Tozer Quotes
from “The Knowledge of the Holy; The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life” by A.W. Tozer
compiled by Bryan Carlson
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.” (Proverbs 9:10)
Preface
“The Church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble, as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping men.”
“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. Modern Christianity is simply not producing the kind of Christian who can appreciate or experience the life in the Spirit. The words, ‘Be still, and know that I am God,’ mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshiper in this middle period of the twentieth century.”
“It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.”
Chapter 1: Why We Must Think Rightly About God
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
“Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.”
“That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us.”
“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.”
“…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.”
“Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry…”
“The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.”
“The masses of adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is; and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.”
Chapter 2: God Incomprehensible
“When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we dare not add to that statement an idea form our own head and make it mean ‘in the exact image.’ To do so is to make man a replica of God, and that is to lose the unicity of God and end with no God at all. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is-God from that which-is-not-God.”
“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 the manageable terms.”
“The Gospel according to John reveals the helplessness of the human mind before the great Mystery which is God, and Paul in First Corinthians teaches that God can be known only as the Holy Spirit performs in the seeking heart an act of self-disclosure.”
“…though polluted and land-locked 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? The answer of the Bible is simply ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’”
“God came to us in the incarnation; in atonement He reconciled us to Himself us to Himself, and by faith and love we enter and lay hold on (sic) Him.”
“’What is God like?’ If by that question we mean ‘What is God like in Himself?’ there is no answer. If we mean ‘What has God disclosed about Himself that the reverent reason can comprehend?’ there is, I believe, an answer both full and satisfying. For while the name of God is secret and His essential nature incomprehensible, He in condescending love has by revelation declared certain things to be true of Himself. These we call His attributes.”
Chapter 3: A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
“…an attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself.”
“An attribute, as we can know it, is a mental concept, an intellectual response to God’s self-revelation.”
“To our questions God has provide answers…These answers He has provide in nature, in Scriptures, and in the person of His Son.”
“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. However brightly the light may shine, it can be seen only by those who are spiritually prepared to receive it. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.’”
“If we would think accurately about the attributes of God, we must learn to reject certain words that are sure to come crowding into our minds—words such as trait, characteristic, quality, words which are proper and necessary when we are considering created beings but altogether inappropriate when we are thinking about God.”
“A man is the sum of his parts and his character the sum of the traits that compose it.”
“Human character is not constant because the traits or qualities that constitute are unstable.”
“God exists in Himself and of Himself. His being He owes to no one. His substance is indivisible. He has no parts but is single in His unitary being.”
“The harmony of His being is the result not of a perfect balance of parts but of the absence of parts. Between His attributes no contradiction can exist. He need not suspend one to exercise another, for in Him all His attributes are one.”
“An attribute, then, is not a part of God. It is how God is, and as far as the reasoning mind can go, we may say that it is what God is, though, as I have tried to explain, exactly what He is He cannot tell us.”
“The divine attributes are what we know to be true of God. He does not possess them as qualities; they are how God is as He reveals Himself to His creatures.”
Chapter 4: The Holy Trinity
“Our sincerest effort to grasp the incomprehensible mystery of the Trinity must remain forever futile, and only by deepest reverence can it be saved from actual presumption.
“Some persons who reject all they cannot explain have denied that God is a Trinity.”
“Every man lives by faith, the nonbeliever as well as the saint; the one by faith in natural laws and the other by faith in God.”
“We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper ‘mystery.’”
“…faith must precede all effort to understand.”
“(Man) 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. After the meaning is discovered, that meaning judges him; never does he judge it.”
“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.”
“When He took upon Him the nature of man, He did not degrade Himself or become even for a time less than He had been before. God can never become less that Himself. For God to become anything that He has not been is unthinkable.”
“The dialogue involving the Father and the Son recorded in the Scriptures is always to be understood as being between the Eternal Father and the Man Christ Jesus.”
“In the Scriptures the three Persons are shown to act in harmonious unity in all the mighty works that are wrought throughout the universe.”
Chapter 5: The Self-Existence of God
“’God has no origin’, said Navatian, and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God.”
“God is self-existent, while all created thing necessarily originated somewhere at some time. Aside form God, nothing is self-caused.”
