12 - Is God Enough?

Here is an idea advanced by an old man of God 2,500 years ago, as recorded in Jeremiah 6:16. “Thus saith the Lord, stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” That is all but one line of the sixteenth verse. The other line I wish were not there, but it is: “But they said, we will not walk therein.”

This text must be seen in its historic context. Israel was in grave physical danger for moral reasons. They had left the old paths and the old ways and had blasted out a shortcut for themselves that was rapidly taking them into quicksand and death, and Jeremiah offered to come to their rescue. He said, “If you want to escape what is ahead for you, ask for the old paths and turn onto the old paved highway that God has made for you, and you will come out all right.” But Israel did not listen. The reason Israel was in trouble was that she had gotten tired of God. This had not been the first time. Once, on the mount, Moses, their leader—whom they rallied to because he was trustworthy, visible and exercised leadership—went out of their sight for a while. Because they could not get their eyes on anything and could not touch anything, they had not the inward stability and stamina enough to wait for God’s time. God was not enough for them, so they made themselves a golden calf. It happened again in the wilderness later, after they had eaten manna from heaven (“angels’ food” it says in Psalms 78:25) and got tired of that diet. Although manna had everything they needed, they demanded to have something a bit more spicy. Consequently, God sent them flesh, but He sent a blight along with it. This was the outcropping of a natural, though sinful, tendency in humanity. It is a bad streak in human nature which finds goodness boring. We get tired of it after a while, and the only way we can endure it is to mix it with something highly spiced. I think I have gotten to the bottom of the trouble today in modern conservative Christian circles of which you and I, of course, are a part and would not be anything else. But there are serious difficulties that some of us are seeing and I believe the root and bottom of it all is that many of us have become bored with God. We have not the courage of the atheist who bares his breast to the high heavens and demands that if there be a God, He strike him dead. We want the safety of the Cross, and yet we are not satisfied with the Cross. We want the protecting wing of God, provided God will allow us a certain number of childish toys that we may be able to play with to keep our juvenile minds occupied while we go our way. We invent to ourselves instruments of music like David (figuratively speaking). We have a multitude of trifles to make up for the fact that God is not enough for us. For many Christians it is a fact that God is not enough. Indeed, there is nobody quite so eloquent as one who is busy arguing in favor of extras and additions that have no place either in the Old or New Testaments or in the traditional church of Christ. Nobody can get quite so eloquent as the man who has found that God is not enough and who has to have something to add to God to satisfy his poor heart. Those who gaze homesick toward the mount and desire a view of God in the fire, who wish to push into the Presence of the Holy God and stand in awful silence there—satisfied as the angels in heaven, as the cherubim before the throne and as the saints of the ages, satisfied with what God is—are considered to be radicals, extremists, fanatics, killjoys and a good many other names not quite so complimentary. Nevertheless, I joyfully put myself over on their side and say that I believe that we will not be where we ought to be until we get to a place where God is enough for us. We all have to live in the world. We even have to live in the twentieth century, believe it or not. There is no avenue of escape just yet. But it is one thing to accept the twentieth century with its multitude of gadgets, sanctifying and making them necessary for our spiritual happiness; it is quite another to live as though we were not in the world at all. From this latter perspective people live where thoughts of God are enough to nourish their minds for days on end. A minute of experience with the Presence of God brings more delight to them than all the invented gadgets in the world! Between those two views there is a great gulf fixed, but a bored and blasJ generation does not want to hear anything about the old paths. Scripture says, “Seek the old paths” (Jeremiah 6:16). There are two errors that are pretty current with regard to old things. The first is that everything old is good, and everything new is bad. That idea, or course, is held by some people, and it harms progress and discourages all thought. It also petrifies the imagination and digs a grave for all expectation. I am afraid that in our evangelical circles, when it comes to theology and spiritual thought, we have adopted the notion that the old is good and that everything new is bad in the realm of theology and spiritual ideas. We have to go back to John Bunyan or somewhere way back yonder to discover a man who has spiritual imagination enough even to state things differently from that which is current in his time. I will tell you what I would like to see for this critical age. I would like to see come out of this student body (and others like it all over the world) a number of persons committed to the everlastingness of the truth as it is given from heaven, manifested in the inspiration of Scripture and the faith of our fathers. I would like to see you committed to this truth, world without end, with your bridges burnt behind you so that it is impossible