Knowledge Of The Holy

God Incomprehensible

Were we to hold our peace the stones would cry out; yet if we speak, what shall we say? Teach us to know that we cannot know, for the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

Let faith support us where reason fails, and we shall think because we believe, not so that we may believe In Jesus’ name. Amen.

The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question: “What is God like?” This book is an attempt to answer that question.

Yet at the outset, I must acknowledge that it cannot be answered except to say that God is not like anything; that is, He is not exactly like anything or anybody.

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We learn by using what we already know as a bridge over which we pass to the unknown. The mind can’t crash suddenly past the familiar into the unfamiliar.

Even the most vigorous and daring mind is unable to create something out of nothing by a spontaneous act of imagination. Those strange beings that populate the world of mythology and superstition are not pure creations of fancy.

The imagination created them by taking the ordinary inhabitants of earth and air and sea and extending their familiar forms beyond their normal boundaries, or by mixing the forms of two or more so as to produce something new.

However beautiful or grotesque these may be, their prototypes can always be identified. They are like something we already know.

The effort of inspired men to express the ineffable has placed a great strain upon both thought and language in the Holy Scriptures.

These being often a revelation of a world above nature, and the minds for which they were written being a part of nature, the writers are compelled to use a great many “like” words to make themselves understood.

When the Spirit acquaints us with something that lies beyond the field of our knowledge, He tells us that this thing is like something we already know, but He is always careful to phrase His description to save us from slavish literalism.

For example, when the prophet Ezekiel saw heaven opened” and beheld visions of God, he found himself looking at that which he had no language to describe.

What he was seeing was wholly different from anything he had ever known before, so he fell back upon the language of resemblance.

“As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire.” The nearer he approaches the burning throne the less sure his words become:

“And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it.

And I saw as the color of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it… This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.”

Strange as this language is, it still does not create the impression of unreality. One gathers that the whole scene is very real but entirely alien to anything men know on earth.

So, to convey an idea of what he sees, the prophet must employ such words as “likeness,” “appearance,” “as it were,” and “the likeness of the appearance.”

Even the throne becomes “the appearance of a throne” and He that sits upon it, though like a man, is so unlike one that He can be described only as “the likeness of the appearance of a man.”

When the Scripture states that man was made in the image of God, we dare not add to that statement an idea from our head and make it mean “in the exact image.”

To do so is to make man a replica of God, and that is to lose the unicity of God and end with no God at all. It is to break down the wall, infinitely high, that separates That-which-is-God from that-which-is-not-God.

To think of creature and Creator as alike in essential being is to rob God of most of His attributes and reduce Him to the status of a creature.

It is, for instance, to rob Him of His infinitude: there cannot be two unlimited substances in the universe. It is to take away His sovereignty: there cannot be two free beings in the universe, for sooner or later two completely free wills must collide.

These attributes, to mention no more, require that there be but one to whom they belong. When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds to work on.

Hence whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God.

If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; and an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.

“The intellect knoweth that it is ignorant of Thee,” said Nicholas of Cusa, “because it knoweth Thou canst not be known, unless the unknowable could be known, and the invisible beheld, and the inaccessible attained.”

“If anyone should set forth any concept by which Thou canst be conceived,” says Nicholas again, “I know that that concept is not a concept of Thee, for every concept is ended in the wall of Paradise…

So too, if any were to tell of the understanding of Thee, wishing to supply a means whereby Thou mightest be understood, this man is yet far from Thee… forasmuch as Thou art absolute above all the concepts which any man can frame.”

Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a God we can in some measure control.

We need the feeling of security that comes from knowing what God is like, and what He is like is of course a composite of all the religious pictures we have seen, all the best people we have known or heard about, and all the sublime ideas we have entertained.

If all this sounds strange to modern ears, it is only because we have for a full half-century taken God for granted. The glory of God has not been revealed to this generation of men.

The God of contemporary Christianity is only slightly superior to the gods of Greece and Rome if indeed He is not inferior to them in that He is weak and helpless while they at least have power.

If what we conceive God to be He is not, how then shall we think of Him? If He is indeed incomprehensible, as the Creed declares Him to be, and unapproachable, as Paul says He is, how can we Christians satisfy our longing after Him?

The hopeful words, “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace,” still stand after the passing of the centuries.

But how shall We acquaint ourselves with One who eludes all the straining efforts of mind and heart? And how shall we be held accountable to know what cannot be known?

