His Infinitude - Part 2 — A.W. Tozer

God's Infinite Perfection

Then when it comes to power, if God had all the power there is except a little bit, and somebody else had a little bit of power hoarded that God couldn't get to, then we couldn't worship God, we couldn't say that this God is of infinite power, because he wouldn't be of infinite power, he'd just be close to it.

But falling short of it a little bit, he wouldn't be quite God. He would be short of infinite, and while he would be more powerful than any other being, and perhaps even more powerful than all the beings in the universe lumped together, he still would have a defect, and therefore he couldn't be God.

For our God is perfect, and perfect in knowledge and perfect in power. And if God had goodness, but there was one spot in God that wasn't good, then he wouldn't be our God and Father. If God had love, but didn't have all the love, just 99 .9 percent of the love, or even higher percentage of the love than that, God still wouldn't be God.

God, to be God, must be infinite in all that he is. He must have no bound and no limit, no stopping place, no point beyond which you can't go, but that when you think of God or anything about God, you have to think infinitely about God.

The Modern Church's Small View of God

Some of you people have charley horses in your head for two weeks after trying to follow this, and I don't know whether I'll have myself. But brother, it's a mighty good cure for this little, cheap God that we've got around here now, modern fundamentalism.

This little, cheap God that you can power around with, the man upstairs there and the fellow that helps you win baseball games and all that, that God, my brother, he isn't the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

He isn't the God that laid the bond that made the heaven and the earth. He is some other God. We can create gods just the same as the heathen can. We educated Americans imagine that it takes a heathen to make a god.

You know you can make a god out of silver or gold or wood or stone, or you can make it out of your own imagination. And the God that's being worshiped in many places is simply a God of imagination. He's not the true God.

He's not the infinite, perfect, all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving, infinitely boundless, perfect God. He's not that God, but he's something short of that. So Christianity is decaying and going down into the gutter, because the God of modern Christianity is not the God of the Bible altogether.

That is, we fall short of it. I don't mean to say that we do not pray to God, I mean to say that we pray to a God short of what he ought to be. So we've got to think of God as being the perfect one. There's a lot I'd like to say about God and a lot I want to say about him, the divine Godhead and the Trinity.

God's Delight in His Own Perfections

I want to give you a little shock here by saying this, that God takes pleasure in himself and rejoices in his own perfections. I want you to hear that, and don't say, Mr. Closer didn't mean that, or don't come and argue, because it won't do me any good.

I've prayed and thought and searched and read the word too long to ever take this back. God takes pleasure in himself, and he rejoices in his own perfections. The divine Trinity is glad in himself. God delights in his works.

You remember that when God created the heaven and the earth and all things that are therein and man upon the earth, that while God was busy creating things and creatures, it kept saying, and God saw it all, and lo, it was good.

Then when God created man in his own image, God looked and behold and said, It's very good. God rejoiced in his works. He was glad in what he had done. When we come to redemption, my friends, redemption is not a heavy work for God.

Redemption as God's Joyful Will

God didn't find himself in a fix like John Foster Dulles and have to rush off somewhere and try to straighten himself out and get right with the angels and get these foreign policies straightened out with the archangels.

God did what he did joyfully. He did what he did joyfully. He made the heaven and the earth joyfully. That's why the flowers look up and smile and the birds sing and the sun shines and the skies blue and the rivers trickle down to the sea.

God made the creation, and he loved what he did. He took pleasure in himself and took pleasure in his own perfections and in the perfection of his work. And when it comes to redemption, I repeat, this was not a heavy task laid upon God by moral necessity.

God wanted to do this. There was no moral necessity on God to redeem mankind. He didn't have to send his Son, Jesus Christ, to die for mankind. He sent him, but at the same time Jesus said he did it voluntarily.

He said, I came of myself. He did it of himself. God was willing. It was the happy willingness of God. A mother doesn't have to get up and feed her baby at 2 in the morning. There's no law compelling her to do it.

The law probably would compel her to take some care of the little type, but she doesn't have to give him that loving care that she does. She wants to do it. She does it because she likes to do it. I used to do it for our little fellows and enjoyed doing it.

I don't think I would do it now, because I don't get up with the alacrity that I used to when I was 22 or 23. But a mother or a father, they do what they do because they love to do it. Now, I'd like to have you know that this awesome, eternal, invisible, infinite, always omniscient God, the God of our fathers and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the God we call our Father which art in heaven, while he is boundless and infinite, he can't be weighed nor measured, you can't apply distance to him, nor time nor space, for he made it all and contains it all in his own heart.

