Let's Bust a Recap : The Knowledge of the Holy

To close out Christian Non-Fiction Week here on ye olde blog, we're bringing in our heavyweight contender: A.W. Tozer's 1963 classic, The Knowledge of the Holy. This slim 117-page volume is considered by many in the evangelical world to be the definitive work of the last century on the attributes of God and as recently as 2006, The Knowledge of the Holy was named in the "Top 50 Books That Have Shaped Evangelicals". In a preface to his penultimate work which was written near the end of his life, Tozer states that the need for it arose from his observation of the loss of the concept of the majesty of God in the Church. And let me tell you: if it was a problem Tozer could readily observe in 1963, it's an even bigger one now.

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." I couldn't even try to tell you how many times I've heard these words come out of my dad's mouth. With this sentence, Aiden Wilson Tozer opens his first chapter of The Knowledge of the Holy and then quickly goes on to point out that "the essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him". Yeah. Tozer comes out of the gate swinging and he pulls no punches for the rest of his compact book. 

Even though it's been almost a year since I read The Knowledge of the Holy, I still find myself mulling over the things I read in this little book. My two main takeaways from this, my first reading of it, are thus:

1. I am utterly incapable of comprehending the majesty of God. While it is good and right and necessary for me to meditate on the person of God, I will only ever scratch the surface of who He is. He is above this world while I am a part of it and for that reason, I can not even begin to plumb the depths of His glory.
2. The attributes of God can never be divided. I can't take a single character trait belonging to God and pluck it out to observe it without stringing along all the others. In my humanity, I sometimes see myself being patient while not being very loving about it. Or I think of a judge proclaiming a sentence without any mercy. But God's patience is always perfectly loving, just, holy, merciful....the list goes on and on. It boggles the mind.

"The child, the philosopher, and the religionist have all one question: 'What is God like?'" In The Knowledge of the Holy, Tozer attempts to answer this question and with every word, he turns the reader's attention back to the majesty of God. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is worth every second of time it takes to read it and more beyond that.