A.W. Tozer Chapter Two: God Incomprehensible

Chapter 2: God Incomprehensible

“Lord, how great is our dilemma! In Thy Presence silence best becomes us, but love inflames our hearts and constrains us to speak.” – Page 7.

 
The idea of God being incomprehensible is in fact, well somewhat perplexing. We are beckoned to know Him yet scripture contends Him unknowable. Our hearts drive us to attest to His magnificence above all the heavens, but our words fall to the ground, failing to capture His essence. How can one know the unknowable and declare the inexpressible? Are these not compatible? Tozer maintains ”Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son,” said our Lord, “and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.” 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. 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. Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source….. The answer of the Bible is simply “through Jesus Christ our Lord.”– Page 9.

Frederick W. Faber describes it this way; “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.” – Page 9.

“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. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is- God from that-which-is-not-God. 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.” – Page 8.

Tozer warns that to compare God with any created thing is idolatrous at best; crudely ignorant in its attempt. “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 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.” – Page 8.

“Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control. We need the feeling of security that comes from knowing what God is like, and what He is like is of course a composite of all the religious pictures we have seen, all the best people we have known or heard about, and all the sublime ideas we have entertained.” – Page 8.

”Canst thou by searching find out God?” asks Zophar the Naamathite; “canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” – Page 9.

”The intellect knoweth that it is ignorant of Thee,” said Nicholas of Cusa, “because it knoweth Thou canst not be known, unless the unknowable could be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible attained.”

 

What we know of God we know only by His disclosures of Himself. Perhaps the greatest of these, or better, the culmination of these are presented to us through the Person of His Son, Jesus. Colossians 1:15; ^“[Now] He is the exact likeness of the unseen God [the visible representation of the invisible]; He is the Firstborn of all creation.” - Amplified Bible. Yet even with this our knowing and understanding of His Person is inadequate and lacking full scope. 1 Corinthians 13:12; “For now we are looking in a mirror that gives only a dim (blurred) reflection [of reality as in a riddle or enigma], but then [when perfection comes] we shall see in reality and face to face! Now I know in part (imperfectly), but then I shall know and understand fully and clearly, even in the same manner as I have been fully and clearly known and understood [by God].”

“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.” – page 9.

 
”Verily God is of infinite greatness,” says Christ’s enraptured troubadour, Richard Rolle; “more than we can think; ... unknowable by created things; and can never be comprehended by us as He is in Himself. But even here and now, whenever the heart begins to burn with a desire for God, she is made able to receive the uncreated light and, inspired and fulfilled by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, she tastes the joys of heaven. She transcends all visible things and is raised to the sweetness of eternal life.... Herein truly is perfect love; when all the intent of the mind, all the secret working of the heart, is lifted up into the love of God.”’

According to Michael de Molinos; God’s love takes our faith where our reason cannot. “In his Spiritual Guide he says that God will take the soul by the hand and lead her through the way of pure faith.... Thus He causes her by means of a simple and obscure knowledge of faith to aspire only to her Bridegroom upon the wings of love.” It appears that understanding is as much a matter of the heart as it is the mind, perhaps more so. So if He Himself has initiated relationship, how can we know Him? “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.” – Page 10.

“Sovereign Father, heavenly King, Thee we now presume to sing; Glad thine attributes confess, Glorious all, and numberless.” Charles Wesley – Page 10.