Tag: Revelation

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date October 6, 2024

“The Theology of Revelation”

The Theology of Revelation

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 22, 1959

Have you noticed in the book of Revelation that we’ve been dealing with, have you noticed how much theology there is in it? Some people have the idea that the book of Revelation is a rather strange, forced book of odd beings and strange creatures, but have you noticed as we went along here how many of the great doctrines of the faith are here? They’re taught, they’re taken for granted, they’re assumed, they’re referred to, they’re interwoven, they’re built in, they’re here, the great doctrines of the faith.

Now in that fifth chapter, beginning with verse 7, it says, And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him that sat on the throne, He and Him, He being the Lamb and Him being God the Father. And when He had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps and golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of saints.

And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof, for thou hast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And hast made us unto our God-kings and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times, ten thousand and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in them, heard it saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever. The four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth forever and ever.

As I have pointed out before, these two chapters are one. This section of Scripture begins, after this I looked, and behold a door standing open in heaven. The first voice which I had heard was the voice of a trumpet talking with me. It said, Come up hither. Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne.

The whole universe is in view, as I have pointed out, and the three divisions of moral creatures is before us here. For moral creatures are divided into three sections, three divisions, the unfallen, the fallen and unredeemed, and the fallen and redeemed. These are the three sections. There are the unfallen creatures. They know nothing at all about sin, because they have never sinned. They know not the joy of forgiveness, for they have never been forgiven. But they are there, ecstatically happy in the presence of God, unfallen creatures.

Then there are the fallen ones that are not redeemed and never will be. Potentially they were. For I believe, along with the man who wrote the song, Lord, I believe, were sinners more than sands upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all redemption paid, for all a full atonement made. But they take no advantage of it, and so they are fallen creatures and remain fallen.

Then there are the redeemed who were fallen but are redeemed and saved. They are ransomed and brought out from their fallen state. There are the three divisions of the world. You will never find any other kind of people or creatures anywhere in the universe. You will never run into any creatures anywhere that do not fall into one of those three categories.

Now, right at the center of all this is the Holy Trinity. The whole universe is there in view, and the Holy Trinity is in the center. In chapter 4, the Eternal Father is prominent as Creator, and that is as it should be, because the Bible begins with the well-known words, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That is repeated and told over and over again.

It is wonderful how the Bible says the same thing over and over again, and yet you don’t get tired of it. You find it said in a different way, and it is the same thing, but still, it sounds fresh and new. It is like a day. You don’t get tired of the day because the day shifts and changes. It is light, and then it is noonday, and then it is long shadows, and then darkness, and then the sky above, and then the moon and the sun, and later in the morning the sun rising, and the stars the next night, and clouds this day.

So, God keeps the same universe revolving around about us, our familiar little world that we know, and yet a man has to be pretty sick and pretty mentally dull to find the world dull. I don’t find the world dull at all. I find that this is a most interesting world, and you find the word like that. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Now, that ought to do, because that says that, and there it is, and God wrote that, and that settles it, and that ought to be enough, but not God. God likes to take the golden threads of truth and weave a thousand, thousand kinds of tapestries using the same threads but getting a different picture each time, and yet the pictures are very much alike. The Eternal Father is here, and it’s said that He created. Psalms 102, for instance, Thou of old has laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thine hands.

And the church has celebrated the Creating Father. You know that old creed, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And here in Revelations 4, here’s the picture, they’re worshiping the Eternal Father. It says, They rest not day and night. Why, we’ve gotten to a state in our country where people feel that if they go to church once a week it’s enough, and if they go to church twice a week, they ought to have a crown. But it says here, they rest not day and night.

You know, the world has missed it. It’s missed it all together. Lent is supposed to be long enough to be serious about religion, and when you die, when you get married, or when the baby’s born. Outside of that, we’re not supposed to take the whole thing too seriously. But they take it seriously all the time. They rest not day and night, and say, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.

And here’s why they worship Him. Thou art worthy, O Lord. Now remember, that’s the Father. Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, because Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are, were, and are created. So, we have here the Eternal Father, prominent as the Creator, and the creatures of all kinds acknowledging this and celebrating it.

Then there’s the Eternal Son, prominent in redemption. Revelation 5, 7 says that He took the book, and they worshiped Him, and they said, Thou art worthy to take the book, for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God. And the Church all down the years has worshiped the Eternal Son for redeeming that which the Eternal Father had created, but which in the wisdom and long suffering of the Father had been permitted to rebel.

And the Church has worshiped Him, and that same creed that I quoted goes on to say, And I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, and continue to worship Him. And in the old Latin song that we have in English, it says, Thou art the King of glory, O Christ, thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. Thou sittest at the right hand of God in glory everlasting.

Now I want to tell you that it’s impossible to overpraise Jesus Christ. It’s possible to become a religious fanatic. It’s entirely possible to overdo something and get one string and twang on that until you lose your hearing. People aren’t listening to you, and they run when they see you coming, if you’re layman.

And if you’re a preacher, they just stay away in droves, because they don’t want to hear that. You say it too much, you repeat it too often, it becomes monotonous. But there is one theme that the Church has always majored on, and when she’s majored on it the most, she has been the purest. And when she has preached it the most vigorously, she has been the most active and most wonderful, and that is the glory of the Eternal Son.

It is impossible to praise the Lord Jesus Christ too much. You can go back into the Old Testament, and you find him there. You find Him before you have gone three verses into the book of creation. You find Him in Exodus as the Lamb, and you find Him in Numbers as the Star that shone on Israel and the Scepter that rose above Judah. And you’ll find him in every book of the Bible down the way through, even in the salty, stodgy book of Proverbs.

You’ll run on to Him there, rejoicing with the sons of men, being as ancient as the Father. And you’ll find Him in the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Hosea, in Daniel, in Amos, and all the rest, down to the end of the Old Testament when the man of God named Malachi saw Him coming, saw Him sitting as a—what did he call him there in the last of Malachi? Brother McAfee sings it sometimes. He says, He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi.

Behold, I send my messenger before thee, and who shall abide the day of His coming? He is found all down through the Old Testament, and He is found, of course, in the New. Try this sometime as an exercise in futility. Try reconstructing the New Testament with Jesus Christ left out of it. Just try that. Try putting the New Testament together and not having the Lord Jesus in it. Try finding only the Father in it. Try finding only history there. Try finding only philosophy there. Try putting the New Testament together.

Go through in your memory, in your mind, and think, now, let’s see, where could I start? And just for the sake of it, I’m going to rule Christ out of the New Testament. You won’t have any New Testament at all. Do you know that? You won’t have any New Testament. You will find either Christ is in it or there’s no New Testament there. It starts back there in Matthew, and in that very first chapter of Matthew, it tells us about him.

The very first chapter starts out by saying the book of the generation of Jesus Christ. One, two, three, four, five, six words, and then comes the name of Jesus Christ. And all the way through, it is the same. He’s everywhere. He’s in all of this. Nobody can write a letter. Nobody can make a speech. Nobody can offer prayer. Nobody can see a vision. Nobody can be caught into the Spirit, but Jesus Christ is there.

It’s Christ all the way through. It’s impossible to overpraise Christ. And the church that is dedicated to the glory of the eternal sun can go through hell and high water and terror and fears and storms and shipwrecks and still come through whole alive and clinging together and will find her feet and get on and get going again. She’ll never perish as long as Jesus Christ is in the middle.

It’s an ominous thing that when Jesus threatened to remove a church’s candlestick, he threatened it on the grounds that your love for Me is not as great as it used to be. He said, you have lost your first love. And everybody knows that doesn’t mean first in time, it means first in degree. They got so busy and so active and so theological and so social that they were doing everything but one thing, and that was they were losing, they weren’t keeping up their love for Jesus Christ the Lord.

So, if you’re going to be an extremist, be an extremist on the right thing. If you’re going to play one tune, get the right tune. If the church is going to go too far in anything, let it go too far in that, for you can’t go too far in glorifying the person of the Son. It’s impossible, I say once more, to overpraise him.

Well, then, the Spirit is also prominent here in these chapters, in front of this throne, for the three persons are of one substance and having identical attributes. What you can say about the Father and the Son, you can say about the Holy Spirit. You can say that the Father is eternal, but you can say that He’s the Eternal Spirit. And you can say that the Son is eternal.

