At the young people's hour tonight and the
senior young people, I expect to be present
and will give a short message.
I want all my young friends to be
there to hear what I have to say.
I want to give a practical talk on
how to make the most of your present
spiritual privileges and means of grace.
Then I'd like also to accent the family
night, Wednesday night, 745.
This Wednesday night will be Family Night Reports
Lecture.
Now we're in Titus where Paul says that
he is a servant of God and apostle
sent to declare the faith of God's elect
and acknowledging of the truth, promotion of the
truth which is after godliness in a hope
of eternal life which God that cannot lie
promised before the world began.
I think that's probably as far as we'll
get.
I talked last week on this phrase, in
hope of eternal life.
Now, which God that cannot lie promised before
the world began.
If you people who don't preach want to
know how humiliated we preachers feel, well, I'll
whisper something to you.
That an apostle inspired by the Holy Ghost
can write a letter to a church or
to a man and pack it so tight
with truth that four or five words will
be enough for us, that's rather humiliating.
I'd like to think that I could paddle
right along beside Paul, but Paul has to
wait for me to catch up, wait weeks,
months for me to catch up with him.
So he said, in hope of eternal life,
and that was last week, which God that
cannot lie promised before the world began, that's
this week.
Now, we look at that, God that cannot
lie.
Of course, we know what God it is.
It's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, whom Paul has said to be the
only God.
We have one Father, one God.
And he told us here of the hope
of the promise.
We have the hope of eternal life.
We have eternal life now, and we have
the hope of eternal life in its broader
aspects and the world to come.
Now, we have this as a promise.
We have this as a promise.
And I would rather have some people's promise
than to have other people's gifts.
A long time ago, a great preacher was
in this city, I think one of the
greatest preachers of the first 50 years of
church history, Paul Rader.
He said that a man, a businessman that
he personally knew to be rather windy and
not too much given to fulfill his promises,
who allowed his imagination to run away with
his ability to produce, promised him he was
going to give him, I think, if I
recall, $100,000 for missions.
Rader said, Have you got a dime?
He said, Sure.
He said, Could I have it now for
missions?
He said, Yes.
Now he said, Thank you.
He said, I know God will get this.
But he wasn't sure about that promised $100
,000.
But the dime, he knew God would get
that.
Well, that was his half humorous but profoundly
meaningful way of saying that some people's promises
are not too valuable.
And I would turn it around and say
that I would rather live by some people's
promise than by other people's gifts.
And here we have a promise.
Not yet that full eternal life, but the
promise of eternal life.
And always remember this, that a promise is
only worth whatever the character is of the
man who made it.
So that the God that cannot lie promised,
and this promise is worth just as much
as God, no more, no less.
All truth rests down upon and begins with
God.
A promise is only as sound, I repeat,
as the one that made it.
It is amusing, if it were not so
obviously painful, to see people struggling to have
faith, on their knees struggling and writhing to
have faith, a frantic struggle to believe, only
indicates that the person who is thus struggling
has lost sight of God and has got
involved in God's promises.
God's promises are made by God, and they
are as good as God and as sure
as God, and they are to us whatever
God is.
And they cannot be less nor more.
They are whatever God is.
And when a person is struggling to believe
a promise, it's obvious that he has detached
the promise from the God who made it
and is for the time in a state
of mental confusion.
Remember, you only have to ask, Who made
the promise?
And if you can get a satisfactory answer,
Who made the promise, then you've gone a
little way.
Then if you say, What has the record
been of this person who made the promise?
And if examination shows the record to have
been 100% sound, that he always came
through the promise, if further investigation shows that
this person has never been known to be
anything but honest and true, and if further
investigation shows that this person is able to
make good on the promise, then why worry
about the promise?
Think first about the man who made it.
You get a letter promising you something, and
you say, Now, Lord, help me to believe
this.
Help me to believe this.
Oh, I want to believe this, Father.
Help me to believe this.
Well, you don't want to believe it if
it isn't so.
If a man wrote me a letter and
said, Mr. Tozer, I'm going to give you
a Cadillac.
