Removing the Veil — Show Us How to Die

✦ Restless Till They Rest in You

Tozer begins behind the veil — and takes Augustine as his guide. The restless heart. The heart that was made for God and cannot find rest in anything else. Every other resting place is temporary. Every other satisfaction is partial. Every other home is a stopover. The heart was formed for God — and nothing less than God will quiet it.

Augustine knew this from experience — the years of wandering, the philosophers, the pleasures, the ambitions — and at the end of it all: You have formed us for Yourself. The restlessness was not a malfunction. It was a homing signal. The heart that cannot rest is the heart that has not yet arrived at the One it was made for. And the restlessness will not stop — cannot stop — until it finds its rest in Him. 🙏

✦ Eternal, Immutable, Omniscient

Tozer opens the curtain — and the view is staggering. What a broad world to roam in, what a sea to swim in. Not a puddle. Not a pond. A sea. The God who is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — and the breadth of Him is beyond calculation.

Eternal. He antedates time. Time did not exist before Him — time began in Him. He does not live inside of time, subject to its passage, aging with its years. Time is His creature. He made it. He will end it. And between the making and the ending, He pays time no tribute and suffers from it no change.

Immutable. He has never changed. He can never change. Not in the smallest measure. Augustine said it in the Confissões — imutável em teu ser, imutável em teu saber, imutável na tua vontade. And Tozer gives the reason: to change, He would need to move from better to worse or from worse to better. He cannot do either. Being perfect, He cannot become more perfect. And to become less perfect would be to become less than God. The immutability is not rigidity — it is perfection so complete that change is impossible.

Omniscient. He knows everything — in one free and effortless act. Not sequentially, not by learning, not by accumulating information over time. All matter, all spirit, all relationships, all events — known at once. He has no past — nothing He has forgotten. He has no future — nothing He has yet to discover. He is. The I AM of Exodus 3:14. The present tense that never passes. 🙏

✦ Holiness So Ineffable

And then Tozer adds the attribute that words cannot hold: holiness so ineffable that no comparisons or figures will avail to express it. Ineffable — unspeakable. Beyond language. Beyond metaphor. Every comparison fails. Every figure of speech falls short. The holiness of God exceeds the capacity of human language to describe. Love and mercy and righteousness are His — and they can be spoken of, however inadequately. But the holiness — the holiness can only be approached in silence.

And none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can apply to Him. Every word we use — good, great, loving, powerful — is a creature's word, shaped by a creature's experience. When applied to God, every word stretches beyond its own meaning and still falls short. He is — and the is contains more than all the words that follow it. 🙏

✦ Not Intellectual — Spiritual

Tozer draws the line that separates knowledge of God from love of God. The highest love is not intellectual. It is not the product of study, or theology, or the accumulation of information about God. It is spiritual. God is spirit — and only the spirit of a person can know Him really. The mind can know about Him. The spirit can know Him.

In the deep spirit of a man the fire must glow. Not the surface emotions. Not the passing warmth of a good sermon or a moving song. The deep spirit. The place beneath the mind, beneath the emotions, beneath the will — the place where the soul meets God in the dark, without words, without concepts, without anything except presence and fire. The fire must glow there — or the love is not the true love of God.

Tozer names the great of the Kingdom — and identifies them not by their theology, not by their influence, not by their accomplishments — but by how much they loved God. The great loved more. That is all. The depth of the love is the measure of the greatness. And the love is not in the head. It is in the deep spirit where the fire glows. 🙏

✦ Yield and Trust — But Insist

Tozer gives the warning that every pilgrim needs: do not tinker. The veil of the self-life — the barrier between the soul and the Holy of Holies — cannot be torn by human hands. When the veil of the Temple was rent, it was rent from the top down. Matthew 27:51. Not from the bottom up. Not by human effort reaching upward. From the top — by God — downward.

God must do everything for us. The soul that tries to remove her own veil will only tangle herself in it. The self-life cannot crucify itself — because the self that does the crucifying is the same self that needs to be crucified. Only God can rend this veil.

Our part is to yield and trust. Two words. The human contribution. Confess the self-life. Forsake it. Repudiate it. Reckon it crucified. And then trust God to do the work.

But Tozer adds the correction that prevents the yielding from becoming passivity: we must be careful to distinguish lazy "acceptance" from the real work of God. The soul that says I accept whatever happens and then goes back to sleep has not yielded — she has surrendered to laziness. We must insist upon the work being done. Not do the work ourselves — but insist that God does it. Expect it. Demand it. Knock until the door opens. Ask until the answer comes. The yielding is not passive. It is active trust that refuses to settle for less than the real work of God. 🙏

✦ Accustomed to the Glory

Tozer's prayer is the chapter's conclusion — and it asks for two things. First: show us how to die. Not a prayer for physical death. A prayer for the death of the self-life — the veil that blocks the way into the Holiest. The dying that produces rising. The cross that produces the resurrection. Show us how — because we do not know how to die to ourselves. Only You can teach us.

Second: rend the veil from the top down. As at the Temple — the moment Christ died, the veil was torn. Not by the priests inside. Not by the worshippers outside. By God — from the top — downward. The way is opened not by human effort but by divine action. And the soul that walks through the torn veil walks into the Holy of Holies — into the presence of the God who is eternal, immutable, omniscient, and holy beyond all expression.

And the final request — the one that connects this chapter to everything this journal has been: we would dwell with You in daily experience here on this earth, so that we may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Your heaven. The morning devotion is the accustoming. The daily dwelling is the preparation. Owen said: all our present glory consists in our preparation for future glory. Tozer says: dwell with Him now — so that the glory of heaven will not be a shock but a homecoming. 🙏