The Knowledge of the Holy: The Faithfulness of 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 reading was another one of those chapters where it seems like all of God’s attributes came crashing in together. Tozer seems to have spent more of the chapter describing how God’s attributes are all one in His being than he did actually describing God’s faithfulness! But it was warranted and served as a good reminder that God is One, not three or even many parts. He is single in everything He does and understanding that will help us know Him much better than we currently do.
In discussing God’s faithfulness, Tozer reminds us that God is immutable (He doesn’t change). And because God doesn’t change, He will be faithful. If there were ever a time that God wasn’t faithful, He would at that very moment have changed. And this gets at the heart of how God is so incredibly different than we are. We change and therefore we can be faithful or unfaithful, depending on how we feel. But God doesn’t change and so He always remains faithful.
I loved when Tozer identifies ways in which we perceive God wrongly. Today he highlighted the idea we have where God is torn between two different aspects of His character. But God is one and his attributes, like say love and justice, are never at odds within Him. There is no Father/Son arm-wrestling match in Heaven to decide whether justice or mercy will be shown to people on Earth. In God’s justice, He shows mercy. And in God’s mercy, He shows justice.
Tozer then moves to God’s faithfulness. The Bible is full of descriptions of His faithful dealings with His people, from Genesis to Revelation. But Tozer highlights a profound truth: God’s faithfulness is the grounds for the blessings we hope to inherit one day. Our confidence that we will receive them rests on our ability to trust God’s faithfulness to keep His word. This ability to trust God’s faithfulness, even through hard times, has a biblical name: faith.
We become people of faith by seeing God’s faithfulness played out before us over and over again. We believe something God says and wait for it to come to pass. Then when we see it come to pass, we have an easier time believing it will come to pass again. There are times when God will give a supernatural measure of faith to help us to believe for things we have never seen before, but most faith grows by watching God do what He says. This is how we gain trust with our parents and others in the natural and it works in a similar way with God.
Understanding God’s faithfulness and becoming a person of faith is crucial to our lives. Only people who know and understand that God is with them and will not abandon them can face the future with courage. Many face life not knowing whether they will succeed or whether death and gloom awaits around every corner. But if you’ve found Jesus faithful, you can even look death square in the face with assurance of victory. You know Your God will not abandon you.
My encouragement for all of us today is to begin to take God at His word. In our lives, you and I have places where we feel like there has been some kind of disappointment with God. That doesn’t mean God has failed, but it’s entirely possible we had incorrect expectations. My encouragement for you today is to find the places where your faith in God has grown weak because You haven’t seen God’s faithfulness and begin to ask Jesus to renew faith in your heart. He will prove Himself faithful. He can do no other.
That’s my takeaway today. What’s yours? Leave a comment so we can all grow together!
That’s my takeaway today. What’s yours? Leave a comment so we can all grow together!
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
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’s Omnipresence
[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.]
Air is everywhere. Air is something we take for granted. But if we were to remove all the air from the room that we are in we would definitely appreciate it more. And when we think about God and His ability to be present everywhere, we relate to Him in the same way. We take for granted His presence but would certainly notice His absence. But awakening to His constant presence is the sweet spot of Christianity that we all strive for. And this is what Tozer encourages us to do.
He first explains omnipresence. Presence is being close to or next to someone or something. Adding the “Omni” to the front means God is next to or close to everyone at all times. Tozer makes the argument God’s omnipresence is assumed and expounded upon throughout the Bible. God is all around us, what water is to fish and air is to birds.
Tozer presents God’s presence in the world as the answer to many of our questions. The secular world is constantly asking whether the world is only physical or a mixture of physical and spiritual realities. God’s presence throughout the world answers these questions with a strong yes. God loves creation. It is both physical and spiritual. God’s presence also means that He is always with us. No believer has to wonder whether God has left. Our awareness of His presence will continually change, but His actual presence never changes. He is always with us. This truth sustains our heart in confusing and turbulent times.
Tozer summarizes all this by telling his readers that we should be comforted by God’s omnipresence, but that we should attempt to live life aware of His presence. For all the comfort of the truth God is near us, it changes believers to be aware of God in their daily lives.
What I love about today’s reading was the assumption that God is there. Obviously that’s true, but we operate so many times without it, even though theologically we know it’s true. We feel abandoned by God. We feel like some how if God was there, He would have saved us from sorrow. But God is always near.
