The Pursuit of God
by A.W. Tozer
Chapter 3: Removing the Veil
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter
into the holiest by the blood of Jesus. Heb_10:19
Among
the famous sayings of the Church fathers none is better know than Augustine's 'Thou
hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in
Thee.'
The
great saint states here in few words the origin and interior history of the
human race. God made us for Himself: that is the only explanation that
satisfies the heart of a thinking man, whatever his wild reason may say.
Should faulty education and perverse reasoning lead a man to conclude
otherwise, there is little that any Christian can do for him. For such a man I
have no message. My appeal is addressed to those who have been previously
taught in secret by the wisdom of God; I speak to thirsty hearts whose longings
have been wakened by the touch of God within them,and such as they need no
reasoned proof. Their restless hearts furnish all the proof they need.
God
formed us for Himself. The shorter catechism, 'Agreed upon by the
Reverend Assembly of Divines at Westminister,' as the old New-England Primer
has it, asks the ancient questions what and why and answers them
in one short sentence hardly matched in any uninspired work. 'Question:
What is the chief End of Man? Answer: Man's chief End is to glorify God
and enjoy Him forever.' With this agree the four and twenty elders who fall on
their faces to worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, saying, 'Thou art
worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created
all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.' (Rev_4:11)
God
formed us for His pleasure, and so formed us that we as well as He can in
divine communion enjoy the sweet and mysterious mingling of kindred
personalities. He meant us to see Him and live with Him and draw our life from
His smile. But we have been guilty of that 'foul revolt' of which
Yet
who can flee from His Presence when the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him?
when as the wisdom of Solomon testifies, 'the Spirit of the Lord filleth the
world'? The omnipresence of the Lord is one thing, and is a solemn fact
necessary to His perfection; the manifest Presence is another thing
altogether, and from that Presence we have fled, like Adam, to hide among the
trees of the garden, or like Peter to shrink away crying, 'Depart from me,
for I am a sinful man, O Lord.' So the life of man upon the earth is a life
away from the Presence, wrenched loose from that 'blissful center' which is our
right and proper dwelling place, our first state which we kept not, the loss of
which is the cause of our unceasing restlessness.
The
whole work of God in redemption is to undo the tragic effects of that foul
revolt, and to bring us back again into right and eternal relationship with
Himself.This required that our sins be disposed of satisfactorily, that a full
reconciliation be effected and the way opened for us to return again into
conscious communion with God and to live again in the Presence as before. Then
by His prevenient working within us He moves us to return. This first comes to
our notice when our restless hearts feel a yearning for the Presence of God and
we say within ourselves, 'I will arise and go to my Father.' That is the first
step, and as the Chinese sage Lao-tze has said, 'The journey of a thousand
miles begins with a first step.'
The
interior journey of the soul from the wilds of sin into the enjoyed Presence of
God is beautifully illustrated in the Old Testament tabernacle. The returning
sinner first entered the outer court where he offered a blood sacrifice on the
brazen altar and washed himself in the laver that stood near it. Then through a
veil he passed into the holy place where no natural light could come, but the
golden candlestick which spoke of Jesus the Light of the World threw its soft
glow over all. There also was the shew bread to tell of Jesus, the Bread of
Life, and the altar of incense, a figure of unceasing prayer.
Though
the worshipper had enjoyed so much, still he had not yet entered the Presence
of God. Another veil separated from the Holy of Holies where above the mercy
seat dwelt the very God Himself in awful and glorious manifestation. While the
tabernacle stood, only the high priest could enter there, and that but once a
year, with blood which he offered for his sins and the sins of the people. It
was this last veil which was rent when our Lord gave up the ghost on
Everything
in the New Testament accords with this Old Testament picture. Ransomed men need
no longer pause in fear to enter the Holy of Holies. God wills that we
should push on into His Presence and live our whole life there. This is to be
known to us in conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held, it
is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day. This Flame of the Presence
was the beating heart of the Levitical order. Without it all the appointments
of the tabernacle were characters of some unknown language; they had no meaning
for
According
to its teachings we are in the Presence of God positionally, and nothing is
said about the need to experience that Presence actually. The fiery urge that
drove men like McCheyne is wholly missing. And the present generation of
Christians measures itself by this imperfect rule. Ignoble contentment takes
the place of burning zeal. We are satisfied to rest in our JUDICIAL possessions
and for the most part we bother ourselves very little about the absence of
personal experience.
