The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer
Chapter 6, The Speaking Voice
(Condensed and customized for
contemporary clarity)
It is the nature of God to speak,
to communicate his thoughts to others. A word is a medium by which thoughts are
expressed, the application of the term “word” to the eternal Son leads us to
believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead. God is forever seeking
to speak to his creation. God is speaking, is continuously articulate, and
fills the world with his speaking voice.
This word of God which brought all
worlds into being cannot be understood to mean just the Bible. 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 Bible is the written word of
God. It is written, confined, and limited by the necessities of ink and paper.
The voice of God, however, is alive and free, just as the sovereign God is
free. 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 that makes the written
word all-powerful.
We take a low and primitive view of
things when we conceive of God at the creation as coming into physical contact
with things, shaping and fitting and building like a carpenter. The Bible
teaches overwise: By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the
breath of his mouth all their host…. For he spoke, and it was done; he
commanded, and it stood fast. And by faith, we understand that the worlds were
prepared by the word of God. (Psalms 33)
Scripture is referring here not to
his written word, but to his speaking voice. The word of God is quick and
powerful. He spoke to nothing, and it became something. Chaos heard it
and it became order; darkness heard it and it became light.
God is here and he is
speaking—these truths are the backing for all other Bible truths. The word of
God affects the hearts of everyone as a light in the soul. In the hearts of all,
the light shines, the word sounds, and there is no escaping them. Even those
individuals who have never heard of the Bible have still been spoken to with
sufficient clarity to remove every excuse from their hearts forever. His
eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood
through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1)
The 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. The tragedy
is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearing, and we have
trained our ears not to hear. Could it be that this voice distilling like a
living mist upon the heart has been the undiscovered cause of the troubled
conscience that craves and seeks immortality?
When God spoke out of heaven to people,
self-centered humans 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. Humans kneel, but not to worship. They
kneel to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things. Our
thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are
more likely to explain than to adore. The order and life of the
world depend upon the voice, but people are too busy or too stubborn to pay
attention.
Every one of us has had experiences
that we have not been able to explain—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. 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 and his persistent effort to communicate with
humans.
Poets and artists create out of
common stuff works of pure and lasting beauty and are considered a genius.
Could it be that a genius is a person haunted by the speaking voice, laboring
and striving like one possessed to achieve ends that they only vaguely
understand?
The voice of God is a friendly
voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless they have already made up their
mind to resist it. The heavens, as well as the earth, are filled with the
goodwill of him. Whoever listens will hear the speaking of heaven.
This is not the hour when people
take kindly to listen, for listening is not a part of popular religion. Religion
has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity, and bluster make
a person dear to God. To a people caught in the tempest, God says, Be still,
and know that I am God. (Psalms 46) Our strength and safety lie not in
noise but in silence. We must get still to wait on God. If we will, we may draw
near to him and begin to hear him speak.
The progression is something like
this: First the sound of a presence walking in a garden. Then a voice, more
intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy moment when the Spirit
begins to illuminate the soul. 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, the
ability to see and rest in the embrace of the Savior.
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. Someone may say, “These words are addressed to me,” and yet in their
heart they do not feel or know that they are, the victim of a divided mindset—God
is mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.
Religious unbelief is due to a
wrong conception of and a wrong feeling about the scriptures. A silent God
suddenly began to speak in a book, and when the book was finished, he lapsed
back into silence again. The facts are that God is not silent and has never
been silent. It is the nature of God to speak. The Bible is the inevitable
outcome of God’s continuous speech.
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 that was once spoken, but it is also a book that is now speaking.
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.
To know the Lord, come at once to
the God of the Bible, expecting him to speak to you. Scripture is a voice, a
word, the very word of God.
Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously assault them. Help me hear you speaking in my heart. Let me get used to the sound of your voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of your speaking voice in heaven. Amen.