In the house church world that I live in, there is a wing of the house church movement in the United States that base their meetings on a concept called God’s prevenience. Prevenience means that God has already been doing something in a certain place or situation before You got there. (You can read more about the “prevenience model” of church here.) God has always been in a place before you got there. Your job is to point Him out. His omnipresence has existed, He’s actually even been doing things there, but as a believer your job is to bring others’ attentions to this fact.
We do this by first learning the truth: God is everywhere. And then we begin to take moments of time, acknowledge the truth in our hearts, and look for signs of God’s being with us in whatever place we are in. As we look, God begins to show us signs of His presence. We begin to realize we are not alone. Sometimes we even begin to realize that the place we are standing in is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). As we sense and become aware of God’s nearness, we begin to get better at making others aware. We can speak into situations showing the world God’s activity. What started as a simple doctrine becomes a means for God breaking in to the lives of our friends.
All of this starts, though, with this simple truth: there is nowhere God isn’t. If you feel like He isn’t with you, we may need to work on your feelings, but He is there. He is not absent. He is always with you. He will show Himself faithful again and again by proving He is with you, even in the darkest of nights. This truth, properly placed in the believers life, will act as a rudder during the storms of life, making them strong in hours that would have overwhelmed anyone else.
That’s my takeaway today. What’s yours? Leave a comment so we can all grow together!
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 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: The Divine Transcendence
[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.]
It’s been said that our generation has lost it’s reverence for anything holy. No where is that more true than when we approach the topic of transcendence. Because we’ve lost a holy appreciation for God and his nature, we talk little about transcendence. Really, we don’t know what it is. But just because we don’t understand it’s relevance doesn’t mean there is no value in the reality. God is transcendent and appreciating that reality will help us in our journey to know and understand Him.
God is transcendent. What that means is that God is infinitely greater and higher than we are. Tozer says that transcendence is used to describe One thing (God) who is above our created universe. He is quick to point out that words like “above” should loose all of their spatial meaning. God is above us in the way that He is separated from us by His beauty and His grandeur. Tozer goes on to describe how God is so much higher than us, but not by degrees. He is of an entirely different category. Even though the archangel is “above” the worm, God is still a similar distance “above” both because He is uncreated. He alone is perfection.
Tozer goes on to say we are all to comfortable with this transcendent God. He argues that if an angel from around the throne of worship would come to earth, they would find our discussion of anything else but God’s glory puzzling. And if we caught a true glimpse of God as He truly is, it would ruin us for anything but discussing Him. These are the words of the enraptured heart, but again, we should trust the words of an enraptured heart. Tozer also points out that an intimate relationship with God, far from being ruined by the fear of the Lord and the awe of His person, is actually strengthened and maintained by reverence for Him.
I feel like this is important to highlight. We want a God we can know and be close to and I think that a God we can be close to is great, especially since it’s the God scripture describes for us. But God sets up a tremendous paradox: The reason we can draw close to God is because of the death of His Son. Should Jesus not have died in our place, drawing near to God would not be an option. Moses, the man who spoke to God as a man speaks to his friends couldn’t look directly at His glory. No man has ever seen the full display of God’s glory and lived to tell the story. And it’s this radiating glory from this uncreated being that is nothing like us that makes Jesus’ death so incredibly valuable to us. We are now invited in to relationship with this God who should destroy us.
We shouldn’t fear being destroyed by God by drawing near to Him. Rather, we enter into God’s presence with reverence, knowing that the ticket into this relationship was extremely costly. We treasure the access we have with God because we know it is unique and not common. We purify ourselves of our sinful ways out of reverence for the One we stand before. And instead of this separating us from God, it draws us closer.
I know that many would say these thoughts are old-fashioned. The stuff of holiness preachers and legalists. But for those who have spent years drawing near, it’s the stuff of gold that enables people to press on into knowing God. I need this today more than ever. I hope you find encouragement to draw close as well.
So today, ask God to reveal His transcendent nature to you. Ask Him to show you what causes the angels to never stop singing. And ask Him to stir in you a love and fear of the Lord. You won’t be disappointed.
That’s my takeaway today. What’s yours? Leave a comment so we can all grow together!
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 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 Secrett
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 