What Does It Mean That God Is Sovereign? — Tozer on the Knowledge of the Holy
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You have heard the phrase, often. God is sovereign. It is said at the funeral. It is said over the diagnosis. It is said in the small group on the Tuesday after the layoff. The phrase is meant kindly. It is meant as comfort. And it has, probably, not always landed as comfort — because the woman receiving the sentence is not quite sure what the sentence is promising. Is it promising that the suffering was sent? Is it promising that the suffering was permitted? Is it promising that the love is bigger than the suffering? Is it promising nothing at all and merely covering the silence the way a polite phrase covers an awkward pause? The word sovereign is doing too many jobs at once, and the woman receiving it has been left without the resources to know which job it is doing in her particular grief.
This is the slow answer. Not the polite phrase. The actual answer A. W. Tozer gave, scattered across The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy — read at the speed Tozer wrote, with three passages held next to one another, because for Tozer the sovereignty of God was not a denominational marker. It was the recovery of an attribute the modern Western church had, in his judgement, almost lost the capacity to mean. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice. For now — read slowly. The question what does it mean that God is sovereign will not be answered by a sentence. It will be answered, the way Tozer answered it, by sitting with a few passages until the shape of the attribute becomes recognisable in the body as well as the mind.
A. W. Tozer was an American pastor with no seminary degree, a manual typewriter, and an unusually severe interior life. He spent the last decade of his life writing The Knowledge of the Holy — a book of short chapters, one per attribute of God — because he believed the recovery of right ideas about God was the recovery the church most needed and was least pursuing. He took the attribute of sovereignty seriously, partly because his denomination had not always emphasised it, and partly because he saw the cost of its absence: a Christianity that affirmed God’s love but had grown shy of His authority, that knew how to call on Him for comfort but had forgotten how to bow before Him in the worship the older saints had known. Tozer wanted both. He wanted a sovereign God who was also tender, and a tender God who was also sovereign — because he believed scripture had given us both, and a faith that received only one of the two would, eventually, have neither.
The first passage: the children of the burning heart
“Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty divine. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, scorned indeed by the too-easily-satisfied religionist, but justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart… Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God. They mourned for Him, they prayed and wrestled and sought for Him day and night, in season and out, and when they had found Him the finding was all the sweeter for the long seeking.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Tozer opens with an attribute that is the foundation of every other attribute, and certainly the foundation of sovereignty: Thine own eternity is round Thee. God is the only being whose own being is its own atmosphere. He is not held up by anything outside Himself. He does not depend on history, on circumstance, on the cooperation of His creatures, on the success of His programmes. Majesty divine — His majesty is His own, not granted, not earned, not contingent. He is the One who simply is. This is the bedrock of sovereignty. A God whose existence is sustained by something else cannot be sovereign over that something else. A God whose existence is sustained by Himself is sovereign by definition, because there is nothing outside Him that He needs to negotiate with.
This is the first thing the question what does it mean that God is sovereign needs to know. The sovereignty is not power as humans tend to picture power — the powerful person who has to keep arranging things so that the power does not collapse. The sovereignty is the unforced authority of the One whose authority is built into His own being. He is not anxious about His sovereignty. He does not have to maintain it. He simply is the sovereign One, the way water is wet — by nature, not by effort.
Hold the second half of the passage. To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love. Tozer is making a quiet polemical move. He is saying: the saints who actually knew the sovereign God did not relate to Him as a problem to solve. They related to Him as an inexhaustible country to enter. They pursued Him. They did not accuse Him. They mourned for Him, prayed and wrestled and sought for Him. They did not demand that He explain Himself before they would worship Him. They worshipped, and the explanations, where they came, came slowly and inside the worship — not before it.
For the modern Christian woman who has been told God is sovereign over a grief she did not deserve, this is the first part of the answer. The sovereignty is not first an explanation of the grief. It is first the description of the kind of God whose presence in the grief is older and steadier than the grief itself. The saints of the past did not begin by extracting an explanation. They began by drawing near, and the nearness was where the meaning, when it came, was slowly given.
(If you have been at the very beginning of slow daily reading and you are not sure where to start — how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin walks the first page. And if the Bible itself has felt like the impenetrable thing — a beginner study Bible for women (and how to use it without being embarrassed) clears the doorstep without making you feel late.)
The second passage: show me Thy glory
“I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, that so I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it twice. The second time, read it as a prayer.
This is the passage where Tozer names the only honest posture before the sovereign God. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. The sovereignty of God is not an attribute the creature stands beside and inspects. It is an attribute the creature can only encounter from below — the way a small thing stands beneath a large thing, the way a child stands at the foot of a parent’s bed in the middle of a thunderstorm. The sovereignty does not require the creature’s approval. It requires the creature’s reception. Show me Thy glory is the only request that fits the situation. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me is the only opening that fits the request.
Notice what Tozer is doing theologically. He is saying that even the desire to know the sovereign God is itself a gift from the sovereign God. I want to want Thee. The first wanting is not in his own power. He cannot manufacture the longing for God; he can only ask the sovereign God to begin the longing in him. This is the sovereignty quietly described: the God who is so much the source that even the soul’s reaching toward Him is His doing, not the soul’s. The sovereignty is not the doctrine that He controls outcomes. It is the deeper truth that He is the ground from which everything good in your interior life — including the reaching for Him — has been arising the whole time.
For the modern Christian woman whose week has been the kind of week that has made her wonder whether she really wants God or whether she is just performing wanting Him — this is the line to keep near the page. I want to want Thee. The sovereign God is the One who answers that prayer specifically. He does not require the want to be present before the prayer is made. He begins the want, in mercy, in souls that have asked Him to. The sovereignty, on Tozer’s account, is what makes the request possible at all. The God who is not sovereign cannot do anything about the absence of your desire. The God who is sovereign can — and does — begin new works of love in souls that have nothing of their own.