You can say that the Father is uncreated, and you can say that the Son is uncreated, but you can also say that the Spirit is uncreated. You can say that the Father is holy, and you can properly say that Holy Thing which shall be born of Thee shall be called the Son of God. And you can also say the Holy Ghost. So, you’ll find the attributes that belong to the Father also belong to the Spirit and to the Son. So, the Spirit is here.

You have the Trinity before that throne, on that throne. You have the Trinity. And the acts of God are attributed to all three persons. This may confuse some people. I talked on the Trinity one time, and some Bible teacher told me I made it sound as if there were three gods. He was just tired, because I’m sure I wasn’t that dumb. I’m sure that I didn’t do it that badly. The truth is that there are not three gods, there’s one God. There is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, yet there are not three Fathers, and there are not three Sons, nor three Holy Spirits, but One.

And if you notice in the creation that the Father is more prominent than the Son or the Spirit, but the Son is also said to create. In Colossians 1, Paul celebrates Jesus Christ, Who is the image of the invisible God, by Whom, that is, by Jesus, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities and powers, He created them. But it had said the Father created them, of course.

And then you’ll find in the 102nd Psalm, Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, and they are created. So, we have creation attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. Is there confusion there? No, there’s identity, not confusion. The reason the Bible can say that the Father created the heaven and the earth, the Son created the heaven and the earth, and the Spirit created the heaven and the earth, is that the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit never work separately. They work together because they are One, eternally One.

And then there’s the incarnation. It says, The power of the Most High shall be upon you, the Spirit shall come upon you, and that holy thing shall be called the Son of God. The Father and the Spirit and the Son of God were at work in the incarnation. Again, in the baptism, I have pointed out before, in other contexts, that when Jesus was baptized, we have the Trinity simultaneously present.

It says that the Spirit came out of heaven, the Son came out of the water, and the voice of God spoke from above, saying, this is my beloved Son. So, we have in the baptism of Jesus all three persons simultaneously present. And you’ll find also in the atonement that the Scripture says that He, Jesus, the Son, offered Himself through the Eternal Spirit without spot unto the Father God. We have all three persons there working together.

The resurrection of Christ is attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. The Father is said to have raised His Son. This Jesus, whom he crucified, has God raised up. But it also, Jesus said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. And it’s also written in Romans 1:4 that it was through the Eternal Spirit that He was raised.

And then in salvation, Peter tells us that the three persons work in salvation, that it’s through the election of God and through the sanctifying of the Spirit and the cleansing of the blood that salvation comes. And in John 14, it tells us of the indwelling. We will come unto Him and make our abode with Him. Don’t be afraid of a plural pronoun before the Deity. Jesus used it. Jesus said, I will send another Comforter, and He will be with you, and the Father will come, and We will dwell with Him and dwell in Him.

So, we have the three Persons here, the three Persons simultaneously present, working and laboring. And while the Father is more prominent in the creation, the Son and the Spirit are there also. And while the Son is more prominent in redemption, the Father and the Spirit are there also. While the Spirit is more prominent in conviction and regeneration, the Father and the Son are not absent.

Now, here we have in this chapter that I have read, the part that I have read, in you hearing the general assembly. Presbyterians have what they call the general assembly. I’m sorry they took it. I’d like to have that. You know, I’d like to call the brethren together and say, let’s have a general assembly. I like that expression. I like some of those big, booming, rumbling, musical, organ-toned expressions the church uses down the centuries. And one of them has been the general assembly.

Well, here is the general assembly, my brother, chapters 4 and 5. Here are the four living creatures, and here are the 24 elders. You know, your associate pastor and I don’t agree on who the 24 elders are, but we’ve not been fighting about it. He’s still been wheeling me around in that glorified kiddy car of his. We’ve been having a good time together, but he believes they’re the prime ministers of the universe.

And you know, I was sitting in Brother Brian’s study the other day over in Toledo while the preliminaries are going on, and I was hearing over the loudspeaker, the missionary talk, and also thinking of my sermon and also looking at books. I can do all three of those things.

And I pulled down a translation, and it said, you know what it said, and I reacted from that something terrible. It said, and when He had taken the book, the four beasts and the four and twenty senators fell down before the Lamb. Yeah? Senators. I’ve had enough senators, you know, and I don’t want any more of these senators. But somebody thought that they were senators, four and twenty senators. Well, it says elders here, and elders, those are good words, Old Testament and New Testament words, and they refer to the leaders of the redeemed.

And then there were angels, and how many angels? You notice how many angels it says, that there are ten thousand times ten thousand. There’s a hundred million to start with, and thousands of thousands, and every thousand, thousands of millions. And since it’s merely plural, and you can put as many ciphers or as many ciphers as you want to on there, there’s just no way of knowing.

But I, as my colored brethren say sometimes, I hear on the radio, they have a little saying. A preacher will be preaching along, and he’ll say, you know what I like about God’s this. And I kind of like that myself. I like that expression. It may not be, wouldn’t be irreverent if a learned professor used it. He’d be slanging, but for a good colored brother preaching away, that just fits. That’s the way he feels about it. He says, what I like about God.

And what I like about God is this, my brethren. I like the fact that God is big and generous, and there’s lots of Him, and that what He does, He does in big vastness and, and hugeness. So, that God isn’t, isn’t small about things. Now, let me, I didn’t intend to say this. In fact, it just struck me now.

But what I want to say now is that you got to watch you don’t get cheap and stingy when you’re serving God. Be awfully careful, awfully careful and watch it. Let’s watch it in this church. You know, we’ve endured. We’ve, we’ve gone through the gristmill and been chewed up here in the last couple of years by our people moving out of the city and the population changing and all that. But let’s watch that we don’t give up and panic. Let’s watch. Let’s keep generous because God is generous. And everything God does is big and generous.

When God makes rivers, he makes them 10 times bigger than they need to be. And when he makes oceans, he makes them 50 times bigger, 100 times bigger than they need to be. And God put leaves on a tree, puts enough leaves on one tree to do for 50 trees.

The average church, you know, with a poor little preacher and a small church board counting pennies would say, I think we can do with the leaf less here on this twig, don’t you? And they’d take that off and say that. Say, now this twig over here, I think you see five leaves. No use to go out on a limb here, excuse the pun, but we take that off. And you can keep trimming back and trimming back.

But God is generous, brother. God gives too much of everything, always gives too much of everything. Think of space. People are talking about space all the time. Think how much space God made. God could have packed all the heavenly bodies there are.

If He’d been careful and kept the tracts from crossing each other, He could have packed them in too. Why, you ever read astronomy and find out how many times, how many, how many earths could have been put in the sun? I forget how many, I always forget numbers, but it runs into millions of earths. You could toss them into the sun and the sun could rumble them around if it was hollow.

And we have too much earth. We got too much earth now. This idea you got to leave the earth in order to, you go off and to Venus. If the right people would go, I’m for it, you know. But the trouble is the right people aren’t going and some of them will come back. But it’s just a vast world.

God is big, but God’s bigger than we know He is, and He’s, He’s vaster. The immensity of God. I wonder if I shouldn’t, I wonder if I shouldn’t preach a sermon on the immensity of God and include that in my book on the attributes. Is immensity an attribute? I think it is. It ought to be because everything God does, he does big and, and immensely. It’s, he’s huge.

And I think it hurts God. God being God and being capable of emotion, I believe it hurts God when we get little. I think so. I believe it hurts God.

Dr. Brown says, you know, that the way to do, to keep God blessing you is when you get out of it–get right back in. Start something else and get right back in. I think it’s all right.

I read an article by a fellow out here in California who establishes churches, and he keeps them down to four to 700 and never lets them get any bigger. Now they start getting any bigger. He promptly goes up to a lot of his members and says, now you get out of here and get yourself a church started over across here. And so out of that one church, he started 10. God just keeps, keeps going.

When they, they could sit back and say, now, isn’t this wonderful? Everything is paid up and it’s just delightful. Absolutely delightful. But you got to keep in trouble if you want to keep blessed. So, I don’t know how I got off on that, but it’s a part of the sermon anyhow.

