The Infinite God

Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite. PSALM 147:5

Tozer once told his congregation that the sermon he was about to preach would make a greater demand on their minds than anything he had brought them before. The subject was the infinitude of God, and the sermon, preached on Psalm 147:5, is among his addresses in the Ochorus library under the title The Infinite God. It is worth reading, and it shows him at his most characteristic: plain-spoken, homely in illustration, and reaching all the while after something that cannot be put into words.

A different mode of being

His starting point was that God does not exist as we exist. We are creatures of time and space and matter; we have beginnings, limits and dependencies. God has none of these. He is not simply a very large, very old, very powerful version of ourselves. He is of a wholly different order of being, and every attempt to picture Him in our own terms falls short before it begins.

To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. ISAIAH 40:25

For this reason Tozer commended an old way of thinking about God which the classical theologians had used for centuries. Since our minds cannot reach up to God directly, we reason towards Him by denying our own limitations of Him. We say that He is self-existent, meaning that He has no origin. We say that He is self-sufficient, meaning that He depends on nothing and no one. We say that He is eternal, meaning that He has no beginning and no end. We say that He is immutable, meaning that He cannot change. We say that He is omniscient, meaning — and Tozer liked to startle his hearers with this — that God has never learned anything and never can, because there is nothing He does not already know. And we say that He is infinite, meaning that whatever He is, He is without limit.

I am that I am

At the root of all this lies the name God gave Himself at the burning bush.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. EXODUS 3:14

Everything else that exists was made, and so owes its existence to something outside itself. God alone simply is. He does not receive His life; He has it in Himself. Tozer drew from this a truth that is both humbling and freeing. God does not need us. He was perfectly complete and perfectly blessed before anything was made, and nothing we do can add to Him or take from Him.

Neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things. ACTS 17:25

This is humbling, because it removes at a stroke the flattering thought that God is somehow dependent on our service or diminished by our neglect. It is freeing for the same reason. If God needed us, His love for us might be self-interest. Because He needs nothing, His love is pure gift. In another of his sermons in the Ochorus library, God Made Man to Worship, Tozer presses exactly this point: God has no need of us, and yet for reasons of His own He desires our love and our adoration. That He wants us, needing nothing, is one of the wonders of the gospel.

No limit anywhere

Infinitude, Tozer said, applies to everything God is. His power has no ceiling. His wisdom has no edge. His love has no bottom. His mercy is not a great deal of mercy but mercy without measure. This, he believed, is the believer’s great comfort. We are always running up against our own limits and the limits of others: limited patience, limited strength, limited time, limited understanding. With God there is never a point at which the supply runs out.

O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! ROMANS 11:33

For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. MALACHI 3:6

It follows, too, that God is never tired of us, never surprised by us, and never at a loss what to do with us. What He has promised He is able to perform, and what He has begun He is able to finish.

Knowing and knowing about

In the same sermon Tozer drew a sharp line between knowing about God and knowing God. Theology, he said in effect, is what the human mind can grasp about God, and an intelligent unbeliever may grasp a great deal of it and still be lost. Eternal life is not a set of correct propositions; it is a living acquaintance with God Himself, given by the Holy Spirit. He compared this knowledge to the way a man knows he is alive — not by reasoning towards it but by a direct and inward awareness which no argument can create and no argument can remove.

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:10

There is deep truth in this, and every Christian who has known the difference between reciting a doctrine and being overwhelmed by it will recognise it.

Weighing it

Yet here the reader meets one of the places where Tozer must be read with care. He sometimes set the heart’s knowledge of God against the mind’s so sharply that careful thought seemed almost a hindrance. He could speak with disdain of theologians and scholars, and at times he described the gulf in the church as lying between evangelical rationalists and evangelical mystics, and left no doubt which side he was on.

Scripture does not permit that division. The first and great commandment requires us to love God with all our mind as well as all our heart.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. MATTHEW 22:37

The Spirit who gives the inward knowledge of God is the same Spirit who inspired the reasoned arguments of Romans and Hebrews. Doctrine does not save, but it guards, and the inward awareness of God that Tozer prized is only safe when it is tested by the written Word. Tozer himself, it should be said, was a careful reader and a precise thinker, and The Knowledge of the Holy is full of sound theology. The corrective he offered was needed: a faith of propositions only is a dead faith. But the cure for dead orthodoxy is living orthodoxy, not less of it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Tozer’s sermon The Infinite God in the Ochorus library, with Psalm 147 open beside it.

2. Take one limit you are pressing against this week — of strength, patience or time — and bring it deliberately to the God who has no limit.

3. Spend a few minutes each day this week telling God what He is, using the attributes in this chapter, and asking Him for nothing.

4. Ask whether you have been serving God as though He needed you. Thank Him instead that He wants you.

5. If you have neglected careful study of Scripture in favour of feeling, or feeling in favour of study, take one step to restore the balance.

A PRAYER

Great is our Lord, and of great power; Your understanding is infinite. You are, and there is none beside You.

You needed nothing, and yet You made me. You lacked nothing, and yet You love me. I cannot understand it, and I do not need to. I worship You.

Forgive me for making You small, and for leaning on my own small strength when Yours has no end.

Give me to know You, not only to know about You. And let all I learn of You end in adoration. Amen.