In the book of Genesis, the third chapter,
I'm going to read a few verses.
It said the serpent was more subtler than
any beast of the field which the Lord
God had made.
And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath
God said, ye shall not eat of every
tree of the garden.
And the woman said unto the serpent, We
may eat of the fruit of the trees
of the garden, but of the fruit of
the tree which is in the midst of
the garden, God hath said ye shall not
eat of it, neither shall ye touch it
lest ye die.
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye
shall not surely die, for God doth know
that in the day in which ye eat
thereof, then your eyes shall be opened.
And ye shall be as God, knowing good
and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree
was good for food, and that it was
pleasant to the eyes, and the tree did
desire to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave
also unto her husband with her, and he
did eat.
And they asked, and both were open.
And they knew that they were naked.
And they sewed fig leaves together, and made
themselves aprons.
And they heard the voice of the Lord
God walking in the garden in the cool
of the day.
And Adam and his wife hid themselves from
the presence of the Lord God amongst the
trees of the garden.
And the Lord God called unto Adam and
said unto him, Where art thou?
Now, the setting of the little message tonight.
Here was the perfect pair, Mr. and Mrs.
Universe.
The perfect pair, dwelling in the perfect environment.
And then came the disobedience, when, as Milton
said, in an evil hour she stretched forth
her hand, and took of the fruit, and
did eat, and gave unto her husband, and
he did eat.
And the fall of him, that great moral
disaster, that theologians call fall, that scientists deny
ever happened, that everybody that has the sense
he was born with knows happened, because the
debris is still in his own heart.
Now, here they were, this guilty pair, bowed
down with care.
And God appeared.
The Lord God was walking as if he
didn't know what had happened.
He didn't know, that is, he walked around
there as if he didn't know, but he
knew all right.
And this guilty pair hid from the presence
of God.
Now, tonight, I hope I may be forgiven.
I hope the engineer may be forgiven.
If he doesn't take that squeak out of
my voice.
It ain't there, brother, it just ain't there.
With your chariot.
I hope I may be forgiven tonight, if
I use some of the same basic elements
that went into last night's sermon.
And I do it without hesitation or apology,
only with an explanation.
So when you hear it, you won't say,
the old man is slipping.
He's repeating himself.
But at the cost of being repetitious, let
me say that there are certain truths that
keep recurring throughout the entire Bible, throughout all
Christian theology, throughout all hymnology, throughout all the
great sermons of these centuries, certain simple truths,
not very many, half a dozen maybe, or
we'll stretch it to say ten or a
dozen.
No more than that.
They keep recurring always.
Like the primary colors in a painting.
You see, all colors are made up out
of a few colors.
All the various shades that you see everywhere
are compounded out of very few colors.
Some say three, some say five, some say
seven.
They're called the primary colors.
And if you gazed upon the most beautiful
garden in the world with a hundred kinds
of flowers in all of their beauty, you
would see only five or at most seven
colors there compounded.
You wouldn't recognize those colors.
You would stand breathless in the presence of
this wonderland of shades of color.
And yet all those shades are made out
of those half dozen or less colors.
Now it is so with everything that can
be said ever from this platform, every truth
that ever can be taught by any Bible
teacher in the world, there are certain primary
colors that make up the painting, certain basic
truths which are woven in as ingredients in
the truth.
And one of those basic truths of those
primary colors is what we call the divine
eminence.
I have quoted before in your presence, for
I very frequently quote it to warm my
own heart and my congregation as well.
I have quoted what the old archbishop said
about God.
He said, God is above all things and
beneath all things and outside of all things
and inside of all things.
He is above, but he's not pushed up.
He's below, but he's not pressed down.
He's outside, but he's not excluded.
He's inside, but he's not confined.
He is above all things presiding and he's
beneath all things sustaining and he's outside of
all things embracing and he's inside of all
things filling.
Now that's the eminence of God as stated
by a French theologian.
And I rather like it, brother.
That puts God where you are and that's
what I love.
Now that is one of the primary colors,
the eminence of God, that God is here.
I can't think of any truth that I
could assert or declare that would have in
it more potential glory and good for you
tonight than just to remind you of the
eminence of God, that God is here.
Old David celebrated the eminence or the omnipresence
of God.
He said, God's every place.
He said, if I hide in the darkness,
God's there.
If I go into the light, God's there.
And if I go up into heaven, God's
there.
And if I even go down into hell,
even I'll find God.
God's every place.
I can't escape from God.
And then Solomon, you'll remember, celebrated it.
He said, God said to Solomon, am I
God far off?