Now, my brethren, these living creatures, these 24 elders, these angels, a hundred million and thousands of thousands. He doesn’t mention other creatures. He mentions them elsewhere. He mentions them in the fourth chapter here. Each one had six wings about him. Why did they need six wings? And they were full of eyes within. But he said, why are they full of eyes?

A fellow came up to me, Toledo. He was very sincere and he was a sincere man, no question. He wanted to know about all those eyes. I don’t know, brother. I don’t know. But to me, it just means that God just fills them with eyes, that God’s just generous, that’s all. He liked that. Well, now there were harpers and there were crowns and there were golden vials of sweet incense and the hearts of all these redeemed ones and these unredeemed who hadn’t needed to be redeemed because they’d never fallen, these unfallen creatures.

Here they were and their hearts were so excited by the presence of the Trinity that their joy became so intense that it passed on to ecstasy. And it was a chastely, pure intoxication, a bliss so bright and so deep as to become uncontrollable. And so they threw their crowns before the throne and they fell down before the lamp.

And yet reason wasn’t dethroned, though they were tasting the purest, purest ecstasy, drinking deep of the fountain of intense delight, delight in which there was no impurity. Yet reason was not dethroned because their delight had reasonable grounds. They worshipped the Father because he had made the heaven and earth and all things, and for His pleasure they are and were created.

They worshipped the Son, that is the Holy Son, because He was slain and has redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation and we shall reign on the earth. They had grounds for their delight, though their reasons had passed to ecstasy. You see, there is a kind of Christianity that is so theological that it can give you ten reasons for everything it does and believes. But it never passes to ecstasy, quite. These brethren passed to ecstasy, these wondrous creatures. Their joy was so deep and pure, I say, their bliss so unalloyed that they were sent into spiritual intoxication.

But they had reasons, there were reasons underneath it all. This was theology on fire, this was reason incandescent. If we try to be happy without reasons, we simply become fanatics and beat our foot, you know, and try to get blessed that way, the way they do in rock and roll. But if we allow reason to rest on the Scriptures and then are filled with the spirit and meditate and contemplate and worship, I believe that we can taste some of this even now.

Now I know it’s possible to be saved and to live and to die and to go to heaven and be a very ordinary Christian and never go very far. I’ve also seen in a few cases and have read in a great many more, people that were lifted up in the spirit to such a degree that ecstasy took over.

I heard a man one time, a good, serious-minded, sensible, good man, father of a family and a good worker in the church. The man was in every way a man that you could trust, an honorable man, a good man, a sensible man, was never charged with any fanaticism or any being overheated in any way. And yet I saw him at the communion table one time, suddenly burst out into holy laughter.

And he tried to restrain it, but he couldn’t. He knelt and he tried to restrain it, but he laughed, and he actually reached his hands around him and hugged himself as though he would keep himself from coming apart with the ecstasy and the delight of it.

Now we have it here, and if God wanted to send a little taste of us to man here below, it was a man named Thomas Upham. Thomas Upham wrote The Life of Madame Guyon. And incidentally, Madame Guyon happens to be a writer I care nothing about. I read her works years ago, but I never read them anymore. But he wrote her life. She was one of the great mystics you know. But this man wrote a little book called A Night of Great Grace, and that was a testimony of the night God visited him.

And I quoted to you here what Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, had said. That wonderful, awesome night when God visited him, and he passed out from being a mathematician to being a happy, joyous Christian. And he tried to write it, but he could only write it in ecstatic phrases. He would say, fire, fire, fire. And he said, glory to God the Father, not the God of the philosophers, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who can be known only in the ways of the gospel. And he wrote joy, joy, joy.

And though here was a man that ranked easily at the top in all of the mathematicians of his time and great thinkers of his day, declared to be one of the three great thinkers ever produced by France, three greatest ever produced by France, yet that man folded that testimony up and put it here in his pocket close to his heart and wore it there until he died. Never did he forget that one night of glorious ecstasy. And after that, he took over and he wrote in defense of the faith of our fathers so wonderfully that he’s never been answered.

His tremendous logical argument about believing God, I won’t repeat it now, but why we should believe God is one thing nobody’s ever been able to answer down to this hour. And yet that man, with a mind such as only maybe a half a dozen have ever had in the history of the world, yet this man was carried out of himself until, like these creatures, rising like a fire, the heat of his joy, the winds of God played over the harp of his soul, and in the presence of the Lamb he was filled with joy and delight. Here they were, too, and they will be.

Now, I don’t say you must know that kind of spiritual experience in order to be converted or to be saved. I don’t say it. But I will say this, that a generation or two ago it was taken for granted that if a man believed on Jesus Christ and didn’t have some kind of a visitation that would confirm his faith, they wouldn’t believe he was converted. But nowadays we just get them in anyway, you know, just any way at all, get them in.

Well, now notice here what he says, every creature heard I saying, verse 13, Every creature heard I saying, Thou art worthy, Every creature heard I saying, Blessing and honor and glory and power. Every creature, John, what do you mean? Every creature in heaven he found that familiar.

John had walked with his Lord and had been many years since the cross now, and he found they in heaven He found that easy to understand. I heard every voice in heaven saying, Worthy is the Lamb. Then he said, I heard them on earth, and he certainly found that familiar because he had been a man and was a man and had been on the earth and was on the earth.

So, it was easy for him to identify the voices of them on the earth. But now he hears a strange sound, another sound. It isn’t heavenly and it isn’t earthly. It doesn’t belong to the ransomed. It doesn’t belong to the unfallen creatures there by the throne. And it doesn’t belong to the redeemed on earth.

To whom do these voices belong? This strange, raucous, dissonant, discordant choir. It’s the choir of the damned. Under the earth heard I them saying, Philippians 2, 9 to 11 says, Wherefore, God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth. There’s the same division and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Remember, my brother, every moral intelligence will someday confess Jesus Christ is Lord. But not every moral intelligence will enter the bliss of the redeemed. God has said it must be now and it must be under His conditions. But John said, I heard not only the ransomed, not only those upon the earth who love the Lord, but I heard the strange sound of those in hell also. And they were forced to say, worthy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain.

Now I want to close with just a little word that seems to be maybe a little bit off the track. I’ve heard, I know what they say, never tack anything on a sermon, and I don’t want to tack anything on. But I will ask you to note here, who are these redeemed? Well, they’re the blood-washed. They’re the blood-washed, it says, of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And I point out again that when Jesus comes, there will be nations and they will not be one nation fused together, one smoky colored nation made up of all integrated races. There won’t be.

There will be nations, it says. And when He comes, he’ll call the nations before Him. And we’ll never, no matter how the starry-eyed dreamers talk, there will never be a time when all the nations of the world will speak one language until Christ comes.

They tell us, you know, there’s Esperanto and there’s basic English. And I don’t know whether everybody’s getting ready to speak Russian or not, but brother, there’s one language I won’t talk; I’ll tell you that now. But we’ll never have a smoky race speaking one language around the world. There will be kindred and tongue and people and nations, not one superior to the other, but different from the other. And now the logic of their presence, here’s the logic of their presence, here’s how they got there. They were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing.

And they heard because there were preachers, and they preached because they were sent. And there we have the logic of missions. There we have the theology behind missions. They came from every kindred and tongue and people and nation and tribe around the world, and they were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing the gospel. And they heard the gospel when it was preached to them, and it was preached to them when somebody was sent to preach it.

Now, I want to tell you this, that I would never continue to be associated with any denomination or missionary society or local church that would let anything stand in the way of the carrying out of the plan of God. For there must be people before that throne out of kindred, tongue and people and nations. They’re not to be white people from Chicago, but they’re to be people from all over, and they can only be there if somebody preaches to them. And that somebody can only preach to them if somebody else sends them.

And therefore, we have the logic of continuing missions. You know, when the eagle gets old, he gets to be fifty years old, they say. He grows something on his beak here, a bony substance that he can’t get his beak open, and he can’t eat. When he’s fifty years old, he can’t eat anymore, and he begins to droop and get thin, and his feathers fall out, and he’s a mess to look at, and he’s too weak to fly, and he’s dying of starvation. Because he has a bony structure that’s come over his beak, and he can’t get it open, he can’t eat.

