05 - The Enemy Within

To speak of the essence of sin, we must begin with God, otherwise we will not know what we mean. From the book of Exodus, the third chapter, I break into a wonderful story at verse 10. “Come now therefore,” God is saying to Moses, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh that thou mayest bring forth my children the people of Israel out of Egypt.

And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? And he said, Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou has brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers has sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say to them? God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM has sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:10-14) Certainly there is no other thing of greater importance than the one behind all the phenomena that we know as nature, behind all mind, spirit, matter, motion and law: God. This one word gives meaning to life. If you were to rule out of human thought the word God and all that clusters around that word, you would not have any valid reason at all for existence; nobody could show why we ought to live. As soon as we introduce the word God, then we have a reason for existence. God is the foundation and the source of all there is. God is to the universe what our blood is to our bodies, and what our souls are to our bodies. Many years ago in England, there once gathered together a number of the great Christian leaders of a certain Protestant group who were attempting to formulate a creed, or articles of faith. They all agreed and did all right on most of it, but they had one word that they could not define or get any proper description for: God. They got into an impasse; no one seemed to be able to do it for reasons that are obvious to the humblest of us. Then in order to break the deadlock and somehow get some light on it, the moderator said to a young preacher sitting off to the side, “Will you lead us in prayer? Let us pray once more for the light of God on this.” And he got up and clutched the seat in front of him and prayed, “Oh, God, Thou art a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in Thy being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth,” and someone cried out, “That’s it! That’s it!” and they took it down. Ever since that we have had the famous expression, “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth”—I AM THAT I AM. It was an archbishop who once said, God is over all things and under all things and outside all things: within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above presiding, wholly beneath sustaining, wholly without embracing and wholly within filling.

It was one man’s conception of God. I have often quoted it and often walked around thinking about it for it embraces so much that God is trying to say to us about Himself. Another old Latin father said this about God: At the contemplation of God’s majesty all eloquence is dumb, for God is always greater than anything that can be said about Him, and no language is worthy of Him. He is more sublime than all sublimity and loftier than all loftiness and profounder than all profundity, more splendid than all splendor and more powerful than all power, more majestic than all majesty, and more merciful than all mercy.