“Canst thou by searching find out God?” asks Zophar the Naamathite; “canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?”

“Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son,” said our Lord, “and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

” The Gospel according to John reveals the helplessness of the human mind before the great Mystery which is God, and Paul in First Corinthians teaches that God can be known only as the Holy Spirit performs in the seeking heart an act of self-disclosure.

The yearning to know What cannot be known, to comprehend the Incomprehensible, to touch and taste the Unapproachable, arises from the image of God like man.

Deep calleth unto deep, and though polluted and landlocked by the mighty disaster theologians call the Fall, the soul senses its origin and longs to return to its Source. How can this be realized?

The answer of the Bible is simply “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” In Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure, although He shows Himself not to reason but to faith and love.

Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love is an organ of experience. God came to us in the incarnation; in atonement, He reconciled us to Himself, and by faith and love we enter and lay hold on Him.

“Verily God is of infinite greatness,” says Christ’s enraptured troubadour, Richard Rolle; “more than we can think;… unknowable by created things; and can never be comprehended by us as He is in Himself.

But even here and now, whenever the heart begins to burn with a desire for God, she is made able to receive the uncreated light, and, inspired and fulfilled by the gifts of the Holy Ghost, she tastes the joys of heaven.

She transcends all visible things and is raised to the sweetness of eternal life… Herein truly is perfect love; when all the intent of the mind, all the secret working of the heart is lifted into the love of God.”’

That God can be known by the soul in tender personal experience while remaining infinitely aloof from the curious eyes of reason constitutes a paradox best described as

Darkness to the intellect
But sunshine to the heart. —Frederick W. Faber

The author of the celebrated little work The Cloud of Unknowing develops this thesis throughout his book. In approaching God, he says.

The seeker discovers that the divine Being dwells in obscurity, hidden behind a cloud of unknowing; nevertheless, he should not be discouraged but set his will with a naked intent unto God.

This cloud is between the seeker and God so that he may never see God clearly by the light of understanding nor feel Him in the emotions.

But by the mercy of God faith can break through into His Presence if the seeker believes the Word and presses on. Michael de Molinos, the Spanish saint, taught the same thing.

In his Spiritual Guide he says that God will take the soul by the hand and lead her through the way of pure faith, “causing the understanding to leave behind all considerations and reasonings.

He draws her forward… Thus He causes her using a simple and obscure knowledge of faith to aspire only to her Bridegroom upon the wings of love.”

For these and similar teachings Molinos was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition and sentenced to life imprisonment. He soon died in prison, but the truth he taught can never die.

Speaking of the Christian soul he says: “Let her suppose that all the whole world and the most refined conceptions of the wisest intellects can tell her nothing.

And that the goodness and beauty of her Beloved infinitely surpass all their knowledge, being persuaded that all creatures are too rude to inform her and to conduct her to the true knowledge of God…

She ought then to go forward with her love, leaving all her understanding behind. Let her love God as He is in Himself, and not as her imagination says He is, and pictures Him.”

“What is God like?” If by that question we mean “What is God like in Himselfi” there is no answer. If we mean “What has God disclosed about Himself that the reverent reason can comprehend?” there is, I believe, an answer both full and satisfying.

For while the name of God is secret and His essential nature incomprehensible, He in condescending love has by revelation declared certain things to be true of Himself. These we call His attributes.

Sovereign Father heavenly King
Thee we now presume to sing;
Glad thine attributes confess
Glorious all, and numberless.

Why We Must Think Rightly About God

O, Lord God Almighty, not the God of the philosophers and the wise but the God of the prophets and apostles; and better than all, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, may I express Thee unblamed?

They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art, and so worship not Thee but a creature of their fancy; therefore enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art, so that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee.

In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

Worship is pure or basic as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God. For this reason, the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself.

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And the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.

We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian but of the company of Christians that compose the Church.

The most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God, just as her most significant message is what she says about Him or leaves unsaid.

For her silence is often more eloquent than her speech. She can never escape the self-disclosure of her witness concerning God.

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, “What comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.

If we knew exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.

Without a doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God.

Thought and speech are”God’s gifts to creatures made in His image; these are intimately associated with Him and impossible apart from Him.

Significantly, the first word was the Word: “And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We may speak because God spoke. In Him word and idea are indivisible.

That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements have little consequence.

Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is.

Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we believe about God.

A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse.

I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.

It is my opinion that the Christian conception of God current in these middle years of the twentieth century is so decadent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers something amounting to a moral calamity.

All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: Who He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.

The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems, for he sees at once that these have to do with matters which at the most cannot concern him for very long.

But even if the multiple burdens of time may be lifted from him, the one mighty single burden of eternity begins to press down upon him with a weight more crushing than all the woes of the world piled one upon another.

That mighty burden is his obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably.

And when the man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure of self-accusation may become too heavy to bear.

The gospel can lift this destroying burden from the mind, give beauty to ashes, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.

But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted, there will be no woe and no burden.

Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them. Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at the bottom a libel on His character.

The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than He is – in itself a monstrous sin – and substitutes for the true God one made after its likeness.

Always this God will conform to the image of the one who created it and will be base or pure, cruel or kind, according to the moral state of the mind from which it emerges.

A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally be no true likeness of the true God. “Thou though test,” said the Lord to the wicked man in the psalm, “that I was altogether such as one as thyself ”.

Surely this must be a serious affront to the Most High God before whom cherubim and seraphim continually do cry, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”

Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place.

“When they knew God,” wrote Paul, “they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”

Then followed the worship of idols fashioned after the likeness of men and birds and beasts and creeping things. But this series of degrading acts began in the mind.

Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this enough, and the history of the Church confirms it.

So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it.

The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God. Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology.

She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, “What is God like?” and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false.

The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind.

The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of Him – and others. In all her prayers and labors this should have first place.

We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of generations past.

This will prove of greater value to them than anything that art or science can devise.

O, God of Bethel, by whose hand
Thy people still are fed;
Who through this weary pilgrimage
Hast all our fathers led!
Our vows, our prayers we now present
Before Thy throne of grace:
God of our fathers! Re the God
Of their succeeding race.

The Holy Trinity

God of our fathers, enthroned in light, how rich, how musical is the tongue of England! Yet when we attempt to speak forth Thy wonders, our words how poor they seem and our speech how unmelodious.

When we consider the fearful mystery of Thy Triune Godhead we lay our hand upon our mouth. Before that burning bush we ask not to understand, but only that we may fitly adore Thee, One God in Persons Three. Amen.

The Holy Trinity Explained

To meditate on the three Persons of the Godhead is to walk in thought through the garden eastward in Eden and to tread on holy ground.

Our sincerest effort to grasp the incomprehensible mystery of the Trinity must remain forever futile, and only by deepest reverence can it be saved from actual presumption.

Some persons who reject all they cannot explain have denied that God is a Trinity. Subjecting the Highest to their cold, level-eyed scrutiny, they conclude that it is impossible that he could be both One and Three.

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These forget that their whole life is enshrouded in mystery. They fall to consider that any real explanation of even the simplest phenomenon in nature lies hidden in obscurity and can no more be explained than can the mystery of the Godhead.

Every man lives by faith, the nonbeliever as well as the saint; the one by faith in natural laws and the other by faith in God. Every man throughout his entire life constantly accepts without understanding.

“God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof” but mortal man never.

Thomas Carlyle, following Plato, pictures a man, a deep pagan thinker, who had grown to maturity in some hidden cave and is brought out suddenly to see the sunrise.

“What would his wonder be,” exclaims Carlyle, “his rapt astonishment at the sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free, open sense of a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be kindled by that sight…

This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas; that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it.

The black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, hail, and rain; what is it? Ay, what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all.”

Biblical Basis for the Holy Trinity

How different are we who have grown used to it, who have become jaded with a satiety of wonder? “It is not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty,” says Carlyle, “it is by our superior levity, our inattention, our want of insight.

It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it… We call that fire of the black thundercloud electricity, and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical, and more, to whosoever will think of it.”

These penetrating, almost prophetic, words were written more than a century ago, but not all the breathtaking advances of science and technology since that time have invalidated one word or rendered obsolete as much as one period or comma.

Still, we do not know. We save face by repeating frivolously the popular jargon of science. We harness the mighty energy that rushes through our world.

We subject it to fingertip control in our cars and our kitchens; we make it work for us like Aladdin’s jinn, but still, we do not know what it is.

Secularism, materialism, and the intrusive presence of things have put out the light in our souls and turned us into a generation of zombies. We cover our deep ignorance with words, but we are ashamed to wonder, we are afraid to whisper “mystery.”