Well, nature takes over about that time and renews his youth. He shall renew his youth like the eagles. You ever hear that? What does it mean, renewing his youth like the eagles? That’s what it means. So, he hunts himself out on real rough, sandy rock, say, the naturalist, and he goes over there and he scrapes. And he works away there, he’s poor, weak head. Why didn’t we think of it sooner? That’s what I don’t understand.

But you know, we never do. We never do, you know. We never think of it in time. So he scrapes his beak there, and pretty soon that comes off and he can chew again. He looks around, there’s a mouse, and the mouse said, that old eagle, he couldn’t, he can’t even open his mouth, he couldn’t eat a baby mouse. So, he gets familiar around the eagle, but he forgets the eagle’s working on his beak. Pretty soon, the eagle gets his mouth open, grabs a mouse, and feels better.

Pretty soon, he gets something else and feels better. In a very short time, he renews his youth, gets a new set of feathers, and his eyes get bright again. And pretty soon, he’s screaming in the sun, and he lasts another 50 years.

How long have we been around here, some of you old timers? I’m sorry, I don’t mean old timers, but some of you people that have been here longer than these children have. How long has this church existed? Thirty, Mrs. Hines, 38 years, is it? You don’t remember that far back, but is it 38 years we’ve been here? I mean the church? About 38. Let’s call it 38 years. What’s year, give or take, year between friends? But say 38 years. It’s not quite 50.

But you know what I believe? I like to run down our list and see those 38 missionaries that we got on our list. Not all of them went up here, but most of them did. The others joined us, but most of them did. Now, what are we going to do? Are we going to say, weep on each other’s shoulders, and say, the time of my departure is at hand, and woe be to Zion for the foxes are running over the walls? Or are we going to say, listen, there’s been a hard lump going over our beaks here.

We’ve been pushing in all directions here, and everybody else has fled. We’re an island here all by ourselves, enjoying ourselves immensely, but we’re going to go. But listen, why can’t we scrape our beaks, feather out again, and send twice as many in the next 30 years, and if the Lord tarries. Twice as much money in the next 30 years if the Lord tarries. When kids now back there in the baby pen will be our missionaries. Why can’t we? I don’t think if you’ve got God, you ever have to give up to discouragement, ever start counting your pennies.

Now listen, God, I’m sorry, but you know we only have two nickels there, and here we’ll give you one. I don’t think God wants us to act like that at all. And I refuse to beg, and I’m not going to beg, and I don’t have to beg. You’ll never get me to stand up here and spend a half an hour begging. I’m not going to do it. God is on His throne, and Christ is at His right hand, and the Holy Ghost is here, and the truth is loose in the earth, and the eagle can scrape her beak and start over.

And I foresee the time, I see it in vision, when the 38 missionaries that we count on our roster will have 38 more beside them. There’s no reason why it can’t be so, because they’ve got to come from kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations. They’ve got to come.

Tibet, they haven’t come yet, and they’ve got to come. They’re over there fighting Russia, but they’ve got to come from there, and they’ve got to come from the valleys, and everywhere. And some of the doors that are now closed, God’s going to open wide until you can hear them when they bang back on their hinges. You can hear it around the world, you see. Don’t you think for a second that God is going to let that old boy over in the Kremlin close all his doors? He’ll do nothing of the sort. He says, I open doors and no man can close them. And I don’t think the Church is made up yet, and I don’t think they’re all in.

Now, I’ll say one thing more, and then I’ll be done for tonight. The cause of missions does not belong to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It belongs to Jesus Christ the Lord. He is the Head of His Church, and as long as we serve Him, we’ll be part of that plan. But if we stop that and get interested in something else and get sidetracked, He’ll choose somebody else, but He’ll have people from tongues, and tribes, and nations.

And I never yet have listened to a missionary complaining about, if we don’t go, the Lord can’t do His work. The Lord will do His work. Jonah wouldn’t go, but Jonah went, and you’ll find it always so.

God, the Sovereign God, will have them there from every tongue, and tribe, and nation, but He won’t necessarily use you. He will if you let Him, and He’ll use me, and He’ll use this church. But if we fail Him, He’ll pick some little old Pentecostal Church down here, Baptist Church, or something else, and they’ll do the work we should have done, but God will do His work, because He says, I saw them there from every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations, and they shall reign on the earth.

The Sovereign God will do his work, all right, but what I’m eager about is that He’ll let me have a little part in it, that He’ll let me help a little, and do my little part, and work through me. That’s what I’m eager about, and that’s what I’m eager that this Church should do, that we should never allow ourselves to become so ingrown that we forget kindreds, and tongues, and peoples, and nations, because He’ll have them, but I don’t want Him to have to say, I’m sorry, but I have to pass you up, you’re too preoccupied. We mustn’t be preoccupied.

We do what was before us, and we’re going to do it, and we’re going to get it done. But in the meantime, we’re not going to forget them out there, and we’re not going to forget the peoples, and tongues, and tribes, and nations. They’ll believe when they hear, and they’ll hear when somebody preaches, and somebody will preach when he’s sent. Believe it? Amen. Well, amen. I guess that’s all for tonight.

Tags Revelation, Worship

Messages

Tozer Talks

Post author By pshappard
Post date June 16, 2024

“The Throne of Revelation“

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The Throne of Revelation

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

February 15, 1959

Open to Revelation and turn to the fourth chapter. We’ll read responsively fourth chapter revelation. After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter. And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.

Now, we have here between what was and what was to come. After this, I looked and behold, a door was opened after this. I looked, after this, these things which had just closed, which were the seven letters to the churches. I preached on one of them, and I’m skipping the other six, because they get so much attention from the teachers. After this I looked and then a voice said, I will show thee things which must be here after.

And here stood the man John, between what had been and what was to come. And John saw a door opened in heaven and he heard a voice as it were the voice of a trumpet and he saw a throne and he saw one on the throne and he heard the sound of the chanting of these creatures, holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty.

Now, John had suffered through the seven churches, those seven churches. John had suffered through them. John is here between what was and what was to come. And what was and what was to come, that is, the two chapters, chapters two and three and chapters on from six on to twenty, are anything but good, anything. John had suffered through his seven churches. Look, look what John had had to hear, what he had to hear, what he had to tell the people. He’d had to talk about works and labors and patience and service and poverty and tribulation and suffering and prison and the sword and death and stumbling blocks and idolatry and backsliding and false apostles and religious liars and external riches and internal poverty, blindness of heart and nakedness and danger to life and the loss of crowns and the failure of rewards and the need to overcome. All of this he had heard, and it wasn’t a pleasant thing to hear.

And yet this was for the moment passed now, and before him in his prophetic mind, he saw four horsemen ride out. He saw the opening of the seals and heard the sounding of the trumpets. He saw the opening of the bottomless pit and he saw the great smoke arise and the scourge of the scorpions. He saw the Antichrist come up out of the earth. He saw the mark of the beast and the great red dragon. And he saw finally, Armageddon and the last judgement. Now, he saw all this and there he was caught between his poor backslidden churches that so desperately needed help, that were in danger of great loss to themselves. And these things, and I’ve only mentioned a few that lay out there, what we call the Great Tribulation.

Now, with all these present woes approaching, I want to ask you, how could John stay sane? There’s one way for you to stay sane and restful and enjoy yourself and have your food digest and enjoy your TV programs and your your nice home and your family, and not have too much worry. It is not to care a hoot about the world and about God and about the things of the Spirit and hell and heaven and judgment and losses and gains and rewards and punishment. That’s one way. But it’s a mighty poor way. And John didn’t belong to the crowd who could know these things and be restful about them.

So, how could John keep sane? How could he keep poised and optimistic in an hour like that? And I asked you how can you and how can I at a time like this, knowing what’s out there, even apart from the Bible? Close that Bible. Shut it. Put a rubber band about it. Put it to the bottom of the drawer and shut the door and lock it. And push the desk into a corner of the attic and determine to forget there is any Bible. All you have to do is listen to the radio now, and if you’re at all sensitive, or if you love the human race, you will find it hard to keep poised or balanced or at peace because of what’s facing the human race, all together apart from what the Bible says. Now, how are we going to live in this day? How are you and I going to live, are we going to make it? Well, John said, behold a door standing open in heaven.