Or said to one of the Old Testament,
am I God far off and not a
God nigh at hand?
And David said that in him we live
and move and have our being.
God is here.
And that is the most wonderful and revolutionary
fact that I could announce to you tonight.
It's worthy of the angel of the annunciation
that there is an invisible but real presence
here tonight pressing down upon us.
And this great reality is the absolute that
gives meaning to all other meanings.
If you take that fact out of human
consciousness or human thought, you have pulled the
kingpin down out of the arch, and all
of human thought will tumble to the ground.
Now, this presence is a seeking presence.
It's said that Adam heard the voice of
the Lord God walking in the garden in
the cool of the day.
And this was not before the fall.
This was after the fall.
This was not among archangels but with two
sinners.
And he was walking in the garden in
the cool of the day.
And this was after the shameful collapse of
their moral lives.
God knew they had sinned, and he wanted
them to know that he knew.
So he appeared.
And there was a voice there.
A schoolmarm could, I suppose, find grammatic fault
with the verse here.
The Bible has a wonderful way of breaking
all the rules, and I rather enjoy it
myself because I've been a rule-breaker since
I can remember.
It says here that they heard the voice
of the Lord God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day.
Now, there isn't a teacher of English anyplace
in Pennsylvania that would give a kid an
F on that because it said they heard
the voice of the Lord walking.
And of course they didn't hear the voice
of the Lord walking, but they heard the
voice of the Lord who was walking in
the garden in the cool of the day.
And they'd shoot that back to poor little
Junior and say, put a who was in
there or I'll flunk you.
But thank God for the good old King
James Version and the good old Bible that
just says it and then you either like
it or else something happens to you.
It says here that there was a presence,
that God was there, and there was a
voice.
A presence and a voice.
If I only had some way of rubbing
that into you, like an alcohol rub, if
I could get that rubbed into your brain,
there is a presence, there is a voice.
Not my presence, not my voice, not Cop's
presence, not his voice, not Brother Thomas' presence,
not his voice, but a voice.
In the cool of the day here in
Hillside, there is a voice and I'm happy
to tell you that it's a friendly voice.
I preach a friendly heaven, ladies and gentlemen.
I never have been able to get righteously
wrought up and frightfully and gloomily indignant with
the human race.
Of course we're a bunch of sinners.
Of course we are.
And unless we repent, we'll all likewise perish.
But I have never been able to get
any white knuckles from squeezing my fist shut,
reminding people they were going to hell.
I believe in a friendly heaven.
I believe that the blood of the everlasting
covenant has swept the last vestige of antagonism
out of the sky and that God is
on the side of the man that'll come
on to God's side and that the voice
that sounds from heaven is a friendly voice
and the presence unseen that is here tonight
is a seeking presence, a seeking presence and
a friendly voice.
Now, there are lots of voices in the
world.
There's the hard voice of duty.
I remember hearing of one Englishman that said
he thought he'd commit suicide.
He said, I am so sick of just
living.
He said, you get up in the morning
and you put on your socks.
And then he said, you run around a
while and at night you come take your
socks off.
Then he said in the morning, you put
on your socks.
He said, I'm so sick of taking off
my socks and putting on my socks.
He said, I just want to die.
Well, all that had happened to him was
that he had sort of made putting on
his socks and taking them off a symbol
of duty.
The things that were pressing in upon him
and forcing him to do, the alarm clock
that gets you out whether you want to
get out or not, and the school bell
that rings little junior to school whether he
wants to go.
And so he goes, not as Shakespeare said,
with shining morning face.
I like Shakespeare, but I've never been able
to understand why he made that mistake.
Who ever heard of a kid going to
school with a shining morning face?
They come home that way, but they don't
go that way.
Now, these are duties.
There's a harsh voice.
Duties are harsh things.
It tells the woman, get those dishes washed.
It tells the woman, have that baby.
It tells the woman, get over there and
get that ironing done.
Get that washing done.
It tells the man, get that day's work
put in.
It tells the engineer, bring that train in
on time.
It tells the soldier, stand at attention there
or take that hill.
The strong, ugly, harsh voice of duty.
It's every place in the world, but that
isn't the voice I'm talking about.
And then there's an accusing voice, the voice
of our own conscience telling us that we've
sinned.
That accusing voice that makes us sick and
white when we hear it occasionally.
And there's the harsh voice of nameless fears,
the hard voice of fear.
The world is full of fear, ladies and
gentlemen.
We're a scared world.
Our noses quiver like a bunny rabbit with
fear.
We're shamed and we're afraid in the universe.
Here we are orphans in the wide world
with the vast forces roaring up and down
that can tear us apart and hurl us
back to the earth again, back to our
native dust.