Who
is this within the veil who dwells in fiery manifestations? It is none other
than God Himself, 'One God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and
of all things visible and invisible,' and 'One Lord Jesus Christ, the only
begotten Son of God; begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God,
Light of Light, Very God of Very God; begotten, not made; being of one
substance with the Father,' and 'the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life,
Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, Who with the Father and the Son
together is worshipped and glorified.' Yet this holy Trinity is One God, for
'we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the
Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father,
another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one: the glory equal and the
majesty co- eternal.' So in part run the ancient creeds, and so the inspired Word
declares. Behind the veil is God, that God after Whom the world, with strange
inconsistency, has felt, 'if haply they might find Him.' He has discovered
Himself to some extent in nature, but more perfectly in the Incarnation; now He
waits to show Himself in ravishing fullness to the humble of soul and the pure
in heart.
The
world is perishing for lack of the knowledge of God and the Church is famishing
for want of His Presence. The instant cure of most of our religious ills would
be to enter the Presence in spiritual experience, to become suddenly aware that
we are in God and that God is in us. This would lift us out of our pitiful
narrowness and cause our hearts to be enlarged. This would burn away the
impurities from our lives as the bugs and fungi were burned away by the fire
that dwelt in the bush.
What
a broad world to roam in, what a sea to swim in is this God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. He is eternal, which means that He antedates time and
is wholly independent of it. Time began in Him and will end in Him. To it He
pays no tribute and from it He suffers no change.
He is
immutable, which means that He has never changed and can never change in
any smallest measure. To change He would need to go from better to worse or
from worse to better. He cannot do either, for being perfect He cannot become
more perfect, and if He were to become less perfect He would be less than God.
He is
omniscient, which means that He knows in one free and effortless act all
matter, all spirit, all relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no
future. He is, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of
creatures can apply to Him.
Love and mercy
and rightousness are His, and holiness so ineffable that no
comparisons or figures will avail to express it. Only fire can give even a
remote conception of it. In fire He appeared at the burning bush; in the pillar
of fire He dwelt through all the long wilderness journey. The fire that glowed
between the wings of the cherubim in the holy place was called the 'shekinah,'
the Presence, through the years of Israel's glory, and when the Old had given
place to the New, He came at Pentecost as a fiery flame and rested upon each
disciple.
Spinoza
wrote of the intellectual love of God, and he had a measure of truth there; but
the highest love of God is not intellectual, it is spiritual. God is spirit and
only the spirit of man can know Him really. In the deep spirit of a man the
fire must glow or his love is not the true love of God. The great of the
Kingdom have been those who loved God more than others did. We all know who
they have been and gladly pay tribute to the depths and sincerity of their
devotion. We have but to pause for a moment and their names come trooping past
us smelling of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of the ivory palaces.
Fredrick
Faber was one whose soul panted after God as the roe pants after the water
brook, and the measure in which God revealed Himself to his seeking heart set
the good man's whole life afire with a burning adoration rivaling that of the
seraphim before the throne. His love for God extended to the three Persons of
the Godhead equally, yet he seemed to feel for each One a special kind of love
reserved for Him alone. Of God the Father he sings:
Only
to sit and think of God,
Oh what a joy it is!
To think the thought, to breathe the Name;
Earth has no higher bliss.
Father
of Jesus, love's reward!
What rapture will it be,
Prostrate before Thy throne to lie,
And gaze and gaze on Thee!
His
love for the Person of Christ was so intense that it threatened to consume him;
it burned within him as a sweet and holy madness and flowed from his lips like
molten gold. In one of his sermons he says, 'Wherever we turn in the church of
God, there is Jesus. He is the beginning, middle and end of everything to us.
...There is nothing good, nothing holy, nothing beautiful, nothing joyous which
He is not to His servants. No one need be poor, because, if he chooses, he can
have Jesus for his own property and possession. No one need be downcast, for Jesus
is the joy of heaven, and it is His joy to enter into sorrowful hearts. We can
exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligation to
Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All our lives
long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the
sweet things that might be said of Him. Eternity will not be long enough to
learn all He is, or to praise Him for all He has done, but then, that matters
not; for we shall be always with Him, and we desire nothing more.'