Now, there my friends, there’s the direction you’ve got to look. And there is the solution. The only solution is from above. The only solution for earth is something from above. There’s nothing that comes out of the earth that can cure the earth. Nothing that spawns or hatches or is born in the earth can do the earth any good. All that fails, rulers and diplomats and agreements and pacts as the newspaper calls them, a man laws and soldiers and weapons and talks and summit conferences and science and culture and all the influence of learning. These are all good and I’m not knocking them. Certainly, it’s better for two diplomats to meet and talk than it is for them to fight. But they haven’t got the solution.

That kindly and well intentioned and much respected gentleman that lies so ill today in the hospital in Washington, not all that he could do with all his good intentions, some love him, some hate him, some wish that he was in orbit, and others think that he’s one of the greatest man that ever lived. Whatever you think of him, remember, he just couldn’t, he just didn’t have either the wisdom nor the power nor the strength to be able to save us. There has got to be help from somewhere else.

Heaven alone can cure. Heaven alone can heal. Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal. But heaven can heal all earth sorrows. Heaven alone, I say, can heal. When He came the first time, you remember, and there were in a certain country, shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And suddenly an angel appeared on to them, and they were so afraid. The angel said, fear not, behold, we bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And immediately there was with the heavenly host, with the angels, a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest, peace on earth to men of goodwill.

Now that was when He first came. When he went away, he said, my peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. And just as He went away, when He had spoken these things, He was taken up from them and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And as they stood gazing toward heaven, lo, two men in white said to them, appeared and said, why gaze ye up into heaven? This same Jesus which ye saw go, shall come again in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven.

Now the world has forgotten this, and the church has forgotten this. All you have to do to find out how unspiritual we are is to get into a tight spot. And then you find how we haven’t been trusting God too much at all. We have been looking to other things rather than to God. But I warn you against looking to anything that doesn’t show through the open door. I warn you against trusting to anything that begins lower down than the throne which John saw. All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We have Him incarnated here, but not His origin here. He came out out of heaven’s open door and through the womb of the Virgin In order that He might redeem mankind.

Now, the church, I say, has forgotten it. And we must take one more gaze into heaven. We must look once more. We must see an open door once again. We must realize that earth’s salvation comes through the open door and that it does not, it is not, it cannot ever possibly originate down here. It cannot be. But you say, did not Jesus originate here? Was He not born here. He got his body here, but He originated nowhere. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

And the Scripture says, behold, a set throne. Now, where it says here a throne was set, I have examined this very carefully. And I know I found out that it does not mean I saw the setting of a throne. You know how you set a table? There’s nothing there and then a woman gets busy and pretty soon she’s got a fine table set, all dolled up and food on it. Well, now that isn’t what it means here. It does not mean I saw a throne being set. That throne was never set. That throne had never been set. He had been with that throne. He the One who had no origin, sat on a throne. And that throne was not a throne being set, that was the set throne. Behold, a set throne. What does a throne proclaim.

When you see a throne, what does it proclaim? Well, it proclaims certainty. And all I pray that you will hear me tonight as I say to you, that in the ups and the downs of the world, that you will look to the throne. There’s no certainty anywhere else, remember it. You know, when we get to the brink of war and then pull back from it, we breathe once more and say, perhaps we will have another breathing spell. But with that breathing spell, we soon catch our breath again as we get to the brink of war once more. No, there is no certainty anywhere but at that throne. John saw it and you and I can see it for it’s set there, and there is certainty.

Now, there isn’t any certainty anyplace else and don’t let anybody tell you that there is. Don’t let them tell you there’s anybody that you can elect that can give you certainty or anybody you can defeat that will bring you certainty or any system or ideology that you can take up that will bring you certainty. There is no certainty in a rotting world, a world of decay.

Then the throne proclaims authority. Authority has got to be somewhere. There isn’t too much authority now. It is broken down everywhere, and broken down in the home, broken down in the schools, broken down in nations. So, there’s hardly a place of authority. But John said I saw a throne set. And that throne symbolizes and proclaims authority.

More than authority, it proclaims sovereignty. There never has been a throne, thank God, there never has been a throne set up in this world that was a sovereign throne. You know, the English refer to their queen as a sovereign, and many other nations have had queens or kings that they called sovereign, but I quarrel with their use of the word sovereign. For the word sovereign is an absolute, universal word. And it cannot possibly be used to designate any queen or anything that ever sat or does now sit or ever will sit on any throne of this world, until the Son of God the Messiah returns. And then there will be a sovereign throne, for sovereignty, of course means absolute freedom, absolute rule over all things without anybody anywhere or any power, any law, anything anywhere daring to challenge it. And there never has been a king like that since the beginning of the world. There isn’t now and there never will be until He comes back.

But this throne that John saw is a sovereign throne. That’s the kingdom of God, the center of the kingdom of God. And it means universal dominion, of course, and it means this other thing that I shall name and that is perpetuity. Oh, my brother, to be able to find something that will last. Did you ever, did you ever get to thinking, now this only applies to people over 35. People under 35, they have no idea in all the wide world but that they live forever. That is, they know better but they don’t feel it. But after you get to 35, which is halfway to 70. And incidentally, any of you thirty-fivers that imagine you’re spring chickens, you’re halfway to 70, just keep on.

But did you ever stop to grieve over the lack of permanence and perpetuity? Things just can’t last. Why, they bring them down and have him dedicated on Thursday and what seems only the next month, they’re married. And in a short while, they begin to get gray and then laugh at their gray hairs, and before very long they slow down and they’re gone. Generation follows generation. Moses prayed that famous prayer, O God, establish the work of my hands. He wanted something that would last.

Well, John here, saw a throne and he saw a throne that was sovereign, authoritative, certain, universal and perpetual. There is one thing that will last; Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever. The scepter of righteousness is the scepter of Thy kingdom. And when God folds up the heavens as a garment and rolls back the stars as a mantle to change, His throne will still stand. I want to testify while I preach and say to you that the older, I get the more I live for that throne. The more I live for that throne, that permanent throne, that which cannot perish nor pass away. There is the throne, that blissful center about which was sing. There’s that blissful center.

And here, my friend, is our sanity. And here’s our certainty and here’s our assurance and here is our cheer. Here’s what gives us cheer. God’s children should be a cheerful people. St. Francis of Assisi believed that a man ought to be a cheerful, and he was a cheerful, happy man.

My wife and I are reading at our morning prayers, we are reading through Thomas Traherne’s great book called “The Centuries of Meditation.” It means meditations done in hundreds Well, he was the happiest man in all the wide world. He thought that when you get up in the morning that you ought to get up like a bird and sing and never be anything but happy. He was an Episcopalian preacher and wrote a couple of great books which went into obscurity and only have been lately resurrected, and I happen to have one of them. But don’t try to borrow it yet for a while. But it’s a great book and hard to get published by Dobell in London.

But this man was delighted man, he was a happy man. And you know that when the old Catholic Church used to canonize people, well, you know that they have to prove that they had a sense of humor; they were happy people. They won’t canonize a gloomy saint. I’m sorry I’d ever be on their side on anything, but I’m on their side on that, because a gloomy saint is more of a problem for the kingdom of God than a modernist. Here is the blissful center. Here’s sanity and here’s assurance and here’s cheer.

Well, One sat on the throne, One sat on the throne. Do you notice, One sat on the throne. And that word “one” there is a kind of “you” general pronoun. It doesn’t say who it is that sat on the throne. A throne was set. There was a set throne in heaven, and One sat on the throne, and it doesn’t say who sat on the throne. But is identification necessary, my friends? Is it necessary that you and I identify why we’re in the last book of the Bible?

Do we have to identify the One that sat on the throne? For here is the center of all worlds, and here is a throne that never was created. Here was the throne that God has sat on from the dim dawn of far beginning. Before there was anything, as the colored brother said the other day, way back on the other side of nothing. There’s going back. And back on the other side of nothing, God had to work. Back on the other side of nothing and this One that sat on the throne. He is not identified here, but must we identify Him? Does He need a name? Don’t we know who it is? Let’s call up a few men and ask them.