“Whatever exists must have had a cause that antedates it and was at least equal to it, since the lesser cannot produce the greater.”
“The human mind, being created, has a understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated. We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside of the circle of our familiar knowledge. We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is self-existent, self-dependent and self-sufficient.”
“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.”
“For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for ‘where’ has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both.”
“It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God.”
“…because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.”
“We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is.”
“Think God away and man has no ground of existence.”
“That God is everything and man nothing is a basic tenet of Christian faith and devotion;”
“’All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.’” (John 1:3)
“The natural man is a sinner because and only because he challenges God’s selfhood in relation to his own.”
“Yet so subtle is self that scarcely anyone is conscious of its presence. Because man is born a rebel, he is unaware that he is one. His constant assertion of self, as far as he thinks of it al all, appears to him a perfectly normal thing.”
“Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, ‘I AM.’ That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural is appears to be good. It is only when in the gospel the soul is brought before the face of the Most Holy One without the protective shield of ignorance that the frightful moral incongruity is brought home to the conscience.”
“’The essence of sin is to will one thing’ (Kierkegaard), for to set our will against the will of God is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in the little kingdom of Mansoul. This is sin at its evil root.”
“Sins are because sin is. This is the rationale behind the much maligned doctrine of natural depravity which holds that the impenitent man can do nothing but sin and that his good deeds are really not good at all.”
“’All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way.’”
Man must take up his cross daily and follow Christ.
Galatians 2:20
Chapter 6: The Self-Sufficiency of God
“Whatever God is, and all that God is, He is in Himself. All life is in and from God, whether it be the lowest form of unconscious life or the highly self-conscious, intelligent life of a seraph. No creature has life in itself; all life is a gift from God.”
“The life of God, conversely, is not a gift from another. Were there another from whom God could receive the gift of life, or indeed any gift whatever, that other would be god in fact. An elementary but correct way to think of God is as the One who contains all, who gives all that is given, but who Himself can receive nothing that He has not first given.”
“His interest in His creatures arises from His sovereign good pleasure, not from any need those creatures can supply not from any completeness they can bring to Him who is complete in Himself.”
“He is what He is in Himself without regard to any other. To believe in Him adds nothing to His perfections; to doubt Him takes nothing away.”
“Probably the hardest thought of all for our natural egotism to entertain is that God does not need our help.”
“Man’s only claim to importance is that he was created in the divine image; in himself he is nothing.”
“Among all created beings, not one dare trust in itself. God alone trust in Himself; all other beings must trust in Him. Unbelief is actually perverted faith, for it put its trust not in the living God but in dying men.”
“The Man Jesus as He appeared in the flesh has been equated with the Godhead and all His human weaknesses and limitations attributed to the Deity. The truth is that the Man who walked among us was a demonstration, not of unveiled deity but of perfect humanity. The awful majesty of the Godhead was mercifully sheathed in the soft envelope of human nature to protect mankind.”
“Let us not imagine that the truth of the divine self-sufficiency will paralyze Christian activity. Rather it will stimulate all holy endeavor. This truth, while a needed rebuke to human self-confidence, will when viewed in its Biblical perspective lift from our minds the exhausting load or mortality and encourage us to take the easy yoke of Christ and spend ourselves in Spirit-inspired toil for the honor the God and the good of mankind. For the blessed news is that the God who needs no one has in sovereign condescension stooped to work by and in and through His obedient children.”
“’It is God which worketh in you.’ He needs no one, but when faith is present He works through anyone.”
Chapter 7: The Eternity of God
“The truth is that if the Bible did not teach that God possessed endless being in the ultimate meaning of that term, we would be compelled to infer it from His other attributes, and if the Holy Scriptures had no word for absolute everlastingness, it would be necessary for us to coin one to express the concept, for it is assumed, implied, and generally taken for granted everywhere throughout the inspired Scriptures.”
“…the concept of everlastingness is necessary to give meaning to any Christian doctrine.”
“’From everlasting to everlasting, thou art God,’ said Moses in the Spirit.”
“Time marks the beginning of created existence, and because God never began to exist it can have not application to Him.”
