“Commentary on the Nature of the Triune Godhead”
Commentary on the Nature of the Triune Godhead
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
June 6, 1954
Tonight, I picked for myself a very difficult section of Scripture. It was Gypsy Smith, I think, or Sam Jones maybe, Sam Jones, the eccentric American evangelist of a couple of generations ago that said that when the average preacher took a text, it reminded him of an insect trying to carry a bale of cotton. And if ever I felt like an insect it’s tonight and if ever I felt I was trying to lift a bale of cotton, it’s tonight. But let me read the passage here in John 5. Jesus answered them, My Father worketh, hitherto, and I work. Therefore, the Jews up the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the Sabbath, but had said also that God was His Father making Himself equal with God. Then answered Jesus, and said unto them, Verily, verily I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of Himself. But what he seeth the Father do, for what things soever He do it, that is the Father, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth and will show Him greater works than these that ye may marvel. For as the Father raises up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom He will, for the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son that all men should honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the Son, honoreth not the Father which has sent Him. Verily, verily I say unto you, he that heareth My word and believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God. And they that hear, shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.
Now, the first part of this section of Scripture I preached on two weeks ago, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work. And now in the passage before us, the opening part of it, our Lord explains how He works with the Father. The Son can do nothing of Himself but what He seeth the Father do. For what things soever He the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. Now, I spoke of the unceasing activity of God the Father, the unwearied, restless and yet ever restful, omnipotent, creative work of the Father, working toward a predetermined end, a purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began.
Now here, our Lord tells us that His working is in line with the Father’s working and all together dependent upon it. The Son can do nothing of Himself. I want you to notice, and I think this is a bit of theology that we can well take with us into every corridor and passage of the whole Word of God, that the Son can do nothing of Himself. But the Son can do everything in Himself. I quoted the old middle age, Middle Ages, medieval theological concept, that the Son is not God of Himself, but He is God in Himself. Or correctly wording it, the Son is not God of Himself, but of the Father. But He is God in Himself. And here we have it that Son works Himself, but He does not work of Himself, for He can do nothing of Himself.
Now there are four wonderful doctrines that are taught here. One of them is the harmony in the blessed Godhead. There is a harmony in the blessed Godhead. I think it would be impossible to overemphasize this doctrine, that there is a perfect harmony between the persons of the Godhead and that we must never allow ourselves, ever once, to think there is any conflict or to think any conflict into the persons of the Godhead. The Father planned it, but He planned it in His Son. And He wrought it out through His Son by the power of the Holy Spirit so that there has never been anything but harmony in the blessed Godhead. And whatever the Father does, the Son sees Him do and works in harmony with what the Father is doing. And the Holy Ghost is the perfect bond between the Father and the Son, energizing the Eternal Son with the energies of the Father, and so working harmoniously to a preordained end. This is taught in this passage and is also taught throughout the entire Bible.
But also, there is taught this, the subordinate position of the Son of Man. This has bothered some people very much, that the Son is equal to the Father, and yet is subordinate to the Father. For our Lord Jesus Christ teaches both. He says that the Son can do nothing of Himself. And He says, the Father is greater than I. And so He takes a subordinate position and prays to His Father. And naturally, an equal does not pray to an equal. An equal prays to one who is above him and to whom he can address his prayers. And when the Son prays to the Father, it is a tacit confession of subordination. He is not equal to the Father. So He prays to One who is above Him. And yet He can say, my Father and I are one. And He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.
Now, what do we mean, and how do we get this way? And is there contradiction there? No. There’s no contradiction there, my brethren, because the old Athanasian Creed has it, that, as pertaining to His Godhead, He is equal to the Father. As pertaining to His manhood, He is less than the Father. And in this ancient and Holy Trinity, there was nothing before and nothing after, nothing higher and nothing lower, but all three persons together, co-eternal and equal, so that Jesus Christ has the two natures, the nature of man and the nature of God, harmonized into one perfect personality. Let us not imagine Jesus as a schizophrenic, one with a split personality, having two personalities, lets us know that He has one personality, but He has two natures harmonized into one personality. And when He speaks about Himself as the son of Mary, He says that I can do nothing of myself. I see the Father do it and I do it and says that the Father is greater than I. When He speaks about Himself as God, He says, I and My Father are one. So, there is no contradiction here. There is only an understanding.