And
addressing our Lord directly he says to Him:
I
love Thee so, I know not how
My transports to control;
Thy love is like a burning
fire Within my very soul.
Faber's
blazing love extended also to the Holy Spirit. Not only in his theology did he
acknowledge His deity and full equality with the Father and the Son, but he
celebrated it constantly in his songs and in his prayers. He literally pressed
his forehead to the ground in his eager fervid worship of the Third Person of the
Godhead. In one of his great hymns to the Holy Spirit he sums up his burning
devotion thus:
O
Spirit, beautiful and dread!
My heart is fit to break
With love of all Thy tenderness
For us poor sinners' sake.
I
have risked the tedium of quotation that I might show by pointed example what I
have set out to say, viz., that God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and
completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet
and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as
that nature is. Such worship as Faber knew (and he is but one of a great
company which no man can number) can never come from a mere doctrinal knowledge
of God.
Hearts
that are 'fit to break' with love for the Godhead are those who have been in
the Presence and have looked with opened eye upon the majesty of Deity. Men of
the breaking hearts had a quality about them not known or understood by common
men. They habitually spoke with spiritual authority. They had been in the
Presence of God and they reported what they saw there. They were prophets, not
scribes, for the scribe tells us what he has read, and the prophet tells us
what he has seen.
The
distinction is not an imaginary one. Between the scribe who has read and the prophet
who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun
with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the
scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of
the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the
Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living
experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
With
the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on God's side to
prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do we consent to abide
all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and never enter at all to look
upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, 'Let me see thy countenance, let me
hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely.' (Son_2:14) We sense that the call is for us, but
still we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in the
outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us?
The
answer usually given, simply that we are 'cold,' will not explain all the
facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart, something that
may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its existence. What is it?
What but the presence of a veil in our hearts? a veil not taken away as
the first veil was, but which remains there still shutting out the light and
hiding the face of God from us. It is the veil of our fleshly fallen nature
living on, unjudged within us, uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close-
woven veil of the self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we
have been secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought
to the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil, nor
is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we shall see
it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there nevertheless, an
enemy to our lives and an effective block to our spiritual progress.
This
veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we commonly
care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are determined to
follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the way leads
temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God within them will
assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the facts however
unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before them. So I am bold to
mane the threads out of which this inner veil is woven. It is woven of the fine
threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of the human spirit. They are not
something we do, they are something we are, and therein lies both their
subtlety and their power.
To be
specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity,
self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of
others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our
natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them.
The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism,
self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of
impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, form any
people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical
observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity
in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of
promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.
One
should suppose that proper instruction in the doctrines of man's depravity and
the necessity for justification through the righteousness of Christ alone would
deliver us from the power of the self-sins; but it does not work out that way.
Self can live unrebuked at the very altar. It can watch the bleeding Victim die
and not be in the least affected by what it sees. It can fight for the faith of
the Reformers and preach eloquently the creed of salvation by grace, and gain
strength by its efforts. To tell all the truth, it seems actually to feed upon
orthodoxy and is more at home in a Bible Conference than in a tavern. Our very
state of longing after God may afford it an excellent condition under which to
thrive and grow.
Self
is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only
in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well try to instruct
leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we
are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must
bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an
ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed
when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.
Let
us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a
figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality
there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of
living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of
which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel
pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say
otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never
fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can
never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus
and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.
Let
us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend the veil.
God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust. We must confess,
forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it crucified. But we must be
careful to distinguish lazy 'acceptance' from the real work of God. We must
insist upon the work being done. We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine
of self-crucifixion. That is to imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep
and the oxen.
Insist
that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. The cross is rough,
and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging
there forever. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering
victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is
forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered in actual
spiritual experience the Presence of the living God. Lord, how excellent are
Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways of man. Show us how to die,
that we may rise again to newness of life. Rend the veil of our self-life from
the top down as Thou didst rend the veil of the Temple. We would draw near in
full assurance of faith. We would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on
this earth so that we may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven
to dwell with Thee there. In Jesus' name, Amen.