The Holiness of God

I'm still reading feverishly along the lines of OT Theology, but today I have been profitably distracted by Phil Brown's musings upon holiness:

• Survey of Holiness in the OT
• Holiness through the OT looking glass
• Defining Holiness: Where to start?
• Rufolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy: Worthless

By way of formulating a response to the last post, I came upon a few comments upon the holiness of God by A. W. Tozer in his classic book, The Knowledge of the Holy. He writes as follows:

The feeling for mystery, even for the Great Mystery, is basic in human nature and indispensable to religious faith, but it is not enough. Because of it men may whisper, "That awful Thing," but they do not cry, "Mine Holy One!" In the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures God carries forward His self-revelation and gives it personality and moral content. This awful Presence is shown to be not a Thing but a moral Being with all the warm qualities of genuine personality. More than this, He is the absolute quintessence of moral excellence, infinitely perfect in righteousness, purity, rectitude, and incomprehensible holiness. And in all this He is uncreated, self-sufficient and beyond the power of human thought to conceive or human speech to utter.

Through the self-revelation of God in the Scriptures and the illumination of the Holy Spirit the Christian gains everything and loses nothing. To his idea of God there are added the twin concepts of personality and moral character, but there remains the original sense of wonder and fear in the presence of the world-filling Mystery. Today his heart may leap up with the happy cry, “Abba Father, my Lord and my God!” Tomorrow he may kneel with the delighted trembling to admire and adore the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.

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 than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to God must be thought of as holy.

God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning, “well, whole.”

(A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, Harper & Row, 1975. p. 112-13, emphasis mine.)

This book has been reissued by HarperOne [Amazon $10.36 pb, 1998 | Amazon $13.57 hc, Large Print/Gift Edition, 1992] and reprinted by Authentic [Amazon $9.99 pb, 2008].

The Holiness of God

Speak, Lord, in the Stillness (pt. 1)

I’ve been meaning to write something about the first day session of Whetstone 2007. It was a message by my pastor, Mark Minnick, and was titled, “Speak, Lord, in the Stillness.” Pastor Minnick took his text from Exodus 33: 1-17 and raised the question of the necessity of getting alone with God. Acknowledging that many preachers argue against the necessity of seeking quiet times with the Lord, Pastor Minnick demonstrated from Scripture that it seemed to be something highly desirable and was the practice of God’s men from the time of Moses onward.

Some in the ministry argue that because of the nature of their ministry and the demands made on their time they can meet with the Lord anytime, anywhere without something as time-consuming as private devotion. Pastor pointed out that if any man, other than our Lord, had those kinds of demands made of him and had that kind of access to God so that he might feel no need of private time with the Lord, it was Moses. Yet from this point on in the wilderness journey “Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp, a good distance from the camp, and he called it the tent of meeting” (Ex. 33:7). This was before the tabernacle was erected. So Moses, to whom God spoke face to face as a man speaks with his friend, felt the need for shutting out the world for times of getting alone with God. In this way he foreshadowed our Lord Jesus Christ, who had greater demands made of Him and unbroken fellowship with the Father, yet He would often slip away for seasons of private prayer.

The picture on the brochure for the conference is of a room that John Wesley set aside in the heart of London for getting alone with God. Wesley was 76 years old when he moved into this house, and he was still pursuing the same thing that Moses was. The purpose for such a place and time for meeting with God is to shut out the clamor of the world so we can focus our attention on the Lord. Jonathan Edwards used to walk out into the woods to meditate and be alone with God. A.W. Tozer had a small study behind the platform in the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church he pastored. He used this room for getting alone with God in the south side of Chicago. When he entered the room, he would change into a pair of old pants he called his “praying pants” and get down prostrate on the floor with his nose pressed into a handkerchief to avoid breathing dust from the carpet. And there he met with the Lord. This just seems to be the felt need of God’s men from the time of Moses down to the present. While this passage in Exodus doesn’t mandate the practice, it definitely presents private devotion as something highly desirable.

I’ll try to post more on this message soon and bring out some of the details from Exodus 33 that are “written for our admonition.”

Speak, Lord, in the Stillness (pt. 1)

He Pursued God - A. W. Tozer

AIDEN WILSON TOZER was born in Newburg, Pennsylvania, on April 21, 1897. In 1915, at the age of seventeen, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Immediately, he entered into a life of devotional fervor. Soon after he was called to pastor a Christian Missionary Alliance church in Nutter Fort, WV. He entered this post without any prior attendance at a Bible college or seminary. He subsequently pastored several C&MA churches, wrote more than forty books, and served as the editor of Alliance Life, a monthly denominational publication.

Of this fine preacher, Warren Wiersbe wrote,

"A. W. Tozer had the gift of taking a spiritual truth and holding it up to the light so that, like a diamond, every facet was seen and admired. He was not lost in homiletical swamps; the wind of the Spirit blew and dead bones came to life. His essays are like fine cameos whose value is not determined by their size. His preaching was characterized by an intensity--spiritual intensity--that penetrated one's heart and helped him to see God. Happy is the Christian who has a Tozer book handy when his soul is parched and he feels God is far away."

["Introduction" to The Best of A. W. Tozer. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1994), p. 9]

This morning I pulled down a copy of Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy and turned to the chapter dealing with "The Love of God." I figured that this would be a fine enough place to read on a Mother's day morning. Here are a couple of brief excerpts from this chapter.

The words "God is love" mean that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is something true of God but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in His unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness and truth. Because God is immutable He always acts like Himself, and because He is a unity He never suspends one of His attributes in order to exercise another.

From God's other known attributes we may learn much about His love. We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning; because He is eternal, His love can have no end; because He is infinite, it has no limit; because He is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity; because He is immense, His love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the loftiest eloquence retreats confused and abashed.

Yet if we would know God and for other's sake tell what we know, we must try to speak of His love. All Christians have tried, but none has ever done it very well. I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a child can grasp a star. Still, by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. So, as I stretch my heart toward the high, shining love of God, someone who has not before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope. ...

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. A child lost in a crowded store is full of fear because it sees the strangers around it as enemies. In its mother's arms a moment later all the terror subsides. The known good will of the mother casts out fear. (pp. 105-106)

A. W. Tozer died on Monday, May 12, 1963. His grave marker simply, yet profoundly, reads: A. W. Tozer--A Man of God. Leonard Ravenhill once said of Tozer, "I fear we shall never see another Tozer. Men like him are not college bred but Spirit taught."

Click here to view more books written by A. W. Tozer (Christian Book Distributors).

Update -
Online Sermon links collected by Paul Schafer at Reforming My Mind - MP3's.

He Pursued God - A. W. Tozer