When I was a very young preacher I got among the Jesus-only people. Now, in case you don’t know what the Jesus-only people are. Now, sometimes you will see a button on their lapel, big around as a school boys cap, and it’ll say Jesus only on it. Now that isn’t what I’m mean, they may be just Moody students, you know, or Nyack students or somebody out trying to tell the world they belong to the Lord. I don’t mean that. But there is a group that called themselves the “Jesus Only” group. I don’t know that they ever were lapel buttons. But they say that the name of the Godhead is Jesus. That the Scripture says, ye shall baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But it doesn’t give us the name, but that Jesus is the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. And they get all mixed up in their mathematics. They say how can three be one, and how can one be three. And they get all mixed up in their mathematics. Their arithmetic gets them into confusion. So, they say there is but one person of the Godhead and that He is named Jesus and that Jesus is the Father and He is the Son and He is the Holy Ghost.
How one can be the father of another has never been explained to me by these friends. And I might add also that these persons believe that everyone who is truly saved and ready for the coming of the Lord has spoken in tongues, and they put you in a tub of water till you do. They say there’s a blessing in the tub, Brother, and they will baptize you till you do come through to their satisfaction, I do not mean to reflect upon them. I think that they are well-intentioned and many times, good people. But of course, you can be good in your heart and be badly mixed up in your head. And they certainly are badly mixed up in their theology. For they teach that there is only one person of the Godhead and He is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. I can’t see how it could possibly be. And that the name of these three, or the name of this One is Jesus.
But anyway, it’s true of a school of modern theologians that there is one person of the Godhead, but he has three masks. That is, He has three faces. The old god of ancient Roman days named Janus, or Janus, had two faces. He looked in two directions. But they’ve gone one further, and they’ve given the Godhead three faces. And when this one Person of the Godhead wants to be the Father, He puts on the Father’s face and turns that to you. When He wants to be the Son, He turns the Son’s face. When He wants to be the Spirit, He turns the Spirit’s face to you.
I find it much easier to believe in an ancient, incorruptible, uncreated Godhead, a fountain of ancient Godhead, and then, the three Persons leaping up out of that Godhead. I have thought of God the Godhead as a great sea, because you know that the mystic theologians taught that the Godhead goes back above and beneath any of the three Persons of the Trinity. That there is the underlying Godhead, and then that the God had expressed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in three personalities. That is what I believe. I believe that the Father is the Ancient Godhead expressing Himself as the Father. And the Son is the Ancient Godhead in expression as the Son. And the Holy Ghost is the Ancient Godhead, all of one substance of one eternity. One, without beginning and without creation. And so, we have the Triune God.
And when Jesus says, I am less than the Father, He’s speaking of His manhood. When He says, I am equal to the Father, He is speaking of His Godhood. And when He speaks of his Godhead, He does not take any low place beneath the Father, neither does the Holy Spirit, but these three are One. It’s a wonderful mystery and I don’t claim to be able to understand it. But I confess I delight to tremble before the throne and say, Holy three times repeated, holy, holy, holy. So, there is a harmony in the blessed Godhead, but there is a subordination of the Son to the Father for the purposes of creation and redemption.
The third thing this text teaches is, the unaffected relation between the Father and the Son in the incarnation. I’m saying so many things these days that I don’t hear anybody else say, that I wonder if it is that I just don’t get around or, is nobody saying it. I preached over in Keswick last week, over the weekend, Saturday, Sunday and Monday in New Jersey. And a lot of Alliance people were there and people who had been in this church, people had come here in days gone by as students and so on. But I had four sermons to preached so I preached on four of the attributes of God. And you know, that the people gave me to understand that they had never heard any sermons on the attributes of God in their life.
I preached on the selfhood of God, and well, three other attributes of God. And they said, they’d never heard any sermons on the attributes of God. And it isn’t that I don’t get around, because when I preach, I have to listen to other preachers. That is, I preach in the morning, say, and he preached in the afternoon. I preach at night and then reverse it. And so as to get a right share, each one taking his turn at bat. And of course, I have to be courteous enough to sit back there and write editorials while the other fellow is preaching. But I never hear this business. I don’t hear anybody preach about the everlasting Godhead and the Eternal Three. I just hear other things and that’s not to reflect on any man who’s preaching the Truth, but it is only to say that there certainly is truth that is being tragically neglected in the day in which we live.