“Because God lives in an everlasting now, He has not past and no future.”
“God dwells in eternity but time dwells in God.”
“That God appears at time’s beginning is not too difficult comprehend, but that He appears at the beginning and end of time simultaneously is not so east to grasp; yet it is true.”
“For Him everything that will happen has already happened.”
“He sees the end and the beginning in one view.”
“…since God is eternal, He can be and continue forever to be the one safe home for His time-driven children.”
“…God’s eternity is so long and our years on earth are so few, how shall we establish the work of our hands?”
“’So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”
“We who live in this nervous age would be wise to meditate on our lives and our days long and often before the face of God and on the edge of eternity. For we are made for eternity as certainly as we are made for time, and as responsible moral beings we must deal with both.”
“The ancient image of God whispers within every man of everlasting hope; somewhere he will continue to exist.”
“God’s eternity and man’s mortality join to persuade us that faith in Jesus Christ is not optional. Out of eternity our Lord came into time to rescue His human brethren whose moral folly had made them not only fools of the passing world but slaves of sin and death as well.”
Chapter 8: God’s Infinitude
“Whatever the cost to us in loss of friends or goods or length of days let us know Thee as Thou art, that we may adore Thee as we should.”
“We have but to want Him badly enough, and He will come and manifest Himself to us.”
“Infinitude, of course, means limitlessness, and it is obviously impossible for a limited mind to grasp the Unlimited."
“All our thought about Him will be less than He, and our loftiest utterances will be trivialities in comparison with Him.”
“Properly, the word can be used of no created thing, and of no one but God.”
“He knows no bounds.”
“He is measureless.”
“All that He is He is without growth or addition or development. Nothing in god is less or more, or large or small. He is what He is in Himself, without qualifying thought or word. He is simply God.”
“…there may be, and I believe there surely are, other aspects of God’s essential being which He has not revealed even to His ransomed and Spirit-illuminated children.”
“Because God’s nature is infinite, everything that flows our of it is infinite also.”
“How completely satisfying to turn from our limitations to a God who has none. Eternal years lie in His heart. For Him time does not pass, it remains; and those who are in Christ share with Him all the riches of limitless time and endless years. God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which He must work.”
“…the gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus is as limitless as God.”
“In God there is life enough for all and time enough to enjoy it.”
“The mercy of God is infinite too…”
“However sin may abound it still has its limits, for it is the product of finite minds and hearts…”
Chapter 9: The Immutability of God
“To say that God is immutable is to say that He never differs from Himself. The concept of a growing or developing God is not found in the Scriptures.”
“For a moral being to change it would be necessary that the change be in one of three directions. He must go from better to worse or from worse to better; or, granted that the moral quality remain stable, he must change within himself, as from immature to mature or from one order of being to another. It should be clear that God can move in none these directions. His perfections forever rule out any such possibility.”
“One who can suffer any slightest degree of change is neither self-existent, self-sufficient, nor eternal, and so is not God.”
“Only a being composed of parts may change, for change is basically a shift in the relation of the parts of a whole or the admission of some foreign element into the original composition.”
“The immutability of God appears in its most perfect beauty when viewed against the mutability of men. In God no change is possible; in men change is impossible to escape.”
“The law of mutation belongs to a fallen world, but God is immutable, and in Him men of faith find at last eternal permanence.”
“For human beings the whole possibility of redemption lies in their ability to change.”
“…His attitude toward us now is the same as it was in eternity past and will be in eternity to come…”
“In all our efforts to find God, to please Him, to commune with Him, we should remember that all change must be on our part.”
Chapter 10: The Divine Omniscience
“To say that God is omniscient is to say that He possesses perfect knowledge and therefore has no need to learn. But it is more: it is to say that God has never learned and cannot learn.”
“Could God at any time or in any manner receive into His mind knowledge that He did not possess and had not possessed from eternity, He would be imperfect and less than Himself.”
“God perfectly knows Himself and, being the source of all things, it follows that He knows all that can be known.”
“He never discovers anything, He is never surprised, never amazed. He never wonders about anything nor (except when drawing men out for their own good) does He seek information or ask questions.”