And men are afraid.
They try to laugh it off and they
hire Bob Hope and some others to try
to make us laugh, but we're a bunch
of scared cats.
And it's more than something to laugh about.
It is a terrible thing and it's causing
us to get old before our time and
it's putting men in insane asylums.
It's driving them to suicide.
Sheer fear, the voice of fear, the haunting,
ghostly voice that is sounding that makes men
afraid.
But there's a wonderful voice because there is
a wonderful presence.
The only reason the Bible has any meaning
is because there is a voice and a
presence.
If God Almighty had stayed a million, million
miles beyond the high imperium and had thrown
our Bible down to us and then lapsed
into silence, the Bible wouldn't have any more
meaning than any other book.
You might as well read Mother Goose's, the
Bible, except for the fact there is a
presence here making the Bible warm.
There is a voice here breathing through the
Bible and speaking to us in the Bible.
And when we read the text, the voice
then speaks to our heart and the presence
is here.
And it's a warm and a friendly voice,
an inviting voice.
The voice of God is not the voice
of justice hunting us down.
If there had been no calvary, no blood,
no atonement, he might have had to come
as a voice of vengeance.
But because there was a lamb on a
tree, his voice is the voice of invitation.
He says, come and draw near and believe
and rest and so on.
These happy, warm, inviting words.
Down in the south, you know, you go
up to the door and somebody will come
out and invite you to come in and
set a spell.
And the voice of God is a warm,
hospitable voice like that and says, come unto
me all ye that labor and are heavy
laden.
You go through your Bible if you will
or if you have a concordance and see
how many times the word come is found.
I like the old church bell in the
steeple.
I always think the church bell says come.
Come, come, come, come.
And the man who wrote The Church in
the Wildwood must have had that idea because
you musicians will remember that the bell rings
come, come, come, come, come, come.
I always forget how many comes when I'm
singing it and come in in the wrong
place.
But there are a lot of comes there
and the bells in God's steeple are ringing
and they're all saying the same thing.
They're saying come.
Now I'd like to say this and I
suppose I'll get accused here of being mystical
if not downright nutty.
But I believe the voice of God is
a very musical voice.
It must be a musical voice because you
see God is the great musician.
He put the one, two, three, four beat
in the universe and he put the rhythm
in the universe.
It's all there.
And it's only sin that makes the world
such a harsh and unmusical place.
If we could hear the voice of God
we'd hear something very wonderfully musical.
I don't think that we'd ever want to
hear a symphony orchestra again and I'm sure
we'd never want to hear banjo if we
heard the voice of God.
For there's all of the beauty of the
sunshine and all of the sound of the
sea.
It says in Revelation that Jesus' voice was
like the voice of many waters.
Have you stood on the shore at night
and listened to the booming of the surf
as the restless waves come splashing in and
beat over the rocks?
There's something wonderfully musical about it.
I always have pictures I have of Jesus
I never cared for but I remember one
painting of Jesus that I rather liked.
It showed him sitting on the shore of
the sea on a rock looking out brooding
moodily over the lake.
I think he must have done that sometimes
and listened to the voice of nature.
Some people don't like birds and artists up
in Chicago went down with some other artists
into what they call Brown County in Indiana
a very wonderful place and one of the
artists after the second day almost had a
nervous breakdown.
He said, I can't stand these birds.
He said, I just can't stand them now
that's all.
He said, in the morning last thing at
night all day long cheep, cheep, chatter, cheep,
cheep he said, they're driving me crazy.
He said goodbye and he packed his suitcase
and went back to Chicago where he could
hear diesel engines and elevated trains.
He had trained his he trained his poor
abused ears to the music of the clack,
clack of an elevated train and the horrible,
hoarse, devilish sound of a diesel engine.
I don't know why they ever put that
horn on a diesel engine.
The diesel engine's all right but why did
they have to borrow a pop gun from
the devil and put it on for a
whistle?
That's what I'd like to know.
You'd think it was the devil with a
bad cold trying to blow his nose.
And yet that fella liked it better than
he liked to hear a robin sing with
a dew on the grass.
It's because he's a diseased man ladies and
gentlemen.
There's something beautiful in nature and any man
who'd rather hear a record than hear a
rooster crow ought to have his head examined.
And anybody that would rather hear Toscanini's fifth
play the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven rather than
hear a cricket at night ought to have
his head examined if he has a head.
Because everything that God made he made beautiful
and good in its time.
And when God speaks it's a musical voice.
People's voices.