And there’s a whole world of golden truth that we can mine out with a pickaxe of prayer from the Bible that will be meat and drink and food and wonderful help to our Christian people. I’m mixing my metaphors there too brother, mining out gold to eat it for food. You preachers just overlook that because I feel the way that the brother, what was his name? In, that great Brooklyn preacher? Beecher, he said, that when a metaphor gets in my way, God help it. He wasn’t concerned very much with it. Anyway, there was an unaffected relationship between the Father and the Son in the incarnation.
Now, we generally say that Jesus Christ left His home far above yonder and that He came down, and cut Himself off from the Father and left the delights of the Father’s bosom and the Father’s heart and walked in exile among men. But that’s only partly true. It is true as we seeing He left His Father’s home above and emptied Himself of all but love. He did do that, but he never emptied Himself of His deity. Never. When it says that He considered not an equality with God something to be held on to but emptied Himself, remember one thing. He never emptied Himself of His deity. He couldn’t do it. It would be metaphysically impossible even to think such a thought as that the Eternal Son should be anything less than God. But he never emptied Himself of one of the attributes of Deity. But He emptied Himself of the accoutrements of deity. He emptied Himself of the evidences of deity and covered the Deity in a cloak of opaque flesh and walked among us as though He were a man. He was God in overalls. God living on the earth and wearing the common denim of mankind and covering over His deity.
But as somebody has pointed out when occasion required, He could let His deity shine through, as once when He prayed to the Heavenly Father and His face became shining white and His garments whiter than any before on Earth. And they shone like the sun as He knelt there. It was only His deity showing itself through the previously opaque veil of His manhood. But even while He walked on the earth, He was within an unbroken fellowship with His Father. For it’s impossible that the Father and the Son should ever cease in the ancient sea of the Godhead to be joined together as One. But the man Christ Jesus cried, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me? And as pertaining to His manhood, He was forsaken of the Father. As pertaining to His deity, forsaking would be impossible. For we cannot divide the Deity or separate the Persons of the Holy Trinity.
So, Jesus when He walked on earth, saw the Father and that gives us our fourth thought, the perfect clairvoyance of the Son. Now, I use that word clairvoyance without apology, though it needs an explanation. What a beautiful word it is, the word clairvoyance. I like it. It means clear seeing, clear sight, perfect visibility, perfect, unending ceiling, no clouds between. But the spooks have taken it and the wizards and witches and spiritualists and what have you. They’ve taken it and now we have clairvoyance used by the spiritists. They have no more right to it than I have the right to the title of being called the King of England. They have no right to it. For the spiritist doesn’t see clearly.
And no one sees clearly but the Son. And what He seeth the Father do, that He doeth. For the Father shows the Son what He sees Him do so that the Father and the Son are working harmoniously within sight of each other. Not all the clouds that ever came over Palestine prevented the clairvoyance of the Son, the clear sight of Jesus Christ. And not all of the shadows that gathered around Calvary prevented the Eternal Son from gazing full into the face of the Eternal Father. As pertaining to His man, He cried in agony of sacrifice and offering, my God, my God, and bled and died as God turned away from the sacrifice.
But the Eternal Godhood was unaffected and undivided. And the Son looked into the clear face of the Father without a shadow between. It had to be like that, my Brethren, it had to be like that. What a terrible mixed up and imperfect redemption it would have been if Jesus Christ had had to fight His way through. If He, the Eternal Son, had been rejected from the presence of the Father, we would not have had Christianity then. We would have had Roman mythology. We were down calling, Mr. McAfee and I, in the neighborhood of the University of Chicago this last week. And we dropped into a little bookstore there with a red door, bookstore, mostly foreign books, that is foreign language, and classics. And I picked up The Aeneid of Virgil, translated into English, and while my friend was driving along, watching the stoplights, I was reading Him about the gods and goddesses of Egypt, or of Rome. And we saw there, I’d read it of course, as he had and you have before, but it was a new translation I enjoyed reading as we went along.
