be large, but not infinitely large. It’s possible for an angel to be good, but not infinitely good. Only God can claim infinitude. So, when I say that God is good, that God has a kind heart, I mean, he has a heart infinitely kind. That there is no boundary to it and no limit to it anywhere. When I say that God is good natured, that He is good and kindly in nature, I mean that He’s infinitely so.

And not only infinitely, but there is another attribute, and I haven’t preached on this one yet. I’ve been putting it off like a task that you want to do and you’re afraid to tackle, but sometime I’m going to jump in and have to get out and announce that I’m going to preach on the perfection of God. My friend, that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. And for a man to talk about the perfection of God is to rise on poor weak wings. My wings aren’t very long, but I can flatten fast, and see if I can get off the ground and see what we can say about the perfection of God. But remember this, anything God is, He is perfectly. God is never part-way anything. He is always completely something or else He isn’t that thing. And when I say that God is kind-hearted, I mean that He is that perfectly. I do not mean that there are ever times when God isn’t feeling good and that He isn’t kind.

There are never any times when God won’t be cordial. Why even the best Christian doesn’t always feel cordial. The best Christian feels sometimes, he didn’t sleep well, and he’s not mad and he’s living like a Christian, but he doesn’t feel like talking in the mornings. He doesn’t feel cordial. He’s not overflowing. He’s not enthusiastic. But there’s never a time when God isn’t, because what God is, He is perfectly.

And then I joyously announce to you that what God is, He is immutably; which means and I’ve preached on that attribute way back there. It will mean that God never changes. That what God was, God is, and what God is and was, God will be. And there’ll never be any change in God.

Then I want to add this and I want you to take this home. Remember that usually you don’t hear what I’m preaching tonight. So, don’t say this man, this man is a heretic. Don’t say that. Check on me. Go to the Word and see if it’s right. If you will be a good Berean and go to the Scriptures and see that these things are true, then that’s all I ask. I don’t ask you to listen to me and take for granted what I have said is being true. You know, there are preachers that if he just clears his throat the audience will believe it. He doesn’t have to say anything. All he has to do is just make a noise. But I don’t want to be like that. And I don’t want you to be that kind of people. And I don’t think you are.

And remember that God is enthusiastic about his works. I said last week and I repeat now, God is not an absentee engineer running His world by remote control. They send a rocket up from Cape Canaveral and they guide it by remote control and if it isn’t doing what it should, they blow it up so it doesn’t hurt somebody. But God never stays off and does His work by remote control. The Scripture says that He upholds everything by the Word of His power. The presence of the invisible Word in the universe makes things run. That’s what makes them tick you know. That’s what makes them tick.

I heard a talk last night. I listen to it every Saturday night. It’s about my bedtime Saturday night, but I won’t tell you what time it is because I don’t want you to know how early I go to bed Saturday night. But this professor gave a talk on space. And he said he believed there were some of them out in space. He’s a professor from one of the universities, so he’s no ordinary chap. He said that, how could we get to the farthest star?

Well, he said, there are huge rockets that are going to be made, a mile long and so big, so broad that they would be over several blocks; and that they’re going to fix it so that you can live in it for several generations. And this generation can start to beget their kind and raise a family right in that rocket while it’s moving at terrific speed toward a star somewhere. And that after the passing of several generations, say 10 generations, a 10th generation will arrive on a star. Well, in the meantime, then they’re guiding it. The fellow said that I heard read or heard on the radio, where there’s a way they have now of getting energy from the sun. Certain fins stick up and when the sun hits it, it makes it run. And then if you pull a fin down, it puts the brakes on. Well, they’re thinking of running things by remote control. But God never runs anything by remote control, never. There are not a half dozen pulleys and chains. God is the perfect creator. And He runs everything by being present in His works.

Now that’s the Old Testament teaching. That’s all through the prophets, and the Psalms and the book of Job; all through the Old Testament. When we hit the age of science, we forgot that; and we have laws now. The Bible knew nothing about the laws of nature. The Bible knew only God was there. If it rained, it was God watering His chambers, watering his hills out in these chambers. If it lightninged it was God. And if it thundered, it was the voice of the Almighty that made the Hines to calve. God was always there. And they were acutely God conscious.

And so, they were never lonely because God was there. God was in this place and I know it not said the father or the man Jacob from whom Israel got their name. And this idea that God is an absentee engineer, running his universe by remote control is all wrong. He is present in perpetual and continuous eagerness, with all the fervor of rapturous love pressing His holy design. Now you say, but I haven’t felt that way about it. Well, it’s unbelief that makes you feel otherwise. Its preoccupation with this world. If you would believe God, you would know this to be true.

Now, I’d like to point out to you this, that God can’t feel indifferent about anything. People are indifferent, but God isn’t indifferent. God either loves with a boundless, unremitting energy, or else He hates with consuming fire. It was said about the Second Person of the Trinity, Thou has loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Therefore, God, thy God has anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. The same Lord Jesus that loved with boundless consuming love also hated with terrible consuming fire and will continue to do that while the ages roll because God is God, and the goodness of God requires that God cannot love sin.

Now, the goodness of God is the only valid raison d’être. You know, that’s not good French, but at least it’s, I don’t know anything in English equivalent to it, the reason for existence, the reason, the explanation for things, the reason underlying things. And the goodness of God is the only reason for it. Don’t you imagine that you deserve to be born and don’t you imagine that you deserve to be alive. You know, the unbelieving poet said, “Into this Universe, and Why not knowing Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.” And then he charged God with it all and said, for all that I’ve done that’s wrong, O God, forgive and take my forgiveness. That was Omar Khayyam.

Well, he thought God owed him something. But remember this, sir, that you can answer every question, every question with this expression, God of His goodness willed it. God out of His kindness willed it. Why were we created? Was it that we deserved to be created? How can nothing deserve something? And there was a time when there was no human race. How therefore could a human race that hadn’t existed deserve something? How could a man that wasn’t yet created, earn anything or pile up any merit? It couldn’t be so. God out of His goodness created us. And why, when we sinned were we not destroyed? The only answer to that is, God, of His goodness, spared us. God out of His kind heart spared us. The cordial, kind intention, God spared us.

And why would God the Eternal Son bleed for us? And the answer is: out of His goodness. It was the goodness of God, the loving kindness of God. Therefore, the children of men put their trust under the shadow of Thy wings. It is the multitude of His loving-kindness. That’s the answer! And why will God forgive me when I’ve sinned and forgive me again and forgive me again? Because, God out of His goodness acts according to that goodness and does what His loving heart dictates that He do. And why does God answer prayer? Now, let’s not imagine that it’s because somebody was good.

Do you know, we Protestants think we think we don’t believe in saints. We believe in saints alright. We don’t canonize them twenty-five years after they’re dead, but we put an “St” behind them which could mean street or saint. We don’t do that, but we do canonize them. And we have St. George Mueller and we have St. Spurgeon and we have St. Moody and we have St. Simpson. We have Protestant saints.

And we get the idea that God answered prayer for them because they were real good. Well, they would deny that fervently if they were here. Every one of them would deny it. Nobody ever got anything yet from God on the grounds that he deserved it. Remember that. Nobody deserves anything to start with, and then having fallen, he deserves only punishment and death. So, when God answers prayer, it’s because God is good. And the answer is, God of His goodness thought of it. God of His goodness, out of his loving kindness, His good-natured benevolence, God does it. So, remember, that’s the source of everything.

Now I’d like to throw this in and I’d like to tell you that those are the only grounds upon which anybody has ever been saved since the beginning of the world. There is an idea abroad that in the Old Testament men were saved by Law. In the New Testament we are saved by grace. That is all wrong. The idea that in the Old Testament men were saved by keeping commandments and the New Testament they are saved by believing on Christ, the second is right, but the first is wrong. Nobody has ever been saved from the day that Abel offered his bloody lamb on a homemade stone altar down to the latest convert made tonight. No one has ever been saved except out of the goodness of God.

Out of God’s grace, His mercy, His loving kindness, because God was good, and gracious and cordial and approachable and kindly, He saved people. It was all by grace. Don’t forget that. We’ve taken the word grace and made a technical word out of it. And it’s become technical. And we’ve taught of divisions between grace and law and say grace saves us now; they were saved by keeping the Law. Nobody was ever saved by keeping anything, because we deserve hell and if God had acted according to justice alone, He simply would have pulled the stopper out and flushed us all down to hell and had been done with it.

But God, out of His loving-kindness, graciously forgave those who would come according to not laws, but what should I say . . . conditions which God laid down, so that everybody is saved by grace. Abel was saved by grace. Noah was saved by grace and Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Remember that? Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord and Moses and all the rest down to the coming of Jesus and His dying on a cross; all were saved by grace out of the goodness of God. And everybody has been saved by grace out of the goodness of God ever since if he’s been saved.

Now, you say, but let’s not become too syrupy here. Let’s not drown in syrup, because God is not only good, God is severe. Yes, Romans 11 tells us about the severity of God. It says, behold the goodness and severity of God. And it says that God, because Israel turned away from God, God was severe with Israel and temporarily broke her off from the good olive tree, and that He grafted in the Gentiles instead. And so, behold the goodness and severity of God.

Remember that God is good toward all that accept His goodness. And those who will not accept His goodness, by rejecting His goodness, then there is nothing that God, even the Almighty God can do if He’s going to allow man his free will; and I believe in free will. Don’t imagine I don’t. I believe in man’s free will that was given by God as a gift of God out of God’s sovereignty. So, He’s given a little provisional sovereignty to us out of His absolute sovereignty, and has said, now, I’ll allow you within a little framework to be your own boss and to choose to go to heaven or to hell. So, that if a man will not take God’s goodness, then he must have God’s severity toward all who continue in moral revolt. In insurrection against the throne of God and in rebellion against the virtuous laws of God, there’s nothing God can do.

And so, His justice disposes of all such. But we’re not thinking about them tonight. We’re thinking about those who have surrendered to His love, those who have surrendered to His love. But somebody says, but what about it Mr. Tozer? God, being holy, as well as good, and being righteous as well as kindly, and we being sinners as we are, aren’t we per force lost and must be not perish? Is it not moral logic that we should perish?

Well, let me quote from the little book I told you that I had would be quoting from a little. It says God, of His goodness has ordained means to help us full fair and many. It was written 600 years ago, and it’s the old-fashioned English. God has ordained means full fare and many means to help us and the chief being that which He took upon Him the nature of man. And in coming as a man, He came where we were, and coming where we were, He understands us by sympathy and empathy. I don’t want to get off into psychological terms. But sympathy is a good old-fashioned country word, “by sympathy,” where we use the same word as pathos. It means feeling or suffering often. And a “sym” is the same as our word symphony. So that sympathy then is, God feeling and suffering along with us.

Empathy, of course is a bit different. It means the ability to project yourself into somebody else and feel as they feel. It’s a wonderful thing, and every old grandmother on any old farm in Tennessee knows what that means. But it took a good scientist to give it a name. Let me read it for you from the Bible, in Biblical language instead of in the language of psychology. Hebrews 2 and Hebrews 4, wherefore in all things it behooved Him, that is, when He took on Him the seed of Abraham, in all things it behooved Him to be made like unto His brethren that He might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God; to make reconciliation for the sins of His people. The people, for in that He Himself hath suffered being tempted; He’s able to succur them that are tempted. And then in Hebrews 4, for we have not a high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points tempted like as we are yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. There’s sympathy and empathy. There is not only a feeling alone with us in our wretchedness, but there is an ability to project Himself into us so He knows how we feel and “can” feel with us. There’s good theology.

Now God of His goodness has ordained means both fair and many. And that was all of God’s goodness, remember. Sometimes we talk about, someday I’ll preach on the justice, some night I will preach on the justice of God. And I want to steal my own thunder just long enough to say one thing. We say sometimes the justice of God requires Him to do so and so. Never use that language. Even if you hear me using it, don’t use it anyhow. Because it never should thus be spoken. There is never anything that requires God to do anything. Always remember that God does what He does because of what He is. And there’s not something standing outside of Him requiring Him to do something. He does what He does out of His own heart; and God being just, acts justly.

So, let’s not say justice requires Him, forces Him, compels Him. Let’s not say mercy compels God, as though mercy was outside of God and came over to God and said, now God, you listen to me, you forgive that bum. He’s on his knees there in the Pacific Garden Mission; and he’s got New Testament there and he’s weeping, and he wants to be saved. You forgive him because I require it of you. No, no. Mercy is not something that stands outside of God and tells God what to do. Mercy is God. You see, all the attributes of God are simply facets of one God in three persons. Is that clear or is that muddy? I hope it’s clear, because it’ll help you to think right. And if you think right, you tend to be right; not necessarily so, but at least it’ll help you.