There lived a man with a name hard to pronounce, and he was found in the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis and never so far as I remember, mentioned again until the book of Hebrews thousands of years later. He had the long, difficult name of Melchizedek, and he was king of Salem which is king of peace. And he lived before there was any Hebrew race and he lived before there was any Old Testament and of course, before there was any New Testament. He lived before any church spire ever pointed to the sky or any choir ever chanted the praises of God. But somehow or other, he had become high priest of the Most High God.

And if we call up old Melchizedek and say to him, sorry to bother you, you’ve been sleeping so comfortably so long, but we’d like to know. John saw heaven opened and saw a throne and saw one on a throne, but he didn’t name him. Who is this that sits on the throne at the center of the universe. And Melchizedek would say, why, it’s the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth. Don’t you love that old expression? They say, you know, there’s a progressive development of doctrine in the Bible. But I like to go back to some of those old grassroot beginnings of things. And in the light of what we know now in the New Testament, those old grassroot expressions have tremendous meaning. Melchizedek knelt before the One he called the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth. And he was the high priest of that God. And so, Melchizedek might answer and say, why don’t you know who He was? This one that sat on the throne was the Most High God.

Let us skip on a little and ask Abraham, to whom he paid tithes. And let’s say, Abraham, who’s meant here? You’re a man of faith. You’ve marched down from Ur of the Chaldees. You’ve come a long way down, and what about it, Abraham? We’re not such good theologians and we see a door open in heaven and a throne there surrounded by creatures of all kinds and seven spirits with eyes and all this wonderful strange, yet there’s a throne and there’s is a, the only one that’s on it is called One and he’s left without a name. Who is it?

And Abraham would say, I’ll give you two names. I’ll give you. I’ll tell you who He is El Shaddai, El Shaddai. What does that mean Abraham? And he would say, why, that’s an old Hebraic word meaning God Almighty, God Almighty, the Almighty God, El Shaddai. It’s He that sits on that throne, the Most High God, El Shaddai.

But Abraham that isn’t enough. Name Him again. Identify Him. Who sits on that throne? And he would say I’ll give you another name, Jehovah Jireh. But what does Jehovah Jireh mean Abraham? And Abraham would answer Jehovah Jireh means the LORD will provide. Don’t worry. The Lord will provide. Do you believe it, my friends? The LORD will provide. El Shaddai, the the Mighty God, the Almighty God, the one that has all the might there is. He says, I’ll provide for you.

And later when He came down in the form of a man and stood among us or sat among us and preached his great sermon on the mount. Me said, why are you people so scared and worried? Why are you bothered, and you get premature wrinkles from worrying? Why, he said, your Father knows what things you have need of before ye ask Him. About whom was He speaking? He was speaking of the one who was El Shaddai, the Almighty God who owned everything, and Jehovah Jireh, who would provide everything.

But if we want still more, we come down the years and say, Moses, we’ve got an odd theological question back here in the book of Revelation. We’ve been preaching on it here and we’re sorry to bother you. We know that you’ve been sleeping well, too. But who is this that sits on the throne? We’ve had a little testimony, but we’d like yours. Moses would bow his head. And in a reverent voice he’e say one time, I, one time I now, by a bush and there was fire in that bush, and I turned aside to see. And when I turned aside, I heard golden voice say, Abraham, Abraham, draw not nigh. I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Go down and deliver Israel. Go down Moses.

And I said, O God, excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me and pardon me, but O God, I’ll go if you want me to go, but they’ll say, who sent you? What do I tell them, God? What is the name? They’ll demand a name. And God said in that same, wondrous, healing voice that filled heaven and earth, this is what you’ll say; say, I am that I am. That is my name forever and that’s my memorials above all generations. I am that I am. I am the Almighty. I am Jehovah Jireh, I am Jehovah Tsidkenu. I am.

All right. We ask another man who happens to be one of my favorites, and that is Isaiah. Isaiah wrote his 66 chapters, and they were filled, filled with great music, filled with music. A great musician could take the book of Isaiah and he could write an oratorio on the Book of Isaiah, at least the score, I mean not the score, but the libretto would be there, the words would be there. And he could write an oratorio that it would take a week to sing and would require the voices of angels to do it justice. For Isaiah was a man with an organ in his soul.

Isaiah, you’re a cousin to the King, and you’re a gifted poet. But where did you get your power? Where did you get jirtle lasting quality? What was it? What is this that Jew and Gentile and church of God have loved all down the centuries? And Isaiah would say, the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up. Oh, Isaiah, excuse us. That’s what we wanted to know. Who was that sitting on the throne? And Isaiah would say, why, it was Jehovah sitting on the throne, Jehovah, the God of our fathers, Jehovah, the Most High God of Melchizedek, possessor of heaven and earth, the El Shaddai of Abraham and the I am of Moses, sitting upon the throne.

Ask our fathers, any of our fathers, back to Paul. Ask them with their long Latin musical, Latin names. Tertullian, Polycarp and Chrysostom and the rest of them whose very names are music. Ask and say, who, who is it? We’re just dumb Gentiles and we don’t know much and we’re busy. Who was that sitting on the throne Tertullian? Who was that, Origin? Who, who was that Anselm? Who sat on that throne? And they would say, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. That was He that sat on that throne, God, our Father. So, when we pray, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. We harmonize with all saints down the years who have said I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

Now, my Brother, you know what our trouble is, that we look around us and we have figured too much. Old Dr. Brown used to when missionary time would come, in his inimitable fashion, he’d get out a pen and sarcastically say, now, you’re going to give to the Lord’s work. You’re going to give. How much can I give? Then, he would stand up here and figure it out, oh yeah, 225.

Well, that’s not it, Brethren. That’s not the place to look. That’s not the place to look for us. That’s not the place to look for you. And you that are young and rearing families, that’s not the place to look for your hope. And you that are worried about your jobs. You’re not supposed to look to the auditor. You’re supposed to look through the open door at the fixed throne and see the one that’s on that throne. And this is our home, my Brethren. God is our home said Moses, a dwelling place for all generations.

And Simpson wrote a hymn by that name, God is my Home. So, this is our home. Your life is hid with Christ in God. And from there my Brethren, we look down. Now you say, how can I do it? You do it by faith. You do it by faith. A young fellow wrote me from, I forget what university. I can’t recall. It was one I was not familiar with the name, but he said, I want to ask you a question. He said, I learned that Jesus Christ is everything to me. But now, he said, how do I get hold of that? He said, do I believe and have faith and believe that it’s true for me or what do I do? And I wrote back and said, my dear young friend, you have asked a question and given your own answer. And I cannot, though I am much older give you any answer, but the one you’ve given. I read, he said, in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is everything to me now. How do I get ahold of it? I said, you’ve answered. Then I quoted him. I said, believe that He means you and dare to rise into it and take it for yours and say it’s not a theory, but it’s a fact. It’s not a doctrine, but it’s a reality, as well as a doctrine.

So, our life is hid with Christ in God. We are God’s. We belong to Him. And from there, my Brethren, we look down. From there we look down, and we look down on everything. We look down on the risen Christ. We look down from the throne where sits the risen Christ. We look down.

Oh, I get accused for being pessimistic because I won’t run around with a daisy in my boutonniere singing all the little songs about toothpaste, because I don’t like that stuff. Because I don’t like it. I don’t like the foolish way people are going. I don’t like what they are making me put up with. I don’t like their opinion of my mentality. They think it’s 12 years old and it isn’t. It’s a little older. I don’t like it. And Brethren, I’m a roaring optimist when I go to the book. When I look out on the world, the Democrats and Republicans and socialists and stragglers, I’m a pessimist out and out where they don’t have the answer. But when I look through the open door at the throne that is set, nobody can be more of an optimist than I am.

So, from up there, we look down. Now, we’re looking down on a problem. A lost sheep has wandered in. Brother bird, he got lost up there in cloud nine. But, let me tell you this. Let me tell you this, anything, anything He is going to say to you has got to be seen from the throne down. We don’t dare see it from our bank account out and from our little place out. We’ve got to see it from the throne down.