The Joy of the Trinity and the Incarnation

And while he rises above it all, at the same time, this God is a friendly, congenial God, and he delights in himself, and he loves his Father. The Father delights in the Son. This is my beloved Son in whom my soul is well pleased.

And the Son delighted in the Father, and said, I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth. And certainly the Holy Ghost delights in the Father and the Son. Then when it came to the incarnation, the incarnation wasn't something that Jesus Christ did, regretting his faith and saying, I hate this thing, I wish I could get out of it.

He came to the womb of the Virgin Mary, and some of the dear old theologians, they said he abhorred the Virgin's womb. Notice that expression. In one of our hymns, he abhorred not the Virgin's womb. The writer thought about this and said, now I'm writing a beautiful hymn and said, wait a minute here, the womb of a creature, how could the everlasting, eternal, infinite God whom space cannot contain, wouldn't it be a humiliation?

He smiled and said, no, he abhorred not the Virgin's womb. He wrote it, and we've been singing it for centuries, that if the incarnation of Jesus Christ in mortal flesh was not a heavy thing that Jesus had to do, the second person of the Trinity, the everlasting Son, the eternal Word, made himself flesh joyously.

And so when the angels sang about the incarnation, they sang joyously about it. Then salvation. Notice in the 15th Luke that when Jesus Christ saves a man, he carries him on his shoulders, and what's the word there, the verb?

Rejoicing, rejoicing. He does it rejoicing. He comes home rejoicing, and the same will be with the consummation in that great day we'll speak about a little later. And I want you to see, my friends, that in creation there is enthusiasm.

Creation as Joyful Energy

If there wasn't enthusiasm it would run down shortly. Look at energy, for instance. When you stop to think of what you are made out of, and what everything is made out of. Made out of atoms. Atoms are made out of protons and neurons and electrons.

And you can't keep them still, not a second. They dash in all directions at tremendous speeds. And the heavenly bodies move the same way. The old Greeks called the movement that they made as they passed through space, the music of the spheres.

I don't think they missed it by very much at all. And I've quoted before several years ago, but I hadn't thought of it, but it comes to my mind now. I think you ought to hear it again. You ought to hear this every once in a while.

The man who said, from harmony, from heavenly harmony, this universal frame began. When nature underneath a heap of jarring atoms lay and could not heave her head, a tuneful voice was heard on high, arise ye more than dead.

Then cold and hot and moist and dry together to their stations leaped, and music's power obeyed. From harmony to harmony, through all the compass of the notes that ran the diapason closing full in man.

I believe that, that God sang when he created things, and that the motion and speed and the hurling bodies as they move about, and the working of little creatures in the earth, the earthworms to make the soil soft, and the working of the sun on the earth, all this is God joyously working in his creation.

Light, Color, and the Beauty of Creation

It's seen in creation, it's seen in light. Do you ever stop to think what it would be like if there was no light, if there wasn't any light anywhere? There wasn't any light, nobody had any light. If God Almighty were to put a lead sack around all the heavenly bodies and suddenly shut out all the light there is, I wouldn't want to be alive, I'd want to turn myself off like a bulb and cease to be and ask God, please, to annihilate me, and I don't believe in annihilation.

But light and speed and color and sound. Some people are afraid of color, they think that spirituality consists in just being drab, like I'm dressed tonight. They think that spirituality is just being drab.

My brother and sister, God made color, and he made all kinds of colors, and he made all shades of colors. Look at the sunset, what is that, just something scientific? Ah, you can't fool me. You think that God made that lovely, beautiful thing out there and splashed the sky with old rose and cerise and blue and white, and that God wasn't smiling when he did that?

You tell me that that's just an accident of nature, scientifically explained? Oh, you've got too much learning for your own good. Go empty your head and get your heart filled and you'll be better off.

Because I believe God made the sunset, and how do I know? I know because the Holy Ghost wrote 150 psalms, and in the 150 psalms he celebrates the wonders of God's creation. Some don't believe that we ought to love God's creation.

They don't. There was a woman who wrote in England years ago, and she says that's soulish, and if we love anything that God made, that's soulish, and we lose it in a great day, that we ought to trim ourselves right down, walk around, I suppose, looking like the inside of a black dog's mouth, dark and gloomy and rather sinister.

Such is, my friends, that God made the colors. Now, the Devil didn't make the colors. The Devil, of course, gets people to use them, but he didn't make them. God made the colors. He made the light, and the light gave us the colors.