And here were the gods and the goddesses marrying and giving in marriage, and fighting and being jealous and having rivals and laying for each other and pushing each other around and trying to murder each other. Those were the gods of Rome. One God would sneak in behind another god’s back and grab a hammer, or sneak something out and disappear into the bushes while another god would chase him. And that was as high as the Romans ever got in their concept of God. And if we listen to poor, uneducated, I mean spiritually uneducated, preaching, we will imagine that there exists in the Godhead some kind of such conflict. And that the Son of God, like some demigod of Rome, slipped in and rescued mankind, like Prometheus brought down fire from heaven, and was punished for her robbery.
But nothing like that exists. The perfect clairvoyance, the perfect sight of the Son, the clear seeing of Jesus as He walked among men and gazed into the face of the Father, for the Father was there and is here. For He says, The Father loves the Son. And this love of course, is not simply the love of God for a good man. It is the Ancient Unity of love among the Holy Three, the Ancient Unity of love. So, that’s what it means in the Bible when it says God is love, and he that loveth, knoweth God. And he that loveth not, knoweth not God.
The next time we build a church, will you remind me to get out of the air lanes, a little off to one side, south, north, east or west, so these blessed, DC-6s don’t go overhead? Do they bother you? Just when I’m saying something I consider important, why there’s eight engines roaring up there. But we’ll try to keep sweet. Someday, we’ll fly without wings, free.
Now it says here, the Father raises the dead and quickens them. And even so, the Son quickens whom He will. Now, if this means anything at all my listening friends, it means that the working of the Son in regeneration is as radical and miraculous as the working of the Father in raising the dead. If it means anything, it means that. That the Father raises the dead and quickens them, and even so the Son quickens whom He will. And that’s in the present tense, and He’s not talking about the resurrection. He’s talking about the present time. The time now is He says, the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God and those who harken will live. So, he’s not talking about future resurrection. He’s talking about the present time.
And He says here, that as the Father has ability to raise the dead and give them life, so He has given to the Son also power to raise the dead and give them life. Only the Father raises the dead in the future resurrection, the Son raises the dead right now. They hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hearken will, shall live.
Now, the work of the Holy Ghost and the work of Christ in making a Christian, is as radical a thing as raising Lazarus from the dead. When Lazarus came out of the tomb a live man where a dead man had been, he stood everlastingly as a figure of a Christian who stands up a live man where a dead man has been. Who stands up a clean man where a filthy man has been.
Over in Keswick, they have what they call the colony of mercy. It’s a whole colony, as the name implies, a lot of buildings given over entirely to men who have gone down through drink or dope or both, or other vices that have dragged them down. And out of my two trips there, and I’ve talked to these men last year when I was there. There was a very brilliant man running around there who had been a professor in the university using, I knew he was because he was using long words. And he could talk books by the hour. And he was nice enough to run around carrying the little Pursuit of God. He told me how much he thought of it.
And I went back and I said, what’s happened to so and so? They said, you mean the fellow that was always talking books and running around here? I said, that’s the man. I mean. Well, you know, he had been a university professor and had gotten in either dope or drink or both, and had gone clear down to the gutter, and had gone over to Keswick to be rehabilitated. And over there, they believe in rehabilitation plus regeneration. So, they not only rehabilitated him by getting him off of this stuff. But they told him the Word of God, day and night and wherever they can get to him. Finally, he got converted, you know where he is now? He’s in a Bible school and he’s going to preach the rest of his days. He’s a middle-aged man already, on the happy underside of middle age, but approaching it, and won’t have a long ministry. But he has quit the university now and he’s in a Bible school in the east and is going to preach.
Now, that is a deliberate quickening by the Holy Ghost that is as radical and as miraculous as the raising of Lazarus from the dead. For here was a learned man whose learning broke down in the crisis. And he went down to the gutter and bounced back again by the grace of God and is now a thoroughly converted and blessed man.
Now, he says here, that all men should honor the Son as they honor the Father. Because there is a harmony in the blessed Godhead. Because there is an unaffected relation between the Father and the Son because of the perfect clairvoyance of the Son, wherein He sees as He has from eternity, the Father at work. And because the Father loves the Son and because the Father has given into the hands of the Son power to raise the dead even as He raises the dead, all men should honor the Son even as they honor the Father. And He says that if we withhold honor from the Son, we would hold honor from the Father also. That’s here. That’s the plain teaching of the Scriptures.
