Reacquainting Ourselves with God's Majesty
Friday Book Notes – January 10th, 2025
Welcome back to Friday Book Notes. My hope, every Friday, is to put together a few quotes from what I am reading. I may or may not comment on them. They are simply an offering of thoughts that caught my attention that I thought may be worth sharing.
I recently finished A. W. Tozer’s classic, The Knowledge of the Holy.[1] I haven’t read Tozer since college. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but overall, I appreciated his work.
In his last chapter, titled The Open Secret, Tozer argues that the greatest need of the church for any age is to “acquaint thyself with God.” He continues, “To regain her lost power the Church must see heaven opened and have a transforming vision of God.”[2]
Who is this God we must acquaint ourselves with? Tozer writes:
The God we must learn to know is the Majesty in the heavens, God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, the only wise God our Savior. He it is that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, who stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in, who bringeth out His starry host by number and calleth them all by name through the greatness of His power…[3]
How are we to know this God? Study alone is not enough. We cannot simply read the Bible, study it, and expect to know God as we ought. There are what Tozer calls “conditions” we must undertake in order to know God, to reacquaint ourselves with him.[4] Tozer offers six “conditions” for reacquainting ourselves with God. Six ways for the church to remember and realign herself with her God.
First, “we must forsake our sins.”[5] Sin separates us from a holy God. Christ forgives us our sins and calls us to a lifestyle of faith and repentance. Though he doesn’t quote 1 John 1:9 it fits: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We surely will sin. Though we are freed from sin’s dominion, sin remains. We must be killing sin before it kills us.[6]
Second, “there must be an utter committal of the whole life to Christ in faith. This is what it means to ‘believe in Christ.’ It involves a volitional and emotional attachment to Him accompanied by a firm purpose to obey Him in all things. This requires that we keep His commandments, carry our cross, and love God and our fellow men.”[7]
Both Tozer’s first and second “conditions” carry the idea of repentance and faith. Repentance is the idea of turning from one thing (sin) toward another (Christ). We turn from sin in repentance and turn toward Christ in faith. Belief in Christ is a continual action.
Third, “there must be a reckoning of ourselves to have died to sin and to be alive unto God in Christ Jesus.”[8] If we are dead to sin, as Paul argues in Romans 6, then we must live as those made alive to God in Christ Jesus. We are not to live under the domain of sin and unrighteousness, but we must present ourselves to God as those who have been brought to life (Rom 6:12-14). In other words, we must live as those who have been made alive. Our words, thoughts, and actions should be transformed by God’s saving work with us.
Fourth, “we must boldly repudiate the cheap values of the fallen world” and we must allow “ourselves only the simplest enjoyments of nature which God has bestowed alike upon the just and the unjust.”[9] I take this to mean, live a simplified life unencumbered by worldly possessions. Tozer doesn’t say such things are necessarily evil in themselves, but he does warn us to not become ensnared by them. Something that is so easy to do in this commercialized and consumeristic day and age.
Fifth, “we must practice the art of long and loving meditation upon the majesty of God.”[10] Rightly, Tozer notes that this will take work, effort. He writes, “the concept of majesty has all but disappeared from the human race. The focal point of man’s interest is now himself. Humanism in its various forms has displaced theology as the key to the understanding of life.”[11] Because of this secularized humanism we have lost the sense of transcendence, lost our sense of anything outside of the limits of our material world. And we are worse for the wear from it.[12]
How do we recover a sense of God’s majesty? “It may be necessary for us to alter our former beliefs about God as the glory that gilds the Sacred Scriptures dawns over our interior lives.” In other words, we must find that vision of God’s majesty anew from Scripture. We must allow the sacred words of God to dawn over the interior of our lives, to be transformed by the renewing of our minds through the Word of God (Rom 12:1-2). God’s majesty, while revealed throughout the created world (Psalm 19), remains chiefly discovered through his Word. To recover the majesty of God, we must recover his Word.
Sixth, “as the knowledge of God becomes more wonderful, greater service to our fellow men will become for us imperative. This blessed knowledge is not given to be enjoyed selfishly. The more perfectly we know God the more we will feel the desire to translate the new-found knowledge into deeds of mercy toward suffering humanity.”[13] We reacquaint ourselves with God and his majesty for the sake of ourselves, but also for the sake of others. We love God to love others. And in loving others we in turn love God. There is always an oughtness to the gospel. We hear, we believe, we obey, we love God, and we love others. We are disciples of Christ and by the very definition of disciple we are to make other disciples of Christ. We have a word that is meant to be shared, declared, and proclaimed throughout the ages. It is a word of hope to a suffering humanity.
All we do, whether corporately as the Church, or individually as a Christ follower, must be done to “extol continually the greatness of [God’s] dignity and power.”[14] Tozer ends by reminding and admonishing:
There is a glorified Man on the right hand of the Majesty in heaven faithfully representing us there. We are left for a season among men; let us faithfully represent Him here.[15]
[1] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York, NY: Harper One, 1961).
[2] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 114.
[3] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 114.
[4] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 115. Tozer does not speak of these “conditions” as being a requirement of our salvation. We are not saved by works. He is saying that because we are redeemed, we will pursue God. In respect, Tozer’s conditions could be described as disciplines of the Christian life.
[5] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 115.
[6] Mortification of sin means to put our sin to death. But vivification is just as important. We must put off our sin but also put on life. This theme of putting off and putting on runs throughout the New Testament letters.
[7] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 115.
[8] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 116.
[9] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 116.
[10] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 116.
[11] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 116.
[12] This is one of the central themes of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
[13] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 116.
[14] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 117.
[15] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 117. Emphasis mine.
Thank you, Will. I haven’t read this, though I have read others by Tozer. Have you read Waiting is Not a Waste: The Surprising Comfort of Trusting God in the Uncertainties of Life by Vroegop?