The Church has not hesitated to teach the doctrine of the Trinity. Without pretending to understand, she has given her witness, she has repeated what the Holy Scriptures teach.

Some deny that the Scriptures teach the Trinity of the Godhead on the ground that the whole idea of the Trinity in unity is a contradiction in terms.

But since we cannot understand the fall of a leaf by the roadside or the hatching of a robin egg in the nest yonder, why should the Trinity be a problem to us?

“We think more loftily of God,” says Michael de Molinos, “by knowing that He is incomprehensible, and above our understanding, than by conceiving Him under any image, and “creature beauty, according to our rude understanding.”

Not all who called themselves Christians through the centuries were Trinitarians, but as the presence of God in the fiery pillar glowed above the camp of Israel throughout the wilderness journey, saying to all the world,

“These are My people,” so belief in the Trinity has since the days of the apostles shone above the Church of the Firstborn as she journeyed down the years. Purity and power have followed this faith.

Biblical Basis for the Holy Trinity

Under this banner have gone forth apostles, fathers, martyrs, mystics, hymnists, reformers, and revivalists, and the seal of divine approval has rested on their lives and their labors.

However they may have differed on minor matters, but the doctrine of the Trinity bound them together.

What God declares the believing heart confesses without the need. of further proof. Indeed, to seek proof is to admit doubt, and to obtain proof is to render faith superfluous.

Everyone who possesses the gift of faith will recognize the wisdom of those daring words of one of the early Church fathers: “I believe that Christ died for me because it is incredible; I believe that he rose from the dead because it is impossible.”

That was the attitude of Abraham, who against all evidence waxed strong in faith, giving glory to God. It was the attitude of Anselm.

“The second Augustine,” one of the greatest thinkers of the Christian era, who held that faith must precede all efforts to understand.

Reflection upon revealed truth naturally follows the advent of faith, but faith comes first to the hearing ear, not to the cogitating mind.

The believing man does not ponder the Word and arrive at faith by a process of reasoning, nor does he seek confirmation of faith from philosophy or science.

His cry is, “O earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord. Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar.”

Is this to dismiss scholarship as valueless in the sphere of revealed religion? By no means. The scholar has a vitally important task to perform within a carefully prescribed precinct.

His task is to guarantee the purity of the text, to get as close as possible to the Word as originally given. He may compare Scripture with Scripture until he has discovered the true meaning of the text. But right there his authority ends.

He must never sit in judgment upon what is written. He dare not bring the meaning of the Word before the bar of his reason.

He dare not commend or condemn the Word as reasonable or unreasonable, scientific or unscientific. After the meaning is discovered, that meaning judges him; never does he judge it.

The doctrine of the Trinity is truth for the heart. The spirit of man alone can enter through the veil and penetrate that Holy of Holies.

“Let me seek Thee in longing,” pleaded Anselm, “let me long for Thee in seeking; let me find Thee in love, and love Thee in finding.

” Love and faith are at home in the mystery of the Godhead. Let reason kneel in reverence outside.

Christ did not hesitate to use the plural form when speaking of Himself along with the Father and the Spirit.

“We will come unto him and make our abode with him.” Yet again He said, “I and my Father are one.

” It is most important that we think of God as Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance. Only so may we think rightly of God and in a manner worthy of Him and of our souls.

Biblical Basis for the Holy Trinity

It was our Lord’s claim to equality with the Father that outraged the religionists of His day and led at last to His crucifixion.

The attack on the doctrine of the Trinity two centuries later by Arius and others was also aimed at Christ’s claim to deity.

During the Arian controversy 318 Church fathers (many of them maimed and scarred by the physical violence suffered in earlier persecutions) met at Nicaea and adopted a statement of faith, one section of which runs:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
The only-begotten Son of God,
Begotten of Him before all ages,
God of God, Light of Light,
Very God of Very God,
Begotten, not made,
Being of one substance with the Father,
By whom all things were made.

For more than sixteen hundred years this has stood as the final test of orthodoxy, as well as it should, for it condenses in theological language the teaching of the New Testament concerning the position of the Son in the Godhead.

The Nicene Creed also pays tribute to the Holy Spirit as being Himself God and equal to the Father and the Son:

Or believe in the Holy Spirit
The Lord and giver of life,
Which proceedeth from the Father and the Son,
Who with the Father and Son together
Is worshipped and glorified.

