The Knowledge of the Holy: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
[Editor’s Note: This is a 23-Day Series exploring different aspects of God’s nature and personality, using Tozer’s “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a discussion starter. You can read the introduction of the series here.]
Today’s chapter is Tozer’s follow up to his last. If God is incomprehensible in the sense that we cannot fully understand Him but loves to reveal Himself to us, how does He do it? According to Tozer, God reveals to us His attributes. “An attribute, as we can know it, is a mental concept, an intellectual response to God’s self-revelation. It is an answer to a question, the reply God makes to our interrogation concerning Himself.”
This can sound really boring and academic if we let it. But Tozer would be the first to walk us back from this being a study instead of an encounter. Consider some of these quotes from the chapter: “…we might be wise to follow the insight of the enraptured heart rather than the more cautious reasonings of the theological mind…” and “To our questions God has provided answers; not all the answers, certainly, but enough to satisfy our intellects and ravish our hearts.” This study will feed our minds to a certain degree but the aim is to feed our hearts and bring us face to face with God Himself.
Tozer goes on to describe that our study in the attributes of God is not an attempt to dissect God into parts. But the attributes of God are things that God is in his totality. God doesn’t have love, He is the definition of it and we learn what love is by looking at Him. God is both just and merciful, but these are not two parts of God that wrestle with each other. God is both without either attribute winning or loosing at certain points in time.
If these concepts cause you to step back, scratch your head, and look confused, then you’ve been paying attention. Part of trying to know God is realizing that at a certain point we are peering into mystery. These mysteries, far from discouraging or confusing us, should cause us to worship. It should bring us to the place of acknowledging how much bigger than us our God is. And as we love this God that seems so shrouded in mystery, He gives light to our heart to understand Him more.
My take away: This is a journey in encountering all of God. We cannot go on a journey of dissecting God like a dead man on a table to find out what makes Him tick. Instead, we are being called into a relationship with the most unique person in the universe. And those encounters with the answers to our questions should provoke an even greater sense of longing and worship of God in Christ. There is no one like God. That’s what makes Him holy. And its into this journey of mystery and longing and worship that we are now about to embark.
Forgive me for waxing poetic this morning. My hope is your heart gets caught up in this journey and waxes a little poetic about Jesus, too.
How about you? What’s your takeaway for the day? Leave a comment so we can journey together!
The Knowledge of the Holy Series
Day 1: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
Day 3: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
Day 4: The Holy Trinity
Day 5: The Self Existence of God
Day 6: The Self Sufficiency of God
Day 7: The Eternity of God
Day 8: God’s Infinitude
Day 9: The Immutability of God
Day 10: The Divine Omniscience
Day 11: The Wisdom of God
Day 12: The Omnipotence of God
Day 13: The Divine Transcendence
Day 14: God’s Omnipresence
Day 15: The Faithfulness of God
Day 16: The Goodness of God
Day 17: The Justice of God
Day 18: The Mercy of God
Day 19: The Grace of God
Day 20: The Love of God
Day 21: The Holiness of God
Day 22: The Sovereignty of God
Day 23: The Open Secret
The Knowledge of the Holy: God Incomprehensible
[Editor’s Note: This is a 23-Day Series exploring different aspects of God’s nature and personality, using Tozer’s “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a discussion starter. You can read the introduction of the series here.]
How can men understand God? More specifically, how can a man who is finite fully understand an infinite God? How can the thimble sized container of man’s understanding hope to contain the ocean of God’s being? Ultimately, we can’t. This is the question with which we have to wrestle with Tozer in this chapter. The struggle is so real, that Tozer points to how men of the Bible continually said God was like something, because they had nothing else they could compare Him to. Human words were to weak to capture what God was really in Himself. We can at best understand what God is like. Tozer finally concedes that we cannot answer what God is in His totality. But we can understand what God has made clear to us about Himself and it’s in this sense we can know God.
Tozer takes the sum of the Bible’s message about knowing God and presents it to us: God is infinite. He will always be greater than your ability to understand Him. If He ever wasn’t, He would cease to be God. But God wants to be known and because of that, He stoops down and shows us what we can handle. So the man who is smug in his knowledge of God is deceived. But the man who humbly confesses what God has clearly shown while simultaneously acknowledging he is only an infant in his understanding, has received wisdom.
This, I think, is what turns off so many unbelievers. They’ve found Christians entirely too comfortable with a God they barely know. They’ve found followers of Jesus who aren’t in awe of who He is and what He’s done. I’ve met some believers who in their pursuit of the knowledge of God, act as if they have become a god themselves. But believers should be in awe of God. They should realize they stand gazing into the things which “many prophets and righteous people longed to see…but they didn’t see it,” (Matthew 13:17). We have access, not just to understand part of God through His word, but an invitation to have a relationship with Him through His Spirit. We cannot live dull to these promises.
At the same time, to the unbelievers who think God can never be known, Tozer says that God has stooped down to reveal Himself to humanity. Not all of him, not most of him, but enough of Him. Enough so that we can understand what we need to have a relationship, enough to enjoy Him, enough to be transformed. The fact that God is too big for us to understand is Good News. We don’t worship someone so weak that we can totally understand Him. It shouldn’t promote hopelessness about the divine, rather, it should produce a seeking heart that longs to know what it can.
And this is the journey we are on. We don’t seek to be built up in the pride of knowledge, but to stare wonderingly at the great truths God has communicated to us about Himself. And in so doing, draw close to His heart.
That’s my take for the day. What’s yours? Leave a comment so we can journey together!
The Knowledge of the Holy Series
The Knowledge of the Holy: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
[Editor’s Note: This is a 23-Day Series exploring different aspects of God’s nature and personality, using Tozer’s “The Knowledge of the Holy” as a discussion starter. You can read the introduction of the series here.]
Today is the first day in our journey with Tozer through the Knowledge of the Holy. Like any good author, Tozer seeks to convince us first that the journey is worth the effort. Why should we be concerned about knowing God? Why should how we think about God matter to us? Does it matter at all?
Tozer argues convincingly that it does. In fact, He argues that our spiritual lives, both as individuals and as churches, rises and falls based on what we think about God. In our spiritual lives, we move towards our perception of who God is, whether we know it or not. Over and over again the Scriptures say that we become like what we behold. We will become like the skewed images of God that we have. “To the pure you show yourself pure, but to the crooked you show yourself shrewd,” (Psalm 18:26). He goes on to argue that the heart of idolatry is recreating God in the image of ourselves. This erodes our worship of Jesus and our ability to follow Him wholeheartedly.
For me this morning, Tozer’s words are strong medicine. Within the last ten or fifteen years the church has undergone a revolution of sorts, where we’ve discovered that many of our beliefs about Christianity were inherited from our fathers rather than given from God. And the result has been at times a healthy questioning of a doctrine or practice and other times a denial of an essential truth of Christianity. I fear often that instead of an honest desire to know Christ, we are really remaking God in the image of our culture and the result is a Christianity that doesn’t look like it’s Christ.
This is why this journey is so important. Not so that we can say we know theology, but so that our lives can grow up into the image of Him who is the Head.
So, that’s my take on today’s chapter. Now it’s your turn. In the comments, leave a brief thought that struck you from Chapter 1 of “The Knowledge of the Holy.”
Day 1: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
Day 3: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
Day 5: The Self Existence of God
Day 6: The Self Sufficiency of God
Day 9: The Immutability of God
Day 10: The Divine Omniscience
Day 12: The Omnipotence of God
Day 13: The Divine Transcendence
Day 15: The Faithfulness of God
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 