“But unless the weight of the burden is felt the gospel can mean nothing to the man; and until he sees a vision of God high and lifted up, there will be no woe and burden. Low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them” (A. W. Tozer). The burden that Tozer is speaking of here is the burden of man’s “obligation to God. It includes an instant and lifelong duty to love God with every power of mind and soul, to obey Him perfectly, and to worship Him acceptably.” When “man’s laboring conscience tells him that he has done none of these things, but has from childhood been guilty of foul revolt against the Majesty in the heavens, the inner pressure may become too heavy to bear.”
The Gospel comes to sinners and people do not really know what sin is until they see their sin as against God. Moralism has swept the Church away and people think that by keeping some outward commands which even those have been lowered by a low view of God, that they are being good and moral. Man must see God and His standard (Himself expressed in the Law) to even begin to really understand what sin is. Man walks around being his own measuring stick and so in pride he thinks that he is good. But what man must see is that God commands men to perfectly love Him with all of their beings. The Church has simply dropped the ball on teaching about sin in its awfulness and so the Gospel has been destroyed for all intents and purposes.
As Tozer points out, behind the problem of such low views of sin is the problem of the low view of God. The book that these quotes are being taken from is entitled The Knowledge of the Holy and is a book on the attributes of God. Tozer has a burden for lifting people’s eyes up and focusing them on the glory and majesty of God. Until that happens, man will not have a sense of sin. There is no real sense of sin until it is seen that all sin is directly against the majesty and glory of God Himself. There will be no anguished cry from the heart of man until he sees the hideous nature of his sin as against the living and holy God each and every moment of His life. Do people today really have the remotest understanding that their sin is in not loving God with their every thought? Do people today understand that sin is simply doing things without a real consideration of loving God? Do people understand that the holiness of God demands and commands that everything they think, desire, and do is to be done out of love for Him and His glory? Do we really understand what it means to be holy and what the standards of perfect love really are? Clearly we do not.
We have movements such as a new version of New Covenant Theology that is really denigrating the law by saying that Christ should be preached and not the Law. But the Law is the Law of God and shows His great holiness in His commandments. Without the Law there is no understanding of sin. So people are told to go to Christ without any real understanding of sin. Without any real understanding of sin, there is no real going to Christ. Without the glory of God being preached as seen in the Law man will not see his sin and will not understand the Gospel. Without God being lifted up, there is no burden in the soul of man. He will go on thinking that he has done some wrong but not really all that bad. In fact, it is an infinite wrong done to God.
Why has the Church for the most part lost the Gospel today? As Tozer sets out, “low views of God destroy the gospel for all who hold them.” Low views of God necessarily lead to low views of sin and therefore of the Gospel. What can the propitiation of God by Christ on the cross mean with a light view of sin? What can the imputed righteousness of Christ mean with a light view of sin? What can the humility of Christ mean in the incarnation and then in going to the cross with a light view of sin? What can the blood of the cross mean with a light view of sin? What can a Gospel mean that consists of grace alone when sin is thought to be almost nothing? What is the love of God in sending His Son to the cross to be a substitutionary sacrifice for sin if sin is but a little thing? As Tozer said, low views of God destroy the Gospel. While many may be in buildings across the land preaching something they call the Gospel, many of those same people have destroyed the Gospel as to the truth of it by having low views of God. No one should misunderstand the gravity of what it means to hold a low view of God. It destroys souls because it blinds them to God’s glory, their own sin, and the Gospel itself. If the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ is the Gospel (II Cor 4:4-6), then low views of God destroy the Gospel. There can be no glory in the face of Christ with low views of God and as such the Gospel of the glory of God is destroyed in that sense.
God Loves... Himself 
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