Well, I don't know if my wife, I
guess, could learn to drive it, but if
somebody gave me a Cadillac, or was going
to give me a Cadillac, first I'd look
whose signature was at the bottom of the
letter, and I would then quietly decide or
try to find out whether the man was
used to making promises.
One dear little old brother who's long ago
gone to heaven, who used to be in
our church years ago, and whose mind began
to break, and I never noticed it.
I never noticed anything wrong until one day
he came up to me and said, Did
you get the car?
And I said, What car?
And he said, Why, I have given 40
automobiles to missionaries and preachers this last month,
and he said, I wonder if you got
yours?
And I shook his hand and said, No,
not yet.
And I knew.
Dear little old brother, he, a lot long
after that, he went off to be with
his Lord.
His mind was breaking.
And, what do they call it, blood shut
off from the mind and it doesn't function.
Some great men, including Emerson, and Dr. Simpson,
and Dr. Zemer, and many others have gone
that way.
Their minds wouldn't work toward the last.
Well, now, if I investigated and I found
that this was simply a kindly promise by
a man who was beginning to slip, then
I'd smile it off.
But if I looked at the bottom of
the letter and I knew that that letter
was signed by a man who not only
had always kept his promises, but was fully
capable of keeping them, why, I wouldn't worry
about it.
I'd be looking up on which lever to
pull to start awaiting the curb.
Because I know I'd get it.
And it's this way with the promises of
God.
God, who cannot lie, promise.
Now, that's all you have to know.
Grant me God and the promises are all
right.
The struggle to believe promises, I insist, is
psychologically and mentally off.
It's not sound.
Because it is a wanting thing to be
true, but not being sure that it is
and trying to make yourself feel that it
is, that's not the way to approach it.
Who made the promise?
Is he able to make good on it?
Is his character such that he will make
good on it?
Find that out.
And when you've found that out, your promise
is as sound as the throne of God.
God that cannot lie, promise, and all truth
begins with God and rests down upon God.
So don't struggle to believe God, and don't
insult God by asking, help me to believe
thee.
God, that saying, help me to have confidence
in thy character, O God.
Help me to stop thinking that you're crooked.
Help me, Lord, to believe that you're honest.
Well, that would insult your father if you'd
go to him and say, Dad, you've promised
to see me through college, but I can't
believe you.
Help me to believe you.
Well, your father would say, have I lied
to you in the past?
And you'd say, never.
And have I always made good on all
my promises?
Yes.
Well, why do you doubt me now?
And he'd feel bad about it because it
would be a reflection on his fatherly kindness
and his basic honesty.
God that cannot lie made these promises, this
promise of eternal life.
And I, for one, don't intend to lie
awake nights wondering if he can keep it.
I know God will keep it all right.
Now, Paul here uses a negative, I want
you to notice.
He said the God that cannot lie.
Saint Dionysius said, we know God more perfectly
by negatives than we do by affirmatives.
That is, we can know what God is
not better than we can know what God
is seeing that the name of God is
secret and the nature of God is so
infinitely removed from ours that we fallen men
find it very difficult to visualize what God
is like.
But we can know what God is not.
And the theologians have always had to follow
that more or less.
To understand God's perfections, they have to go
to negatives.
For instance, if you were preaching on the
self-existence of God, you'd say God had
no origin.
And I don't know how else you would
say it because human language won't go any
further than that.
That's it.
God had no origin.
Everything else had an origin, including the very
seraphim archangels, but not God.
Therefore, if God had no origin, therefore, he
must exist in himself.
And so we get the positive by means
of the negative.
If you wanted to preach on God's self
-sufficiency or meditate on it, you could say
God has no support.
And if God has no support, if nothing
holds him up, then he must hold himself
up.
Therefore, he must be self-sufficient.
So by a negative, you'd arrive at a
positive.
If you wanted to think on the eternity
of God, you'd say God had no beginning.
And if God had no beginning, he always
must have been.
And if he always must have been, therefore,
he is eternal, and you'd have the eternity
of God.
If you wanted to meditate on the immutability
of God, you'd say that God knows no
change.
And if God does not change, he always
must have been what he is now.