They may be nasal or adenoidal or guttural
or scrappy or high or too low but
all the voice of God how beautiful it
is.
Dr. Simpson said one time said that one
time he had been reading an old book
he didn't say what book but I think
I know I could tell you people some
things if I didn't, if I wanted to.
I think I knew what he'd been reading
because I've run on to his sources in
my own reading.
He said he was reading a book one
time the gist of which was that God
is waiting to speak in the depths of
your soul if you'll get quiet enough to
listen to him.
So he said I decided to try it.
He said I knelt down all by myself.
He said I began to listen in my
own heart to see if I could hear
God speak.
And he said I never knew before how
nervous I was.
And he said I never knew how noisy
the world was and how noisy I was.
But he said little by little I put
it all away and put it all for
me and I began to listen.
And pretty soon I began to hear.
And then he launched into one of those
poetic descriptions of his that I can't imitate
of the great, lovely, fragrant beautiful musical voice
of God.
It was things like that that made A
.B. Simpson Simpson.
He was hearing God speak in his heart.
My friends, that voice is in this tabernacle
tonight.
Not in mine.
Not in my rather nasal voice.
They say it sounds like Truman's.
My voice more or less distorted by this
gadget here.
That's not musical but there is a voice.
And you won't hear it.
It didn't come out of my mouth.
If you'll bow the good ear which is
your good ear bow your good ear down
a little towards your chest and listen.
I think you'll hear God speaking.
Because there's a presence and that presence is
speaking.
And it's a seeking presence and an inviting
voice.
And God is here tonight with that presence
and with that voice.
Now there are some people who hide from
the presence.
You will see that the Adam and Eve
hid from the presence of God.
Sin made them ashamed.
They had gotten into their sin together and
now neither one could help the other one.
She with her feminine arts couldn't help Adam
and he with his masculine strength couldn't help
Eve.
They had gotten in together and now they
had to each one get out alone.
And I might stop and develop that thought
a little.
Listen, young fellow, you're going to get into
sin with that girl but when you get
out you're going to get in and out
all by yourself.
If you ever get out she can't help
you.
And listen, you man, you're part of a
business firm and there's a bit of chicanery
going on and a crooked deal and you're
going to sign a paper that will make
you a party to a crooked deal.
You get in with the company but when
you get out, if you ever do, you'll
get out all by yourself.
That's the terrible irony of sin.
You sin with the crowd but you crawl
out of the mire if you ever crawl
out all by yourself.
Nobody can help you out.
Adam took courage from Eve and Eve took
courage from Adam and they held hands and
sinned together.
And now they couldn't help each other and
so they got scared and fled from the
presence and the voice into the garden or
into among the trees of the garden.
Such painful confusion as it all was.
And so they hid from the presence and
they hid from the voice.
I was thinking down in my room that
would be the biography of some of you
dear people.
You're hiding from the presence and shrinking from
the voice and you've been doing it a
long time.
If anybody could write your life, I could
write your life and I think for a
lot of you I could convince it.
You might not say you have a life
that's worth writing as good as some of
these young evangelists.
Sixteen year old evangelists write their lives and
all they can say is I was born.
But you have a little more.
You've been hiding from a presence and shrinking
from a voice and those are the two
major truths in your life and they have
been because there's another major truth and that
is that you've sinned and you're ashamed.
There is something about sin that makes us
ashamed and particularly ashamed when God is near
and we sense that God is near.
When God is in this place it was
then that Jacob was ashamed and it was
then that Isaiah was ashamed.
It was then that Daniel sat down astonished.
It was then that John threw himself like
dead on the ground when the presence of
God moves down.
Oh, if we could only recapture a sense
of God's presence.
You never need to pray for God to
come although if you do pray for God
to come God won't get mad.
Theologians sometimes get mad about things that God
smiles about.
God will know what you mean.
When you say, Oh God come into our
midst you don't mean God come into our
midst.
You mean, Oh God make me conscious of
thy presence in the midst.
When a blind man says, Oh God let
the sun shine he means, Oh God heal
my eyes so I can see the sunshine.
The deaf man can't hear the birds sing
and so a sinner can't sense the presence
of God.
That's the terrible woe of it.
And so we walk the world orphans without
any sense of the divine presence.
I tell you that to live in a
world like this even to live in a
city like Chicago or New York or Pittsburgh
or Philadelphia and have the presence of God
puts velvet on all the hard pavements and
puts peace and quiet in all the rocky
sounds.
To have God with you to know that
God is there.
To take God with you to bed at
night and to be able to smile in
your sleep and to know that God is
there and to have God all around you.
I tell you it's a wonderful thing and
it's real and it's just as real as
the air that breathes.