Well, what is this then? What are these fair, full, many means that God has made for His people. Why the precious amends that He’s made for man’s sin; turning all our blame into endless worship, turning all our blame. Sometimes, I say things to God in prayer so terribly bold, almost arrogant, and I have never been rebuked by God yet, never been rebuked. They said about Luther, I’m certainly not drawing any comparison. I would have been glad to have cleaned his shoes and carried them and put them at his bedroom door. But they said of Luther that when they heard him pray, it was an experience in theology. That when he began to pray, he prayed with such self-abnegation, such humility, such repentance that you pitied him. But as he prayed on, he prayed with such boldness that you feared for him.

And I have sometimes in my private prayers, gone to God with thoughts that I hesitate to mention, but I’m going to mention this one. Only this last Friday. I said this to God in prayer, I’m glad I sinned, God. I’m glad I sinned, for Thou didst come to save sinners and lots of good people. There are a lot of good people. I’m not a good man. You have to use slang to describe me by nature. I come that way. And when I saw it in my boys, I didn’t blame them. I paddled them, but I didn’t blame them. And now, when I see it now in my grandchildren, I don’t blame them.

There’s something miserably, nasty about the Tozers and the Jacksons. They married up and I got here, through the Tozers and the Jacksons. My father’s name was Jacob S. Tozer and my Mother’s name was Prudence Jackson. They married and she had six, caustic, sharp tongued, abusive, all but one. He’s a nice guy who lives down in Florida. He never hurt anybody, but the rest of us all had sharp tongues. And so, I haven’t anything. I can’t go to God and say, God, I didn’t do what that fellow did. I’ve done everything, either in actuality or in thought that could be done. The devil himself couldn’t have thought of anything that I haven’t thought of in my lifetime.

So, I was praying to God about it. And I said, O God, these good men, these good men, and I began naming good men, these good men, I can name them around here. Good men, and compared with me, they’re good men. But I said, God, they can’t love you as much as I do. For he that is forgiven much He loves much. And the more God has pardoned and the farther up He’s brought us from the deeper depths, the more we’ll glorify Him in that Day.

The doctor saves a man who only has a runny nose. He wouldn’t write a book about that or a tract. He didn’t do much after all. If the fellow would have waited out three days and taken an aspirin he would have gotten well anyhow. But the doctor who takes a man with a tumor on the brain, or with a heart with a spike in it, and puts that man asleep and with great care and prayer and skill brings that man back to life, he has some reason to be proud of his ability I suppose as a human being. And so, there’s some of you so nice that when God saves you, there’s not too much. But when He saved me, O Grace Divine, how sweet Thou art. How sweet Thou art that can save a wretch like me.

Well, the precious amends that He made in turning our blame, all our blame into endless worship. Do you know what I think? I think that the Bible teaches, I think our Lord hinted at it and I think Paul developed it further, that the day will be when they’ll gather around us from, it may be from outer space, I don’t know, but at least from the identifiable heaven of the Bible, they’ll gather around us from everywhere and say, behold, the marvels of God.

I remember reading, and you’ve read it in the book of Acts, seeing the man that was healed standing among them, they could say nothing. And seeing, seeing that that wicked sinner, that wicked sinner standing there, what can we say? We can only say, worthy is the Lamb that was slain and worthy is the goodness of God. That out of His infinite kindness, His unchanging, perfect, loving-kindness, made amends for us full fair and many, turning all our sins into endless worship.

My Brethren, Jesus is God. And Jesus is the kindest man, notice I don’t say was, never say was about Jesus except when you’re speaking of a historical act which is now over. Jesus was by the well. Jesus was in the manger. Jesus was in the carpentry shop. You can put the past tense or the past perfect wherever you want to when it’s a historic fact that Jesus has accomplished. But if you’re talking about what He is, never say was; for what He was, He is and what He is, He ever will be. And Jesus is the kindest Man ever to draw breath in this world. The kindest Man ever to live on this earth.

Well, kindness, you know, is something that we must have a bit of it. It must be a reflection, a lingering flavor like an old broken vase that once had beautiful flowers in it. And the vase is broken, but the scent of the roses hang around the vase. So, mankind, fallen like a broken vase dashed to the pavement and splintered into a million pieces, yet has something we call kindness.

I remember reading and I suppose that one of the kindest men in America was Lincoln. When Lincoln visited the hospital, and here a young soldier, a young soldier, a young officer, so badly wounded that it was obvious that he was going to die, I’ve forgotten his name. I did know his name. He was a Northern soldier and was lying there, obviously going to die and the nurses whispered, Mr. President, he can’t make it. And the great big, tall, homely president went into the hospital ward and walked about among the men. And then he went over to this dying young officer who has bled white and was dying, and went over and stooped down, kissed his forehead and said, Lieutenant, you got to get well for me. And the nurses around said they heard a whispered word, Mr. President, I’ll do it. And he did. He did. When a proclamation was signed and the war was over. He’s one of Lincoln’s boys, not his son, but one of the boys that Lincoln had brought back from the grave.

Another time they went into his office where he sat gazing out the window; looking out the window over the grassy sward below. He said, Mr. President, you seem very serious today. Yes, he said, today is butcher day. They’re going to shoot a lot of boys today in the army. Their sentenced to die for retreating under fire or doing something else in wartime. And he said, I don’t blame those boys. They weren’t cowards. Their legs did it. Half humorous, you know, along with these tears, said their legs are to blame. They’re not to blame. He said, I am going over the list and he flipped the papers. John Doe, Jim Smith, all down the line. He said, I’m going to save every one that I can! That’s why we love Lincoln, not because he freed the slaves or saved the Union, but we love Lincoln because he had a big heart.

But my friends, his was a limit. He had a limit. They used to say that when his wife Mary did things she shouldn’t, somebody came on the White House lawn and she was running, screaming and the great tall president was behind him with a paddle. And they said, “What’s going on here?” Oh he said, she won’t obey. Now he could get mad you see and he could act otherwise unkind, but not Jesus. The kindest Man ever to live in this world was Jesus. The kindest man ever to draw human breath was Jesus, is Jesus. He is now, is now the kindest man ever to live in this world.

Dickens said to a group of literary men; they were talking about pathos in literature. They said, what, what, they were discussing books and deeply pathetic books, books that moved you to tears. Matthew Arnold said of Burns, that his poetry was so poignantly beautiful, piercingly pathetic, that it was hard sometimes to read, because it wounded you so deeply. Well, they were talking about such literature and somebody said, “what do you consider, Mr. Dickens, to have the most pathos, the most, deep feeling of all literature that you know? Oh, he said, there’s no question, the story of the Prodigal Son.” He said, there’s nothing like it in all literature.

Who wrote it? Well, who spoke it? The kindest man in all the world! When I’m reading through the Scriptures and I come to that passage, and a certain man has two sons, instinctively, I will bow my head. Something inside of me wants to go down and do obeisance before the Heart that could think of that, could think that story.

Well, I must close now in five minutes. But I’d like to say this to you, that He is not revolted by your wretchedness. He has no despite of anything that He’s made; nor does He disdain the service in the simplest office that to our body belongest. The Lord would be your nurse, your caretaker and your helper, and He’s not revolted by anything about you. He wills that you joy along with Him, The Everlasting Marvel and the high over passing love of God, the irresistible love of God out of His goodness, sees you perfectly even though you’re not perfect, He sees you perfect rather than perfectly. And He wants us to be glad in Him.

Now I’d like to drive this home, as I might be able to occasionally night after night. I want you to get it, that God wants you to be glad in Him. He takes no pleasure in human tears. And He came and wept that He might stop up forever the fountain of human tears. He came and bereaved His mother that He might heal all bereavement. He came and lost everything that He might heal the wounds that we have from losing things. And He wants us to take pleasure in Him. Now let us put away our doubts and trust Him

There’s a gentleman friend of mine who’s only been converted a year and a half, and he’s forty-eight years old. And he’s one of the most zealous men that I know, one of the most zealous men. He’s learning fast, oh, he’s learning fast. He follows me around when he hears that I’m in a town in the East. He brings his tape recorder and comes over. He done that several times. And he was in Pittsburgh. He came up to my hotel room. When he had been saved a year and a half. He has a fine son about twenty-five who was going to the mission field. And I said to him as he was leaving my hotel room, now I said, I want to say something to you. And it’ll take you at least five years to understand it. But I said, don’t be shocked by it. Don’t be shocked by what I’m telling you. You’ve only been saved a year and a half, but hear this; that God wants to please you and that He is pleased when you are pleased. You’re His child, you’re surrendered, your will is His will and His will is your will. You’re not in rebellion. You’re not seeking your own will. You want to do the will of God, granted, that’s true. Now, let me tell you, He wants to please you. God loves to please His people. Did you ever see a mother or a father bringing gifts to their children?

Did you ever see the lover bringing gifts to the bride. He wants to please the people He loves and the people that love Him. The idea that God must always make you miserable is not a Biblical idea at all. Jesus Christ knew God and He suffered from the irritations and pollutions or rather persecutions of the world and the bitterness of their polluted hearts. They made it hard for Him. But as far as God was concerned, He was pleased with God and God was pleased with Him. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. God can say that now to His people, my brethren.

So, remember, that God isn’t pleased by your being miserable. He’ll make you miserable if you won’t obey. But if you’re surrendered in obedience, the goodness of God has so wrought through Jesus Christ, that now He wants to please you. And He wants to answer your prayers so you’ll be happy in Him. He wants to do that. Let’s put away all doubts and trust Him.

I’ve got this little book, Gerhard Tersteegen, that song, Midst the darkness, storm and sorrow, one bright gleam I see. Well, I know the blessed tomorrow Christ will come for me. And then he writes six stanzas and the last four lines are these. He and I in that bright glory, one deep joy shall share, Mine to be forever with Him and His that I am there. Have you ever stopped to think about that? That God is going to be as pleased to have you there as you are to be there. The goodness and mercy of God, the loving kindness of the Lord.

My friends, it is wonderful, and there’s only one way to end this sermon when you’re talking about that, and that is, just break off and quit. For one idea suggests another forever. As you talk about the loving-kindness and tender mercies of God, who loves us so much that He wants to please us; and when He can bring us into such relationship to Him that He can please us without spoiling us, and He pleases us, and He’s pleased when we’re pleased. And when we’re pleased with Him, He’s pleased that we’re pleased. One common joy we’ll share, mine that I’m forever with Him, His that I am there.

Thank God. Thank God. We’ve been a very quiet crowd tonight, but I trust you’ve heard what I’ve had to say. Take it home with you. Brood over it. Dream over it. Think over it. Pray over it. And let us praise the loving-kindness of God forever. For of His goodness, there is no end. Amen and Amen.

Tags attributes, Goodness, Tozer

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date March 7, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“God’s Immanence and Immensity”

Sunday evening, September 21, 1958

Message #2 of #10 in Attributes of God Series

Colossians 3:1-3

Tonight I’m to give the second in a series which I have called “A Journey into the Heart of God.” I want to talk about God these nights. I want to first read a text or two. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it. And whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Then there’s the text which I have chosen for my every night text, “your life is hide, with Christ, in God.” And then, this one in Philippians, “Yea doubtless I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”

Let us pray. Father, we’re unworthy. We’re unworthy to think these thoughts and our friends are unworthy to hear them expressed. But, while we are not worthy, we will try to do this in a worthy manner. Hear worthily and speak worthily though we know that we have looked upon evil sights, we have heard with our ears evil words, and we have walked in evil ways. But now, we trust that is behind us, and our eyes are upon Thee. Show thyself to us, O God. We’ve sung about Thee the Shepherd, the sweet wonder of Jesus. And we ask Thee now that this evening, we may again have a vision of the Triune God through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

Now, faith is of two kinds: nominal and real. The nominal faith is faith that accepts what it is told and can quote text after text to prove it. That is nominal faith. And it’s amazing how nominal faith, nominal belief can weave these texts into garments, cloaks and curtains for the church.

And then there is another kind of faith. It is faith that depends upon the character of God. You remember that the Scripture does not say, Abraham believed the text and it was counted unto him for righteousness. It says, Abraham believed God. It was not what Abraham believed. It was who Abraham believed that counted. Abraham believed God. And the man of true faith, believes God and His faith rests on the character of God.

Now, the man who has real faith as over against nominal faith, has found a right answer to the question, what is God like? There is no question that is more important, none whatsoever until it’s answered. What is God like? And the man of true faith has found an answer to that question. And this is by revelation and illumination. You see, I would have to say again what I have said so often perhaps to the point of monotony, that the difficulty with the church now is, even the Bible-believing church, that we stop with revelation. But revelation is not enough. Revelation is God’s given word. It’s an objective thing, not subjective. It’s external, not internal. It is God’s revelation of truth. And a man may believe that, and believe it soundly, and hold it to be true. And yet have only an objective revelation, or truth, that has been objectively revealed.

There is another word, and that is the word illumination. The man of real faith believes the Word, but he has been illuminated so he knows what the word means. That doesn’t mean he’s a better Bible teacher, but it means that he has had what the Quakers called an opening. His heart has been opened to the Word.