Apart from the question of whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or the Father and the Son, this tenet of the ancient creed has been held by the Eastern and Western branches of the Church and by all but a tiny minority of Christians.

The authors of the Athanasian Creed spelled out with great care the relation of the three Persons to each other, filling in the gaps in human thought as far as they were able while staying within the bounds of the inspired Word.

“In this Trinity,” runs the Creed, “nothing is before or after, nothing is greater or less: but all three Persons coeternal, together and equal.”

How do these words harmonize with the slaying of Jesus, “My Father is greater than I”?

Holy Trinity Meaning and Examples

Those old theologians knew, and wrote into the Creed, “Equal to His Father, as touching His Godhead; less than the Father, as touching His manhood.”

This interpretation commends itself to every serious-minded seeker after truth in a region where the light is all but blinding.

To redeem mankind the Eternal Son did not leave the bosom of the Father; while walking among men He referred to Himself as “the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father,” and spoke of Himself again as “the Son of man which is in heaven.

” We grant mystery here, but not confusion. In His incarnation, the Son veiled His deity, but He did not void it. The unity of the Godhead made it impossible that He should surrender anything of His deity.

When He took upon Him the nature of man, He did not degrade Himself or become even for a time less than He had been before. God can never become less than Himself. For God to become anything that He has not been is unthinkable.

The Persons of the Godhead, being one, have one will. They work always together, and never one smallest act is done by one without the instant acquiescence of the other two.

Every act of God is accomplished by the Trinity in Unity. Here, of course, we are being driven by the necessity to conceive of God in human terms.

We are thinking of God by analogy with man, and the result must fall short of ultimate truth; yet if we are to think of God at all, we must do it by adapting creature thoughts and creature-words to the Creator.

It is a real if understandable error to conceive of the Persons of the Godhead as conferring with one another and reaching agreement by interchange of thought as humans do.

It has always seemed to me that Milton introduces an element of weakness into his celebrated Paradise Lost when he presents the Persons of the Godhead conversing with each other about the redemption of the human race.

When the Son of ‘God walked the earth as the Son of Man, He spoke often to the Father and the Father answered Him again; as the Son of Man, He now intercedes with God for His people.

Holy Trinity Meaning and Examples

The dialogue involving the Father and the Son recorded in the Scriptures is always to be understood as being between the Eternal Father and the Man Christ Jesus.

That instant, immediate communion between the Persons of the Godhead which has been from all eternity knows not sound nor effort nor motion.

Amid the eternal silences
None heard but He who always spake,
And the silence was unbroken.
O marvellous O worshipful
No song or sound is heard
But everywhere and every hour In love,
in wisdom, and power;
The Father speaks His dear Eternal Word. —Frederick W. Faber

A popular belief among Christians divides the work of God between the three Persons, giving a specific part to each, as, for instance, creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, and regeneration to the Holy Spirit.

This is partly true but not wholly so, for God cannot so divide Himself that one Person works while another is inactive.

In the Scriptures, the three Persons are shown to act in harmonious unity in all the mighty works that are wrought throughout the universe.

In the Holy Scriptures, the work of creation is attributed to the Father (Gen. 1:1), to the Son (Col. 1:16), and to the Holy Spirit (Job. 26:13 and Ps. 104:30).

The incarnation is shown to have been accomplished by the three Persons in full accord (Luke 1: 35), though only the Son became flesh to dwell among us.

At Christ’s baptism, the Son came up out of the water, the Spirit descended upon Him and the Father’s voice spoke from heaven (Matt. 3:16, 17).

Probably the most beautiful description of the work of atonement is found in Hebrews 9:14, where it is stated that Christ, through the Eternal Spirit, offered Himself without spot to God; and there we behold the three persons operating together.

The resurrection of Christ is likewise attributed variously to the Father (Acts 2:32), to the Son (John 10:17-18), and the Holy Spirit (Rom. 1:4).

The salvation of the individual man is shown by the apostle Peter to be the work of all three Persons of the Godhead (1 Pet. 1:2), and the indwelling of the Christian man’s soul is said to be by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (John 14:15-23).

The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity

The doctrine of the Trinity, as I have said before, is truth for the heart. The fact that it cannot be satisfactorily explained, instead of being against it, is in its favor. Such a truth had to be revealed; no one could have imagined it.

