Theological Beliefs
A.W. Tozer opened his best-known book with a claim that sounds like exaggeration until a man sits with it: what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. Not what we say about God. What actually comes into our minds — the picture that surfaces, unbidden, when the word lands.
The call comes at 1:40 in the morning, and it is about his daughter, and the first words out of him are not to the nurse. They are to the ceiling. "I knew it. I knew you would." Then he hears himself, and the nurse is still talking, and he does not know what he meant by it.
Twelve hours earlier, at a table with friends, he had said that God is good, and he had meant that too. Two theologies, and only one of them answered the phone.
This is the top rung of the ladder, and the beliefs on it are the ones a man holds about God: who He is, what He is like, what He requires, whether He has spoken, and what happens when a man dies. Every belief beneath this one tilts to match it. Get God wrong and the error does not stay in the God compartment. It runs downhill into what a man believes about the universe, about truth, about the men around him, about himself, and about what a Tuesday is for. And the belief that runs downhill is not the one he gives at the table. It is the one that answers the phone.
Theological Beliefs
"And he prayed to the LORD and said, 'O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster'" — Jonah 4:2
Read what Jonah knew. His stated theology was flawless; he could recite the description of God that God had given of Himself at Sinai, word for word, from memory, under stress. And the recitation is the reason he ran. He knew God was merciful and he did not want mercy spent on Nineveh, so the belief he could say perfectly and the belief he lived by pointed in opposite directions, and his feet followed the second one onto a boat. A man can have the right words about God in his mouth and the wrong God in his chest, and the record contains a prophet to prove it.
That is the room. Not what a man would say about God if asked. What he holds, underneath the saying, at 1:40 in the morning.
Nobody Is Exempt
There is no such thing as a man with no theological beliefs. There are men who have examined theirs and men who have not.
The devout man holds them. So does the atheist; there is no one up there is a claim about God, held with the confidence of a creed, and it carries every consequence a creed carries. The man who shrugs and says he does not think about it holds one too: the question does not matter is an answer to the question, and it governs his life as firmly as any catechism would. Indifference is not neutrality. It is a verdict, delivered without a trial, on the one question that decides the meaning of every other one.
So a man cannot opt out of this rung. He can only decide whether to find out what is on it, and most men never do, because the picture that surfaces when the word lands feels like seeing God rather than like a belief about Him, and nobody examines what feels like sight.
The God He Describes and the God He Deals With
Every man carries two theologies, and they rarely match.
The first is the one he gives in conversation: polished, defensible, roughly what his tradition taught him to say. The second is the one that shows up when the phone rings. The God he braces against when the news is bad. The God he bargains with in the waiting room. The God he assumes is keeping a running total. The first lives in the mouth. The second lives in the chest, and it was installed much earlier, through a different door, and when the two disagree the second one is running his life.
The Law knew this about men before any man noticed it about himself. "Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves" — Deuteronomy 4:15-16. No form. They had heard a voice and seen fire and been shown no shape at all, and the warning that followed was not about foreign gods. It was about the shape their own hands would give to the God they had actually met, because a man cannot leave a formless God alone. He carves. The carving today is not wood; it is the picture that surfaces, the face he has assigned to the word, and a man can worship the true God under a carved face for fifty years and never know the face was his.
The Face His Father Gave Him
Here is where most of the carving was done, and it should be said plainly.
The word Father does not land on any man clean. It lands through the man who raised him, or did not. The boy whose father was absent tends to carry a God who is far away and hard to reach. The boy whose father was harsh tends to carry a scorekeeper whose approval is one failure from being revoked. The boy whose father was passive carries a God who will probably not show up. Even the boy with a good father carries a map that is better than most and is still not the country.
None of it was chosen. All of it went in, top rung, through the first door, in the years before examination was possible, and because the grown world treats God-talk as a subject a decent man does not raise, the carving usually sits untouched for decades, governing his whole posture toward heaven while he assumes he is seeing God as He is. God Himself raised the comparison, and did not flinch from it. "A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor?" — Malachi 1:6. He accepts the word. He also asks what the man has done with it, and the question cuts both ways: a man can withhold from God the honor a father is owed, and a man can hand God, without ever deciding to, the face of the father he had.
The face has to come out of the chest and onto the bench, and the only honest bench is what God has said about Himself, in the text, and not the residue of a childhood. "To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One" — Isaiah 40:25. The question is rhetorical, and most men have an answer anyway, and the answer is usually a man who is dead or in another state.
Why the Top Rung Costs the Most
Wrong beliefs on the lower rungs cost a man money, friends, years. Wrong beliefs here set the trajectory of everything, including where the road ends.
