Who is God?

Left to ourselves, we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms...We want a God we can in some measure control.

 (Knowledge of the Holy by A.J. Tozer)

 

A friend of mine is asking on her blog, "Who is God to you?"  The problem with trying to answer this question is that we somehow have to take the language of the heart and put it into words that can be apprehended by the mind -- and, although God can be known by the heart, He cannot be encompassed by the mind of man.  God can be known only by withdrawing inwardly in worship and meeting Him in silent adoration.  In his wonderful book, Knowledge of the Holy, A. J. Tozer says this:

 

The words, "Be still and know that I am God," mean next to nothing to the self-confident, bustling worshipper in this middle period of the twentieth century.  

 

Still, when someone asks us, love both of God and of man drives us to attempt to explain who God is to us, knowing all the while that only He can truly reveal Himself to each one of us as He did to Abraham, to Hagar in the desert, to Moses, to all the prophets, and to all the saints.  As Paul said, "Who is equal to such a task?"  Jesus said, "No one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals Him."  Paul, though he knew much about God from his education in Judaism, did not really know God until his conversion to Jesus Christ.  Then he said that all he knew came not from others but from revelation.  He spent 3 years in the desert of Arabia before he met the other Apostles of Jesus; all that time, God was revealing Himself to Paul. 

 

What is amazing to me was that as I began to very feebly attempt an answer to Who is Your God? yesterday, knowing that nothing I could say was in the least bit adequate, this morning during my prayer time, I picked up my Kindle Fire --- not something I usually do.  And what came up immediately on the screen was a book I had never ordered or even known about:  Knowledge of the Holy by A.J. Tozer.    In awe, I did order the book and began reading, finding that Tozer was so much better than I at expressing what my heart already knows.  Somehow, he is able to translate that language into words the mind can understand.

 

He begins with a prayer:  O Lord God Almighty, not the God of the philosophers and the wise, but the God of the prophets and apostles, and better than all, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, may I express Thee unblamed?

 

For the next few days, I want to just pull passages out of his book because I am so in awe that it was brought to me just at the moment I needed it.  Because it is on my Kindle, I do not have page numbers to cite:

 

"...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.....Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, "What comes into your mind when you think about God?" we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.

 

"Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God...That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us."

 

"The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long...The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all but one question:  "What is God like?"

 

I will continue tomorrow with Tozer's insights.  But the fact that this book appeared on my screen this morning tells me something about the God I know -- He is present at every moment, and where he is, He is acting --- not just an inert observer.  I believe that He Himself has entered into this conversation.