The Faithfulness of God
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Among the reasons that A.
W. Tozer is one of my favorite authors is because his writings are balanced. He
is not hyper-Calvinistic, nor ultra-Arminian. He does not arrive at
conclusions, strictly by following logic, but is faithful to the flow of the
biblical text. In other words, he does not take a pet doctrine and follow it to
other deductions, saying, for example, “All right, if my first premise is
right, then it follows logically that the second, third, fourth and fifth, must
also be true.” Tozer understood well that the Bible is the product of divine
thoughts, well above those that a man can imagine or reach, and for that
reason, he accepted the Scripture, as it states. This chapter of his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, is a good
example of his theology. L. Brueckner
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| A. W. Tozer |
The Faithfulness of God
It is a good thing to give thanks unto Thee and to sing praises
unto Thy name, O Most High, to show forth Thy loving-kindness in the morning
and Thy faithfulness every night. As Thy Son while on earth was loyal to Thee,
His Heavenly Father, so now in heaven He is faithful to us, His earthly
brethren; and in this knowledge we press on with every confident hope for all
the years and centuries yet to come. Amen.
As emphasized earlier, God’s
attributes are not isolated traits of His character but facets of His unitary
being. They are not things-in-themselves; they are, rather, thoughts by which
we think of God aspects of a perfect whole, names given to whatever we know to
be true of the Godhead.
To have a correct
understanding of the attributes it is necessary that we see them all as one. We
can think of them separately but they cannot be separated. “All attributes
assigned to God cannot differ in reality, by reason of the perfect simplicity
of God, although we in divers ways use of God divers words,” says Nicholas of
Cusa. “Whence, although we attribute to God sight, hearing, taste, smell,
touch, sense, reason and intellect, and so forth, according to the divers
significations of each word, yet in Him sight is not other than hearing, or tasting,
or smelling, or touching, or feeling, or understanding. And so all theology is
said to be stablished in a circle, because any one of His attributes is
affirmed of another.”
In studying any attribute,
the essential oneness of all the attributes soon becomes apparent. We see, for
instance, that if God is self-existent He must be also selfsufficient; and if
He has power He, being infinite, must have all power. If He possesses
knowledge, His infinitude assures us that He possesses all knowledge. Similarly,
His immutability presuppose His faithfulness. If He is unchanging, it follows
that He could not be unfaithful, since that would require Him to change.
Any failure within the
divine character would argue imperfection and, since God is perfect, it could not
occur. Thus the attributes explain each other and prove that they are but
glimpes the mind enjoys of the absolutely perfect Godhead.
All of God’s acts are
consistent with all of His attributes. No attribute contradicts the other, but
all harmonize and blend into each other in the infinite abyss of the Godhead.
All that God does agrees with all that God is and being and doing are one in
Him.
The familiar picture of God
as often torn between His justice and His mercy is altogether false to the
facts. To think of God as inclining first toward one and then toward another of
His attributes is to imagine a God who is unsure of Himself, frustrated and
emotionally unstable, which of course is to say that the one of whom we are
thinking is not the true God at all but a weak, mental reflection of Him badly
out of focus.
God being who He is, cannot
cease to be what He is, and being what He is, He cannot act out of character
with Himself. He is at once faithful and immutable, so all His words and acts
must be and remain faithful. Men become unfaithful out of desire, fear,
weakness, loss of interest, or because of some strong influence from without.
Obviously none of these forces can affect God in any way. He is His own reason
for all He is and does. He cannot be compelled from without, but ever speaks
and acts from within Himself by His own sovereign will as it pleases Him.
I think it might be
demonstrated that almost every heresy that has afflicted the church through the
years has arisen from believing about God things that are not true, or from
overemphasizing certain true things so as to obscure other things equally true.
To magnify any attribute to the exclusion of another is to head straight for
one of the dismal swamps of theology; and yet we are all constantly tempted to
do just that.
For instance, the Bible
teaches that God is love, some have interpreted this in such a way as virtually
to deny that He is just, which the Bible also teaches. Other press the Biblical
doctrine of God’s goodness so far that it is made to contradict his holiness.
Or they make His compassion cancel out His truth. Still others understand the
sovereignty of God in a way that destroys or at least greatly diminishes His
goodness and love.
We can hold a correct view
of truth only by daring to believe everything God has said about Himself. It is
a grave responsibility that a man takes upon himself when he seeks to edit out
of God’s self-revelation such features as he in his ignorance deems
objectionable. Blindness in part must surely fall upon any of us presumptuous
enough to attempt such a thing. And it is wholly uncalled for. We need not fear
to let the truth stand as it is written. There is no conflict among the divine
attributes. God’s being is unitary. He cannot divide Himself and act at a given
time from one of His attributes while the rest remain inactive. All that God is
must accord with all that God does. Justice must be present in mercy, and love
in judgment. And so with all the divine attributes.
The faithfulness of God is a
datum of sound theology but to the believer it becomes far more than that: it
passes through the processes of the understanding and goes on to become
nourishing food for the soul. For the Scriptures not only teach truth, they show
also its uses for mankind.
The inspired writers were
men of like passion with us, dwelling in the midst of life. What they learned
about God became to them a sword, a shield, a hammer; it became their life
motivation, their good hope, and their confident expectation. From the
objective facts of theology their hearts made how many thousand joyous
deductions and personal applications! The Book of Psalms rings with glad
thanksgiving for the faithfulness of God. The New Testament takes up the theme
and celebrates the loyalty of God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ who
before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession; and in the Apocalypse Christ
is seen astride a white horse riding toward His triumph, and the names He bears
are Faithful and True.
Christian song, too,
celebrates the attributes of God, and among them the divine faithfulness. In
our hymnody, at its best, the attributes become the wellspring from which flow
rivers of joyous melody. Some old hymnbooks may yet be found in which the hymns
have no names; a line in italics above each one indicates theme, and the
worshiping heart cannot but rejoice in what it finds: “God’s glorious
perfections celebrated.” “Wisdom, Majesty and goodness.” “Omniscience.”
“Omnipotence and immutability.” “Glory, mercy and grace.” These are few samples
taken from a hymnbook published 1849, but everyone familiar with Christian
hymnody knows that the stream of sacred song takes its rise far back in the
early years of the Church’s existence. From the beginning belief in the perfection
of God brought sweet assurance to believing men and taught the ages to sing.
Upon God’s faithfulness
rests our whole hope of future blessedness. Only as He is faithful will His
covenants stand and His promises be honoured. Only as we have complete assurance
that He is faithful may we live in peace and look forward with assurance to the
life to come.
Every heart can make its own
application of this and draw from it such conclusions as the truth suggests and
its own needs bring into focus. The tempted, the anxious, the fearful, the
discouraged may all find new hope and good cheer in the knowledge that out
Heavenly Father is faithful. He will ever be true to His pledged word. The
hard-pressed sons of the covenant may be sure that He will never remove His
loving- kindness from them nor suffer His faithfulness to fail.
Happy the man whose hopes rely
On Israel’s God; He made the sky,
And earth and seas, with all their
train;
His truth forever stands secure;
He saves the oppressed, He feeds the
poor,
And none shall find His promises vain.
Isaac
Watts
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