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A TOZZER on John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word… (a must read!)
Pentru articole in Limba Romana despre si de la A. W. Tozer faceti click
John 1:1
The Word Became Flesh
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
An intelligent plain man,
untaught in the truths of Christianity, coming upon this text, would
likely conclude that John meant to teach that it is the nature of God to
speak, to communicate His thoughts to others. And he would be right. A
word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of
the term to the Eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is
inherent in the Godhead, that God is forever seeking to speak Himself
out to His creation. The whole Bible supports the idea. God is speaking.
Not God spoke, but God is speaking. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking Voice.
One of the great realities with which we have to deal is the Voice of God in His world. The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this: “He spake and it was done.” The why of
natural law is the living Voice of God immanent in His creation. And
this word of God which brought all worlds into being cannot be
understood to mean the Bible, for it is not a written or printed word at
all, but the expression of the will of God spoken into the structure of
all things. This word of God is the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality.
The Voice of God is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only
force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled
Word is being spoken.
The Bible is the written word
of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the
necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is
alive and free as the sovereign God is free. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”
The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have
power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe. It is
the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise
it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.
We take a low and primitive
view of things when we conceive of God at the creation coming into
physical contact with things, shaping and fitting and building like a
carpenter. The Bible teaches otherwise: “By
the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by
the breath of his mouth. . . . For he spake, and it was done; he
commanded, and it stood fast.” “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.”
Again we must remember that God is referring here not to His written
Word, but to His speaking Voice. His world-filling Voice is meant, that
Voice which antedates the Bible by uncounted centuries, that Voice which
has not been silent since the dawn of creation, but is sounding still
throughout the full far reaches of the universe.
The Word of God is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became something. Chaos heard it and became order; darkness heard it and became light. “And God said — and it was so.” These twin phrases, as cause and effect, occur throughout the Genesis story of the creation. The said accounts for the so. The so is the said put into the Continuous present.
That God is here and that He is
speaking — these truths are back of all other Bible truths; without
them there could be no revelation at all. God
did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance
by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words,
constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist
across the years. God breathed on clay and it became a man; He breathes
on men and they become clay. “Return ye children of men,” was the
word spoken at the Fall by which God decreed the death of every man,
and no added word has He needed to speak. The sad procession of mankind
across the face of the earth from birth to the grave is proof that His
original Word was enough.
We have not given sufficient attention to that deep utterance in the Book of John, “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Shift
the punctuation around as we will and the truth is still there: the
Word of God affects the hearts of all men as light in the soul. In the
hearts of all men the light shines, the Word sounds, and there is no
escaping them. Something like this would of necessity be so if God is
alive and in His world. And John says that it is so. Even those persons
who have never heard of the Bible have still been preached to with
sufficient clarity to remove every excuse from their hearts forever. “Which
show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also
bearing Witness, and their thoughts the mean while either accusing or
else excusing one another.” “For the invisible things of him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things
that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are
without excuse.”
This universal Voice of God was
by the ancient Hebrews often called Wisdom, and was said to be
everywhere sounding and searching throughout the earth, seeking some
response from the Sons of men. The eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs begins, “Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice?” The writer then pictures wisdom as a beautiful woman standing “in the top of the high places, by the way in the places of the paths.” She sounds her voice from every quarter so that no one may miss hearing it. “Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of men.”
Then she pleads for the simple and the foolish to give ear to her
words. It is spiritual response for which this Wisdom of God is
pleading, a response which she has always sought and is but rarely able
to secure. The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our
hearing, and we have trained our ears not to hear.
This universal Voice has ever
sounded, and it has often troubled men even when they did not understand
the source of their fears. Could it be that this Voice distilling like a
living mist upon the hearts of men has been the undiscovered cause of
the troubled conscience and the longing for immortality confessed by
millions since the dawn of recorded history? We need not fear to face up
to this. The speaking Voice is a fact. How men have reacted to it is for any observer to note.
When God spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centered men who heard it explained it by natural causes: they said, “It thundered.”
This habit of explaining the Voice by appeals to natural law is at the
very root of modern science. In the living breathing cosmos there is a
mysterious Something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to
understand. The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to
his knees and whispers, “God.” The
man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to
search, to find the cause and the how of things. Just now we happen to
be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the
scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain
than to adore. “It thundered,” we
exclaim, and go our earthly way. But still the Voice sounds and
searches. The order and life of the world depend upon that Voice, but
men are mostly too busy or too stubborn to give attention.
Every one of us has had experiences which we have not been able to explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness.
Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from
some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an assurance that we are
from another world, that our origins are divine. What we saw there, or
felt, or heard, may have been contrary to all that we had been taught in
the schools and at wide variance with all our former beliefs and
opinions. We were forced to suspend our acquired doubts while, for a
moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and heard for ourselves.
Explain such things as we will, I think we have not been fair to the
facts until we allow at least the possibility that such experiences may
arise from the Presence of God in the world and His persistent effort to
communicate with mankind. Let us not dismiss such a hypothesis too
flippantly.
It is my own belief (and here I
shall not feel bad if no one follows me) that every good and beautiful
thing which man has produced in the world has been the result of his
faulty and sin-blocked response to the creative Voice sounding over the
earth. The moral philosophers who dreamed their high dreams of virtue,
the religious thinkers who speculated about God and immortality, the
poets and artists who created out of common stuff pure and lasting
beauty: how can we explain them? It is not enough to say simply, “It was
genius.” What then is genius? Could it be that a genius is a man
haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and striving like one possessed
to achieve ends which he only vaguely understands? That the great man
may have missed God in his labors, that he may even have spoken or
written against God does not destroy the idea I am advancing. God’s
redemptive revelation in the Holy Scriptures is necessary to saving
faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Saviour is necessary if the
vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and
satisfying communion with God. To me this is a plausible explanation of
all that is best out of Christ. But you can be a good Christian and not
accept my thesis.
The Voice of God is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it. The
blood of Jesus has covered not only the human race but all creation as
well. “And having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to
reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things
in earth, or things in heaven.” We may safely preach a friendly
Heaven. The heavens as well as the earth are filled with the good will
of Him that dwelt in the bush. The perfect blood of atonement secures this forever.
Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to listen, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God. But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last great conflict God says, “Be still, and know that I am God,” and still He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie not in noise but in silence.
It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us.
Then if we will we may draw near to God and begin to hear Him speak to us in our hearts.
I think for the average person the progression will be something like this:
First a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden.
Then a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear.
Then the happy moment when the
Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had been only
a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and
intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend.
Then will come life and light, and best of all, ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and All.
The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept
the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such,
but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page
are actually for them. A man may say, “These words are
addressed to me,” and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are.
He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of God as
mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.
I believe that much of our
religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling
for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent God suddenly began to speak in a
book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again
forever. Now we read the book as the record of what God said when He was
for a brief time in a speaking mood. With notions like that in our
heads how can we believe? The facts are
that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God
to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the Word. The
Bible is the inevitable outcome of God’s continuous speech. It is the
infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar human
words.
I think a new world will arise
out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that
it is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is now speaking. The prophets habitually said, “Thus saith the Lord.”
They meant their hearers to understand that God’s speaking is in the
continuous present. We may use the past tense properly to indicate that
at a certain time a certain word of God was spoken, but a word of God
once spoken continues to be spoken, as a child once born continues to be
alive, or a world once created continues to exist. And those are but
imperfect illustrations, for children die and worlds burn out, but the
Word of our God endureth forever.
If you would follow on to know
the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you.
Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing; it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living God.
(via)
Reblogged from rodi
31 Jan 2013
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