And the problem of racism, the problem of modernism and the new ecumenical council called by the Holy Father to woo us back into the fold and squirt stuff on us and make us good Catholics, we’ve got to settle that all from the throne down. If you try to get a lot of angry fundamentalists together down here sending telegrams to the President and to the State Department, all you’ve got is a bunch of people mad. But if you face all these problems from the throne down, you’re on top of it brother, just as sure as you live. No matter what happens to it, you’re still on top of it. Amen.

If I had just been having a good time up there but there’s somebody listening. I don’t know. I lost contact with you 10 minutes ago. So, I don’t know whether you still heard me. But as for me, don’t pity me and say poor man, he must carry a burden. I’m one of the happiest men in the world; by nature, one of the most miserable and by grace, one of the most delighted, because long ago I saw a throne and One sitting on a throne. And though imperfectly, I’ve tried to see everything else from the throne down. Well, everybody said, amen. Amen.

And so, we’ve got to see that throne, that set throne, that fixed throne and that One that we’ve now identified, sitting on that throne, receiving the adulation of all the heavenly host. And from that throne we view the Cold War and from that throne we view any possible hot war and from there we view the missiles and crime and corruption and race trouble and accidents and woes and diseases and death. From there, we look down. So instead of being under the circumstances, we’re on top of the circumstances. Amen.

Tags Revelation, Throne

Messages

Tozer Talks

“How to Think as a Christian“

PDF Formatted Transcript DownloaD

“How to Think as a Christian”

Pastor and author A.W. Tozer

March 17, 1957

Now, in the 16th chapter of the book of Matthew, the second of two talks on that, where Jesus began to show His disciples how He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. And Peter took Him and began to rebuke Him saying, be it far from thee Lord. You’ll notice the margin says, pity thyself, Lord. This shall not be unto thee. But He turned and said unto Peter, get thee behind me satan. Thou art an offence unto Me, for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.

My almost invariable method is to consult anywhere from five to a dozen or more translations in order that I may be sure I know just what the man said, or what Christ said, or the prophet said, or the apostle. And what Jesus said here was this, you’re not thinking like God, you’re thinking like a man. Last week, I talked about that and showed that human sympathies and affections can get in and make us think like human beings down on the earth instead of spiritual beings born from another world. And I closed with the question, how shall we escape the world’s influences, and think the thoughts of God, we Christians?

For you see, the world has all of the techniques of brainwashing. The world has all the techniques. They have literature, schools, the general-accepted mores of society; they have history and tradition. They have every kind of sort of communication now, the two new methods of communication, radio and television. And they have all this.

And so, the world creates a mentality, but it is not the mentality of heaven. It is the mentality of earth. And the work of the Holy Ghost is to create on earth a mentality of heaven in the hearts of people who are on earth, but whose interests are in heaven.

Now, how shall we escape the debauchery of our minds by the world? And how shall we gain the mind of Christ so that we shall think like God? Well, briefly, there are I said, three, I said four last week, but I want to give you a fourth one. The first is revelation, the Scriptures of truth. You see, there are two kinds of theology abroad. There are three kinds. There’s a theology of the world, which is simply paganism. That’s all, nothing else, just paganism. They may name the name Jesus or God or the Bible or have some Biblical words, but their theology is that of the world. It’s been influenced by Christianity, but not controlled by it. So that while it is not Greek or oriental, it’s pagan. Nevertheless, it’s American paganism and we must, then there’s a second, we must correct that, there’s a second. We’ll never be able to correct the world’s theology, but there is a second, and that is, the church’s theology.

And the church’s theology is a compound of badly, infrequently read and badly understood Scriptures, along with what has been called, chimney corner Scripture, and what Paul called old wives tales. And when you shake this all up together, you have a strange and corrupt mixture which is neither one nor the other. It is neither Christian nor totally heathen, but it’s a mixture in between.

Well, how are we going to get to the truth, the Word of God? This book that I hold in my hand is the Word of God. And we correct misconceptions and cleanse our minds and deliver ourselves from wrong thoughts about God and ourselves and the world and sin and the future by reading the Scriptures themselves. There never was a time when so many Bibles were printed. It’s the world’s best seller, everybody knows it. And I read just this week, this last week, that the librarian down at the main library down in the city said that the Bible was the most asked for and the most read book that they have down there. That is true and that’s good. But it’s not good enough. In going to the Scriptures, we are not to go to them to criticize them nor to bring anything to them, but to find out what they teach about all these things, and what they teach about God and Christ and creation and man’s relation to Himself, and man’s relation to God and man’s relation to the future. And all of these things that we must know, we’ll have to go to the Bible to find it out.

There is a sentence used by, I think the Baptists, which ought to be true of everybody, that it is the, what do they call it, the source book of faith and practice, the only alone source of faith and practice. What we are to believe and how we are to live is given to us by revelation. And the Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the Truth to sight. And we must go to the Scriptures themselves, the Word of God and read the Word of God.

How much Bible reading do we do? That’s an important question. Because I well know how much newspaper reading we do. I well know how much reading is done of other things. And remember, whether you know it or not, if you do not constantly correct your thinking and purify your mentality by the Word of God, you will be thinking like a man and not like God just as sure as you live, and nothing will change it but that. There’s revelation. That’s first.

Then there’s inspiration. And what do we mean by inspiration? We mean the Spirit’s impulses within the mind to correct any wild notions that we might have. Job talked about the wild ass’ colt, the untamed wild creature given over to its impulses and whimsies, that puts its nostrils in the air and snorts and bays and races across the fields untamed and uncorrected. And so with the impulses of the human heart, even Christian impulses, unless we have what the old men used to say, the sweet influences of the Holy Spirit, you know, when we came under the domination of the imagination-less, inspiration-less, beauty-less culture, we got afraid to talk about the influences of Spirit because they said while the Spirit is not a thing, the Spirit is a person.

Well, of course we know it’s a person. We can quote the creed’s. We know what the Bible says about it. We know the Holy Spirit is a person and not an it, though even the King James version uses it once or twice. But the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. But, shall we say, that because He’s a person, He can’t have influence? They talked about the influences of the Spirit. And they believed that there was a divine inspiration that came on men, and came through the Scriptures and by means of the Scriptures. But that it put within the hearts of Christian men, impulses to righteousness, the influences of the Spirit, they called it. We will rule that all out. Nobody will talk about that now. But that’s one of the things we ought or bring back into the church again, and, and dust it off, and polish it up, and make it mean what it used to mean, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in the heart to correct the wild notions that we have; the impulsive, Adamic notions and ideas, and bring them into line with revelation.

Then there is a third word and that is illumination. It’s not quite the same as inspiration, for inspiration has to do with impulse and influence, while illumination has to do with Divine Light that falls upon the Scriptures. The Spirit breathes upon the Word and brings the Truth to sight. And it was our father’s belief that the word of God could not be understood unless the Spirit breathed upon it. The Methodist believed that. The early Baptists believed that. The Salvation Army believed it, and the Lutherans used to teach it. And it was true taught in the Presbyterians. All Protestantism once believed it, that it took an illumination of the Holy Ghost to make us see Truth. And the German said, the heart is always the best theologian, always better than the head, because it’s there the illumination falls.

So, illumination is the third word. And we must have the illumination of the Spirit on the Scriptures. Saw through the Word of God. Saw through it and read it through, and yet never have any illumination on it. It’s like walking in the night. But when we have the illumination of the Spirit, breathing on us, then we know we know. And it saves us from the darkness of reason, for reason is dark, don’t forget it. In the world they tell us, and this is part of the world error; they say reason is a lamp. And there is a sense in which that is true. Reason is a lamp.

When I was a boy, I went fishing with an old fellow named Billy Q as I recall, an old man. And we fished along a creek, or run, we called them there. It was very dark, very dark. We had no lights of course, of any sort, and it was very dark. But he had a fire going. And I said, Billy, how are we going to get home? How are we going to get out of here. We were really in the bushes. And he smiled in front of the fire there. He was an old woodsmen and an old fisherman and he knew. So, he picked up a firebrand. And you know, a burning firebrand gives off very, very little light. But Billy knew what to do with it, so he just began to swing it. And swinging it around his head, he walked ahead of me. And as he swung it around his head, the flame went out, but the glow came on, and Billy enlightened our pathway. Illumination took us clear up the path and back onto the road so we knew where we were out of the bushes. He did it by swinging around this brand that glowed by the wind, in the wind.