0 Blessed Trinity!
0 simplest Majesty! O Three in One!
– Thou art forever God alone.
Holy Trinity!
Blessed equals Three.
One God, we praise Thee. —Frederick W. Faber

The Self-Existence of God

Lord of all beings! Thou alone canst affirm I AM THAT I AM; yet we who are made in Thine image may each one repeat “I am,” so confessing that we derive from Thee and that our words are but an echo of Thine own.

W6 acknowledge Thee to be the great Original of which we through Thy goodness are grateful if imperfect copies.

We worship Thee, O Father Everlasting. Amen. “God has no origin,” said Novatian and it is precisely this concept of no-origin which distinguishes That-which-is-God from whatever is not God.

Origin is a word that can apply only to things created. When we think of anything that has origin we are not thinking of God.

In our effort to discover the origin of things, we confess our belief that everything was made by Someone who was made of none.

Read and Learn  More The knowledge of the Holy

By familiar experience, we are taught that everything “came from” something else. Whatever exists must have had a cause that antedates it and was at least equal to it, since the lesser cannot produce the greater.

Any person or thing may be at once both caused and the cause of someone or something else; and so, back to the One who is the cause of all but is Himself caused by none.

The child by his question, “Where did God come from?” is unwittingly acknowledging his creaturehood. Already the concept of cause and source and origin is firmly fixed in his mind.

He knows that everything around him came from something other than himself, and he simply extends that concept upward to God.

The little philosopher is thinking in true creature-idiom and, allowing for his lack of basic information, he is reasoning correctly.

He must be told that God has no origin, and he will find this hard to grasp since it introduces a category with which he is wholly unfamiliar and contradicts.

The bent toward origin-seeking is so deeply ingrained in all intelligent beings, a bent that impels them to probe ever back and back toward undiscovered beginnings.

To think steadily of that to which the idea of origin cannot apply is not easy if indeed it is possible at all.

Just as under certain conditions, a tiny point of light can be seen not by looking directly, at it but by focusing the eyes slightly to one side, so it is with the idea of the Uncreated.

When we try to focus our thoughts upon One who is a pure uncreated being we may see nothing at all, for He dwelleth in light that no man can approach unto.

Only by faith and love are we able to glimpse Him as he passes by our shelter in the cleft of the rock.

“And although this knowledge is very cloudy, vague and general,” says Michael de Molinos, being supernatural, it produces a far more clear and perfect cognition of God than any sensible or particular apprehension that can be formed in this life; since all corporeal and sensible images are immeasurably remote from God.”

The human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated. We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside of the circle of our familiar knowledge.

We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is self-existent, self-dependent, and self-sufficient.

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself.

The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.

To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries.

This requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him.

Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for “where” has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both.

He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent, and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.

Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely,
Yet sublimely Three,
Thou art grandly, always, only God is Unity!
Lone in grandeur, lone in glory,
Who shall tell Thy wondrous story?
Awful Trinity! —Frederick W. Faber

It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God.

Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us.

We prefer to think about where it will do more good – about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before.

For this, we are now paying a too-heavy price in the secularization of our religion and the decay of our inner lives.

Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. “What bearing does this have on my life?” he may ask.

“What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?”

To this, I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological.

Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene.

The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope,
Know then thyself presume not God to scan:
The proper study of mankind is man,

If followed literally would destroy any possibility of man ever knowing himself in any but the most superficial way. We can never know who or what we are but we know at least something of what God is.

For this reason, the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique.

For reasons known only to Himself, God honored man above all other beings by creating him in His image. And let it be understood that the divine image in man is not a poetic fancy, not an idea born of religious longing.

It is a solid theological fact, taught plainly throughout the Sacred Scriptures and recognized by the Church as a truth necessary to a right understanding of the Christian faith.

Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself possesses nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon the One who created him after His likeness.

The fact of God is necessary to the fact of man. Think God away and man has no ground of existence. That God is everything and man nothing is a basic tenet of Christian faith and devotion.

Here the teachings of Christianity coincide with those of the more advanced and philosophical religions of the East. Man for all his genius is but an echo of the original Voice, a reflection of the uncreated Light.

As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call.

Not man only, but everything that exists came out of and is dependent upon the continuing creative impulse. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…

All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.” That is how John explains it, and with him agrees the apostle Paul.

“For by him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.

