Preface and Chapter 1: Thinking Rightly About God

In our own present day experience, has our view of God become so "low and ignoble, as to be totally unworthy of thinking, worshiping men?" Have we surrendered our lofty concept of God? For that matter, was our own concept of God ever lofty to begin with? At first glance I would hesitate in answering this question, not because I would have to search for occasions of this act, but because I am hesitant to explore past a surface which may loosely cover an unwanted conclusion. Tozer points out in the early 1960's that Christians entertained such a low view of God as a result of a "hundred lesser evils"; do we in our own time, in fact are we in our own lives, guilty of making "minor concessions" for sin, things only slightly noticeable, which over time have diminished our awe and reverence of the Almighty? Tozer also points out that if you took all of the problems of the world and confronted them at once, their magnitude would not compare to the "overwhelming problem of God: that He is, what He is like, and what we as moral beings must do about Him," or how we respond to Him. Often I think that we have that last part down; however, when you start to put real searching thought to the first two, His Absolute Existence and His incomprehensible components, or attributes, you begin to see that your supposedly acceptable response (your worship) is utterly and completely unacceptable. Without a right thinking about God, called "Orthodoxy", where you really understand "what God is like", you risk imagining God as something He is not, forming in your mind something other than the God of Israel, ending up in an unfortunate idolatrous state. What it all comes down to is that at some point the church allowed the corruption of simple basic theology - she got the wrong answer to the question: "What is God like?"

So, with all that said, what are we to do about it? What is the root of the problem? OUR DEFACED CONCEPT OF GOD! In a nutshell, we must "purify and elevate" our concept, or understanding, of God until it once again reflects the true character and nature of God.