The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God (AW Tozer Series Book 2)

by A.W. Tozer

reminding God that he knew He would act like Himself in the human emergency.

Nothing has entered the being of God from eternity, nothing has been removed, and nothing has been changed.

when God acts justly He is not doing so to conform to an independent criterion, but simply acting like Himself in a given situation.

Everything in the universe is good to the degree it conforms to the nature of God and evil as it fails to do so.

Then he looked straight at God for the answer, for he knew that it lies in what God is.

There is nothing in His justice which forbids the exercise of His mercy.

God is never at cross-purposes with Himself. No attribute of God is in conflict with another.

When God punishes the wicked, Anselm concludes, it is just because it is consistent with their deserts; and when He spares the wicked it is just because it is compatible with His goodness; so God does what becomes Him as the supremely good God.

This is reason seeking to understand, not that it may believe but because it already believes.

justice is not violated but satisfied when God spares a sinner.

actively compassionate.

the Old has more than four times as much to say about it as the New.

Wherever and whenever God appears to men, He acts like Himself. Whether in the Garden of Eden or the Garden of Gethsemane, God is merciful as well as just.

He has always dealt in mercy with mankind and will always deal in justice when His mercy is despised.

If we could remember that the divine mercy is not a temporary mood but an attribute of God’s eternal being, we would no longer fear that it will someday cease to be.

Were there no guilt in the world, no pain and no tears, God would yet be infinitely merciful; but His mercy might well remain hidden in His heart, unknown to the created universe.

It is human misery and sin that call forth the divine mercy.

To receive mercy we must first know that God is merciful.

We must believe that God’s mercy is boundless, free and, through Jesus Christ our Lord, available to us now in our present situation.

give us hearts to believe that we are accepted in the Beloved; and give us minds to admire that perfection of moral wisdom which found a way to preserve the integrity of heaven and yet receive us there.

grace is His goodness directed toward human debt and demerit.

There never was a time when the law did not represent the will of God for mankind nor a time when the violation of it did not bring its own penalty,

The spring of Christian morality is the love of Christ, not the law of Moses; nevertheless there has been no abrogation of the principles of morality contained in the law. No privileged class exists exempt from that righteousness which the law enjoins.

Grace made sainthood possible in Old Testament days just as it does today.

none has ever returned to the divine favor except through the sheer goodness of God. And wherever grace found any man it was always by Jesus Christ.

Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The first man in human history to be reinstated in the fellowship of God came through faith in Christ.

We can never know the enormity of our sin, neither is it necessary that we should. What we can know is that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”