“That God knows each person through and through can be a cause of shaking fear to the man that has something to hide—some unforsaken sin, some secret crime committed against man or God.”
“And to us who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope that is set before us in the gospel, how unutterably sweet is the knowledge that our Heavenly Father knows us completely. No talebearer can inform on us, no enemy can make an accusation stick; no forgotten skeleton can come tumbling out of some hidden closet to abash us and expose our past; no unsuspected weakness in our characters can come to light to turn God away from us, since He knew us utterly before we knew Him and called us to Himself in the full knowledge of everything that was against us.”
Chapter 11: The Wisdom of God
“There is indeed a secondary, created wisdom which God has given in measure to His creatures as their highest good may require; but the wisdom of any creature or of all creatures, when set against the boundless wisdom of God, is pathetically small.”
“The idea of God as infinitely wise is at the root of all truth.”
“Wisdom, among other things, is the ability to devise perfect ends and to achieve those ends by the most perfect means.”
“Wisdom sees everything in focus, each in proper relation to all, and is thus able to work toward predestined goals with flawless precision.”
“In spite of tears and pain and death we believe that the God who made us all is infinitely wise and good.”
“We rest in what God is. I believe that this alone is true faith. Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith.”
“Our insistence upon seeing ahead is natural enough, but it is a real hindrance to our spiritual progress. God has charged Himself with full responsibility for our eternal happiness and stands ready to take over the management of our lives the moment we turn in faith to Him.”
“’What I am is all that need matter to you, for there lie your hope and your peace. I will do what I will do, and it will all come to light at last, but how I do it is my secret. Trust me, and be not afraid.’”
“With the goodness of God to desire our highest welfare, the wisdom of God to plan it, and the power of God to achieve it, what do we lack?”
Chapter 12: The Omnipotence of God
“Sovereignty and omnipotence must go together. To reign, God must have power, and to reign sovereignly, He must have all power. And that is what omnipotent means, having all power.”
It is identical in meaning to almighty. “He alone is almighty.”
“…God has power. Since God is also infinite, whatever He has must be without limit; therefore God has limitless power; He is omnipotent. We see further that God the self-existent Creator is the source of all the power there is, and since a source must be at least equal to anything that emanates from it, God is of necessity equal to all the power there is, and this is to say again that He is omnipotent.”
“He gives but He does not give away. All that He gives remains His own and returns to Him again.”
“Science observes how the power of God operates, discovers a regular pattern somewhere and fixes it as a ‘law.’”
“The trustworthiness of God’s behavior in His world is the foundation of all scientific truth.”
“All the power required to do all that He wills to do lies in undiminished fullness in His own infinite being.”
Chapter 13: The Divine Transcendence
“When we speak of God as transcendent we mean of course that He is exalted far above the created universe, so far above that human thought cannot imagine it.”
“If some watcher of holy one who has spent his glad centuries by the sea of fire were to come to earth, how meaningless to him would be the ceaseless chatter of the busy tribes of men. How strange to him and now empty would sound the flat, stale, and profitless words heard in the average pulpit from week to week. And were such a one to speak on earth would he not speak of God?”
“’There is no fear of God before His eyes.’”
“Wherever God appeared to men in Bible times the results were the same—an overwhelming sense of terror and dismay, a wrenching sensation of sinfulness and guilt.”
Biblical examples: Abram, Moses, Isaiah and Daniel
“…a vision of the divine transcendence soon ends all controversy between the man and his God.”
Chapter 14: God’s Omnipresence
“The word present, of course, means here, close to, next to, and the prefix omni gives in universality. God is everywhere here, close to everything, next to everyone."
“Few other truths are taught in the Scriptures with as great clarity as the doctrine of the divine omnipresence.”
“’God is over all things,’ wrote Hildebert of Lavardin, ‘under all things; outside all; within but not enclosed; without but not excluded; above but not raised up; below but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly beneath, sustaining; wholly within, filling.’”
“The doctrine of the divine omnipresence personalizes man’s relation to the universe in which he finds himself.”
“At this point faith begins, and while it may go on to include a thousand other wonderful truths, these all refer back to the truth that God is, and God is here.”