Now, you can’t have too many texts. And this is not said to mean that texts are not valuable. They are. I’m using many of them tonight. But you see, texts are means toward an end and that end is God. The given revelation is a means toward an end, and God is the end. The text is never the end. That’s why I never fight over translation or get all worked up and steamed up over translations. A text is a means to an end. We are making the mistake now, since there’s plenty of money and the printers will print anything anybody will write. We’re making the mistake of thinking that if we get the word said in a different way, there’ll be some magic effect in that word. That if it is read in the King James Version, that’s okay. But, if we get a new version varying just a little, we have automatically received something new. It doesn’t follow my Brethren. It doesn’t follow. The illumination is what matters.

And the word of God is a means toward an end, just as roads are a means to our destinations. A road is nothing in itself. Nobody ever built a road and fenced it in at both ends, and planted posies along it and beautified it and said this is a road. They said this is a way, a way, a means toward somewhere. And so, the Bible is a whole series of highways; all leading toward God. And when the text has been illuminated and the believer of the text knows that God is the end toward which it’s moving, then that man has real faith.

Now, I told you that these nights, that I intended to use an occasional quotation from an old book. I never saw but one copy of it in my life. I wouldn’t know where to go to get it now. One time it was a very famous book, but it fell into desuetude and nobody knows anything about it much. I’ve quoted from it in the past. I preached a sermon until the sermon got so well known that I quit preaching it. On the “Three Wounds of a Friend.” And I spoke last week briefly about this little book. It’s called The Revelation of Divine Love,” written by a woman by the name of Julian, 600 years ago.

Now one day she said as she prayed, she had a little experience and here’s what it was. She said I saw a very small object as large as a hazelnut. Now when I was a boy on the farm, we had hazelnuts and hazelnuts as we knew them, was about the size of a large marble. No larger than that. It’s not even as large as the largest marbles, but just the size will say of a mib, I think they call it, a good size marble. You may have seen larger ones, but these were wild growing and those as I remember them. And she said, she saw this little tiny object. And she said, what might this be? And something in her heart said this is all that is made. This is all that is made. This little, tiny, hazelnut sized affair is all that is made. Now, I want you to think about this with me; all that is made.

Years ago, I remember reading the great French philosopher and mystic and mathematician, Pascal, sitting up on the hillside in the woods in West Virginia reading Pascal’s thoughts. Now, I remember that he said this, he said, we are halfway between immensity and that which is infinitesimally small. And he said, you will find worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds, our solar system, moves around another solar system, and that solar system with our solar system moves around another solar system, and that solar system with ours and so on, on and on and on, out infinitely into size and vastness. Then he said, if you turn the other way, you will find little worlds within little worlds going down and down to molecule, the atom and the electron and the proton and so on, down and down, down into an infinitesimal smallness.

Now he said, I believe that man, made in the image of God, is exactly halfway in between that which is infinitely large and that which is infinitesimally small. Now, there’s no way to prove that. But that’s a frightening place to be brother. To know that you’re half as big as the universe but also half as small, and that they can keep reducing you and reducing you and melting you down, reducing you. Pretty soon, you’re infinitesimally small. Or we can go out in increasing spirals until we’re so vast until the world is so vast that we cannot think it anymore. You know, we think that the sun is very large with its planets circling around it. But if you study astronomy, even elementary astronomy, you will learn that there are heavenly bodies so large, suns so large, that they could take our sun, and all of its planets, and all of the satellites that revolve around those planets, and could throw them into that sun, that other sun and never notice it. They say that there are suns that you could put millions of our suns in, they are so large. I give up. I don’t even try to understand it.

Then there is space. Of course, such vast worlds have to have distance between them. So, we have what we call space. I don’t think space is a thing. I think it’s just a way we have of accounting for different positions in the vast universe. But we call it distance. And you know, they don’t measure it. Oh, if it’s the moon they say 250,000 miles. If it’s the sun, they say 93 million miles, but after that, they start talking in light years.

Do you know what a light year is? Well, a light year is the time that it takes light traveling for one year. And light gets along at the rather amazing speed of 186,000 miles a second. That is, every minute light travels 11 million miles. And every hour it travels 669 million miles. And every day it travels 16,061,000,000 miles. And every year it travels 5,862,484,000,000 miles. And then they tell me that’s how far light travels in a year. And there are bodies so far away that to tell us how far they are, they can’t measure them in miles. They made them in light years. They say it’s as far away as it would take light so many years traveling at 186,000 miles a second. You know that’s quite a quite a rate of speed. And they say that there are bodies that are millions of light years away, say ten million just to get a start. So, if you want to know how far it is from Earth to that body I’m talking about, you multiply 5,862,484,000,000 by 10 million and you’re getting around somewhere where we’re the distant is. Doesn’t that stun you? It makes my head ache. There’s not too much to ache. And when you get that far up, Brother, you’re going.

Now, seen over against this, you and I are terribly small. Now we’re not the smallest thing there is. We’re not infinitesimally small, because you start dissolving us, melting us down and getting at the molecules and at the atoms and that the bits of disembodied matter or energy that we call by various manufactured names and you’ll find that we’re, according to Pascal, half as big as the universe which is a tremendous thought I’d say.

Now, over against that stands God. Over against it stands God. And there is an attribute of God, I talked about the attribute of God last week called infinitude. I want to talk about the attribute of God called imminence now, and immensity. You know, there’s such a thing as, as God’s imminence, that is, it’s an attribute of God, and it’s taught in Christian theology, that God is imminent. That is, that you don’t have to go distances to find God, that God is imminent, that He is in everything, that He’s right here.

I have a little, I borrowed a little formula. I’ve repeated it very often until some of you know it by heart. If you don’t, you should. And I want to repeat it now. I think I did last week. Let me give it to you. It is very brief. It is that God is above all things, and beneath all things, and outside of all things, and inside of all things. That God is above, but He’s not pushed up and He’s beneath, but He’s not pressed down. And He’s outside, but he’s not excluded. And He’s inside, but He’s not confined. That God is above all things presiding and beneath all things sustaining and outside of all things embracing and inside of all things filling. That is the imminence of God. That’s what that means. And that’s taught in Christian theology.

So that God doesn’t travel to get anywhere. We say, O God, come and help us. Well, that’s good to say that because we mean it in its psychological way. But actually, God doesn’t have to come to help us, because there isn’t any place where God is not. And I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea then there thy hand shall hold me. And if I go up to Heaven, even there God will be and if I make my bed in Hell, even there God will be.

So, it’s impossible to think of a place where God is not. After you have gone out into those millions of light years and found bodies so vast that you could throw all our solar system, and all of the galaxies to which this solar system belongs into it, and to be like throwing a shovel full of coal into a furnace; and it would simply swallow it up and go on. After you thought of all that, remember that God contains all that. That God is outside of all things, and inside of all things, and around all things, that are God made this. That is the immensity of God.

Now, the Scripture teaches the immensity of God. Let me give you a few verses. It says in Isaiah, “who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and made it out heaven with a span and comprehended the dust of the earth and the measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in the balance. The Holy Ghost is bigger than all the universe, this little hazelnut here, you know, that the woman saw, and then another. Behold, all the nations are as a drop of a bucket. It’s awfully hard to get a Christian scared. It’s hard to get him panicked if he really believes in God. If he’s just a church member, you can get him panicked, but if he really believes in God, it’s very difficult to do it. Very difficult for a great big mouth like Khrushchev to get anybody scared if he really believes in God. You know, Khrushchev is beginning to sound more and more like Hitler. By the way, where is Hitler? He’s beginning to sound more and more like him.

And the same God that disposed of Adolph will dispose of Nikita one of these days. Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and they are counted as the small dust of the balance and He takes up the islands as a very little thing. It is so small He doesn’t even notice that. All the nations before Him are as nothing, and they’re counted to Him as less than nothing and vanity. Old Dr. Neighbor used to say, the word vanity in the Hebrew meant a soap bubble, something that floated. It’s just a tiny, infinitesimally thin, iridescent skin. If you touched it and it was gone and nobody could find it again. And that’s what it means. All the worlds and nations are to Him as a soap bubble. And he says, “It is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are but are as grasshoppers, that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. To whom then will ye liken God, or to whom shall I be equal says the Holy One? Lift up your eyes on high and behold, who has created these things that bringeth out their host by number: He called them all by name by the greatness of His power or might. For that He is strong in power, not One to faileth.

Now there, as I pointed out in another set of circumstances, there is probably the most daring flight of imagination ever made by the human mind. I think we have here in Isaiah that which is vaster and more and more awesome than anything ever struck off of the mind of Shakespeare. Do you remember what Shakespeare said? That the lark at morn sings hymns at Heaven’s gate. And somebody pointed out that nobody else had ever a thought of that except Shakespeare. That the lark mounts on her quivering wings to the very gate of Heaven and there sings her hymns.

Milton wrote “Paradise Lost.” And a great critique, I think it was Macaulay who said that Milton could write “Paradise Lost” and get away with it. But that Shakespeare couldn’t have. Because, Shakespeare’s mind was so brilliant, that if he had ever tried to take in “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained;” if his mind had ever gone out to try to take in Creation and the Fall and redemption of man, that he would die, he would have died of a rupture of the brain. That his imagination was so tremendous, it would have blown his head off in the language of the street. Milton, not being quite so great, not quite so imaginative, managed to toddle along and not die under it.

But so great was the imagination of Shakespeare that according to this critique, he would have died under it. It would have killed him if he had tried to think a thought that big, because his mind would have gone so vast. But here, I find something bigger yet than anything thought that Shakespeare even ever had. And it is the thought of the Great God, the Shepherd of the Universe, moving through His light years with its trillions, and billions and millions and 1000s, with its light traveling at 186,000 miles a second, with its world so big that our whole solar system would look like a grain of sugar or sand by comparison. And God stands out yonder and calls all of these millions of worlds as His sheep, and calls them all by name. He says, “Come on,” and leads them out across the vast sky.

I’d say this is the highest thought that anywhere that I know anything about in the Bible, or out of it. This vast, huge illimitable thought, and because of the greatness of His power, not one faileth. Just as a shepherd keeps all of his sheep and not one is lost, and so, God keeps all of His universe. Men point their tiny little glasses at the stars and talk learnedly, and when it’s all over, they’ve just been counting God’s sheep, nothing more. And God is running His universe.

And then in the Psalms, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, O Lord, my God, Thou art very great, Thou art clothed with honor and majesty, who covereth thyself with light as with a garment, who stretcheth out the heavens like a curtain, who layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, who maketh the clouds His chariot, and who walketh upon the wings of the wind.

Well, there we have the greatness, the immensity of God, the imminence of God, set over against the vastness of the world and the littleness of the world. For as she said, I saw all of this vastness reduced and I saw how big it actually was set over against God Almighty. It was the size of a hazelnut. Then she said, I marvel at one thing, and I’ve thought of that myself. I marvel at what could hold it together? Did you ever wonder about what held things together? Do you ever wonder why things didn’t fall apart? I have.

I had a younger brother who used to lie on the floor and cry. And they’d say, what’s the matter Ully? He would say, I’m afraid I’ll fall up. And I’ve had my imaginations like that too. I wondered how things didn’t come apart; didn’t tear loose at the seams. Well, she said, I marveled how it might last. Now, since distance is all in God and since matter depends on God’s Word, and since life is a ray from God’s heart, then there isn’t too much to worry about. But she said, How can all this last? How can it hold together and then she said, it came to me and I saw that all things has it being in the love of God, and that God made it and God loves it. And God keeps it. I can’t think of a better formula my friend for you to take home with you. That’s why you don’t fall apart; because God made you. God loves you. And God keeps you. And what God made God loves because it’s inconceivable that God should make anything that he didn’t love.

A fellow recently brought a picture that he had painted. He’d been working on a picture he had worked, he said quite a while on that picture. He brought it and showed it to see if I liked it. Well, now it’s inconceivable that he didn’t like his own picture. I liked it too. But he liked it. That’s the reason he brought it to show it to me. We like that which we make. And God loves that which He made. And because He made it, He loves it. And because He loves it, He keeps it and nobody is going to lose anything that they love, if they can help it.

Now, a mother may lose her baby by death, but she won’t do it if she can help it. The man may lose his property or estate or his car or his job, but he won’t if he can help it. And so, God Almighty is in a position never to lose anything, because He’s able not to lose. He keeps it. He keeps it because He loves it, and He loves it because He made it, or did He make it because He loved it. I don’t know. But, He keeps it because He made it and loved it or loved it and made it. I heard an Episcopalian rector one time who preached a sermon on immortality. And he gave one of the finest arguments for immortality that I’ve ever heard. He said, The Bible says that Abraham was a friend of God. Now, said the Rector, how would it be he said, that a man should ever give up his friend. He said, if a man is your friend, you wouldn’t lose him if he could help it. And if he died, you’d bring him back if you could. You would keep your friend if he was your friend. Well, God Almighty is able to keep his friend. So that’s why we know that Abraham will rise again from the dead, because he’s God’s friend, and God isn’t going to allow His friend to lie around and rot forever. He’s going to bring him out of the grave again. And that’s why I believe in immortality. I believe that God made us and God loves what he made and is keeping what He loves.

