A. W. Tozer Chapter Five: The Self-existence of God

Excerpts from Chapter 5:

Opening Prayer:

“Lord of all being! Thou alone canst affirm I AM THAT I AM; yet we who are made in

Thine image may each one repeat “I am,” so confessing that we derive from Thee and that our words are but an echo of Thine own. We acknowledge Thee to be the great Original of which we through Thy goodness are grateful if imperfect copies. We worship Thee, O Father Everlasting. Amen.”

In the book “Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ” by John Piper, the author makes note of the glory of God's eternal existence in the second Person of the Godhead – Jesus Christ. I quote; “The first particular glory that upholds all the rest is the mere eternal existence of Christ. If we will simply ponder this as we ought, a great ballast will come into the tipping ship of our soul. Sheer existence is, perhaps, the greatest mystery of all. Ponder the absoluteness of reality. There had to be something that never came into being. Back, back, back we peer into endless ages, yet there never was nothing. Someone has the honor of being the first and always. He never became or developed. He simply was. To Whom belongs this singular, absolute glory? The answer is Christ, the Person the world knows as Jesus of Nazareth.”

As created beings in a created environment, this reality is unfathomable. The shear prospect of entertaining God's eternal existence seems so foreign to our senses that it is almost intolerable. We as believers are only left with surrendering our reason to the Spirits’ care through a heart of worship and praise.

”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 human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated.

We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside of the circle of our familiar knowledge. We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is self existent, self-dependent and self-sufficient.”

“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! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for “where” has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.”

“, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene.”

“A more positive assertion of selfhood could not be imagined than those words of God to

Moses: I AM THAT I AM. Everything God is, everything that is God, is set forth in that unqualified declaration of independent being. Yet in God, self is not sin but the quintessence of all possible goodness, holiness and truth.”