All things were created by him, and for him; and he is before all things, and by him, all things consist.”

To this witness the writer to the Hebrews adds his voice, testifying of Christ that He is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His Person, and that He upholds all things by the word of His power.

In this utter dependence of all things upon the creative will of God lies the possibility for both holiness and sin. One of the marks of God’s image in man is his ability to exercise moral choice.

The teaching of Christianity is that man chose to be independent of God and confirmed his choice by deliberately disobeying a divine command.

This act violated the relationship that normally existed between God and His creature; it rejected God as the ground of existence and threw man back upon himself.

Thereafter he became not a planet revolving around the central Sun, but a sun in his own right, around which everything else must revolve.

A more positive assertion of selfhood could not be imagined than those words of God to Moses: I AM THAT I AM.

Everything God is, everything that is God, is outlined in that unqualified declaration of independent being.

Yet in God, the self is not sin but the quintessence of all possible goodness, holiness, and truth.

The natural man is a sinner because and only because he challenges God’s selfhood to his own. In all else he may willingly accept the sovereignty of God; in his own life, he rejects it. For him, God’s dominion ends where he begins.

For him, the self becomes Self, and in this, he unconsciously imitates Lucifer, that fallen son of the morning who said in his heart, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will be like the Most High.”

Yet so subtle is the self that scarcely anyone is conscious of its presence. Because man is born a rebel, he is unaware that he is one.

His constant assertion of self, as far as he thinks of it at all, appears to him a perfectly normal thing. He is willing to share himself, sometimes even to sacrifice himself for a desired end, but never to dethrone himself.

No matter how far down the scale of social acceptance he may slide, he is still in his own eyes a king on a throne, and no one, not even God, can take that throne from him.

Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his selfhood and from that elevated position declares, “I AM.”

That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good. It is only when in the gospel the soul is brought before the face of the Most Holy.

One without the protective shield of ignorance that the frightful moral incongruity is brought home to the conscience.

In the language of evangelism, the man who is thus confronted by the fiery presence of Almighty God is said to be under conviction.

Christ referred to this when He said of the Spirit whom He would send to the world, “And when he comes, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness and judgment.”

The earliest fulfillment of these words of Christ was at Pentecost after Peter had preached the first great Christian sermon.

“Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men, and brethren, what shall we do?” This “What shall we do?” is the heart cry of every man who suddenly realizes that he is a usurper and sits on a stolen throne.

However painful, it is precisely this acute moral consternation that produces true repentance and makes a robust Christian after the penitent has been dethroned and has found forgiveness and peace through the gospel.

“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” said Kierkegaard, and we may with equal truth turn this about and declare, “The essence of sin is to will one thing.”

For to set our will against the will of God is to dethrone God and make ourselves supreme in the little kingdom of Mansoul.

This is sin at its evil root. Sins may multiply like the sands by the seashore, but they are yet one.

Sins are because sin is. This is the rationale behind the much-maligned doc: fine of natural depravity which holds that the independent man can do nothing but sin and that his good deeds are not good at all.

His best religious works God rejects as He rejected the offering of Cain. Only when he has restored his stolen throne to God are his works acceptable.

The struggle of the Christian man to be good while the bent toward self-assertion still lives within him as a kind of unconscious moral reflex is vividly described by the apostle Paul in the seventh chapter of his Roman Epistle; and his testimony is in full accord with the teaching of the prophets.

Eight hundred years before the advent of Christ the prophet Isaiah identified sin as rebellion against the will of God and the assertion of the right of each man to choose for himself the way he shall go.

“All we like sheep have gone astray,” he said, “we have turned every one to his way,” and I believe that no more accurate description of sin has ever been given.

The witness of the saints has been in full harmony with prophet and apostle, that an inward principle of self lies at the source of human conduct, turning everything men do into evil.

To save us completely Christ must reverse the bent of our nature; He must plant a new principle within us so that our subsequent conduct will spring out of a desire to promote the honor of God and the good of our fellow men.

The old self-sins must die, and the only instrument by which they can be slain is the Cross.

“If any man comes after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” said our Lord, and years later the victorious Paul could say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

My God shall sin its power maintain And in my soul defiant live!

‘T is not enough that Thou forgive,
The cross must rise and self be slain.
0 God of love, Thy power disclose:
T is not enough that Christ should rise,
I, too, must seek the brightening skies,
And rise from death, as Christ arose. —Greek hymn