The Knowledge of the Holy

by A.W. Tozer

True religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time.

His message must be not only timeless but timely.

With our loss of the sense of majesty has come the further loss of religious awe and consciousness of the divine Presence. We have lost our spirit of worship and our ability to withdraw inwardly to meet God in adoring silence.

“Be still, and know that I am God,”

It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.

Since this book is neither esoteric nor technical,

O, Lord God Almighty, not the God of the philosophers and the wise but the God of the prophets and apostles; and better than all, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, may I express Thee unblamed?

They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art, and so worship not Thee but a creature of their own fancy; therefore enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art, so that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee.

Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God.

Thought and speech are God’s gifts to creatures made in His image; these are intimately associated with Him and impossible apart from Him.

I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.

That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems,

That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably.

“Thou thoughtest,” said the Lord to the wicked man in the psalm, “that I was altogether such as one as thyself.”

Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Let faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not in order that we may believe.

“The intellect knoweth that it is ignorant of Thee,” said Nicholas of Cusa, “because it knoweth Thou canst not be known, unless the unknowable could be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible attained.”

We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him.

“Canst thou by searching find out God?” asks Zophar the Naamathite; “canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?

Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source. How can this be realized?

“through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure,

Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience. God came to us in the incarnation; in atonement He reconciled us to Himself, and by fa...

Darkness to the intellect But sunshine to the heart. —Frederick W. Faber

Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him.”

God, being infinite, must possess attributes about which we can know.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

real explanation of even the simplest phenomenon in nature lies hidden in obscurity and can no more be explained than can the mystery of the Godhead.

What??

He may compare Scripture with Scripture until he has discovered the true meaning of the text. But right there his authority ends. He must never sit in judgment upon what is written.

He dare not bring the meaning of the Word before the bar of his reason. He dare not commend or condemn the Word as reasonable or unreasonable, scientific or unscientific.

Love and faith are at home in the mystery of the Godhead. Let reason kneel in reverence outside.

“We will come unto him and make our abode with him.”

Yet again He said, “I and my Father are one.”

It was our Lord’s claim to equality with the Father that outraged the religionists of His day and led at last to His crucifixion.

The attack on the doctrine of the Trinity two centuries later by Arius and others was also aimed at Christ’s claim to deity.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, The only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of Him before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made, Being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made.

For more than sixteen hundred years this has stood as the final test of orthodoxy, as well it should, for it condenses in theological language the teaching of the New Testament concerning the position of the Son in the Godhead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit The Lord and giver of life, Which proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and Son together Is worshipped and glorified.

The authors of the Athanasian Creed spelled out with great care the relation of the three Persons to each other, filling in the gaps in human thought as far as they were able while staying within the bounds of the inspired Word.

“In this Trinity,” runs the Creed, “nothing is before or after, nothing is greater or less: but all three Persons coeternal, together and equal.”

“My Father is greater than

“the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father,”

In His incarnation the son veiled His deity, but He did not void it. The unity of the Godhead made it impossible that He should surrender anything of His deity.

They work always together, and never one smallest act is done by one without the instant acquiescence of the other two.

Gethseneme

When the Son of God walked the earth as the Son of Man, He spoke often to the Father and the Father answered Him again; as the Son of Man, He now intercedes with God for His people.

The fact that it cannot be satisfactorily explained, instead of being against it, is in its favor.

O Blessed Trinity! O simplest Majesty! O Three in One! Thou art for ever God alone. Holy Trinity! Blessed equal Three. One God, we praise Thee.

“God has no origin,” said Novatian and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God.

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself.

The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.