“He is there as He is here and everywhere, not confined to tree or stone, but free in the universe, near to everything, next to everyone, and through Jesus Christ immediately accessible to every loving heart. The doctrine of the divine omnipresence decides this forever.”
Chapter 15: The Faithfulness of God
“All of God’s acts are consistent with all of His attributes.”
“God, being who He is, cannot cease to be what He is, and being what He is, He cannot act out of character with Himself. He is at once faithful and immutable, so all His words and acts must be and must remain faithful.”
“I think it might be demonstrated that almost every heresy that has afflicted the church through the years has arisen from believing about God things that are not true, or from over-emphasizing certain true things so as to obscure other things equally true. To magnify any attribute to the exclusion of another is to head straight for one of the dismal swamps of theology; and yet we are all constantly tempted to do just that.”
“Upon Gods faithfulness rests our whole hope of future blessedness. Only as He is faithful will His covenants stand and His promises be honored. Only as we have complete assurance that He is faithful may we live in peace and look forward with assurance to the life to come.”
Chapter 16: The Goodness of God
“The goodness of God is that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of good will toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature He is inclined to bestow blessedness and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people.”
“If God is not good, then there can be no distinction between kindness and cruelty, and heaven can be hell and hell, heaven.”
“…the ground of all blessedness is the goodness of God.”
“The cause of His goodness is in Himself; the recipients of His goodness are all His beneficiaries without merit and without recompense.”
“He hears prayer because He is good, and for no other reason.” Faith is not meritorious; it is simply confidence in the goodness of God.”
“Christ walked with men on earth that He might show them what God is like and make known the true nature of God to a race that had wrong ideas about Him.”
“By our own attitudes we may determine our own reception by Him.”
“The greatness of God rouses fear within us, but His goodness encourages us not to be afraid of Him. To fear and not be afraid—that is the paradox of faith.”
Chapter 17: The Justice of God
“In the inspired Scriptures justice and righteousness are scarcely to be distinguished from each other.”
Justice, when used of God, is a name we give to the way god is, nothing more; and when God acts justly He is not doing so to conform to an independent criterion, but simply acting like Himself in a given situation.”
“Because of our sin we are all under sentence of death, a judgment which resulted when justice confronted our moral situation.”
“But when the penitent sinner casts himself upon Christ for salvation, the moral situation is reversed. Justice confronts the changed situation and pronounces the believing man just. Thus justice actually goes over to the side of God’s trusting children.”
1 John 1:9
“But God’s justice stands forever against the sinner in utter severity. The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions. It hushes their fears and allows them to practice all pleasant forms of iniquity while death draws every day nearer and the command to repent goes unregarded.”
Chapter 18: The Mercy of God
“…we who were one time enemies and alienated in our minds through wicked works shall then see God face to face and His name shall be in our foreheads. We who earned banishment shall enjoy communion; we who deserve the pains of hell shall know the bliss of heaven. And all through the tender mercy of our God…”
“Mercy is an attribute of God which disposes God to be actively compassionate.”
“He has always dealt in mercy with mankind and will always deal in justice when His mercy is despised.”
“Forever His mercy stands, a boundless, overwhelming immensity of divine pity and compassion.”
“As judgment is God’s justice confronting moral inequity, so mercy is the goodness of god confronting human suffering and guilt.”
“It is human sin that called forth the divine mercy.”
“We must believe that God’s mercy is boundless, free and, through Jesus Christ our Lord, available to us now in our present situation.”
Chapter 19: The Grace of God
“In God mercy and grace are one; but as they reach us they are seen as two, related but not identical.”
“As mercy is God’s goodness confronting human misery and guilt, so grace is His goodness directed toward human debt and demerit. It is by His grace hat God imputes merit where none previously existed and declares no debt to be where one had been before.”
“Grace is the good pleasure of God that inclines Him to bestow benefits upon the undeserving.”
“…the channel through which [grace] flows out to men is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.”
“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.”
“The Old Testament is indeed a book of law, but not of law only.”
“And how could it be otherwise? God will always be Himself, and grace is an attribute of His holy being.”
“Had the Old Testament times been times of stern, unbending law alone the whole complexion of the early world would have been vastly less cheerful than we find it to be in the ancient writings.”