These men were simply trying to say what the Bible says all the time about God, that God is. Moses knew that if he was going to go down into Egypt he would have to be sent. Moses said unto God, “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, the God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say unto them?” And God said, “You go tell them that I AM sent you. I AM THAT I AM.” That is the sacred word, the Tetragrammaton, the incommunicable name, the name that is covered up in the King James Version by the capital letters for Lord. The old translators felt that it was too holy to use carelessly or even unnecessarily, so they shielded it under the word LORD in places. To this day, they say that in the Near East if a person who cannot read sees a piece of paper lying on the floor, he or she will pick it up and reverently keep it high and say, “Perhaps the name of God may be on that.” No one would want to be guilty of inadvertently trampling the name of God down into the dust. God is Self-existent Selfhood—that’s what He means here. You will excuse me, I hope, for attempting to explain that which is beyond any man, but we are trying to blunder into it the best we can and hoping that God will save the pieces. Here, out of the expression I AM THAT I AM, we have stated Self-existing Selfhood. “God has no origin,” said one of the church fathers. The very word “origin” is a creature word and it means and testifies whether it is willed or not. It is applied to everything that has breath or has existence because it indicates that it started somewhere, originated somewhere. It is the one word that cannot be used for God. God has no origin; He is the Creator. When we use the word “origin” it testifies that all things that exist are dependent, that they are relative, that they came out of something, that they are a reflection of some original, that they are water out of some ancient fountain, that they do not exist in themselves, that they cannot stand up in their own might, but that they flow from some invisible source. One time a gentleman wrote me a nice, but very sharp letter, with a word of rebuke because I had said something nice about Joseph Addison. He said, “Don’t you know that Joseph Addison belonged to the school of 17th Century rationalists? And all he could say about God was that the mighty heavens above and all the sweep of the galaxy testify of their Great Original. The very word ‘original’ brands him as being a rationalist. He is not a Christian at all.” I have no trouble with the term “Great Original”—none whatsoever in the wide world. Addison tells us that the sun and the moon and the stars shout that the hand that made them is divine. They can label Addison as they will; I still can use the word the “Great Original” in capital letters for that is exactly what God is. He is the original for which there is no origin. He has given meaning and life and existence to all things that be. This God, the original Self, I AM THAT I AM, underived, uncreated eternal self, is God. Let us look at the word “self.” It went for a walk one night with a man named Adam, and it got in bad company, so the word “self” is a bad word now in theological circles, as well it ought to be. Somebody said, “Turn it around, tack an ‘h’ on it, and you have ‘flesh.’” That is true also, but God is the originating Self out of which all other selves originate, and there is nothing sinful there. God is that holy Being, unsupported, independent, and Self-existent. I preached a sermon one time in which I said that God did not need us. It bothered some people because they felt that that was carrying it just a little bit too far; they always felt somehow, even though they were good believers, that God did secretly feel that if we ran out on Him, His world would collapse. I never did think that, and I do not think it now. My brethren, God does not need you, and God does not need a broad-winged angel by the throne of light. God does not need any creature. The poet said that creation has not set thee on a higher throne. Only God’s heart needs us. God in His uncreated Being does not need us; He was before there was anything, and if it were all to be beaten back out of existence, into ancient nothingness, God would still be the same God forever and ever, unperturbed, world without end. But God’s heart needs us. Let me bring it down a bit from the stratosphere and illustrate it like this: There is a man who is a very rich house-holder. He has three cars, two garages, life insurance, and everything that an American businessman is supposed to have. He has a fine wife that thinks he is the only man in the world. He is accepted every place socially, belongs to the country club, and plays golf. In fact, his golf balls would not even look at ordinary golf balls. He is way up there and does not need anybody at all; he is self-sufficient. But do you know what he has not got? He has not got a baby around the place, and his poor, hungry heart cannot live on golf balls and bank accounts. Financially, he does not need any children around the place, he does not need anything. But as he walks around trying to look tough, in that sissy heart of his there is a longing to hold a baby in his arms. He does not need the baby, but his heart needs the baby. So when one comes into the home, the woman gets the credit for loving the baby, but the man is the one who really goes crazy about the infant. That is because the man has a heart in him, and I say God gave him that heart, the God of the Great Original, and the heart of man came from the heart of God. God does not need anybody, for He is the unsupported, independent, self-existent God. Self in God is no sin. A great English poet named Faber¹, one of the greatest God-lovers since Augustine, dared this line: he said that God admired Himself and loved Himself, without sin. I would cautiously use such an expression, but the poet had liberty and license, and he did not go too far. It is proper and right to say that God loves Himself because all love flows out of God and back into Him again, and the love of God for Himself is the holiest thing that archangels can dream of. The old theologians used to say there has to be three Persons in the Trinity because God the Father is love, and He loves God the Son with all the uncreated love of His Fatherhood, but there has to be a means of communication between the Father and the Son, equal to both so that the outpoured love of the Father might be received without being diminished by the Son, and that which linked the Father and the Son is the Holy Ghost. Thus, they argue for the Trinity. I do not know that their argument is waterproof. I do not know that if I did not believe in the Trinity that I would accept it because of that argument—but I think it is a delightful argument anyway. I believe that God loves Himself, and the Persons love each other and honor each other because God is the uncreated Self in whom there is no sin and could not sin because He is God. What is sin then? When a creature made by God with moral perception, conscience, the knowledge of right and wrong, an ego and a relative, essential self, goes into rebellion against God and says, “I will arise”—there is the essence of sin. The first sin in the Bible is not the sin of Eve. It went way back to the very storms of fire by the throne of God when a created being dared to exalt his contingent and relevant self against the great uncreated Self we call God. He dared to defy God through his teeth and say, “I will arise.” The essence of all sin is the rebellion of the creature against the Creator. Sin has many symptoms and many manifestations. There are sins of the mind, will, affections, flesh, but they all flow out of the liquid essence of the bottle containing the poisonous essence called