Now, that is one kind of illumination. But there’s a better kind, and you know what it is. We have now the electrical lights, various sorts of electric lights. And we have artificial lights which aren’t really artificial. They’re actually, they go back to the sun, but they’re caught and funneled in another way and we call them artificial. And that kind of illumination is infinitely better than swinging a firebrand round your head.

Well, now about all the light that you and I can have by nature is the light of the firebrand we swing around our head. But there is a better light than that, and it is the illumination. Reason is a firebrand, and it’s better to have it than not to have it. And if we do have it, it’ll help us to walk right and stay out of jail and look after our families and be decent. Reason will do that. And we can by vigorously swinging a little stick we call reason. We can get enough light to walk right, but we can’t get enough to save us from the torch itself. We can’t get enough to save us from the world itself. It takes revelation plus illumination that our minds might be illuminated by that which is above reason. If you think that Paul ever fell on his knees before reason, and Paul was Greek-taught, don’t forget it. Paul knew the Greek and was taught by the Greeks under the Greek philosophers and knew about them and could quote them. And yet, if you think that Paul was on his knees before reason, read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2. That’s all you have to do. Just read 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, and you’ll know better from that time on. For He said, where’s the wise man? Where’s the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world and the reasoners, that God made them all foolish, and He has by the Holy Ghost through the gospel given us the real light. And then I mentioned a fourth, and that is the presence of the Holy Spirit Himself to create the mind of Christ in us.

But I want to issue a little warning right here, and it is that no single act of grace will do for us alone, and we with finality, what we want. I picked up a hymnal here, my old 108-year-old hymnal. I go to it sometimes as a source of inspiration. Here was a man of God and they used to sing this in the Methodist Church and other churches. Jesus, plant the root in me; all the mind that was in Thee. Settled peace I then shall find, for Jesus is a quiet mind. Anger no more shall feel, always even, always still. Meekly on my God recline, Jesus is a gentle mind. I shall nothing know besides Jesus and Him crucified. Perfectly to Him be joined, Jesus is a loving mind, I shall triumph evermore, gratefully my God adore. God so good, so true, so kind; Jesus is a thankful mind. Lowly, loving, meek and pure, I shall to the end endure. Be no more to sin inclined, Jesus is a constant mind. I shall fully be restored to the image of my Lord, witnessing to all mankind, Jesus is a perfect mind.

Now they used to long for that, and when a young preacher came to be ordained, they said, have you succeeded in entering into the experience of this perfect mind, perfect love? And he said, no sir, I haven’t yet. And they said, are you seeking? And if he could say, yes sir, vigorously; earnestly seeking they would ordain him. They wanted to know that he either had had some kind of an experience or was earnestly seeking.

Well now, I want to warn that no single act of grace, and it’s never meant to teach it, no single act of grace will do this alone. The mightiest, overwhelming anointing of the Holy Ghost that ever came on a man, will not do this work finally and alone. We can undo the work of God and do it in our own hearts. God wants to baptize us with a spiritual mind and He will do it, but it requires that we live by the Word, that we study the Word, that we fill our minds with the Word, that we look to Him every moment for illumination.

And then there comes our fifth word, cultivation. There is something for us to do. We must cultivate the Spirit’s mind, the mind of Christ. Let this mind be in you, said the man of God. Bent is really what He meant rather than intellect. But let this mind be in you. We’ve got to cultivate. It’s a great mistake to think that we can get converted and then because we have it in Christ, we have everything and from there on we can give little attention to it. It’s a great mistake to think that if we go on and are filled with the Spirit of God, that’s the end of it, and that there’s nothing nowhere from there.

My brethren, when Jesus was filled with the Holy Spirit, anointed is the word that was used by Peter, anointed with the Holy Spirit. Do you know the next thing He did? What was it? He was led of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. That was the next thing. So, don’t think for a second that the anointing of the Holy Ghost in any degree or measure that God may give or may have given it to you is sufficient. There must be cultivation. And by steeping our minds in the wrong things, we can undo the work of God in making the mind of Christ.

I wonder if I could dig up kind of a grotesque illustration. Suppose that there is a very fine interior decorator. He has consulted the finest, most artistic minds that he can could locate, and he is busy decorating a room. And he has his various colored paints there, and he’s doing it slowly. And this room is evidently going to be a beautiful room, beautifully designed and beautifully done. And then quitting time comes and he goes home and in the middle of the night, some scoundrelly little vandal-ish boys come in and to have themselves a good time, and I wouldn’t have been above it when I was a kid. They pick up brushes and go to work, and undo everything up to that moment. And it’s repeated the next night and the next night. That’s exactly what you and I can do my brother. The mighty Holy Ghost can bring a thankful mind, a noble mind, a pure mind, and begin to teach us to think the thoughts of God. And we can walk right out and fall into the hands of influences like bad boys that will paint weird pictures and make our ugly faces all over the walls of our hearts. And instead of the walls of Zion, standing in their beauty, they will be defaced by the mischief of the devil.

So, you and I have to cultivate the mind of Christ. You cannot without the Scriptures have the mind of Christ, and you cannot know the Scriptures without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. But even these will not keep your mind heavenly unless you cultivate a heavenly mind, by prayer, by meditation, by dreaming over the Scriptures, by deliberately thinking God’s thoughts about things, and by deliberately eliminating the influences that make your mind either impure or worldly.

I sometimes don’t care whether I’m with some certain Christians or not. They don’t do me any good and I can’t do them much good. For everything from the time, you get with them until you leave is the world. It’s the world, it’s a nice part of the world, but it’s the world nevertheless. But there are some thank God that when you talk to them, the conversation swings around as a needle in the compass swings around to the north magnetic pole. And pretty soon, you’re talking about wonderful things. They that loved the Lord met and talked often one with another. And the Lord heard it and wrote it down in a book. And they shall be mine, saith God in that day.

We can be too jocular. We can be too worldly. We can know too many things, and we can be interested in too many things, and thus scatter our mind. Jesus talked about a single eye, and Paul said, this one thing I do. So there must be a unifying of the forces of our minds and a settling of our minds on the Lord Jesus Christ. And then we’ll think like Jesus. Would you say that narrows our minds, narrows them terribly? Oh, my friends, just what little experience in a small, imperfect way that my own heart has had, I want to tell you that it doesn’t narrow them at all, but it releases them into a vast world of freedom, our minds I mean, into a vast world of freedom that we never knew before.

He is not a caged-bird, who looks heavenward and moves toward God. He’s released. He’s in the cage who thinks as man thinks. Peter was in a cage. His mind was in a prison when he said, Lord, that isn’t the way we do it here. Don’t go get yourself killed. You don’t need to. Pity yourself, Lord. He was in a cage, and it was the Lord who was free when He turned on him and said, you’re thinking like a man instead of like God. That’s not good grammar, but that’s the way we say it now. We’re thinking as a man thinks instead of as God thinks.

Now, my brethren, may we not these days, don’t go home from church this morning, or wherever you’re going, and by remembering the latest Reader’s Digest quip, or the funny thing somebody said, or some worldly thing, dissipate the influences of the Holy Ghost. But, rather go and live in line with them. And then you move upward into freedom. And it’s the centered mind that is the free mind. It is the scattered mind that is an imprisoned mind. And the mind of the world is imprisoned, but the mind of the Christian is released upward into God, upward into infinitude, upward into the vast sea of being we call the Godhead.

So, that is how we escape the evil influences of the world and get a mind like Christ: revelation, inspiration, illumination, the indwelling Holy Ghost, and cultivation.

I hope you’ll be back tonight. There will be a lot more here. If things go as they have been, I think they will. Some are coming that I know from out of town. And I want to talk tonight and give the 10th in a series which I’ve been following Sunday nights and we’ll have one of those gracious, wonderful song services. I don’t ever hear anything like it anyplace to go. And I could come and sit and listen and join in with my cracked baritone and when time comes to preach, I could go home and say, well, I’ve been to church. So you come tonight. Breathe deep before you get here. Get your lungs ready. We’re going to have a great evening by the grace of God. All right.

Tags Christian, Illumination, Jesus Christ, Peter, Revelation, Satan, Tozer