The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. Proverbs 9:10
The following gleanings are from The Knowledge of the Holy, The Attributes of God: Their Meaning in the
Christian Life by A.W. Tozer.
“It is impossible to keep our moral practices sound and our inward
attitudes right while our idea of God is erroneous or inadequate.”
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most
important thing about us.
The history of mankind will probably show
that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history
will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its
idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low
thoughts of God.
For this reason the gravest question before
the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is
not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart
conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward
our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but
of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most
revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant
message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid, for her silence is often
more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her
witness concerning 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. It is highly
significant that the first word was the Word: ‘And the Word was with God, and
the Word was God.’ We may speak because God spoke. In Him word and idea are
indivisible.
That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being
of God is of immense importance to us… Only after an ordeal of painful
self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.
A right concept of God is basic not only to systematic
theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the
foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole
structure must sooner or later collapse.”
“The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to
purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him-and
of her. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place. We do the
greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed
and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew
and Christian fathers of generations past. This will prove of greater value to
them than anything that art or science can devise.
O God of
Bethel, by whose hand
Thy people
still are fed;
Who through
this weary pilgrimage
Has all our
fathers led!
Our vows,
our prayers we now present
Before Thy
throne of grace:
God of our
fathers! Be the God
Of their
succeeding race.
Philip Doddridge
“The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question:
‘What is God like?’
This book is an attempt to answer that
question. Yet at the outset I must acknowledge that it cannot be answered
except to say that God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody.
We learn by using what we already know as a bridge
over which we pass to the unknown. It is not possible for the mind to crash
suddenly past the familiar into the totally unfamiliar. Even the most vigorous
and daring mind is unable to create something out of nothing by a spontaneous
act of imagination…”
“When the Spirit would acquaint us with something that lies beyond the
field of our knowledge, He tells us that this
thing is like something we already know,
but He is always careful to phrase His description so as to save us from
slavish literalism…”
“When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we
dare not add to that statement an idea from 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… To think of creature and Creator as alike in essential being is to
rob God of most of His attributes and reduce Him to the status of a creature.
It is, for instance, to rob Him of His infinitude: there cannot be two
unlimited substances in the universe. It is to take away His sovereignty: there
cannot be two absolutely free beings in the universe, for sooner or later two
completely free wills must collide. These attributes, to mention no more,
require that there be but one to whom they belong.
When we try to imagine what God is like we
must of necessity use that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds
to work on; hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have
constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not
God.”
“If what we conceive God to be He is not, how then shall we think of
Him? …how can we Christians satisfy our longing after Him?”
“The yearning to know What cannot be known, to comprehend the
Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image
of God in the nature of man…”
“The answer of the Bible is simply ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ In
Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows
himself not to reason but to faith and love. 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 faith, and love we enter and lay
hold on 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.”
“That God can be known by the soul in tender personal experience while
remaining infinitely aloof from the curious eyes of reason constitutes a
paradox best described as
Darkness to the
intellect
But sunshine to the
heart.
Frederick
W. Faber.”
A Divine Attribute: Something True About God
“For the purpose of this book an
attribute of God is whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of
Himself… 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-such words 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. We must break ourselves of the habit of thinking of the Creator as
we think of His creatures… 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.”
“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…”
The Holy Trinity
“A popular belief among Christians divides the work of God between the
three Persons, giving a specific part to each, as, for instance, creation to
the Father, redemption to the Son, and regeneration to the Holy Spirit. This is
partly true but not wholly so, for God cannot so divide Himself that one Person
works while another is inactive. In the Scriptures the three Persons are shown
to act in harmonious unity in all the mighty works that are wrought throughout
the universe.
In the Holy Scriptures the work of creation is attributed to the Father
(Gen. 1:1), to the Son (Col. 1:16), and the Holy Spirit (Job 26:13 and Ps
104:30). The incarnation is shown to
have been accomplished by the three Persons in full accord (Luke 1:35), though only the Son became
flesh to dwell among us. At Christ’s baptism
the Son came up out o the water, the Spirit descended upon Him and the Father’s
voice spoke from heaven (Matt. 3:16, 17). Probably the most beautiful
description of the work of atonement
is found in Hebrews 9:14, where it is stated that Christ, through the Eternal
Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God; and there we behold the three
Persons operating together.
The resurrection
of Christ is likewise attributed variously to the Father (Acts 2:32), to the Son (John 10:17, 18), and to the Holy Spirit (Rom. 1:4). The salvation of the individual man is shown
by the apostle Peter to be the work of all three Persons of the Godhead (I
Peter 1:2), and the indwelling of the
Christian man’s soul is said to be by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
(John 14:15-23).
The doctrine of the Trinity, as I have said
before, is truth for the heart. The fact that it cannot be satisfactorily
explained, instead of being against it, is in its favor. Such a truth had to be
revealed; no one could have imagined it.”
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.
Frederick W. Faber
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