So, all things have it’s being in God. And I want you to think of God the maker, God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. I want you to think of God the lover. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. And I want you to think of God the keeper. And if you’re a real Christian, now if you’re not a real Christian, this doesn’t apply to you. It doesn’t apply to you if you’re not a real Christian; if you’ve not been born anew and washed in the blood of the Lamb. Then, this doesn’t apply to you and there isn’t any use of my trying to make it apply. But if you’re a true Christian, this applies to you.

And so, the little lady got another thought, and she said this, if this is all true, and it is all true, then why be we not all at great ease of heart and soul. She said, why aren’t Christians the happiest people in all the wide world? Why aren’t we Christians the most easeful people and the most restful people all the wide world? Well, I’ll tell you why. She said because we seek to have rest in things that are so little. This hazelnut you see brother. This little hazelnut into which is condensed all it is that we try to find our pleasure in those little things.

Now, I want to strip you down tonight a little bit and ask you a question or two. Think with me a little bit. What is it that makes you happy? What is it that keeps you feeling good? What cheers you up and tucks up your chin and gives your morale a lift? Is it your job? Is it the fact that you have good clothes? Is it that you’re well married or that you have a fine, fine position? Just what is it that keeps you, that you’re taking your joy in? Well, that’s our trouble and that’s why even though we know that the immensity of God is so vast, that seen over against God, everything, even out to the farthest interstellar space is just the size of a hazelnut. It’s nothing at all. It’s a grain of sand. And yet, we’re not a happy people. Because we multiply things. We got our mind set on things. We multiply things, and we increase things, and we perfect things, and we beautify things, and we put our confidence in things and God. We have our job and God. We have our husband and God. We have our strong body and God. We have our good job and God. We have our home and God. We have our ambition for the future and God.

And so, we put God as a plus sign after something else. Now my Brethren, all of the great souls of the world, from David and Paul, and Augustine, and all the rest down to this present hour; every responsible writer who has ever been illuminated from the Scriptures by the Holy Ghost has said the same thing. And whether he came from one school of Christian thought or another; as long as he was orthodox, he said the same thing. And particularly if he was spiritual, he said the same thing, that our problem is that we are putting our confidence in things and not in God. And this lady said, God showed me that all the things that are, are only the size of a hazelnut, why therefore should I put my confidence into things so little, that God has to hold it together? Why should I trust things?

We multiply, I say, and we increase and still we’re afraid and we are troubled. And we’re anxious and we’re unsatisfied. And you know why? I’ll tell you why. Because, all that is beneath God sufficeth not us. God made you in His image and you’re stuck with it. God did not make the chimpanzee in his image. He did not make that beautiful horse as he gallops across the field; he’s a symphony in motion. God did not make him in His image. God did not make that beautiful bird that the poet says “Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. God made him beautiful, but He didn’t make him in His image.

So, God made only you in His image, and you’re stuck with it man, sinner man, lost man, Christian man, you’re stuck with it. You’re made in the image of God and because you’re made in the image of God, nothing short of God will satisfy you. And even if you happen to get saved on this nickel in the slot and you escape Hell and take Heaven modern idea of evangelism; that Jesus came in order that we would escape Hell and go to Heaven. That poor, little kindergarten view of Christianity, even if you’re that kind of believer, remember one thing my brother, that even you will find somewhere down the years, that you will not be content with things plus God. You will have to have God minus all things. You’ll have to come to a place in your life.

But you say, don’t you have things? You have a suit. What does it say here? Richmond Brothers. Sure, I have a suit. And I have some pens here that I get kidded for carrying around. And I have what else do I have? God knows I don’t have much, only a lot of books. But I do have books and a wife and some children and grandchildren and friend. I have all that. But brother, just as sure as I set my hopes and my comfort upon things and people, I lose something out of my heart. It dare not be things and God. It dare not be people and God. It must be God and nothing else. And then whatever else God gives, we hold an arm’s length and we hold it dear for Jesus’ sake. And we love it for His sake, but it is not necessary to our happiness. If there’s anything necessary to your eternal happiness but God, you’re not yet the kind of Christian that you ought to be. For only God is the very rest.

I like that old expression “very” as an adjective, “very” rest. Only God is the very rest. So says the book of Hebrews. And that word “very” there is another form of the word verily. When Jesus our Lord wanted to say something that was true, so true that He wanted to underscore it, He said, verily, verily, I say unto you. Truly, truly this I say. And only God is the true rest, the very rest. And you see, God takes great pleasure in having a helpless soul come to Him, simply and plainly and intimately. He takes pleasure in having us come to Him. You know, this kind of Christianity doesn’t draw big crowds. Nobody wants this except a few of those who have their heart set on God, and they want God more than they want anything else in the world. They want the spiritual experience that comes from knowing God for Himself; that they could have everything stripped away from them, and still have God. That kind of people listen, but they’re not vastly numerous in any given locality.

So, this kind of preaching doesn’t draw vast numbers of people. But I’ll tell you what it does do, it’s likely to draw the hungriest ones, and the thirstiest ones, and some of the best ones. And so, God takes great pleasure I say, in having helpless people come to Him, simply and plainly and intimately. He wants us to come without all that great overlarding of theology. He wants us to come as simply and as plainly as a little child. And if the Holy Ghost touches us, we’ll come like that.

Now my Brethren, I said last week that God had boundless enthusiasm. I repeat it now that God is boundlessly enthusiastic. I’m glad somebody is, because I don’t find very many Christians that are. Or if they are, they’re not enthusiastic for the things that matter. If they’re going to have a movie, they can get all steamed up about that. If they’re going to go on the moonlight cruise, they get all worked up over that. But if you just say, look, look, behold God, behold God, you can’t get much enthusiasm these days. So, I’m glad somebody is enthusiastic and brother, God’s enthusiastic. He’s enthusiastic for Himself in the persons of the Godhead. The persons of the Godhead are infinitely delighted with each other. The Father is infinitely delighted with the Son. And the Son is infinitely delighted with the other two persons of the Godhead. He is delighted with His whole creation I repeat, and especially for men made in His image. You see, unbelief comes and throws a cloud over us and shuts out the light of God. And we don’t believe what’s actually here, that God is delighted, infinitely delighted with us.

And here’s a little prayer that was made, “O God, of thy goodness, give me thy self, for Thou art enough to me, and I may ask nothing that is less and find any full honor to Thee. God give me thy self.” Do you know what a revival is Brother? We make out that a revival is everybody running around falling in everybody else’s neck and saying, forgive me for thinking a bad thought about you and me. And forgive me for that nickel that I forgot to pay back. Or, we say a revival consists of people getting very loud and noisy. Well, all that might happen in a revival. But let me tell you, the only kind of revival that would be here when the worlds are on fire, is the kind of revival that begins by saying, O God, give me thy self; for nothing less than Thee will do. For anything less than God, anything less than God, she says ever me wanteth. I like that little expression. She said, O God, I get all this hazelnut. Everything from the proton to the farthest, remotest heavenly body up and down the scale. All the beautiful things of earth and sky and sea, and all the diamonds of the mines and all timber of the forest and all the charm of the landscape and all the riches of the cities. If I have it all and have not thee, ever me wanted. Translated into modern English, O God, it won’t be enough, won’t be enough.

Do you know, deep down what’s the matter with everybody? Nobody would say it and the average person wouldn’t believe it; and if he heard me quote these three words, he would laugh in my face and say, “what are you doing teaching Chaucer? No, no, teaching theology. And I’m simply using some old phrases to get it home to him in a new way. Friends, the problem with the world is, everybody is saying and doesn’t know he’s saying it, “ever me wanted.” You know, there’s a little shrine inside of you. There’s a shrine so far in, that nobody can know that shrine but you. There is a penetralium, a deep, deep shrine far eastward in Eden. And it lies in that great soul of yours, that soul that is bigger than the starry universe; and there’s a shrine there and a garden and a throne. And no matter what you get, there’ll be a cry from that shrine, ever me wanted. O God, I’m still hungry. God, I’m still hungry. Who are they that commit suicide? They are not the poor. They’re the rich. Who are they did commit suicide? They’re not the simple, known fellow on the street. They’re movie actors and politicians and people that are widely known. Give men everything as the song had it, take the world, but give me Jesus. And we can, we can have all the world and have not Jesus, and still, there’s a cry from deep within, “ever me wanteth.

And do you know I think this would be the world’s greatest calamity. The greatest calamity for a human soul, to be made in the image of God, and to be made with a spirit so big, that it can contain the universe and cry for more; that it’s bigger than the heavens and the heaven of heavens, and be empty of God. And go through the eternity to come crying, “ever me wanteth.” O God, forever and forever; O God, I’m hungry. And I can’t eat and I’m thirsty and can’t drink. Send Lazarus that he might dip his finger in the water and put it on my forehead, for I suffer these flames.

And I wonder if the flames of Hell aren’t kindled from deep in the shrine where a dry and cracked and parched, the soul of men cries, O God, “ever me wanted.” I’ve had everything. I’ve had religion. I’ve had position. I’ve had money. I’ve had children. I’ve had a wife or husband. I’ve had clothes and had a good home. I’ve had, I’ve had, I’ve had, but O God, this is a little hazelnut. It’s nothing. And my heart cries, O God, I miss that which I wanted the most.

Do you know friends, really down at the bottom, that’s the problem. That’s the problem with Russia. That’s the problem in Washington. That’s the problem everywhere. Ever, ever, they want, because they can get everything. You know the old story of Alexander who conquered the world and wept because there was not more world to conquer. Man has gone to the North Pole and to the South Pole and now turns his greedy eyes on the moon and on the planets; have and get and get and have.

The richest nation in the world is America. We’ve got the most. We think we’re in a recession. And still, cars are coming out longer and bigger and looking more like jukeboxes than ever. And there’s still more money and more bank accounts. I heard of a fellow whose deductions began to catch up and did finally catch up with his salary, but mostly, it’s not so. After they’ve taken off everything they want to take off and can think of, still the average fella has more money than he used to. Back when I was young fellow, a man used to raise ten kids on a dollar a day and do a good job. Now we’ve got everything, absolutely everything. And yet what country in the world is the most troubled, have more breakdowns, more insanity, more murders, or triangles, or bug houses and more hospitals and more psychiatrists, and more couches, in America. It’s rather a cynical thought, an ironic thought that the richest nation in the world manages to have the most divorces, the most suicides, the most juvenile delinquency; proving again that no matter how much you give a man, if he misses God, he cries ever me wanteth and goes out to do some crime.

And if you give him everything and then add God to it, you have wronged him and he’s wronged his own soul, for God wants to be first and wants to be all. Money won’t do it. If you take the kingdom of God and His righteousness, God will add money to you, as much as you need. If you take the kingdom of God and His righteousness, God may send your way learning and art and music and legitimate earthly loves. God may send it all to you and let you have it. But always with the understanding that He can take it away again and you won’t grumble, you’ll still have God. God is all.

Now, I close. Isaiah wrote, thy sun no more going down neither shall thy moon withdraw itself. For the Lord shall be thine everlasting light. And the days of thy mourning shall be ended. And the silk weaver of Germany wrote a kind of wild paraphrase on this, running like this. “O my God, How great is God! how small am I! A mote in the illimitable sky, Amidst the glory deep, and wide, and high Of Heaven’s unclouded sun. There to forget myself for evermore; Lost, swallowed up in Love’s immensity, The sea that knows no sounding and no shore, God only there, not I. More near than I unto myself can be, Art Thou to me; So have I lost myself in finding Thee. The boundless Heaven of Thine eternal love Around me, and beneath me, and above; In glory of that golden day, The former things are passed away— I, past and gone. And then we’ve almost lost as Scofield says of the Song of Solomon; we’ve almost lost our ability to kneel, bare-footed before such a burning bush as this.

When the church has restored to her again, the kind of spirit that can understand what Isaiah meant, and Tersteegen meant when he paraphrased Isaiah, then we will have revival. Then we’ll have the kind of revival the Quakers had. Then we will have the kind of revival the Methodist had. Then we’ll have what they had at Pentecost. Then we’ll have what the Quakers had and then we’ll have what the saints had had down the centuries. Wherever the fire glowed until the ages turned, that’s what they had. So have I lost myself in finding thee; have lost myself forever, O Thou Son, the boundless heaven of thine eternal love around me and beneath me and above. This is God.

