What Comes into Our Minds

These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes. PSALM 50:21

The Knowledge of the Holy opens with a claim so simple that it is easy to read past it, and so large that it governs everything Tozer ever taught. The most important thing about any of us, he said in effect, is not our circumstances or our achievements or even our conduct, but what we actually think God is like when we think of Him. Not what we would say if asked to recite a creed, but the picture that rises in the mind, unbidden, when the name of God is spoken. That picture, more than anything else, determines the whole shape of a life. And the same is true of a church.

The idea beneath the idea

Tozer was careful to distinguish between two things. There is the doctrine of God a man professes, and there is the idea of God he actually holds. They are often not the same. A man may confess with complete sincerity that God is holy, almighty, all-knowing and good, and yet live day by day as if God were distracted, indulgent, easily managed and a little out of date. The creed is in the head; the real conception is buried deeper, in the heart, and it is found out not by what a man says in church but by what he does when he is alone, afraid, tempted or offended.

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. PSALM 14:1

Notice where the fool says it. Not aloud, necessarily, and not in argument. In his heart. Practical atheism is compatible with a great deal of religious observance. So is practical idolatry. And this was the heart of Tozer’s diagnosis. He believed that the church of his day had not abandoned its doctrine of God. It had simply lost its sense of Him. It had kept the words and let the reality shrink, until the God of its imagination was a smaller, softer, more manageable figure than the God of the Bible.

Idolatry of the mind

That shrinking, Tozer argued, is the essence of idolatry. We think of idolatry as the carving of images, and so it is. But the image in wood or stone is only the outward form of something that happens first within. Before a man bows down to an idol, he has already imagined a god unlike the true God, and then made something to match his imagination. Paul traces exactly that sequence.

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. ROMANS 1:21

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man. ROMANS 1:23

The Christian who never goes near a pagan shrine may still be an idolater in this deeper sense. If the God he worships is less holy, less just, less loving, less great than the God who has revealed Himself, then he is worshipping a figment, however orthodox his vocabulary. Tozer did not soften this. He believed that low thoughts of God were not a minor defect of modern piety but the root of most of its other failings.

Why it matters so much

He traced the consequences with some care. A low view of God produces low worship, because no one is moved to awe by a being he thinks he understands. It produces low morals, because a God who does not much mind sin will not much restrain it. It produces shallow evangelism, because a sinner who has never trembled before God will not know what he has been saved from. It produces a church that relies on technique and entertainment, because it no longer expects anything from God Himself. It produces prayer that is thin and occasional, because a small God is hardly worth talking to. Put right the thought of God, Tozer believed, and a great many of these other troubles would begin to put themselves right.

To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? ISAIAH 40:18

Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth. ISAIAH 40:26

That was why he wrote The Knowledge of the Holy at all. He did not intend a textbook of theology. He intended a series of meditations on the attributes of God — His self-existence, eternity, infinitude, holiness, wisdom, faithfulness, justice, mercy, love and the rest — that would lift the reader’s thoughts to something nearer the truth, and so move him to worship. Each chapter in the book begins with a prayer. The purpose was devotion, not debate.

The only true image

Here a word of balance is needed. Tozer’s method in The Knowledge of the Holy is largely to reason from the attributes of God as the church has classically confessed them. That is a sound and ancient method, and Christians have benefited greatly from it. But the New Testament places one image of God above every other. When Philip asked to be shown the Father, the Lord answered him plainly.

Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. JOHN 14:9

The fullest and surest thought of God that any human mind can have is the face of Jesus Christ.

For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:6

Tozer knew and believed this; he was a thoroughly Christ-centred preacher. But a reader who takes up his book on the attributes should keep the Gospels open beside it. The holiness, justice, mercy and love of God are not abstractions to be defined; they have walked among us, wept at a grave, been nailed to a cross and risen from the dead. The cure for a small idea of God is not only to think harder about His perfections but to look longer at His Son.

Correcting the picture

How is a distorted idea of God corrected? Tozer’s answer was that it cannot be done by the mind alone. The thought of God must be conformed to God’s own revelation of Himself in Scripture, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit, who takes the things of God and shows them to us. It requires reading the Bible with the question constantly in view: what does this tell me God is like? It requires repentance, because many of our wrong thoughts of Him are not innocent mistakes but convenient ones. And it requires worship, because the heart learns God by adoring Him as surely as the mind learns Him by study.

Be still, and know that I am God. PSALM 46:10

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Without consulting any creed, write down honestly what you actually feel God to be like. Then compare it with Isaiah 40.

2. Think back over the past week. Where did your actions reveal a smaller God than the one you profess? Name one instance.

3. As you read the Bible this week, ask of every passage the single question: what does this show me God is like?

4. Read one of the Gospels through at a sitting, looking only at how Jesus reveals the Father.

5. Consider whether any of your wrong thoughts about God are convenient ones — ideas you keep because they make Him easier to live with. Confess them.

A PRAYER

O God, I have thought that You were altogether such a one as myself. I have made You small enough to manage and soft enough to ignore.

Forgive me for the idols of my imagination, for every thought of You that is beneath You.

Show me Your glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Correct what I think of You by what You have said and done.

Let me see You as You are, and let that sight change everything else. Amen.