And if he always was what he is
now, it's easy to reason that he will
always be what he was and is.
And infinitude, if you wanted to meditate on
God's infinitude, you could say God has no
limitations.
Well, if God has no limitations, then it
can only mean that there is no boundary
anywhere, that God is limitless.
This is, of all thoughts, the most difficult
to grasp, so we'll skip over it pretty
fast.
And if you wanted to think on the
omniscience of God, you'd say, well, God cannot
learn.
God cannot learn.
Why?
Because he already knows all there is to
know.
Knowing himself perfectly, and containing all things, he
knows all that can be known.
That is the negative.
So Paul used it here.
God that cannot lie.
And the scriptures, not only the theologians, but
the scriptures also follow this method.
He says in Isaiah about himself, The Lord
fainteth not, neither is weary.
And he says, I the Lord change not.
And he says, He that keepeth thee will
not slumber nor sleep.
And he says, He cannot deny himself.
And he says, With God nothing is impossible.
And he says, With God it was impossible
for him to lie.
So there we have all these passages from
the scriptures showing that we can know God
by what he is not.
And so Paul used it freely and said
God that cannot lie.
If he had simply said the true God
or the God of truth, you could have
figured that out.
All right, but it's more powerful put negatively.
And the gentleman who believes in positive thinking
might learn a lesson here, though he never
will.
That sometimes you can back into the station
better than you can pull the head in
in this terrible day.
And this is true, that sometimes God is
able to tell us what he is by
telling us what he's not better than by
telling us what he is.
So this hope of eternal life was promised
by this kind of God.
What are you going to do?
Go home and sweat it out and wonder
if it's true and pray for faith?
No, get acquainted with God and be at
peace.
Acquaint thyself with him and you'll not worry.
And then he says he promised before the
world began.
That is, other versions say before eternal ages
he promised.
Now if he promised before the world began,
he must have promised somebody who was present.
And if he promised before the eternal ages,
he must have promised somebody who was before
the ages were.
Now to whom then was the promise made?
Well, I wouldn't have thought of this myself,
but there lived about 200 or more years
ago a brilliant and godly Presbyterian preacher by
the name of John Flavell.
I've always called him Flavell, but I see
that the dictionaries of biography call him Flavell.
John Flavell.
He was an English Presbyterian preacher.
When I was a boy on the farm,
for the sheer paucity of reading matter, I
read everything I could get hold of from
the time I can remember.
Calendars, anything.
Railroad sketches, anything.
Even the writing material or printed matter on
cereal boxes.
I read everything.
And we had nothing around there to read.
Nothing.
Didn't even take a daily paper.
I couldn't read that.
Nothing.
My mother bore a book occasionally, and I'd
read that.
And somewhere there fell into my hand a
book of sermons by John Flavell.
Now, John Flavell was an old Puritan, an
old Presbyterian Puritan type of preacher.
And though I was only a boy, maybe
12, I read his sermons.
And I remember to this day after the
passing of the years some of the brilliant
and wonderful things John Flavell said.
And he was preaching in one sermon on
the text, Therefore, from Isaiah 53, 12.
Therefore, I will divide him a portion with
the great, and he shall divide the spoiled
with the strong.
And he was preaching on that text, Therefore.
And he said, This indicates, this indicates that
the Father made a covenant with the Son
before the world was and before man was,
and that the covenant rests not upon poor
man but upon God.
That this man's salvation was a compact made
between the Father and the Son.
And incidentally, John Milton puts that same thing
into Paradise Lost.
We've forgotten to read Paradise Lost, now that
we can get Al Cap.
And, what's his name?
Well, my brother, I think we ought to
read Flavell and Milton.
I believe we'd get more out of it
than we would out of reading Moon Mullins.
And he says that the Father made a
compact with the Son.
Back there.
And therefore, shall he divide a portion with
the great and divide the spoiled with the
strong.
And he went on brilliantly to set before
his readers in heavy language without illustration and
without any side remarks.
They weren't supposed to have illustrations and side
remarks.
They'd gone to church in those good old
days or the kirk, they called it in
Scotland.