My Brethren, let’s remember the text again, “hid with Christ, in God. If you gain the whole world and find not God in your own soul, what have you found? It’s worth nothing to you. Friends, these days, let’s search. Let’s go home to pray. Let’s get still. Let’s get quiet. Let’s learn the wonder of silence. Let’s learn the beauty of the secret seeking after God. There the Bible before us opened and our knees bent, and all alone in humility and penitence, let us cry, “only God, only God and God alone. Take the world but Give me Jesus.” Will you do that? We need it in this church. You need it. We all need it. May God grant it through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now Father, wilt Thou bless all who listened tonight. Wilt Thou grant we pray, that we may forget the things that are behind and press forward toward the things that are ahead. And that we may see all that is as only the size of a hazelnut and ourselves in God as vast, so vast that we encompass the worlds and are utterly empty without Thee. Fill us O God. Fill us with thyself for without Thee, ever we’ll be wanting. Fill us with thyself, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

Tags Attibutes, Immanence, Immensity

Messages

Tozer Talks

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

PDF Formatted Transcript Download

“A Journey into the Heart of God”

Message #1 of #10 in “Attributes of God Series

Colossians 3:1-3

I want to take one text. And while I hope to preach the Word from all over, this one text is sorta going to be, is going to sound the note and set the key for this series which begins tonight. Colossians, the third chapter, the first three verses. If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead and your life is hid, with Christ, in God. Those eight words, divided into twos, would make a good sermon for anybody. I give it to you free. Anybody that wants that can have that as a sermon. It’s the Lord’s Word, but I’ve just pointed out your life is hid, with Christ, in God. And I then want to limit that to this: with Christ, in God.

I’ll tell you what I want to do. Nobody hesitates to quote D.L. Moody. Nobody hesitates to quote Andrew Murray. Any preacher that can and wants to quote Spurgeon. With acceptance. Anyone can quote R.A. Torrey and quote Dr. Ironside and everybody says, That’s all right. Now what I want to do over these coming nights, is to go way back for help to a book written 600 years ago, and quote a few things from that book and weave it into the message that I am preaching about this journey into the heart of God; with Christ, in God.

This was written by a very saintly woman. I’m not much of believer in women preachers. I never heard one that helped me any. And this is not a plea. I like men preachers. And I even like books written by men. But a man ought not to be so stubborn, that he is his own worst enemy. And so if a woman writes a book, a little tiny book you can carry around your side pocket, and it lives 600 years, I conclude that, if it’s helpful, I ought to humble myself and read it. So, I want to quote what this little lady said about the Trinity. She said, Suddenly, the Trinity filled my heart with joy, and I understood that so it shall be in heaven without end.

Here you see my friends, is a step up from this utilitarian heaven that most people want to go to where they’ll have everything right. Split-level, two cars, and fountain and swimming pool and golden streets. She saw that heaven would be heaven because the Trinity will fill our hearts with joy without end in heaven. For the Trinity is God and God is the Trinity. And the Trinity is our maker and keeper; and the Trinity is our everlasting love and everlasting joy and bliss by our Lord Jesus Christ. And where Jesus appeareth, the Blessed Trinity is understood.

Here, my brethren, is what we must get into our heads and hearts, that Jesus Christ is the full, complete manifestation of the Trinity. And he that has seen the Father, he said, has seen me. And He has set forth the glory of the Triune God; all of God there is. So that where Jesus appeareth, God is. And where Jesus is glorified, God is. And where Jesus is love, God is.

Our scripture confirmation of this, I wouldn’t quote anybody unless there were scripture that would confirm it. No man has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us. And His love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit. There you have the Father and the Son, or the Father and the Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. There you have the Trinity. And whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God. That’s 1 John 4:12-16. John 17:20-23, Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.

Do you believe on Jesus Christ through the word of the Apostles? Do you? Do you believe on Jesus Christ through the word of the apostles? If you do, then Jesus said distinctly here, I’m praying for you. That they all may be one as Thou Father art in Me and I in Thee that they may be one in us. I in them and Thou in Me.

Now, another man said, some of you heard my little book review on the radio yesterday; and that man prayed this prayer, he said, O God, who art the Truth, make me one with Thee in everlasting love. It wearieth me often to read and hear many things, but in Thee is all that I would have and can desire. Now, when the church will find that out, we will come out of our doldrums. As soon as the church finds out that salvation is not a lifeboat only; that it is not an insurance policy against Hell only, but that it is a gateway into God and that God is all that we would have and can desire. And to quote again, Julian, she said, I saw that God is to us everything that is good and comfortable. She said, He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, and claspeth us and all encloseth us for tender Love that he may never leave us, being to us all that is good.

That is all I want to quote, but I start there and I point out to you, that Christianity is a gateway into God. And then when you get into God, with Christ, in God, then you’re on a journey into infinity, into infinitude. And that there is no limit, there is no place to stop. There isn’t one work and a second work or a third word, and that’s it. But there is numberless experiences and spiritual epochs and crises that can take place in your life; going on and journeying out into the heart of God in Christ.

Now, God is infinite. I’d like to talk a little about that. That’s the hardest thought that I will bring to you in any of this. In any of these sermons in this series, the hardest thought that I will ask you to grasp is that God is infinite. Now, you cannot understand what infinite means, but don’t let it bother you. I don’t understand it and I’m trying to preach about it.

Infinite means so much that nobody can grasp it. But reason nevertheless kneels and acknowledges that God is infinite. But as near as we can make out what we mean by infinite, we mean that God knows no limits and no bounds and no end; that what God is, He is without boundaries. And all that God is, He is without bound or limits.

Now we’ve got to eliminate all careless speech here. Because you know, you and I talk about unlimited wealth, and there’s no such thing as unlimited wealth. You can count it. We talk about boundless energy, which I don’t feel as if I have at the moment. But, there’s no such thing as boundless energy. You can measure a man’s energy. And we talk about somebody taking infinite pains. An artist takes infinite pains with his picture. But, he doesn’t take infinite pains. He just takes pretty good pains. He does the best he can and throws up his hands and says it isn’t right yet, but I’ll have to let it go.

That’s what we call infinite pains. But that’s a misuse of the word infinite. And misuse of the word boundless and unlimited, because the word boundless, unlimited and infinite, they all mean the same thing. And they describe God and they don’t describe anything but God. They do not describe space, nor time, nor matter, nor motion, or energy, nor creatures, nor sands, nor stars. All of that can be measured. Because you see, measurement is a way created things have of accounting for themselves.

Weight, for instance, that’s how things account for themselves to intelligence for the gravitational pull of the earth. You know how much you weigh and some of you wish you didn’t, but it’s the gravitational pull. We call that weight. And that’s how your body accounts to you for your condition. And then we have distance, space between heavenly bodies. That’s distance. Then we have length. The extension of a body into space. That’s length.

And we have various other ways of measuring things, because everything is relative you know and it’s just in part and it’s limited. You can always measure a thing. We know how big the sun is. We know how big the moon is. We know how much the earth weighs. We know how much the sun weighs. We know how much many other heavenly bodies weigh. We know how much approximately there is in the ocean. We know how deep it is, we can measure it because you know, even though it seems to be boundless, it really isn’t boundless at all. It always has a bound. You start in Liverpool and start traveling this direction on the Queen Mary or the United States, and when you get out of sight or land, you’d say, “why this ocean is boundless.” But, you wait a while and the happy old lady that stands out on Bedlow Island down in the southern part of Manhattan, you’ll see her and she’ll be a bound for you. That’s as far as the ocean goes. And so, you go up river and get off.

So there’s nothing boundless but God. There is nothing that it is infinite but God. Because you see, God is self-existent and absolute, and everything else is contingent and relative. Everything is relative. There’s nothing very big and nothing very wise and nothing very wonderful. It’s all relatively so. It is God that knows no degrees. The poet says one God, one Majesty, there is no God but Thee, unbounded, unextended unity.

For a long time, I wondered why he said, unbounded, unextended unity. That was the great hymn writer Faber. I wondered why he said it; unextended. God doesn’t extend into space. God contains space. It was CS Lewis who said, if you could think of a sheet of paper infinitely extended in all directions, and you were to take a pencil and make a line one inch long on it, that would be time. When you started to push your pencil, that’s the beginning of time. And when you lifted off the paper, that’s the end of time, and all around it, infinitely extended in all directions is God. That’s a good illustration.

Now, if there was a point where God stopped, then God wouldn’t be perfect. You see, for instance, if God knew almost everything, but not quite everything, then God wouldn’t be perfect in knowledge. Isn’t that right? His understanding wouldn’t be infinite as it says, in 147th Psalm. If God knew almost everything, let us take all it can be known, everything that can be known, past, present and future, spiritual, psychic, and physical everywhere throughout the universe. And let’s say God knows all about that except one percent. He knows 99% of all it can be known. Well, I’d be embarrassed to go to heaven and look into the face of a god that didn’t know everything. He has to know it all, or I can’t worship Him, because I can’t worship that, which is not perfect. And so God has to know all there is, or else, I can’t worship Him.

And then when it comes to say, power. If God had all the power there is except a little bit, and somebody else had a little bit of power hoarded that God couldn’t get to, then we couldn’t worship God. We couldn’t say that this God is an infinite power, because He wouldn’t be of infinite power. He’d just be close to it. But, falling short of it a little bit, He wouldn’t be quite God. He would be short of infinite. And while He would be more powerful than any other being, and perhaps even more powerful than all the beings in the universe lumped together. He still would have a defect and therefore, He couldn’t be God. For our God is perfect; and perfect in knowledge and perfect in power.

And if God had goodness, but there was one spot in God, that wasn’t good, then He wouldn’t be our God and Father. If God had love, but didn’t have all the love, just ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the love, or even higher percentage of the love than that, God still wouldn’t be God. God to be God must be infinite in all that He is. He must have no bound, and no limit, no stopping place, no point beyond which you can’t go, but that when you think of God or anything about God, you have to think infinitely about God.

Some of you people have charley horses in your head for two weeks after trying to follow this, and I don’t know about what I’ll have myself. But brother, it’s a mighty good cure for this little cheap God that we’ve got around here now in modern fundamentalism. This little cheap God, that you can pal around with “the man upstairs” there and the fellow that helps you win baseball games and all that. That god, my brother, He isn’t the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He isn’t the God that laid the bound, that made the heaven and the earth. He’s some other god.

You know, we can create gods just the same as the heathen can. We educated Americans, imagine that it takes a heathen to make a god. You know, you can make a God out of silver or gold or wood or stone. Or, you can make it out of your own imagination. And the god that’s being worshipped in many places, is simply a god of imagination. He’s not the true God. He’s not the infinite, perfect, all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving, infinitely boundless, perfect God. He’s not that God, but he’s something short of that. And so, Christianity is decaying and going down into the gutter. Because the God of modern Christianity is not the God of the Bible all together. That is, we fall short of it. I don’t mean to say that we do not pray to God. I mean to say that we pray to a God short and what He ought to be. So, we’ve got to think of God as being the Perfect One.

Now, there’s a lot I’d like to say about God and a lot I want to say about Him, the Divine Godhead and the Trinity. And I want to give you a little shock here now by saying this: that God takes pleasure in Himself and rejoices in His own perfection . I want you to hear that, and don’t say, now Mr. Tozer didn’t mean that, or don’t come and argue, because it won’t do any good. I’ve prayed and thought and searched and read the Word too long to ever take this back. God takes pleasure in Himself; and He rejoices in His own perfection. The Divine Trinity is glad in Himself. God delights in His works.

You remember that when God created the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein and man upon the earth, that while God was busy creating things and creatures, it kept saying, and God saw it all and lo, it was good. Then when God created man in His own image, God looked and behold, and said, “it’s very good.” God rejoiced in His works. He was glad in what He had done. And when we come to redemption, my friends, redemption is not a heavy work for God. God didn’t find himself in a fix like John Foster Dulles and have to rush off somewhere and try to straighten himself out and get right with the angels and get His foreign policy straightened out with the archangels.

God did what He did joyfully, my brethren. He did what He did joyfully. He made the heaven and the earth joyfully. That’s why the flowers look up and smile, and the birds sing and the sun shines, and the sky is blue, and the rivers trickle down to the sea. God made the creation and it was, He loved what he did. He took pleasure in Himself and took pleasure in His own perfections and in the perfection of his work.

Then, when it comes to redemption I repeat, that this was not a heavy task laid upon God by moral necessity. God wanted to do this. There was no moral necessity on God to redeem mankind. He didn’t have to send His Son Jesus Christ to die for mankind. He sent Him, but at the same time, Jesus said He did it voluntarily. He said, I came of myself. He did it of Himself. God was willing. It was the happy willingness of God.

A mother doesn’t have to get up and feed her baby at two in the morning. There’s no law compelling her to do it. The law would probably would compel her to take some care a little tyke, but she doesn’t have to give him that loving care that she does. She wants to do it. She does it because she likes to do it. I used to do it for our little fellas, and I enjoyed doing it. I don’t think I would now, because I don’t get up with the alacrity that I used to when I was twenty, two or three, but a mother or a father, they do what they do, because they love to do it.