to go back theologically from this evangelical position. Then, before God Almighty, I would hope to see you full of the Spirit, with a Spirit-filled intellect immersed in the truth. The result would be the truth related in an imaginative way for our time. Truth would have that purpose and imaginative power that would enable us to show surprise and wonder when we talk about the things of God. We have lost that in religious ideas. Consequently, we have had to make up for our lack of wonder, surprise and “zing” by dragging in ten thousand things that God never intended should be dragged in at all. Therefore, it is often very difficult to tell whether we are in the church of God or at some amusement park. The second error, which we also strangely enough embrace, is that everything new is good and everything old is bad. That view has to do with our practice of religion. When it comes to our beliefs, we accept the doctrine that what our bearded fathers believed about a text is all there is to it, and that there is not anything else that can be said on the subject. All we have to do is have a good memory, remembering what Dr. So-and-so said about it because memory is the only faculty of the religious mentality that is working much now. We try to remember what the fathers said about a text, but we bring no imagination, no fresh life, no fresh touch, to the development of it ourselves. The error that everything new is good and everything old is bad takes place in the realm of practice and worship and religious activity generally. This is a view, if I can sanctify or dignify it with the word view, of the partly educated or the badly educated (I do not know which would be worse), of the intellectually vain and the worldly, of the carnal man who has not the Spirit. Such are the unstable and the impatient, the bored and the contemptuous. It can lead, of course, to great rebellion against the truth. If the idea that everything new is good and everything old is bad gets into theology, it makes modernists out of us. If this notion gets into fundamental circles, it makes fools out of us, and there is a great deal of it throughout the country. What is the way? The way is given to us here by the Holy Ghost: “Stand in the way, and see for yourselves, and ask for the old paths, the good way, and you shall find rest to your souls.” What shall we find in these good old paths? We will find everlasting truths. We will find what may be called the primary grounds, the irreducible elements, those things that are neither new nor old; they are ancient and eternal and have no time quality attached to them at all. The great doctrines of the Bible are not timely. When a man comes up to me and says, “Mr. Tozer, that was a timely sermon,” I take it as a doubtful compliment, for the truths of God are not timely (that is, geared into time). The truths of God are eternal. They rise above time, and they were as true when Adam was in the garden as they will be true in the millennium or in the ages that follow. There are certain great truths: God, God’s creating us, our response and relation to God, human sin, human redemption, the incarnation, the indwelling Christ, the union of the soul with the Triune God. All these are great, eternal truths, true under all kinds of conditions, among all people everywhere and in every age in the world, no less true and no more true because they are absolutely true. Indeed, we will never be where we should be until these become to us the source of thrill. The entertainment of great spiritual concepts will lift us like a song until, brooding upon the great ideas of the Triune God and all He means to us, will thrill us like a stimulant from within. We will never be where we ought to be until we go back to those old paths and learn to find God. We will cease to be bored with God. We will cease to make His redemptive plan merely an escape from hell and put the thought of hell and all that way behind us in the dim disappearing past. Instead, we will center our affections upon God and Christ, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, and become specialists and experts in the realm of the spiritual life. It is amazing how little outside stimulus we need if we have that inward stimulus. It is amazing how much God will meet our needs. It will not be God and something else. It will be God everything. And then, wisely, we will gear into our times, and we will gear into the gadgets around us, and we will gear into the needs of others, and in a moment we will become as practical as overshoes and as alert to the needs of the world around us as the most keen sociologist. Nevertheless, at the same time our great anchor will be God above. And if at any moment we should be cut off from our environment so that we did not have the stimulation and comfort of what the world provides, we would still be perfectly restful, for God would be enough. This is where we should seek to be, and I do not think this is too heavy a burden for you young people. I think youth will respond to the right leadership if it is given them, so I deliberately turn your minds to the old paths—not the old beards and the old clothes, nor the old ideas, but to the ancient and eternal truths which our fathers have given and which the Scriptures contain. Then, from there on we will know God and Christ in increasing intimacy as the years go by, and we will find heaven drawn near and earth receding as we get older. May God give us the courage to be obedient to His truths in this tragic, critical and dangerous hour in which we live.

[Tozer preached this sermon in Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, on the morning of March 4, 1954.]