Now, there are those who do not honor the Son. They honor Him only as a good teacher, perhaps the best, but only a good preacher or teacher, and preacher of the Word. And the Scripture says that all men should honor the Son as they honor the Father. So, you need to have no hesitation in attributing all of the worship and glory to the Son that you would attribute to the Father. You need to have no fear, because the Father lives for the glory of the Son and the Son lives for the glory of the Father. And the Spirit of God lives for the glory of the Father and the Son.
So, we honor the Son of God. We have no hesitation whatsoever in praying to the Son, as we pray also to the Father. And while it is not usually done, we also have no hesitation in addressing the Holy Ghost. Somebody was asking me today what I thought about praying to the Spirit. Is it ever the right thing to do? Should we ever pray to the Spirit? And my answer is that normally we pray to the Father in the name of the Son and in the Spirit. But also, Jesus Christ had no hesitation in receiving prayers and granting them when He walked among men.
So obviously, there is no formula. If there had been an unbroken and unbreakable formula, that the only way to pray would be to pray to the Father in the name of the Son, then why should Jesus have broken that order and allowed prayer to be made to Himself?
Plainly, then, the Persons of the Godhead are equally God. And the Persons of the Godhead are equally present before our minds when we pray. And when we sing, Holy Spirit, faithful guide ever near the Christian side, we’re praying to the Spirit. And when we pray, Holy Ghost with light divine, fall upon this heart of mine, were praying to the Spirit. And I think if you will read your Bible, you will find instances where a man apostrophies the Holy Ghost. Come thou north wind and blow thou south wind and blow upon this garden that the sweet spices may flow out, apostrophe to the Holy Ghost. And prayers are to be made to the persons of the Trinity. Normally to the Father in the name of the Son, but also without harm and without any transgression of the Scriptures, to the Son when you want to pray to the Son. And if in prayer or song to the Holy Ghost, then also to the Holy Ghost.
Always remember friends, that God is never jealous for a formula. Religious people are. They’re jealous for a formula. They put it 1-2-3-4. And if you say 1-2-4-3, they leap all over you. And white-faced with anger, they prove they love the truth because they’re so mad. And they love the order, the beautiful order of the truth. And if you say four before you’ve said three, they hate you for your heresy. They love the truth so much.
Always remember friends, one time more let me say it. God is easy to get along with. And if your heart is right, He is not so concerned about the formula. No, no. God is kind and good and gracious. God has to be. He has to be because there are some of us that are just too hard to get along with. And if God was as hard to get along with as we are, there would be one perpetual quarrel between our souls and God. So, God has to be easy to live with, and He is. And if He knows you mean right, He’ll let you make all sorts of mistakes and He won’t care. But just as soon as self gets in, and you mean wrong, the holiest thing you do is unholy. As soon as you curse your conduct with self or sin, everything you do becomes wrong. But as long as you love God and people, He’ll let you tumble around a lot and won’t mind it a bit, and sit and watch you as a mother fox will lie in the sunshine with her chin on her paws with a smile on her face and watch her little, little foxes. I don’t know what a little fox is called. Let’s call them puppies.
But anyway, everybody that has ever hunted foxes knows how sometimes they’ll come upon that beautiful, idyllic picture. Picture the old mother watching her little foxes. And I have seen mother cats and watching their kittens. And I have seen mothers watching their babies the same way. And God knows that the most mature of us, we still toddle sometimes. And so, He’s quick to overlook our ignorance, but He’s never quick to overlook our sin. If sin is in it, that’s injury, that’s disease, that’s threatening death. And so, God’s quick to leap on the sin and deal with it. But He never rides us because of formulas that we’ve broken.
So, I don’t care what anybody says. If I want to pray to the Spirit, I’m going to pray to the Spirit. Normally we don’t, but if we want to, let’s do it, and smile and say, if I’m making a mistake, God understands. He knows I mean the whole Godhead. When I say Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, I mean all the persons of the Trinity.
Now, verse 24, we close with that. And how important it is, how important in the pale light of sin and of death and judgment. How important it is that we hear these simple words. Have you noticed friends, that when our Lord Jesus is talking to the believer and attempting to teach and instruct the believer’s heart, He gets so profound sometimes that you have to keep your chin up to keep from drowning under the glory of it. But when He tells us how to get saved, He makes it so simple, so very simple. And here it is, He that heareth my words and believeth on Him that sent me hath everlasting life and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death unto life. Now that is so simple, so simple. He that heareth my Word.