Now I’d like to have you know, that this awesome, eternal, invisible, infinite, all-wise, omniscient God, the God of our fathers, and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the God we call, Our Father which art in heaven. While He is boundless and infinite, He can’t be weighed nor measured. You can’t apply distance to Him nor time nor space, for He made it all and contains it all in His own heart. And while He rises above it all, at the same time, this God is a friendly, congenial God, and He delights in Himself. The Father delights in the Son. This is my beloved Son, in whom my soul is well pleased. And the Son delighted in the Father and said, I thank Thee Father, Lord of heaven and earth. And certainly the Holy Ghost delights in the Father and the Son.

Then when it came to the Incarnation; the Incarnation wasn’t something that God, Jesus Christ did gritting His teeth and saying, I hate this thing. I wish I could get out of it. He came to the womb of the Virgin Mary and some of the dear old theologians, they said he abhorred. Notice that “he abhorred not the Virgin’s womb” Did you ever notice that expression, in one of our hymns? He abhored not the Virgin’s womb. The writer thought about this and said, Now, he was writing a beautiful hymn and said, wait a minute here. The word the womb of a creature? How can the everlasting, eternal, infinite God whom space cannot contain, wouldn’t it be a humiliation? Then he smiled and said, no, He abhorred not the Virgin’s womb. He wrote it and we’ve been singing it for centuries. That at the incarnation of Jesus Christ in mortal flesh, was not a heavy thing that Jesus had to do. The second person of the Trinity, the Everlasting Son, the Eternal Word made Himself flesh joyously, joyously. And so, when the angels sang about the Incarnation, they sang joyously about it.

And then salvation. Notice that in the 15th of Luke, that when Jesus Christ saves a man, He carries him on His shoulders and what’s the word there, the verb? Rejoicing, rejoicing, He does it rejoicing. He comes home rejoicing. And the same will be with the Consummation in that Great Day we’ll speak about a little later.

Now, God is not only pleased with Himself, and delighted with his own perfections, and happy in His work of creating and redeeming, but He is also enthusiastic. There’s an enthusiasm in the Godhead. And I want you to see my friends, that in creation, there is enthusiasm. If there wasn’t enthusiasm, it will run down shortly. Look at energy for instance. Why when you stop to think of, when you stop to think of what you are made out of, and what everything is made out of. Made out of atoms and atoms are made out of protons and neurons and electrons. And you can’t keep them still, not a second. They dash in all directions at tremendous speeds. And the heavenly bodies move the same way. The old Greeks called the movement that they made as they pass through space, the music of the spheres. I don’t think they missed it by very much at all.

And I’ve quoted before several years ago, but I hadn’t thought of it but that comes to my mind now. I think you ought to hear it again. And we ought to hear this every once in a while. The man who said from harmony, from heavenly harmony, this universal frame began, when nature underneath a heap of jarring atoms lay and could not heave her head. The tuneful voice was heard on high, arise you more than dead. And then cold and hot and moist and dry together to their stations leaked and music’s power obeyed. From harmony to harmony through all the compass of the notes it ran, the diapason closing full in man. I believe that, that God is saying when He created things, and that the motion and speed and the hurrying bodies as they move about, and the working of little creatures in the earth, the earth worms to make the soil soft and the working of the sun on the earth. All this is God joyously working in His creation. It’s seen in creation, it’s seen in light.

Did you ever stop to think of what it would be like if there was no light, if there wasn’t any light anywhere? If there wasn’t any light, nobody had any light. If God Almighty where to put a lead sack around all the heavenly bodies, and suddenly shut out all the light there is, I wouldn’t want to be alive. I’d want to turn myself off like a bulb and cease to be and ask God please to annihilate me, and I don’t believe in annihilation.

But, light and speed and color and sound. Some people are afraid of color. They think that spirituality consists in being, just being, just being drab. You know, drab like I’m dressed tonight. They think that spirituality, just being drab. My brother and sister, God made color. And He made all kinds of colors and He made all shades of colors. Look at the sunset. What is that? Just something scientific? You can’t fool me. You think that God made that lovely, beautiful thing out there and splash the sky with old rose and cerise and blue and white, and that God wasn’t smiling when He did that. You tell me that that’s just an accident of nature scientifically explained? Oh, you’re got too much learning for your own good. Go empty your head and get your heart filled and you’ll be better off, because I believe God made the sunset. How do I know? I know because the Holy Ghost wrote 150 Psalms. And in the 150 Psalms, He celebrates the wonders of God’s creation.

Some don’t believe that we ought to love God’s creation, they don’t. There’s a woman who wrote in England years ago and she says that soulish and if we love anything that God made, that soulish, and we lose it in the Great Day. That we ought to trim ourselves right down and walk around, I suppose looking like the inside of a black dog’s mouth, dark and gloomy and rather sinister. The fact is my friends, that God made the colors.

Now, the devil didn’t make the colors. The devil of course, gets people to use them, but he didn’t make them. God made the colors. He made the light and the light gave us the colors. Put the light of the sun through a prism and it will break up into its seven major or seven primary colors and then out of those primary colors, you get all colors you have. Now, I don’t believe that a woman ought to, a Christian woman, ought to try to look like a Christmas tree. I don’t think that. But I don’t think there’s any harm in wearing colors. Now, some of you dear old ladies won’t like me for this and you’ll want to paddle me good and say, what’s happening to the old man. Is he breaking up? No, I’m not breaking up. I always believed this. I always believe in colors. I like to see color. I’d like to see it everywhere. God made it all. And so, God’s enthusiastic about it.

I find enthusiasm in the Godhead. I see enthusiasm and energy. We used to say back there, I used to preach about this and us it for an illustration. I say, if you take a glass of water, there are atoms enough in a glass of water to blow up a whole city. And that sounded rather extreme. But, one day a little fellow, a little sawed off fellow with a sharp nose, gave the order and some men flew over Hiroshima and dropped a bomb about as big as a glass of water and blew the city to bits and killed 120,000 people. Just atoms. Just the little atoms. That’s all it was. It didn’t happen to be H2O or something else, but just atoms.

So, I tell you with so much energy in the world, and so much ability to come back and make good after you have killed a thing, out in my state of Pennsylvania, the money greedy dogs have gone out there and here’s what they’ve done. They have gone and bought up the coal rights in certain sections of the state. Beautiful hills that I grew up to see and love. Beautiful, sun-kissed hills, sometimes misty blue in the setting of the sun. And I would see them there, and I as a boy, loved them. And the creeks or cricks as we call them that ran below and the little runs and ran out to the rivers and down to the sea.

It was all very beautiful to me, that I went back to my old place here a few years ago and I found that these money hungry fellows had sold out the coal rights. And you know what they did? They didn’t dig a hole and go back after the coal. They took bulldozers and drag the top off of the earth; trees, grass everything to get down to the coal and lifted the coal out. And the result was, thousands and thousands of acres, whole hills that used to go up with their green to meet heaven’s blue, lay gashed like one vast grave that hadn’t been filled in. And the state of Pennsylvania said you got to fill it all in or we’ll fine you $300. And they looked at each other and grinned and said would cost us several thousand to fill it in. So, here’s your $300 and they left it as it was.

And I went away grief-stricken to see my beautiful hills, now great, ugly sandpits; and I went back in a few more years. You know what nature had done? Dear old, busy, enthusiastic and fun-loving joyous Mother Nature, did you know what she did? I don’t know where she got the seed, and I don’t know where she got anything, but I know she began to draw a green veil over that ugly gash. And now if you’d go back this summer, I think by this time or certainly by next summer, it will have cured itself. God Almighty put in nature the ability, when evil man, loving money would, would take bulldozers and steam shovels and gouge great ugly holes in God’s lovely creation, God gave Mother Nature ability to go right back and in a few years pull a curtain of green over it and start the trees again and now you can see nature.

You see, she’s busy, she’s enthusiastic, but there’s no she. It’s God my brethren. It’s God. We ought to stop thinking like a scientist and think like a psalmist. We’ll get right with God when we think like a psalmist and an apostle and stop thinking like a technician or mechanic. That’s our trouble, we think like mechanics. We say nature did this, and of course I’ve used the expression but I am explaining by nature, I mean God, enthusiastic over His work. So, there is God working with color and sound and bodies in space out there traveling around. Man can make them travel 25,000 miles an hour, but they’re poor, little old creeping oxcarts compared with the speed God gets out of them. Some of those heavenly bodies, the way they go.

And why did God say go out there and say, now get going fast. I don’t know, just God was just happy in His creation. That’s all. He looked, and lo, it was very good. This infinite God was enjoying Himself; somebody is having a good time in heaven and earth and sea and sky. Somebody is painting the sky, old rose and cerise and blue and pink and white. Somebody is making trees to grow where only gashes grew a year ago. Somebody is causing the ice to melt out of the river, and the fish to swim and the birds to sing and lay their blue eggs and build a nest and hatch their young. Somebody is running the universe. And I believe I know who it is. I believe it’s the Eternal Father, strong to save, whose power rules the restless wave. I believe that it’s the Trinity. That it is Our Father who art in heaven, Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord. God is having a good time His world.

And so, let us not think anymore of God as being heavy browed and gloomy. I repeat, that when God made the heaven and earth, they sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. There wasn’t a funeral at the creation of the world, there was an anthem, and all the creations sang; and at the Incarnation they sang. I know some of these textualists, they shut you right up. They put a clammy, pasty, pall over your happy mouth and say, now the angels didn’t sing, “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” According to the Greek, it says they said, “Peace on earth, goodwill to men.” But all you have to do is read that brother. You can’t read that without getting happy. If something begins to move in you. You get a rhythm. You get music in your heart! Peace on earth, goodwill toward men, they said. That was singing. There was singing at the Incarnation.

And then, at the resurrection there was singing. I will sing among my brethren said Jesus in the Psalm, and when He rose from the dead, it doesn’t tell us in the New, but it foretells it in the Old, that one of the first things Jesus did was to sing. And one of the last things He did before He went up to die, was to sing a hymn along with his brethren. And I’d loved to have heard that hymn. And you know, you’ll indentify it. It is found in the Psalms. I don’t know which one.

And think about the Rapture. Did you ever stopped to think about the Rapture? Now, some of you have got so far from prophecy. You’ve been scared out and intimidated and chased down the alley until you don’t believe in the coming of the Lord anymore. The pre-tribulationist and the post-tribulationist and the amillennialist and what have you, have all scared a lot of you people and scared me. I still believe Jesus Christ is coming back to the world He made and died for. I still believe He’s coming back and His feet will stand on that day where they stood once on the Mount of Olives. Do you believe that. I believe He’s coming back.

Now I’ll admit that I don’t go with everything I see in the Scofield notes. And I’ll admit that I don’t go along with everything that everybody puts on a chart and stands up with a long stick and says, now, this is this and that’s that and the other thing is the other thing. That’s carrying it too far brother. I don’t want to know more than Isaiah. I’ll be satisfied if I’m just a shade under Isaiah. But not more than Isaiah. So I’m not going to, I’m not trying to know more than Daniel and Isaiah and John on the isle of Patmos. Yeah, well, I knew John was somewhere but I’m getting tired and forgot where he was.

Well brethren, I believe He’s coming back again. You know, everybody knows how to die, but have you ever stopped to think you’ll be all mixed up when you come to the Rapture. You know, it’s going to be something that has never happened before. And lots of people have died. Old Jacob pulled his feet into bed with him and leaned on his staff and gave up the ghost and slept with his fathers. That was a dear, quaint old way they had and doing in those days. They slept with their fathers. Everybody slept with Grandpa. And there they lay, all row on row, sleeping together. And that’s the way they died. They knew how to die. You know how to die. You just lie down and when it gets so that you can’t live, you die.

And so, we’re not too much worried about dying, but the Rapture. I tell you that that’s a hard one. What’s going to happen? Here you are sleeping out here Dear Mrs. Deet sleeping over here, Brother Wood and Brother Moore, all out here and Brother Gately and all of these that we’ve known during the years. They lie sleeping all around. And if the Lord tarry, why, you and I will join them. We’ll go. We can’t live forever, down here I mean. And you’ll die.

But then, coming up out of there; getting up out of there. And if you’re walking around on the street and the Lord; you hear the sound of a trumpet that’s louder than the horn of a diesel engine and you recognize the timber isn’t earthly at all. It’s heavenly, and it isn’t even the music of the spheres. It’s the music of the voice of Jesus, the Son of God. And suddenly you’re transformed. You won’t know what to do. You know, you won’t know how to act. You can’t find out anywhere. When they are going to be presented before the Queen, they know how to curtsey. You know that I couldn’t do it, I’d fall apart, but they do it. They curtsey and they know how to approach kings and queens and presidents and all other VIPs. But nobody’s told us what to do when we get over yonder.