“Grace made sainthood possible in Old Testament days just as it does today.”
“No one was ever saved other than by grace, from Abel to the present moment.”
“And wherever grace found any man it was always by Jesus Christ. Grace indeed came by Jesus Christ, but it did not wait for His birth in the manger or His death on the cross before it became operative. 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. In olden times men looked forward to Christ’s redeeming work; in later times they gaze back upon it, but always they came and they come by grace, through faith.”
“…’where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.’”
“To ‘abound’ in sin: that is the worst and the most we could or can do…All thanks be to God for grace abounding.”
Chapter 20: The Love of God
“God is love.”
“John was by those words stating a fact, but he was not offering a definition. Equating love with God is a major mistake which has produced much unsound religious philosophy…”
“If literally God is love, that literally love is God, and we are in all duty bound to worship love as the only god there is. If love is equal to God than God is only equal to love and God and love are identical. Thus we destroy the concept of personality in God and deny outright all His attributes save one, and that one we substitute for God.”
“The words ‘God is love’ mean that love is an essential attribute of God.”
“…we see love showing itself as good will. Love wills the good of all and never wills harm or evil to any. This explains the words of the apostle John: ‘There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.’ Fear is the painful emotion that arises at the thought that we may be harmed or made to suffer. This fear persists while we are subject to the will of someone who does not desire our well-being. The moment we come under the protection of one of good will, fear is cast out.”
“Love is also an emotional identification. It considers nothing its own but gives all freely to the object of its affection.”
“Another characteristic of love is that it takes pleasure in its object.”
“Hell is a place of no pleasure because there is no love there.”
“…we have the certain promise that the causes of sorrow will finally be abolished and the new race enjoy forever a world of selfless, perfect love.”
“God does not love populations, He loves people. He love not masses, but men.”
“In Christian experience there is a highly satisfying love content that distinguishes it from all other religions and elevated it to heights far beyond even the purest and noblest philosophy.”
Chapter 21: The Holiness of God
“Until we have seen ourselves as do sees us, we are not likely to be much disturbed over conditions around us as long as they do not get so far out of hand as to threaten our comfortable way of life. We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.”
“We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable.”
“It is possible to have some truth in the mind without having the Spirit in the heart, but it is never possible to have the Spirit apart from truth.”
“Holy is the way God is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other that it is. Because He is holy, all His attributes are holy…”
“God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death.”
Holy means “well, whole.”
“When He arises to put down iniquity and save the world from irreparable moral collapse, He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation. God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys.”
“We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of God passed by.”
Chapter 22: The Sovereignty of God
“God’s sovereignty is the attribute by which He rules His entire creation, and to be sovereign God must be all-knowing, all-powerful, and absolutely free.”
“God is said to be absolutely free because not one and no thing can hinder Him or compel Him or stop Him. He is able to do as He pleases always, everywhere, forever.”
“The sovereignty of God is a fact well established in the Scriptures and declared aloud by the logic of truth. But admittedly it raises certain problems which have not to this time been satisfactorily solved. These are mainly two.
“The first is the presence in the creation of those things which God cannot approve, such as evil, pain, and death. If God is sovereign He could have prevented their coming into existence. Why did He not do so?”
“While a complete explanation of the origin of sin eludes us, there are a few things we do know. In His sovereign wisdom God has permitted evil to exist in carefully restricted areas of His creation, a kind o fugitive outlaw whose activities are temporary and limited in scope. In doing this god has acted according to His infinite wisdom and goodness. More than that no one knows at present; and more that that no one needs to know. The name of God is sufficient guarantee of the perfection of His works.
Another real problem created by the doctrine of the divine sovereignty has to do with the will of man. If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees, how is it possible for man to exercise free choice? And if he cannot exercise freedom of choice, how can he be held responsible for his conduct? Is he not a mere puppet whose actions are determined by a behind-the-scenes God who pulls the strings as it pleases Him?
“The attempt to answer these questions had divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacabus Arminius and John Calvin. Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man.”
“Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil.”
“…in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom.”
“There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made.”
Tozer, A.W. The Knowledge of the Holy; The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the Christian Life. HarperOne, 1992.
