The child the philosopher and the religionist have all one question, what is God like? A.W. Tozer
Last week we started off the next division in our study, the things that are to come. In Chapter 4 we entered the Throne Room of God with John and spent time taking in the magnificent scene of God’s throne, the twenty- four elders and the living creatures who stood near the throne worshipping God. We took in a glass like expanse that appeared like a crystal sea spread out before the throne and we pondered even more the brilliant radiance of God the Father, who had the appearance of jasper and carnelian.
From his position in the spirit in the throne room of heaven, above the earth, John sees the events of Revelation unfold. John begins to describe what he sees, hears and feels using pictures and images of what he understands to the best of his ability. The faces of the living creatures are like an ox, like a lion and so on. We see a lot of metaphors and similes.
It is by pictures and images that our hearts are able to understand and communicate concepts to one another. Pictures are the basic of human language. Before there was an alphabet, symbols and pictures, called pictograms were used to communicate. If there were a person in this room tonight that did not understand English, but spoke another language that I was unfamiliar with, and I had to communicate a message to that person, I would immediately resort to drawing a picture, drawing a symbol that I would know he or she could recognize so we could communicate. It might be choppy but we would get by. I might draw a cloud, a road, a cup of coffee, a book, a house, a fire, a person and so on. Even now as I say these words pictures of the meaning of these symbols are coming up in your mind. You see a cloud, you see a house, and you see a road. The details of these pictures in your mind and my mind might be a little different depending on our culture, experience, knowledge, etc…. If I were to tell each of you to draw a house, each one of us would draw a house but they would all be different. One might draw a box with a triangle on top with a little door and chimney on top. One might draw a rectangle with a door and some windows. One might draw a two story house, another might have great artistic ability and draw an elaborate house with bricks, a front porch, a swing and windows with pretty shutters, another from another time or culture might draw a log cabin, a hut, a tent, a teepee and so on. The same applies to drawing a road, some picture a dirt road and the other a six lane highway.
Although the concepts of houses and roads may be universal, the details are beyond our imagination unless we draw more pictures to clarify or unless we have some shared experience or knowledge of the concept being communicated, i.e.…a shared culture, a shared generation, a shared interaction with the same person, a shared experience. All of these give us a shared understanding of one another and make it easier to communicate with one another using less words, sometimes without even using words, just a glance, a knowing smile, a rolling of the eyes and we know the other person knows and understands. The closer we are to one another the easier it is sometimes to communicate without words, without drawing pictures for one another because our lives, or thoughts, our struggles, our fears and our hearts are already in a large sense already shared and known by the other person. The further away we are, the less known we are by the other person, the more need we have of words and pictures to make ourselves and our thoughts known and understood by another person. I don’t nearly have to explain my childhood and past to someone who I grew up around and with, then I do to someone who did not grow up around me, who lived in another state, in another class, in another generation. If I were to say, 121, or Obama you all would know exactly what I am referring to without further description needed because we are close enough one another to understand the meaning of these words sharing the same location and time period. If you were to mention something, a popular toy or person from the 1960’s and 1970’s you might lose me because of my age. We are separated by age and probably location.
As humans, we are limited. We can only know one another in part and cannot be known fully except by God, who fully knows each and every one is in such an intimate way, that it exceeds even our own knowledge of ourselves.
But who can know God? To what can we compare him to? How do we draw a picture of God? We can’t. Even John after seeing God Himself, is unable to help us in any way to draw a picture of him for there is nothing for John to compare God to draw us a picture or compare his likeness in a language for us to understand except to say that He is illuminating.
A.W. Tozer expresses the dilemma well in his book The Knowledge of the Holy.
When the spirit attempts to acquaint us with things that are above our knowledge, he tells us that this thing is like something we already know. But he is always careful to phrase his description so as to save is 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 to 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, still it does not create of unreality. One gathers that the whole scene is very real, but entirely alien to anything men know on earth. So in order 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 on it, though like a man is so unlike one that he can only be described 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 and idea from our own 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 which separates that which is God from that which is not God. To think of creature and creator as like in essential being is to rob God of most of his attributes and to reduce him to the status of a creature. It is for instance to rob him of his infinitude.” – A.W. Tozer the Knowledge of The Holy
God is beyond us and the mere concept of him rattles our senses. He is spirit, without form and body like us. He is unseen by the eye. His throne is above us in the heavens where we have no access. His ways are not our ways; his thoughts are not our thoughts. Unlike us he is immutable and does not change. He is what he always was and will always be. His very nature and attributes boggles our minds. He is eternal above time; he has no beginning and no end. He always was, is and will be. He is the creator and is self-existent. He was never created. He is not a part of creation, as a creature like us. He is omnipresent, he is above space, controls space, and in some sense is space for in Him we move, live and have our being. A.W.Tozer describes our being in God as, God is to us as the ocean is to the fish and as the air is to the birds, he is our environment. What Tozer is saying is that our spirits live, move, walk and find their breath in God. Apart from God, being in God, we could not breath. Yet he is not a substance, God is a person, with a mind, emotions, a will all his own. He is all sovereign, all powerful and yet he exists in three in one. He is all righteous and all holy and such concepts as this is foreign to us because there is no one righteous on earth, no, not even one.
There are no comparisons in this world for us to comprehend what God is like. He is Holy, Holy, Holy. We always want to explain him by things we know and understand, but we cannot. They all fail in the end to capture him. There are no pictures, no images that we can call upon so that we can know Him by and yet Jesus came to us so that we could know him. Apart from Jesus we would have no ability to know God. “For no one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18)
God exists outside our senses, outside our understanding and the only way we have of knowing him is if he reveals himself to us and even in his revealing himself to us, as he did to John in Revelation 4, our minds have no ability to comprehend the glory they see because they draw a blank when it comes to comparing him to the known and created world. He is unlike anything we have ever known, anything we can imagine, unlike any concept or image we could ever grasp with our finite minds. Yet John tries to the best of his limited ability to communicate to us by writing down what he sees. He uses metaphors and similes to begin drawing us pictures so we can comprehend his meaning, but all metaphors, all similes, all comparisons are grossly inadequate and fall short. They barely amount to scribbles on conveying the glory of the throne room of God and He who sits on the throne.
But how we value these scribbles, these immature drawings that John left behind for us! Even in their limitations what would our bible be without them? At the very least they tell us, Heaven is for real and it is glorious. God is on his throne. He is not absent. He is brilliant like light. He is fearful like lightning and thunder. He is beautiful like jewels. Pure like crystal and there is something about him that burns red like a stone like fire. He is to be worshipped. There are torches of fire before his throne that burn continually and creatures of different faces around his throne worshipping him continually and elders, rulers and victors of some sort falling down before his throne worshipping with the living creatures. The rest is hazy and we have to be careful about adding more detail then what is given to us to understand. This is comprehension enough. God is and He is Holy, Holy, Holy and is to be feared and worshipped. This is what we take away from Revelation chapter four and all of this serves as a magnificent backdrop as we begin to look at Revelation 5.
