Reform & Revive

Well, seems like a good time to get this blog off to its start, so without any further ado, Welcome to Reform and Revive! With this post I hope to encourage and inspire other contributors to the site to get some of their own delicious content going that I myself am so eagerly looking forward to! I don’t have a long post, but hopefully a good one!

In thinking on what to write my first post about, I felt it appropriate to write on that which we should all turn our gaze of attention: the awesomely incomprehensible Living God of the Universe. And as I was thinking about writing about God and who He is, I was reminded of a book that profoundly changed my life and my view of God: The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer. I recommend this book without reservation to ANYONE and EVERYONE. In it Tozer does a superb job, maybe as good as can be done by a finite human being, in beginning to describe the incomprehensible-beyond-human-language nature of God.

In a sermon preached by Tozer on God’s Holiness, he began by telling the story of Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Last Supper. When he was painting, Da Vinci had little problem with anything except the faces. Then he painted in the faces without much trouble except for one: the face of Christ. Feeling helpless to paint him but knowing he must, Da Vinci finally gave in and painted his face quickly. In despair he said that it was hopeless to do any better since he could not adequately paint Christ. Tozer remarked that attempting to talk about God and His Holiness is much like this; he knows he is helpless to be able to do justice with words to describe the infinite, eternal, perfectly Holy God.

With that said, I would like to offer some reflections on a few tremendous quotes by Tozer in this book, particularly relating to God’s self-existence and self-sufficiency, that have changed my mind and heart. Here are a few:

“’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…The child by his question, ‘Where did God come from?’ is unwittingly acknowledging his creaturehood…He must be told that God has no origin, and he will find this hard to grasp since it introduces a category with which he is wholly unfamiliar and contradicts the bent toward origin-seeking…” – Pg. 25

“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 indeed they have no technique for discovering.” – Pg. 26

As I was reflecting on this recently it suddenly dawned upon me. God cannot be proven empirically through human methods of scientific or social inquiry precisely because those methods can be applied only to those things which are created and thus, have a cause. A being with no cause or beginning simply cannot be explained through human inquiry or the scientific method. This approach in fact is entirely unable to touch God. Yet so often we (Christians and non-Christians alike) approach God as if He were equal with us, as if “God” were more of a position to be occupied rather than the self-existent, self-sufficient, perfectly Holy, eternal God that He is. Furthermore, these quotes and Scripture really opened my eyes to see the fact that God, unlike us who are entirely contingent upon Him, has no outside source He must consult or rely upon for life or indeed, for anything. He has life fully in Himself and needs nothing. He is the only being that exists that is entirely free in the truest sense of the word. In fact, in the words of Tozer, “The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.”

There is a lot more to mine out of those quotes I am sure, but I will leave you with one more quote from Tozer and a verse. Enjoy!

“To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us!” – Pg. 26

Exodus 3:14 : God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

- Whit Wilson

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 4:59 am and is filed under Contributor: Whit W., Theology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.