They went there not to hear stories but
to hear theology.
An hour long.
Two hours long.
John Flavell's sermon on the therefore from Isaiah
53 that God made the covenant with the
Son before eternal ages.
With whom else could he have made a
covenant before the worlds began?
Before there was a seraphim to stand by
the throne of grace or the sea of
fire?
Before there was an angel?
Before a man ever breathed?
With whom did he make his compact and
to whom did he make his promise?
He made it to his eternal Son who
later became flesh to dwell among us.
So that the God who cannot lie promised
before the world began.
Now your certain hope rests for the future
rests upon this kind of God.
This kind of God the Father, Son and
Holy Ghost.
And the promises depend upon the covenant.
And that's why you don't have to worry.
Your certain hope for the future absolutely rests
in God and I want to say this
to you.
It's independent of anything you can see or
touch.
Independent of anything you can see or touch.
This covenant anything that you can see, touch,
taste, smell, hear, anything that is sensible that
belongs to the senses is completely divorced from
the things we tie it up to.
We tie the tri-Christianity up to democracy,
civilization, politics, financial conditions and all the rest.
Never, never, never.
Never.
Your hope for all the ages doesn't rest
upon democracy.
What do I think about democracy?
Do I think that democracy is a good
way of life?
Yes, I do.
I don't think it's the best but I
think it's a good way of life.
I think the best government is theocracy.
When Jesus Christ comes back to rule the
earth that will be theocracy, the rule of
God over the world.
That's the best.
I think second best is democracy, the rule
of the people.
And I am quite satisfied with our Republican
form of government, our American way of life
and I have nothing to say but good
about it.
But I would only say this, that Christianity
has flourished under every sort of political system.
It flourished in the court of Caesar.
It flourished in the Middle Ages, in the
days of chivalry and the days of manors
and lords of the manor and serfs and
slaves.
It prospered in the day when men were
slaves.
As Paul said, he was a slave of
Jesus Christ, drawing an illustration from current society.
It flourishes now in Korea.
It flourishes now under Jean Cachet out on
that little island of Formosa.
It flourishes in tiny little places in some
of the hard, tough countries of South America.
And Christianity rests upon God and it antedates
not only all political systems but all politicians,
all statesmen and all men.
And it goes back before eternal ages and
links itself like a mighty chain to the
very throne of God.
Therefore, political systems don't change anything.
But you say, well, political systems can soon
stamp out Christianity.
That's what we think, my brethren, but I
don't believe it for a moment.
I am not, I am not for these,
these Russian and other churchmen who come over
here and try to pull our legs and
tell us that they have religious freedom in
Russia.
I know that they don't.
But I also know that the Holy Ghost
hasn't permitted the seed of God to die
in Russia.
I heard the other night on FM a
beautiful, beautiful choir.
It was a Russian choir.
The recording was made in London and it
was made recently.
It was sung by Russian voices.
I lay in my bed after I'd gone
to bed, I lay and listened to the
FM to this wonderful music of the Russian
choir.
And in my heart I had an indignation.
I said, people like this, that have genius
like this and ability like this, that have
the warmth and the emotion and the feeling
of passion that they have, that they have
to be ruled by those devils in the
Kremlin.
That these fine, warm-hearted, friendly, religious-minded
Russian people have to be ruled over by
these communistic, atheistic devils.
In my heart I'm indignant that it should
be so.
And I pray that the day may come
even in Russia when God will destroy this
octopus and will take from the hearts and
brains and bodies of the Russian people the
chains that are there.
For all you have to do is destroy
the ruling classes in the Kremlin and destroy
communism.
And you have the finest and most emotional
and passionate and friendliest people.
Now don't misunderstand me and go ahead and
say Tozer made an impassioned speech in favor
of Russia.
Never in favor of communism.
It is the breed of the devil.
It is the vomit of hell.
It is the seepings from the sewers of
limbo.
And I hate it with everything in me.
And all of its sneaking devilishness and all
of its evil chicanery.
I hate it.
But I pity the people upon whose hearts
and minds it's been clamped down like a
vice.
They're better than that.
They don't deserve it.
