His Immensity - Part 1 — A.W. Tozer

Losing Life to Find True Life

To give the 2nd in a series which I have called, Journey into the Heart of God. I want to talk about God these nights. I want to first read a text or two, For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? There is the text which I have chosen for my every night text, Your life is his with Christ in God. And then this one in Philippians, For doubtless I count all things but loss.

For the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but done, that I may win Christ. Let us pray. Father, we are unworthy to think these thoughts, and our friends are unworthy to hear them expressed.

Seeking a Vision of the Triune God

But while we are not worthy, we will try to do this in a worthy manner. Hear worthily and speak worthily, though we know that we have looked upon evil sights, we have heard with our ears evil words, and we have walked in evil ways.

But now we trust that is behind us, and our eyes are upon thee. Show thyself to us, O God. We have sung about thee, the shepherd, the sweet wonder of Jesus, and we ask thee now that this evening we may again have a vision of the triune God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen. Now, faith is of two kinds, nominal and real. The nominal faith is faith that accepts what it holds and can quote text after text to prove it. That is nominal faith, and it's amazing how nominal faith, nominal belief, can weave these texts into garments, cloaks and curtains for the Church.

Real Faith Rests on God's Character

And then there is another kind of faith. It is faith that depends upon the character of God. You remember that the scripture does not say, Abraham believed the text and it was counted unto him for righteousness.

It says, Abraham believed God. It was not what Abraham believed, it was who Abraham believed that counted. Abraham believed God, and the man of true faith believes God and his faith rests on the character of God.

Now, the man who has real faith, as over against nominal faith, has found a right answer to the question, What is God like? There is no question that is more important, none, none whatsoever, until it's answered.

What is God like? And the man of true faith has found an answer to that question, and this is by revelation and illumination. You see, I would have to say again what I've said so often, perhaps to the point of monotony, that the difficulty with the Church now is, even the Bible-believing Church, that we stop with revelation.

Revelation and Illumination

But revelation is not enough. Revelation is God's given word. It's an objective thing, not subjective. It's external, not internal. It is God's revelation of truth, and a man may believe that and believe it soundly and hold it to be true, and yet have only an objective revelation or truth that has been objectively revealed.

There is another word, and that is the word illumination. The man of real faith believes the word, but he has been illuminated so he knows what the word means. That doesn't mean he's a better Bible teacher, but it means that he has had what the Quakers call an opening.

His heart has been opened to the word. Now, you can't have too many texts, and this is not said to mean that texts are not valuable. They are. I'm using many of them tonight. But you see, texts are means toward an end, and that end is God.

Scripture as a Means Toward God

A given revelation is a means toward an end, and God is the end. The text is never the end. That's why I never fight over a translation, or get all worked up and steamed up over a translation. A text is a means to an end.

We are making the mistake now, since there's plenty of money and the printers will print anything, anybody will write. We're making the mistake of thinking that if we get the word said in a different way, there will be some magic effect in that word.

That if it is read in the King James Version, that's okay, but if we get a new version varying just a little, we have automatically received something new. It doesn't follow, my brother. It doesn't follow.

The illumination is what matters, and the word of God is a means toward an end, just as roads are means toward destination. A road is nothing in itself. Nobody ever built a road and fenced it in at both ends and planted posies along it and beautified it and said, This is a road.

They said, This is a way, a way, a means toward somewhere. And so the Bible is a whole series of highways, all leading toward God. And when the text has been illuminated and the believer of the text knows that God is the end toward which he's moving, then that man has real faith.

Julian's Vision of Creation in The Revelation of Divine Love

Now, I told you that these nights that I intended to use occasional quotations from an old book. I never saw but one copy of it in my life. I wouldn't know where to go to get it now. One time it was a very famous book, but it fell into desertion and nobody knows anything about it much.

I quoted from it in the past. I preached a sermon until the sermon got so well known that I quit preaching it on the pre-vow of the three wounds of a friend. And I spoke last week briefly about this little book called The Revelation of Divine Love, written by a woman by the name of Julianne, 600 years ago.

One day she said as she prayed she had a little experience, and here's what it was. She said, I saw a very small object as large as a hazelnut. Now, when I was a boy on the farm we had hazelnuts, and a hazelnut as we knew them was about the size of a large marble, no larger than that.