And suddenly, you’re walking down the street and you’re somebody else, and you look at yourself, no more warts, no more wrinkles, and feel your face, no more hollow holes and feel head and hair. It didn’t used to be, and you’re glorified and you look away and see the Son of God and you’re like Him. And you won’t know what to do. The people lying in their graves, what will they do? Did you know that I know what they’ll do.

I mentioned this one time, and where did I mention this? The trouble of getting around so much is you forget where you have been. And I mentioned it somewhere and a man came up afterward and I said, we were going to sing, sing arise and sing ye that dwell in dust. That’s what it said, rise and sing ye the dwell in dust. For the earth shall cast forth her dead. And a man came to me and said I heard a sermon, a great sermon preached one time called, “Singing Dust, Singing Dust,” that the dead who sleep in the dust of the earth shall rise, and they’ll sing, and it will be singing dust.

Well, there’s going to be singing at the Rapture. And there’s going to be singing at the Consummation, and that Great Day, Thou art worthy to take the Book and to open the seals thereof for Thou was slain and hast redeemed us. That’s the theme of the new song. The theme of the new song isn’t, I am. The theme of the new song is “Thou art.” Do you notice the difference? When you leave the old hymnody of Wesley and Montgomery and Watts and the rest of them, it was Thou art, Thou art, Thou art O God, Thou art. Then when you get down to the modern hymns of the modern era, the modern fundamentalist it’s, I am, I am, I am, I am. It makes me sick to my stomach. All this, I “aming.”

Well, I know we can testify and we have a right to and occasionally a good hymn of testimony is all right too. But, we’ve overdone it as we have over done almost everything else we’ve ever done anything about, we’ve overdone it. So, we’ve overdone this I am, I am stuff.

My brethren, let me say to you that the joy of the Lord, the joy of the Lord is a song of the ransomed is going to be, Thou art, Thou art worthy O God. They said to take the books. Thou hast redeemed us to God and has made us kings and priests and we shall reign on the earth. And I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000s and 1000s of 1000s. And you put on a blackboard how many that is and I will buy a dinner. I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the beasts and the elders and the number of them was 10,000. Isn’t it strange that men are made, actually made. They have got such timber and I when I say timber, I mean timber here. They’ve got such timber in their head, that instead of getting happy over this, they solemnly try to figure out who these deacons were and these elders and beasts and these creatures. And they write books on who they were and what they looked like. Isn’t that strange? How dumb can a scholar get? I don’t know about these creatures here. See me five minutes after the Rapture and I’ll tell you about it. But now, I just have to take it by faith. Thou hast made us kings and priests, and he said all these creatures saying, Worthy is the Lamb. Not, “look at me, I’m wonderful, I’m happy, happy, happy, happy!” No, the Lamb, the Lamb is worthy. So that’s the Consummation.

Well, my brethren, the infinite Godhead invites us into Himself to share in all the intimacies of the Trinity. And Christ is the way in. Did you know the moon is geared this way toward the earth; relative to the earth. It’s geared this way. It turns, and the Earth turns. But, they turn in such a way, that we only see one side of the moon, we never see the other They’re hoping to go around and see the other side. I’m not interested. It’s the dark side. But, we see only one side of the moon. And I thought, the Eternal God is so vast, so infinite, extends out so far into infinitude that I can’t hope to know all about God and all there is about God.

But God has a man-ward side just as the moon has an earth-ward side and always keeps that smiling, yellow face turned earth-ward. So God has a man-ward side and always keeps that turned man-ward; and that side is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God’s man-ward face, God’s man-ward side. Jesus is the way God sees us. He always looks down and sees us in Jesus Christ. And then, we go back to my quotation, where Jesus appeareth, the Blessed Trinity is understood.

Now, I close and I want to ask some questions. Are you contented with nominal Christianity? If you are, I have nothing for you. Are you contented with popular Christianity that runs on the authority and popularity of big shots? If you are, I have nothing for you. Are you content with elementary Christianity, with the beginnings, the elementary beginnings of things? If you are, all I’ve got for you, is to exhort you earnestly to press on toward perfection. But if you’re not satisfied with nominal Christianity and popular Christianity and the first beginnings of things, and you want to know God, the Triune God for yourself, why, pray for me and I’ll be preaching on these subjects.

Tags Attibutes, God's Love

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date February 21, 2021

Help spread the word and share this message with your friends

“We Have This Treasure in Earthen Vessels” – September 14, 1958

2 Corinthians 4:5-7

Beginning tonight at seven o’clock as has been intimated, I shall preach a series of sermons if I am able to stand up under it because I realized that this will be the most difficult series I ever preached. Not physically difficult, but a great fear is on you when you talk about God. If you don’t talk about Him worthily, you had better not to mention His name. And I will begin tonight this series, “A Journey, an Excursion into God.” The text for all the time will be, “with Christ in God, with Christ in God” from Colossians. [Complete ten-part sermon series starts next Sunday, February 28 on TozerTalks.com]

Tonight I want to talk a little about the unity of the Trinity and the fact that wherever Jesus is, the Trinity is there; God manifests Himself. We will come unto him. And I also want to talk about the enthusiasm of the Godhead. God’s uncreated enthusiasm for His work, for all that He has made, all that He’s doing, from creation to the consummation. So I’d like to have you come, we’ve announced it over the radio, and I think there will be good crowds. But we want you.

Now I want this morning, to follow last Sunday mornings text in Second Corinthians chapter four, and beginning with verse five, this. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus sake. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the Excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. That will be the text. We have this treasure in earthen vessels that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us.

Now, the Holy Spirit refers here to what he calls, this treasure. And the preceding verses give us some hint, and the rest of Paul’s writings, what that treasure is. The Christian, let’s begin like this, that the Christian has within him a priceless deposit. He has received something which has made him, I wonder if I dare say, biologically different from all the rest of mankind. He is like other people, so much like other people, that if you see two men sitting on a bus side by side or riding in an airplane or sitting at a conference table in some business house, or working at the mill, you couldn’t tell them apart. They are just men, just two men. But they are as much different as Heaven is different from Hell finally, because one of them is just man, born of the degenerate seed of Adam, living his self centered, decent, nice, life, but self-centered and godless. The other has within him a priceless deposit, a new, living organism directly from God; in a wonderous way, that philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, cannot possibly ever understand, to say nothing of explaining. He has become a partaker of the divine nature. And he is a shrine wherein dwells the ineffable Godhead.

Now I don’t use words carelessly. If I’m sitting around a table eating with brother McAfee and Brother Moore, I might say some things that where I couldn’t document, you know, just teasing along but, when I’m preaching the Word, I’m ready to back all that to say, with the exceptions and occasional lapsus linguae when I say Jacob and mean Abraham, and I couldn’t force back a mistake. But I say that a Christian, a true Christian, a regenerate Christian. Now there are other kinds of Christians, you know. There are Christians in name only and those that are dead and think they are living and all sorts of so-called Christians, but I am talking about the real Christian, the only real kind of Christian there is. He’s a shrine wherein dwells the ineffable Godhead.

And I mean by that, is that you cannot divide the substance of the Godhead. It was said way back in the beginning of the church that we dare not confound the persons, and we cannot divide the substance. The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are of equal substance, eternal and therefore, God cannot be partly present anywhere. And the Father cannot be where the Son is not nor the Son where the Spirit is not, nor the Father and the Spirit where the Son is not. While it was the Son who was incarnated and died on the tree and not the Father and not the Spirit. Yet also Jesus said while walking on Earth, the Son of Man which is in the bosom of the Father. He came and was incarnated, and yet never left the bosom of the Father. For the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are of one eternal, uncreated substance. Jesus said, that if we kept His commandments and followed Him and loved Him, “We will come and make our abode with him.” Now this is the priceless treasure; and the commission and ability to make known to others this truth, the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Now that’s point number one, that the Christian has a priceless treasure. He doesn’t have any more if he is a millionaire Christian, and he doesn’t have any less if he’s in the old folks home, or in the poorhouse. He still has a treasure, so excellent, so infinitely excellent that language cannot possibly describe it. That it takes hymnody and imagination and faith and worship and years of experience, even to touch remotely on the borders of this vast glorious ocean of molten gold that lies in the heart of the Christian. Now that’s one thing.

Now the second thing is, we have this priceless treasure in earthen vessels. Would it not seem logical that anything so exquisitely lovely, should be contained in something as near like it as possible? Would it not seem that diamonds should be contained in caskets made of gold? But here we have this priceless treasure that angels desire to look into, contained in an earthen vessel.

Now, every Christian has felt the incongruity of this. You see, out trouble friends is that we’re lazy. We’re mentally lazy and we’re spiritually lazy and we like to get everything settled and made up and fixed, nailed down and labeled and pigeonhole and have a rubber band around it so we know right where it is, and thus our Christianity becomes a conventional, neat little package. We never like to be suspended. We never like to have any incongruities, or any inconsistencies or paradoxes in our lives. But I submit that the Christian life is a life with the good many paradoxes in it, and a great many incongruities. So many, that they have been openly attacked by unbelievers as proof that Christianity is not real and not of God.

We know better than that and we know the reason for these incongruities, the apparently incongruities. But it’s apparently incongruent that the excellency of this treasure, this treasure with all its excellence, should be committed to an inferior vessel, a base vessel made of clay. Paul even calls it this vile body, though that’s not quite the right translation. This earthly, base, inferior thing, as much inferior to the content as a ten-cent store flower pot might be if you were to pour it full of molten gold. Now, this vessel is not only our bodies, but our total personalities; the flesh with all its weakness; the mind and its state of much imperfection; and the soul, as fragile as cobweb as we see it. And we’ve all felt this inconsistency in our reverence, maybe we have never said it.

You know, we Christians keep quiet about a lot of things. David did the same thing. David said, when I thought to utter this, why if I say this, it will be a hindrance, it will be a stumbling block to the children of the thy people. So he kept it to himself in the 73rd Psalm. One of the paradoxes he faced, one of the difficulties of why good people often suffer and bad people always get fat and their eyes stand out and have everything. David said that bothered him a long time but he never peeked. He said, I kept that to myself because I didn’t want to hinder God’s children.

And so I imagine that there are some of these paradoxes that we Christians mull over in prayer and in meditation, but we don’t mention because we’re afraid of raising questions we can’t answer. But the answer lies here my Brethren and Sisters. The answer lies here. It’s a deep truth this answer is; why such an infinitely precious treasure should be contained in such a casual, ordinary vessel. It’s the reason, the answer is here. I say the reason and the understanding of it is a profound philosophy.

Now, don’t misunderstand and don’t shy away from the word philosophy. Because I believe that all people are philosophers. I believe we all ought to be. For a philosophy of life is a viewpoint from which you can glass all the terrain and look out on all the neighborhood. And it is a high, vantage point from which you can orientate yourself and square away so your values get right, and your directions get right, and you hear your marching orders. You know what to do and confusion leaves you, and frustration goes, and your mind clears up, and you know who you are and why and whom you belong. That is spiritual philosophy.

Every Christian ought to be a philosopher. If he just depends on texts, pretty soon, somebody will come along with a barrage of text and upset him; Jehovah’s Witness or somebody. But, if he dives deep and finds out what those texts mean and extract the deep spiritual meaning from them, and gets himself a philosophy of the spiritual life, then he will not be shaken. He can’t shake him. No Jehovah’s Witness with these phonograph records, and his brass will ever be able to move him. Nobody will ever change him at all.

It’s amazing how stupid God’s people are. A preacher came to me in a Bible conference not too long ago. And he had a tract written by Jehovah’s Witness against the Trinity and he was all wrought up and disturbed. He said, oh, we’ve got to do something. He was all worried. He said, the people are getting all worried about this, because this nasty little tract said that one plus one plus one equals three. And therefore we had three Gods a nasty little crack written in the spirit those men can write. And this man who was middle-aged was disturbed and he said his people were disturbed. Why should people who have had one year under a good pastor be disturbed about the Trinity? Why should we not make our churches into Bible schools and seminaries so that our people can go out instructed in the book?

Now I said I would give you the reason that God temporarily allows an infinitely priceless treasure to be contained in an ordinary earthen vessel. It’s because of who God is and who we are. And it’s because of what God is and what we are. You see, God is uncreated, and we are His created works. God is self existent, and we exist from Him. God is the originating cause and we are but God’s thoughts incarnated. God, the upholder and the Sustainer, and the Mover of all matter and time and space and law and motion and energy. God is the fountain of it all. God is the life of all that lives. God is the wisdom of all the wise. God is the Soul of all souls of all beings.

And so, the logic of God’s claim to preeminence; we being simply satellites thrown from God so to speak, sparks struck from the holy anvil; we being made in His image, simply, we being created, there was a time when we were not. There never was a time when he was not, for He is eternal, and never had a beginning. You and I had a beginning. He thought us into being and spake us into existence. And when he did, we became creatures. And the difference between God and creatures is a gulf fixed so wide that it’s wider than the Gulf that separated Dives and Lazarus, for it is the gulf between God and not God. It is the gulf between that which is created and that which is not created. It is the gulf between the creature and the Creator, an infinite Gulf separates that which is the uncreated Godhead from all His created beings even though they be archangels or seraphim by the throne.