A pause — for the body
The sovereignty of God lands in the body before it lands in the mind, when it lands at all. The body recognises a steady authority before the intellect can articulate why.
Sit somewhere quiet. Set the page down. Notice your shoulders — where they are sitting in relation to your ears. The modern Christian woman who has been carrying the chronic background sense that she is the one keeping everything together often carries the sense in her upper trapezius, the band of muscle from the base of the neck to the shoulders. The carrying is not entirely her fault — much of her life has, in fact, required her to keep things together, and the body has adapted. But the carrying is also the somatic shape of a soul that has not yet rested its weight on the sovereign God. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop — not push, drop. Imagine, as the shoulders drop, that the keeping-everything-together is no longer your job. Then take a second breath, and on the exhale, let the jaw release as well. Two breaths. Shoulders down. Jaw soft.
That small loosening is the body’s way of beginning to believe what the doctrine of sovereignty is asserting. The body has been holding the family, the household, the calendar, the unspoken anxieties of the people who depend on her, and the holding has cost her years of accumulated muscular tension. The doctrine of sovereignty is, at the somatic level, the permission to put the holding down — not in the sense of abandoning the responsibilities, but in the sense of recognising that the responsibilities were never, finally, hers alone. The sovereign God has been doing the deeper holding the whole time. The body can stop bracing as if everything depended on it, because everything has never depended on it.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow daily putting-down. One passage per session, room for the honest sentence about what the holding has cost, no demand to perform a level of trust you do not yet feel. The workbook is not where you learn to win arguments about predestination. It is where you slowly let the sovereign God become the felt context of your day rather than the doctrinal proposition you are trying to assent to.
(If the study part itself has felt heavy — if you would like a quieter way in — learning the Bible as a beginner: the slow, honest starting place carries the same patient pace this article uses. And if you would like a worked example of the slow analytical reading the fathers taught — inductive Bible study for beginners — a 4-step method walks one psalm fully.)
The third passage: lift your heart and let it rest
“Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary though it be a Pullman berth or a factory or a kitchen.”
— A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
This is the smallest of the three passages, and also the most practical. Tozer is naming the lived corollary of the sovereignty of God. The God whose own eternity is round Him, whose authority is built into His being, who begins new works of love in souls that have asked Him to — that God is not far from any of His creatures. He is present in the Pullman berth. He is present on the factory floor. He is present in the kitchen. Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus and you are instantly in a sanctuary. The sovereignty is not the doctrine that He is high and far. It is the doctrine that He is high and near — that the One who holds the universe is also the One whose attention is on you in the middle of the chopping of the onion, and that the lifting of your heart toward Him is sufficient to put you, immediately, in the only sanctuary that ultimately matters.
Hold the word rest. The sovereignty of God is, finally, the attribute that lets you rest. A God who is not sovereign cannot be rested in, because the things the God is not sovereign over might still derail the resting. The diagnosis. The phone call. The household. The future. If God is not sovereign over those things, the rest is provisional. The rest is contingent on the things going the way you hoped. The rest is, in practice, no rest at all.
The sovereign God can be rested in. Not because the things will go the way you hoped. They may not. Tozer is not promising they will. He is promising something stronger: that whether they go the way you hoped or not, the God you are resting in is large enough to hold both outcomes, and the resting is therefore possible in either case. Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus. The resting is not a strategy for getting the outcomes. The resting is the answer to the outcomes, regardless of which one arrives.
For the modern Christian woman whose nervous system has been running on the chronic anticipation of what might go wrong — this is the line to keep near the page. The sovereignty of God is not the promise that nothing will go wrong. It is the promise that the One you can rest your heart upon is large enough to hold whatever does. The rest is small. The sanctuary is immediate. The God you have been carrying everything for is the God who has been carrying you the whole time.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at what is the Trinity — Augustine’s slow answer and what are the attributes of God — Tozer’s plain theology. Each takes a single classical question and walks it slowly through one father.)
What the slow answer actually leaves you with
So — what does it mean that God is sovereign. The polite-phrase answer is true: God is in control. Hold the phrase. Tozer would. But hold it inside the lived answer, which is the one The Pursuit of God and The Knowledge of the Holy are both reaching for: the sovereignty of God is the unforced authority of the One whose own eternity is round Him, whose existence is sustained by Himself, who begins new works of love in souls that have asked Him to, and whose presence is so available that the lifting of your heart toward Him in any location at all is sufficient to constitute a sanctuary.
The sovereignty, read this way, stops being the doctrine that quietly worries you. It becomes the doctrine that lets you put the day down. The God in charge is the God you can rest in. The God in charge is the God whose authority does not require your management. The God in charge is the God whose love toward you has been the steady context of your life since before you were born, and whose plans for your week — whatever they turn out to be — are inside that love, not outside it.
What slowly answering the question what does it mean that God is sovereign does, over a year, is move the doctrine from your head to your shoulders. You stop trying to control. You start praying, with Tozer, Lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus — and you find, on the morning you say it slowly, that the sovereignty has rearranged itself from a problem into a permission. You are no longer trying to keep everything together. You are letting Him be, toward you, the sovereign He has always been, and the keeping quietly stops being the task.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each session, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the sovereign God in proximity to a soul that has stopped trying to manage everything and started letting Him be, toward her, the sovereign He has always been.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Tozer’s slow vocabulary — eternity round Thee, begin in mercy a new work of love, lift your heart and let it rest upon Jesus — into a daily companion built for the woman whose question about the sovereignty of God is, at last, ready to become the rest the doctrine has always been offering.