Not even as large as the largest marble, but just the size which they have a mib, I think they call it, a good-sized marble. You may have seen larger ones, but these were wild-growing and those as I remember them.

And she said she saw this little tiny object, and she said, What might this be? And something in her heart said, This is all that is made. This is all that is made. This little tiny hazelnut beside the fair is all that is made.

Now, I want you to think about what this would mean. All that is made. Years ago I remember reading the great French philosopher and mystic and mathematician, Pascal, sitting up on the hillside in the woods in West Virginia reading Pascal's Thoughts.

Pascal and the Vastness of the Universe

And I remember that he said this. He said, We are halfway between immensity and that which is infinitesimally small. And he said, You will find worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds. Our solar system moves around another solar system, and that solar system with our solar system moves around another solar system, and that solar system with our and so on and on and on, out infinitely into size and vastness.

And he said, If you turn the other way, you will find little worlds within little worlds, going down and down the molecule, the atom and the electron and the photon and so on, down and down and down into an infinitesimal small.

Now, he said, I believe that man made in the image of God is exactly halfway in between that which is infinitely large and that which is infinitesimally small. Now, there's no way to prove that, but that's a frightening place to be, brother, to know that you're half as big as the universe, but also half as small, and that they can keep reducing you and reducing you and melting you down, reducing you.

Pretty soon you're infinitesimally small. We can go out in increasing spirals until we're so vast, until the world is so vast that we cannot think it anymore. You know, we think that the sun is very large with its planets circling around it.

But if you study astronomy, even elementary astronomy, you will learn that there are heavenly bodies so large, suns so large, that they could take our sun and all of its planets and all of the satellites that revolve around those planets and could throw them into that sun, that other sun, and never notice it.

They say that there are suns that you could put millions of our suns in. They are so large, I give up, I don't even try to understand it. Then there is space. Of course, such vast worlds have to have distance between them, so we have what we call space.

I don't think space is a thing, I think it's just a way we have of accounting for different positions in the vast universe. We call it distance. You know, they don't measure it. Oh, if it's the moon, they say 250 ,000 miles.

If it's the sun, they say 93 million miles. But after that, they start talking in light years. And you know what a light year is? Well, a light year is the time that it takes light, is light traveling for one year.

And light gets along at the rather amazing speed of 186 ,000 miles a second. That is, every minute light travels 11 million miles, and every hour it travels 669 million miles, and every day it travels 16 ,061 ,000 ,000 miles, and every year it travels 5 ,862 ,484 ,000 ,000.

Then they tell me that's how far light travels in a year. And there are bodies so far away that to tell us how far they are, they can't measure them in miles. They measure them in light years. They say it's as far away as it would take light so many years traveling at 186 ,000 miles a second.

You know, that's quite a rate of speed. And they say that there are bodies that are millions of light years away, say 10 million just to get a start. So if you want to know how far it is from earth to that body I'm talking about, you multiply 5 ,862 ,484 ,000 ,000 by 10 million, and you're getting around somewhere where the distance is.

Doesn't that stun you? It makes my head ache. There's not too much to hate, and when you get that far out, brother, you're gone. Now, seen old against this, you and I are terribly small. Now, we're not the smallest thing there is.

We're not infinitesimally small, because you start dissolving us, melting us down, and getting at the molecules and at the atoms and at the bits of disembodied matter or energy that we call by various manufactured names.

You'll find that we're, according to Pascal, half as big as the universe, which is a tremendous thought, I say. Now, over against that stands God. Over against it stands God, and there is an attribute of God.

God's Infinitude, Imminence, and Immensity

I talked about the attribute of God last week called infinitude. I want to talk about the attribute of God called imminence now, and immensity. You know, there's such a thing as God's imminence. That is, it's an attribute of God, and it's taught in Christian theology that God is imminent.

That is that you don't have to go distances to find God, that God is imminent, that he is in everything. It is right here. I have a little, I borrow the little formula. I have repeated it very often, but some of you know it by heart.

If you don't, you should, and I want to repeat it now. I think I did last week. Let me give it to you. It's very brief.