But you say, then why don't they rise
and throw it off?
They tried that in Hungary, didn't they?
You know what happened there.
Only God can deliver them.
So don't you believe for a minute that
the ancient seed of God that was planted
in the minds of the common plain people
is dead in Russia.
There are still Christians there.
Operating under difficulties, but they're still there and
they're still in China.
Don't think that the 40 or more years
that our alliance missionaries labored and sweat and
struggled and suffered in China is for nothing.
There are still Christians.
The God who cannot lie promised before the
world began and he promised before Marx and
Lenin and he promised before Mao Zedong and
Khrushchev.
Well, some others would say, well, Christianity must
go along with civilization.
No.
Civilization is simply a combination, application of science
to man's life.
And it's given us this we call civilization.
Christianity, philosophy, and science are combined.
That is the top froth of Christianity, as
combined with science and philosophy to create this
civilization that we have now.
But civilization can disappear and we can go
back to the ox cart.
And still it won't change anything in heaven
yonder.
It won't change anything inside of men.
It won't change the covenants of God and
the God who promised the sun in holy
compact before the ages began.
He will not fail us if our civilization
is destroyed.
It goes back to the Constitution of the
United States.
I believe in this Constitution of the United
States.
I hold it to be one of the
greatest documents, as the English said, ever struck
off by the hand of man.
For all these years it has kept us
free, the freest people in the world.
And I grieve when I see Supreme Courts
interpreting the Constitution so as to shield the
communistic vermin that crawls in Washington.
But nevertheless, before the Constitution of the United
States was written, the cross stood high above
all times.
And so it doesn't depend upon it.
It doesn't depend on politics, nor wars and
financial situation, nor space travel, nor churches, nor
denominations, nor the Christian and missionary alliance.
God that cannot lie promised before the world
began.
And there is our hope.
God never does anything new, said Meister Eckert.
By that he means that God never does
anything suddenly or impulsively.
He says, behold, I will do a new
thing, and I make all things new.
But he's talking about our new.
He only talks from our side.
He said, behold, I will do something that
from your standpoint will look new.
Behold, I will do something that to you
will seem new.
But he does nothing that he has in
covenant to do with his eternal son before
an angel's wing trembled by the sea of
fire.
He never does anything new.
And the old German theologian is right.
God never does anything new.
And if he blesses you today, he promised
it before the world was.
And if he saves you today, he does
it according to a covenant he made with
his son before the eternal ages.
And if he answers your prayer, he answers
it according to a compact he made with
his eternal son before the world was.
So God never does anything new.
God never adds any codicils to his will.
When God made his will, he made it
and sealed it in blood and settled it
in the God who cannot lie sore by
himself because he could swear by no other.
And he never adds any codicils.
Our assurance is in him.
Let me read 2 Timothy 1, 9, and
we'll close.
Who has saved us and called us with
an holy calling, not according to our works,
but according to his own purpose and grace,
which was given us in Christ Jesus before
the world began.
Maybe we could read yet a little passage
from Ephesians 1.
To the praise of the glory of his
grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in
the beloved, in whom we have redemption through
his blood, the forgiveness of sins, wherein he
hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and
prudence, having made known unto us the mystery
of his will, according to his good pleasure,
which he hath purposed in himself, that in
the dispensation of the fullness of times he
might gather together all things in Christ, both
which are in heaven and which are on
earth, even in him in whom also we
have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to
the purpose of him, who worketh all things
after the counsel of his will, that we
should be to the praise of his glory,
who first trusted in Christ.
Ah, my brother, you don't have to worry
about the promises nor about the God who
made them.
All you have to be bothered about is
whether you are living as you should live,
whether you love him as you should, whether
you are living as clean as you should
live and as right and as good, and
whether you are as useful and as fruitful
as God wants you to be.
You can think about that and pray over
that all you want to, distrust yourself all
you want to, never insult the majesty in
the heavens by doubting him, for he is
the God who cannot lie, and he promised
eternal life before the world began.
And we who have believed him become part
now of that eternal compact which he made
with his Son for eternal ages.
Amen and Amen.