self: self-will, self-love, self-confidence, self-everything. There is nothing wrong with self. God made me a self, and He distinguished me from my brother who is also a self. But God, who spells his SELF in capital letters, spells my name in lower-case letters. God, who puts my self in Roman letters, puts His own SELF in italics. The God who had no origin made me. I had an origin; I come like the sunbeam from the sun. If a sunbeam coming down from the sun at the speed of 186,000 miles a second, were suddenly to go into rebellion—if such a thing were possible—and say, “I will not look to the sun anymore; I am on my own,” he would cut himself off from the central sun, cease to be, and plunge into everlasting darkness. That is exactly what happened to the human race. We are all here, and we are all in one piece, and we have the self that God gave us, but we have cruelly and sinfully wrenched ourselves loose from the originating Self, God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, as it says so sweetly in the creeds. We have said to God, “I will arise.” One text in the Bible that sums up all that I could say or think on this subject, Isaiah 53:6, reads, “We have turned every one to his own way.” That was Isaiah’s description of the sinner for whom Jesus had to die in love. The difference between Christ and the antichrist is that Jesus said, “Thy will be done,” and the antichrist says, “My will be done.” The difference between the highest saint and the sinner is, “Not my will but thine,” and “my will, my will.” The essence of all sin is setting up my stubborn will against the will of God. Sometimes in our evangelistic meetings, particularly in young people’s meetings, we unintentionally degrade this. We act as though we could accept Jesus as our Savior and not accept Him as our Lord—as though we could divorce His Saviourhood from His Lordship. I have heard men say, “Just accept Jesus, that is all you have to do, and it is all right with you; you will go right to heaven zooming through like jet propulsion! Just accept Jesus; take this gospel and go.” So we send them out confused, bewildered, and wholly without any proper concept of what the gospel really means. Jesus Christ is not two, but one, and He cannot save whom He cannot control. His office cannot be separated. If you will not have Him as your Lord then you do not have Him as your Savior, and you are self-deceived. We tell them, “Come on, now, maybe in fifteen or twenty years you can take Him as your Lord and maybe go to China.” No! It is all wrong! I believe that Jesus Christ is one. All His glorious offices are indivisible. If I take Him, I take all of Him, and He will not save me if He cannot boss me. He will not deliver me from hell if He cannot deliver me from self. Self is the essence of sin. The text says, “We have turned everyone to his own way.” This is a lovely, poetic description of this devilish rebellion of the human heart against God. We have turned, everybody, to our own way. The ways are not all the same. They are as many as there are people, but we have turned to our own way. It is not the way we have turned to but the fact that it is our own way that curses us and puts the blight upon us forever. We were not created to have our own way. We were created to stand and gaze at God in delight and obey Him like the creatures that Ezekiel saw (Ezekiel 1), finding all our delight in doing His holy will. One of these days God is all you are going to have. Today you have other things, your ambitions and your great dreams. I used to dream when I was in my middle teens that I was going to do great deeds some day—be known around the world and all that. How I thank God that I have been delivered from such delusions, dreams of youth. But if you should gain all that you dream and plan, it will turn out to be the way of despair, loss and woe. But the way of God—oh, what a gentle way! Heinrich Sousa, the famous German devotional man of generations ago, said, “God does not want to keep you from pleasure; He wants to give you all pleasure, which is Himself.” God wants to deliver us from selfish pleasure that we might have selfless pleasure forever. Self-will is the great sin, for it is rebellion against the Lord of Creation. It is an insult to royalty and, in essence, a lethal sin. There is the woe that lies upon the proud, untrusting, self-centered, and self-preserving. We forget that Jesus said, “Except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone” (John 12:24), and we try to preserve ourselves by self-feeding, self-loving, self-defending. “Oh, to be saved from myself, dear Lord, Oh, to be lost in Thee.” That stubborn will is your trouble. You say, “My trouble, Mr. Tozer, is that my temper gets in the way.” No—that is bad enough, God knows, but that is not the essence of it. The root of your trouble is that you are still in control of things. Your trouble is not impurity nor dishonesty, and those are sins that fill the cup and bring the wrath of God, but at the root of all these sins of the mind and flesh is that central, ancient rebellion of the spirit of man against God. The essence of sin is rebellion. When we preach consecration, when we preach that we ought to lay ourselves at the cross of Jesus and die there with Him that we might rise to newness of life (Romans 6:4), we are not preaching a fancy Christianity. We are preaching the only Christianity the New Testament contains. He that would save his self shall lose it, and he that will lose it for His sake shall keep it unto everlasting life (see Matthew 16:25). Here is the eternal wisdom of Paul’s statement, “Not I, but Christ” (Galatians 2:20). Do you ever feel so good you do not know what to do with yourself? The old writers used to call that “animal spirits.” You can live on that. You can live on ambitions and hopes. You can live on service Christianity: you can teach, sing, play the Jew’s harp, and be soloist in the choir back at home. You can do lots of things and still not actually know what it means ever to have a cross like a sword go into your heart to slay the old rebellious self, to rise again in newness of life free from its curse, to follow Jesus and run the race set before you without hindrance and without weights that you carry (Hebrews 12:1). When you are by yourself, stop and check up on yourself and try to get in touch with God about all this. Are you examining your life? I would like to make it easier, but I cannot. If I made it easier I would be a liar and betrayer. Self is your trouble. Take up your cross and deny yourself (Luke 9:23). I do not mean to deny your homeland and go to Africa, or to deny some big paying job and become a pastor—that is not it. It is profounder, more essential, and more basic than that. Jehovah’s Witnesses do that. Soldiers leave America and go to Korea. Do you think you deserve a crown as big as a washtub because you are willing to leave a job here in the United States and go to China? Business people do that. That is not noble, necessarily. There is a self that is deeper than all that, and it must die or it will keep you down. Do you want to be saved from yourself, that unreconstructed rebel within your spirit, that stubborn self-will that flings your head and says, “I will”? Do you want to be saved from it? I only know one way. You cannot discipline it out of you; that will help but will not kill it. You cannot educate it out of you; that will refine you but it will not kill self. Only the cross of Jesus can slay the enemy within my breast.

Oh cross, that lifteth up my head, I dare not ask to hide from thee;

I lay in dust, life’s glory dead, And from the ground there blossoms red, Life that shall endless be.

[This sermon was delivered at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, September 30, 1952.]