The Self-Existence of God

Excerpt from The Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer [online text]

By our effort to discover the origin of things we confess our belief that everything was made by Someone who was made by none.

The human mind, being created, has an understandable uneasiness about the Uncreated. We do not find it comfortable to allow for the presence of One who is wholly outside of the circle of our familiar knowledge.  We tend to be disquieted by the thought of One who does not account to us for His being, who is responsible to no one, who is self-existent, self-dependent, and self-sufficent.

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself.  The philospher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering.  To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our catergories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us posses, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him.  Yet how He eludes us!  For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made.

It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without having once thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God.  Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think.  Such thoughts are too painful for us. ... And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularization of our religion and the decay of our inner lives.

We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is.  For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is a fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique.

Man is a created being, a derived and contingent self, who of himself posseses nothing but is dependent each moment for his existence upon One who created him after His own likeness.  The fact of God is necessary for the fact of man.  Think God away and man has no ground of existence.

Information concerning painting:

"Young Italian Girl by the Well" by Franz Winterhalter