Now, does that describe you? Have you heard the words of Jesus? I believe you have. I believe every one of you has heard the word of Jesus. There isn’t one that hasn’t heard the words of Jesus. If you haven’t heard them all, you’ve heard some of them. And the words of Jesus usually, any words of Jesus are like samples of seawater. They all say about the same thing. And if you’ve heard the words of Jesus, then the next thing is, believeth on Him that sent Me.
Now, does that describe you? He hath everlasting life. If you can say it does describe you then, he has everlasting life and he shall not come in to condemnation, but has already passed from death to life. That’s so simple that nobody will believe it. It’s as though somebody would find an elixir of life or a universal panacea for the cure of all diseases. You know, nobody would believe it, first. Everybody would say it can’t be so. Jesus Christ our Lord has laid down here a universal panacea. He has given us the true elixir. He has told us where the fountain of youth is. And He has said simply, it consists of hearing the words of Jesus and through those words, believing on the Father who sent Jesus. And if we do that, then we have everlasting life and we shall not come into condemnation. But has passed from death, have passed from death unto life.
And somebody says in that case then, what happens to the Christian who breaks down, who has lapsed, who sins? The answer is, there is a difference between coming into discipline and coming into condemnation. The believer who fails his God and sins, comes into discipline, but not into condemnation. But the sinner, is already under condemnation. The Christian, who was believed on the Son.
Could I give you an example? There were two men, Peter and Judas Iscariot. Peter had believed, had heard Jesus Christ and believed on the Father, and had passed out of death into life and was out of condemnation. And he got in a tight spot and failed God. Another one of the apostles also got in a tight spot and failed God. One was Peter, the other was Judas. Christ looked on Peter and brought him under discipline. And Peter repented and wept copiously. As it says in the original, tears and floods of tears, he wept copiously. And in his repentance was restored to favor and blessing. He did not come into condemnation, but he did come under discipline.
But Judas Iscariot went out and it was night. And he went to his own place and he was the son of perdition. Judas Iscariot, who never believed on the Father nor on the Son, and who never was regenerated, went out to night and condemnation. Peter who believed, but failed, went out to discipline and forgiveness. There’s the difference, my brethren. You come to Jesus Christ as you are, weary and worn and sad. Come to Jesus Christ as you are, sinful and tired and without self-confidence, knowing you can’t live it and knowing it, come anyway. Hear the words of Jesus and believe on the Father and the Son. Trust the words of Jesus; that’s believing on him. And God will give you eternal life. God will promise you that you will never come into judgment, for that is condemnation.
God has given me a passage of Scripture to which I am clinging and holding tight. And I don’t understand it, why it’s like this. I don’t understand why it’s like this. But I am telling God about this every once in a while. For this is as the waters of Noah unto me. For as I have sworn that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee. For the mountain shall depart and the hills be removed, that My kindness shall not depart from thee. Neither shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on me. And I tell God about this every once in a while, and I put my name in here so He’ll be sure that I know what he’s talking about. And says, I’ll never be angry again. And I’ll never rebuke you again.
Discipline? Yes. I expect discipline. But I don’t expect ever to see an angry face in God Almighty’s heaven again. That’s not because I’m good, but that’s because He has sent a Redeemer. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. And because the Lord is our Redeemer, we never need to worry after we have trust, if we do trust and walk on with Him. Now, that’s in the Book.
Well, there’s a little running commentary on what our Lord said. It certainly isn’t all, but it’s something. And I pray that God may give every one of you courage to go on believing. And then I trust that you who may not believe, might this very night pass over the narrow little line that separates between believing and not believing, having life and not having life. You have heard His words? Do you believe on Him? Do you believe on the Father who sent Him? Do you believe? Then, will you believe? Will you believe now? Right now, will you believe in the name of the Son of God? As the Father quickens the dead from the graves, so the Son quickeneth whom He will. And whoever hears His voice and harkens, he shall be quickened into eternal life by the Son who takes His honor from the Father and receives this authority from the Father. Will you now, believe?