If God is a scorekeeper, all of life becomes performance, and rest becomes impossible. If God is indifferent, holiness becomes wasted effort and suffering becomes noise. If God is a machine that takes prayer as coin, then prayer becomes technique and disappointment becomes proof that He is broken. A man in the book of Judges built a private shrine, hired himself a priest, and said the machine's creed out loud: "Now I know that the LORD will prosper me, because I have a Levite as priest" — Judges 17:13. He was robbed of his priest and his gods in the next chapter, by men who ran the same theology at a larger scale. And if there is no God at all, then nothing above a man outranks the strongest man in the room, and every man eventually meets the strongest man in the room.
There is a further cost, and it is the quietest. "Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them" — Psalm 115:8. A man becomes what he worships. Carve a scorekeeper and he will keep score, on his wife, on his sons, on himself. Carve a distant God and he will be a distant father. The face he has given to God is the face his children are learning to see on him, and the psalm says it is not a coincidence.
One Door Beneath This One
Every question on this rung narrows, sooner or later, to a single one, and the question is not is there a God or what is He like. It is what a man holds about the one Man who claimed to be the answer to both: who He was, what He did, and whether it is true. Not what the man was told. Not what costs nothing to say. That question is not settled on this page, because this page is about the rung, and the question is the whole ladder.
It has a room of its own directly beneath this one, and a man does not pass through this rung without going down into it. Nothing else on the floor stands in front of that door, and nothing below it is reachable from here except through it. When he comes back up, the rung he is standing on will look different, and the ground beneath the ladder, which is the next room on the walk, will be the first thing to show it.
How Men Carve the Top Rung Wrong
The man with two theologies who has met only one. The creed at the table is the one he would show a stranger. The one at 1:40 in the morning he has never listened to, and it is the one raising his children.
The shrug. I don't really think about it. That is a verdict on the question that decides every other question, delivered without a trial, and filed under undecided.
The man who has never examined the face. He would tell anyone that God is his Father, and the Father he pictures has his own father's silence, his own father's temper, or his own father's absence, and he has never noticed the resemblance.
Micah with his Levite. He has built the arrangement, said the prayers, and paid the priest, and he holds, underneath it all, that the arrangement obligates God. The first time God does not prosper him, he will conclude that God is broken.
The man who sorts every rung but this one. He examines his politics, his money, his rules for living, and leaves the top rung sealed, because it was settled at nine and marked do not open. Everything he rebuilds beneath it stays crooked, and he blames the lumber.
The man who stops at the rung. He has examined what he holds about God, corrected the face, cleared the carving, and never gone down the one door beneath this page, because the question behind it costs more than the rest of the ladder combined.
Three Questions at 1:40 in the Morning
TRUTH: Which of my two theologies is true, and how would I know? Not which one he prefers or which one his tradition taught him to say. He finds the second one by listening to himself when the phone rings, and he tests both against the only description of God that was not carved by a man.
LOVE: What face of God are my sons learning from mine? They are not learning it from the creed he says. They are learning it from the way he keeps score, or does not, from whether he shows up, from what he does with a failure. The psalm says he becomes what he worships, and they are watching what he has become.
LAW: Am I answerable for a face I did not carve on purpose? He is. The face went in through his father, and he is the one who has kept it for thirty years without once holding it up to the text. God asked where His honor was, and the question was not addressed to the man's father.
I Thought You Would Call Me Father
The second theology can be found. The face can be named, and traced, and held up against the text until the resemblance to a dead man is undeniable, and the shrug can be refused out loud. A man does that work himself, over years, with nobody to do it for him, and it is right that he should.
And there is a line in the record where the carving is looked at from the other side. "I said, How I would set you among my sons, and give you a pleasant land, a heritage most beautiful of all nations. And I thought you would call me, My Father, and would not turn from following me" — Jeremiah 3:19. I thought you would call me Father. That is God, speaking of a people who had carved Him into something else and wandered off, and the tone of the sentence is not the tone of a scorekeeper. A man who has spent this room discovering what face he gave to God should read that line slowly and notice whose disappointment is in it, and what it was that God had been hoping to be called.
The man on the phone at 1:40 called Him something. It was not that.
Where the Top Rung Leads
A man who has stood on this rung honestly has met his second theology. He has heard what he says to the ceiling and stopped pretending the creed at the table is the one running his life. He has found the face, traced it to the man who gave it to him, and set it on the bench beside what God has said of Himself, and the two did not match. He knows what the carving has been doing to his children. And he has stood at the door beneath this page, which is the door the whole floor turns on, and gone down into it or knows that he must.
What he holds about God has never stayed in the room about God.
The first thing it decides, before it touches his politics or his money or a single sentence about himself, is what he takes the whole of everything to be. Whether the world he wakes up in was meant. Whether it is going anywhere. Whether the ground under the ladder was put there, or just happens to be there. A man who has just corrected the face of God will find that he has been carrying answers to questions about the universe that he has never once said out loud, and that every one of them was set by the face.