For just as the atmosphere presses on you
all parts of your body 14 pounds to
the square inch at sea level so the
presence of God presses in on your spirit.
And you can live in the world and
not be conscious of that atmospheric pressure until
you're reminded of it and so you can
live in the world and not be conscious
of the presence of God there to help
you.
Now, I want to call attention to you
that self-condemnation that drove Adam and Eve
from the presence of God is a very
good friend.
To be condemned, to condemn yourself, it's a
very good friend.
It's a wonderful moment in the life of
a man when he says, Oh God, I
accused myself.
Oh God, I did it.
It's a wonderful moment in a man's life
when self-condemnation hits him.
And I think that one of the difficulties
with us is that we can't get conviction
on people anymore.
People come to God without having any conviction
of their own iniquity.
And the result is they never get very
deeply saved.
They're poorly born.
Now, I'd like to think that you can
be saved even though you're not very well
saved.
I'd like to think that, you know.
I wish I could think it and I'm
not sure but what I'd do in a
kind of an oblique way hope that there
are some people that'll get to heaven by
the skin of their dentures.
But I'm not sure, brethren.
I'm not sure.
But I believe that we'd get converted more
wonderfully if we got convicted more deeply.
But we're afraid to get people convicted.
I preached at council one year.
Let's see, what did I preach about?
I preached about Salome and Herod and Herodias
and that dancing girl, you know, the dance,
the old man and John the Baptist preaching
his head off.
I preached that.
And I preached sin.
I told people they were sinners.
And an Alliance preacher, now as big as
life and twice as noisy, came up to
me afterward and said, you never should have
done it.
You make people feel they're sinners.
He said, why nobody will come tonight.
They feel they're criminals.
And in spite of that, somebody gave an
altar call and they came flocking down to
the front.
I tell you, we need to know we're
sinners.
We need to find that out.
We need to know it.
And we need to have it born in
upon us.
Up around Chicago, everybody's a theological sinner, but
nobody's actually a sinner.
All those good Calvinists up there are theological
sinners.
You just beat a bush anywhere and there'll
be a Calvinist with a Bible, Schofield Bible
under his arm, hop out and say, all
our righteousnesses are filthy rags.
All have sinned and come short of the
glory of God.
But if you turn on him and say,
I don't believe you're quite right, brother, your
text's wrong, he'll get white mad.
He's a sinner, all right, but he's only
a theological sinner till you prick him.
And then he becomes a sinner indeed.
We need to know that we're sinners indeed,
ladies and gentlemen.
No theological man ever went to heaven who
was a theological sinner, who just went to
God and said, now God, I read in
the Bible that I'm a sinner, and if
I'm a sinner, I suppose I ought to
get saved.
Will you please save me?
Nobody ever got that way.
You can't do it that way, brethren.
God Almighty knows that your emotions are tied
up with our good and our bad.
And he knows that if you're not emotionally
smitten, you'll never be emotionally lifted.
And he knows that if you make a
man sick to his stomach of a sin,
he'll quit it.
But if you only convince him theologically that
he's a sinner, he'll sneak around back to
the building and commit it again.
And that's our trouble in these terrible days.
We want to make religion easy for people,
and so we never bring any self-condemnation
down on them.
Now, when self-condemnation hits you, and you
know you're a sinner, you can do one
of two things.
You can let that self-condemnation drive you
to the wounds in Jesus' side for cleansing,
or you can let that self-condemnation drive
you into the wilderness to hide from God.
And people react those two different ways to
self-condemnation.
When Peter felt condemnation, he wept bitterly.
When Judas felt it, he committed suicide.
You can go one way or the other.
Self-condemnation is a good friend because it
tells you how bad off you are.
But it's also a dangerous master if you
let it drive you from God.
If a man says now, I am so
bad, I don't think God would ever have
anything to do with me, self-condemnation has
become his enemy then, not his friend.
I remember once a woman, a young woman,
a nurse, came to see me and she
said, Mr. Tozer, I'm the backslider.
She said, I have backslidden completely because she
said, I have been among doctors and I
find they're cads, was her expression.
And she said, they're no good and I've
lost my spiritual life.
And she said, I am so bad that
I'm not even going to bother God about
it.
She said, I just don't think that God
would do right if he'd forgive anybody that's
as bad as I am.
Well, that was a tough one now.
If you preachers don't think that was a
tough one, it was.
You didn't have to convince her that she
was a sinner.
She knew it, but she was so self
-condemned that she felt that God wouldn't do
right if he forgave her.
So I was thinking hard and praying hard
and finally I said,