Knowledge of the Holy: Knowing God Through His Attributes

by A.W. Tozer

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.

Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.

The gospel can lift this destroying burden from the mind, give beauty for ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and no burden. Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.

Were we to hold our peace the stones would cry out; yet if we speak, what shall we say?

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control.

Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience.

For the purpose of this book an attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself.

What is God like? What kind of God is He? How may we expect Him to act toward us and toward all created things? Such questions are not merely academic. They touch the far-in reaches of the human spirit, and their answers affect life and character and destiny.

Though God in this threefold revelation has provided answers to our questions concerning Him, the answers by no means lie on the surface. They must be sought by prayer, by long meditation on the written Word, and by earnest and well-disciplined labor.

“As nothing is more easy than to think,” says Thomas Traherne, “so nothing is more difficult than to think well.”

“We think more loftily of God,” says Michael de Molinos, “by knowing that He is incomprehensible, and above our understanding, than by conceiving Him under any image, and creature beauty, according to our rude understanding.”

What God declares the believing heart confesses without the need of further proof. Indeed, to seek proof is to admit doubt, and to obtain proof is to render faith superfluous. Everyone who possesses the gift of faith will recognize the wisdom of those daring words of one of the early Church fathers: “I believe that Christ died for me because it is incredible; I believe that he rose from the dead because it is impossible.”

faith must precede all effort to understand.

is most important that we think of God as Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.