So you see, there has to be a proper relationship held and established. You and I have to realize we come from God and go back to God. We’re dependent upon God. We revolve around God as the satellite around its sun. As the planets around the sun in the heavens, that we depend upon God out of God and into God. And that because God is, we are and if God were not, we’d cease to be. All this, we’ve got to know. And we’ve got to have this relationship right. And as long as we hold a right relationship between us and God, everything is all right.

But as soon as we misinterpret our high honor; as soon as we begin to say, I am a Christian, I’m a brother to Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, Heaven is my home, and I have been redeemed. I have all the righteousness of God in Christ. Soon as we get to talking like that. Pretty soon, Old Mother Nature rouses and shakes her head and whispers to us, you’re somebody really. You weren’t until you were converted, but you are now. You’re somebody. You’re a wonderful fellow. And we begin to misinterpret the high honor that God has bestowed upon us. And we begin to take the place of God Himself. And instead of realizing that we’re dirt picked up by the sovereign choice of God and inhabited, we begin to think that we’re superior. We look down on yellow people and black people and moderns and liberals and Mohammedans and atheists, and harlots and all the rest, forgetting that no Christian ever I ought to look down on anybody. No Christian ever ought to take any attitude, but that of complete humility. And along with Wesley say when he saw the drunk there, but by the grace of God go I.

We all ought to know this, but you see, I can preach this to you, and you can write it down in a notebook and memorize it. And when it’s all over, we still don’t have it. We feel a natural, though depraved love of self. And that, of course, upsets all spiritual balance and destroys all the logic of our being, and brings a blight to our souls. So God won’t rest until He dethrones us experientially.

Now, the fault I find, and I’m a member of Keswick Council, and McAfee sits in on it and Mr. Chase. But nevertheless, I say, and I’ve said it there at Moody Church, that my fault I find with it is, that it is too much in the head and not enough in experience. You can know the doctrine of the crucified life. You can be instructed and have even this philosophy that I’ve talked about, this viewpoint, realizing that God is above all, and you’re beneath all and God is in heaven, you’re on earth, that God is righteous, to you belongs confusion. You can know that and not experience it. And until you experience you don’t really know it. For lots of people are in Hell that went to Keswick meetings and believed in the deeper life. Don’t forget that.

John Bunyan and that great old masterpiece of his which I’m reading again for my own joy, old Calvinist that he was, he nevertheless took one of these, one of his characters Ignorance, I think, right up to the gate of Heaven. And he got the order, you go below and send him down to Hell. And then said the old allegory, he said this, “then I perceived there is a way to Hell from the gate of Heaven.” That you can be religious all your life, and yet never have experienced it. Only have known it in your head. Only be orthodox.

So, it’s the same with the deeper life, the crucified life. You can know all about it, and if everybody that can get up and spin off all about, not I but Christ, be honored, loved and exalted. If everybody that knows the doctrine, we’re living it what a bunch of Christians we’d be. But we know it, but we don’t experience it. So, the dear God wants to bring us to the experience of it. So He gives us a continual demonstration to keep us humble. Oh, you’d think that life would humble us, wouldn’t you. You would think that a businessman who goes out and invests all his money in a deal and has it blow up in his face and has to start again as a machinist working for a dollar and a quarter an hour or whatever he gets. You’d think that would humble him but, no, no. You’d think the young woman who is in love with a young man and they’re engaged and one day he sends her a note saying, I’ve changed my mind. I’m joining the Foreign Legion and jilts her. You’d think that would knock her pride. But no, it doesn’t. She’ll go right out and ball a while and go right back before her mirror and doll herself up and think she’s as pretty as she was before.

You can’t destroy pride from the outside. It takes a work of God within to do it. And so God does this, God gives us a vessel that is a constant problem to us. Our weak, frail bodies, our aging bodies, and our tired minds and our bad memories, and our forgetfulness, and our low IQ, and our poor, total self, he gives us that. He said, now that’s what sin has done to you. That’s why you’re like that. But I put within you an eternally, precious treasure that’s yours. And it’s yours forever and ever and ever, while the ages roll. And so in order that you might remember who you are, and how low you are, and how worthless you are apart from My love, why I’m just going to let you carry this treasure around in the little old vessel to keep you humble.

You know, Francis of Assisi was a great soul. He wasn’t over on our side quite, but he was a great soul. And he used to refer to his body as a donkey that he rode around in. He took good care of it. He said, take care of the body. It’s the donkeys he called it Brother Ass. He said, this is the donkey that God gave me to ride around on. And that’s all he ever called his body. It was just the transportation we say now. This vessel, this precious treasure had to have transportation. And so that was the vessel. He saw that and God wants us to see it.

We must experience our undoneness not learned in seminary. But of course, you get the root of it, the idea of it in seminary or in Bible school or in your church, but you must experience it in your heart. My brother, It is one thing to know that your IQ is low. It’s another thing to get up and make up bobble in society and be a red face for two weeks. There’s a difference you see. It’s one thing to know your memory is bad. It’s quite another thing to forget a telephone number right when you’re desperately in need of it.

So God just lets us be weak like this. Somebody says, why doesn’t God make our bodies powerful and strong, worthy of the treasure it contains? Why doesn’t he make our minds to be like the very mind of Christ, perfect and all? Well, if God did that, pretty soon he’d have another rebel on his hand. He’d have another Lucifer. You’d look yourself over and say, this is that great Babylon which I have built. And God would have to turn you out to eat grass until your feathers were grown. So the result is, God just lets you trot around in this poor old donkey of a vessel of yours. But don’t forget, faith knows what you got. Faith knows that we have that infinitely, precious deposit. We are the dwelling place of the ineffable Godhead. Jesus Christ Himself lives in our hearts. The Holy Ghost inhabits our beings. And we’re God’s children. And our names are written in His hands and on His shoulders and in His heart. And we are as dear to Him as the apple of His eye, and ten million, ten million hells can’t take us out in His hand. And yet, He’s not going to let us in any wise do any strutting.

I heard again while I was in the East about the man who’s so important he could strut sitting down. And you and I know that a fellow can he, . . . we’re just naturally proud. And if we can’t be proud of anything else, we’ll be proud of the fact that we’re humble. And so the Lord let you have this vessel of yours, this earthen vessel. That’s where you get your humbling you see. If the Lord merely said to you, now son, you’re pretty weak, and you’d better watch it. We’d say thank you Father, I’ll try and we’d have nice testimony. But the Lord says it, then let you fall flat on your face. And you get up and say, O God, oh, what a fool I’ve made of myself. I don’t know whether God replies to such talk or not, but if He does, He’d say something like this, “Well, if you had believed what I told you, you wouldn’t have fallen, but I had to let you tumble in order that you’d believe it and experience it. You see, any doctrine that isn’t experienced is very likely to be simply nominal and not real. You’ve got to experience it.

Now, so that treasure remains in earthen vessels that we may know our own weakness; that we may know our own ignorance; that we may have no confidence in the flesh ever; and that we may be all and in all. I mentioned this casually on the radio yesterday. Maybe most of you didn’t hear it, so I’ll tell you now. Last week I was in Buffalo at a conference. I didn’t attend the yak-yak sessions. I attended evening sessions when they didn’t do anything, but just hear the Word, that is, the preaching.

And while I was there, I think I never got such treatment. They rolled out the red rug. And the red carpet, I really walked around on the red carpet. And I went back to my hotel room about the third day or second maybe day and I said to myself, it looks as if my preaching was getting more effective than before. And it did look like it. And then the letter came in a batch of mail from the office in New York and I opened it up. Some of it was routine, but one was a letter from a missionary in Vietnam, a young fellow with a number of degrees. He said that the Alliance Witness was like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead. When it was good, it was very, very good. But when it was bad, it was horrible. And he called attention and he used those words and he call attention to a recent editorial. And he said, I am dismayed at such tabloid thinking. He said it’s rah-rah thinking. It’s oversimplification. Then he ended by saying, why don’t you let God judge the world? I was trying to be the judge of the world.

Well, that kind of hurt me coming from an Alliance missionary, but pretty soon, a sense of humor got a hold of me. And I said to myself, what’s that you were saying to yourself here a couple hours ago that you think your preaching is getting more effective? I said to myself, isn’t it maybe that God just knew that you needed this letter? So, I have that letter as a treasure. Because it helped me to remember that not everybody is on my side. And that I make a lot of mistakes too. And that I do oversimplify and that I got a lot of things wrong with me, but I’m not apologizing, I’m explaining. For I’m simply saying, I have this treasure in earthen vessel. And if you find the earthen vessels getting chipped and checked and cracked, and Brother, don’t look at me, I know it. But I also know he can’t take the treasure away. I also know that you can’t rob me of that eternal deposit which I got when I believed in Jesus Christ’s savingly and was made partaker of the divine nature. And every time I start to raise my head just a little bit, God let’s somebody come along and slap me down. So I’ve got used to it. I thank Him. I thank Him.

Wouldn’t it be terrible if the Lord would never let your enemies get to you and only have your friends. You know what happens to politicians when they never listen to anybody but their friends, they get defeated. Just let anybody go to Washington or Springfield, or wherever it is and listen to his friends. Next time he’ll be defeated. Because his friends have all the good things to say. He’d better listen to his enemies, so he’ll run scared. Then he might get elected.

So, in the kingdom of God, I have got so many friends. I got friends here in this church that are so dear to me, that they are dearer than the birth of blood and flesh. And they wouldn’t say a thing against me if they knew I was wrong. My good board, those dear men, I know that they wouldn’t say anything against me even if they knew I was dead wrong. But you know, that isn’t good for a man. Too much of that will swell your head. So, the Lord let somebody come along with the other side. That’s to show that you still are a man in the flesh and that you have an earthen vessel and that it’s not a very good vessel.

Well, this kind of thing won’t hurt the honest good man of God. Because he’ll be glad to get rid of his self-confidence after all, for self-confidence is a hellish thing. And really self-confidence is a deceitful thing because nobody’s really self-confident. Everybody has really got a deep, basic inferiority complex. But self-confidence is there nevertheless. But we’re glad to be rid of it. Glad to be thrown out on God. We’re glad to have infinite wealth in a poor, little ten-cent store vessel. We’re glad that eternity dwells in the temple of time. We’re glad that the High Godhead comes to the mortal man and lives there.

Well, he’ll be glad to get rid of his ambition and his pride and what Simpson called the strength that harms. And he’ll be glad to endure the discipline of the earthen vessel. Isn’t that a good book title, “The Discipline of the Earthen Vessel?” Why doesn’t somebody write a book on it? Dave Gillespie, I hearby appoint you herewith. I’ll write the introduction, if you’ll write the book, “The Discipline of the Earthen Vessel.” You have got to have it. You’ve got to have it. You gotta have your lashings. God doesn’t like to do it, but He’s got to do it, to keep us low, so we can raise us high. And if we won’t go down, He will slap us down. And He will let this earthen vessel slap us down.

Poor old Brother Hoffman, tired, old, weary body. And I see you in varying degrees of decrepitude. God bless you. And you look at me and smile and say, now look who’s talking. I know, I know. It’s the old earthen vessel, Brother and Sister. But it’s the discipline, if you can learn the discipline the earthen vessel. If you can let your troubles be your school teacher. If you can go to college to your weakness, and sit and listen to the lecture delivered by your ignorance. And learn from your poor base vessel. That after all, all that God has to do is withdraw His hand and you’d sink for a million eternities. But He holds you in His hand and says no man can pluck you out.

So, we’ll enjoy more in that glorious day. Because we’ve had this little while of riding on an ox cart. God doesn’t give you a Packard. He gives you an ox cart and bumps along and says here, bump along on the ox cart. I’m speaking spiritually now. If He gave you a jet plane, you’d blow up with pride, so He just keeps you bumping along or on your feet. And every once in a while you’ll look up and say O God, I’m below and Thou art above. I’m little and Thou art great. I’m weak and Thou art mighty. I’m ignorant and Thou art omniscient. Your attitude is right then and your relationship to God is right. And you’re off the throne and God’s on the throne and the logic of your being is in balance. Everything is all right.

And if ever you change your mind about it, listen to your friends and believe all the cards they send you on your anniversary. When they tell you how you can sing or how you can preach or how they do love you. Just as soon as you do that the Lord will say, well, the poor boy has got to have another bump.So, He lets the old earthen vessel crack up a bit and you come crawling out wiping your eyes and saying, dear God, why didn’t I know better. We don’t. We don’t Brother. We just never learn. We’re going to one of these days when we know as we are known and we look on His face and His name is on our forehead. Then we’ll thank Him for the discipline of the earthen vessel.

Tags Acts, David, Servanthood