Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Among the seven deadly sins of medieval lore was sloth (acedia)—a state of hard-bitten, joyless apathy of spirit. There is a lot of it around today in Christian circles; the symptoms are personal spiritual inertia combined with critical cynicism about the churches and supercilious resentment of other Christians’ initiative and enterprise.

what happens when we do not heed the message of Ecclesiastes. For the truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.

The Bible pictures the word of God as having a similar twofold character. God is the king; we, his creatures, are his subjects. His word relates both to things around us and to us directly: God speaks both to determine our environment and to engage our minds and hearts.

How could a man with no official position, whose only job was to talk, be described as the God-appointed ruler of the nations? Why, simply because he had the words of the Lord in his mouth (v. 9): and any word that God gave him to speak about the destiny of nations would certainly be fulfilled.

1. God’s commands are true. “All your commands are true” (Ps 119:151). Why are they so described? First, because they have stability and permanence as setting forth what God wants to see in human lives in every age; second, because they tell us the unchanging truth about our own nature.

Sexual laxity does not make you more human, but less so; it brutalizes you and tears your soul to pieces. The same is true wherever any of God’s commandments are disregarded. We are only living truly human lives just so far as we are laboring to keep God’s commandments; no further.

2. God’s promises are true, for God keeps them.

True Christians are people who acknowledge and live under the word of God. They submit without reserve to the word of God written in “the Book of Truth” (Dan 10:21), believing the teaching, trusting the promises, following the commands. Their eyes are upon the God of the Bible as their Father and the Christ of the Bible as their Savior.

we show a great deal more interest in the gifts of healing and tongues—gifts of which, as Paul pointed out, not all Christians are meant to partake anyway (1 Cor 12:28-30)—than in the Spirit’s ordinary work of giving peace, joy, hope and love, through the shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God.

1. “God is love” is not the complete truth about God so far as the Bible is concerned.

It is not an abstract definition which stands alone, but a summing up, from the believer’s standpoint, of what the whole revelation set forth in Scripture tells us about its Author.

“God is spirit” (Jn 4:24 RSV, NEB; “God is a spirit,” the more familiar rendering, is incorrect). The second comes from the opening section of this very epistle. John offers it as a summary of “the message we have heard from him [Jesus] and declare to you,” and it is this: “God is light” (1 Jn 1:5). The assertion that God is love has to be interpreted in the light of what these other two statements teach, and it will help us if we glance at them briefly now.

God’s love is stern, for it expresses holiness in the lover and seeks holiness for the beloved.

2. “God is love” is the complete truth about God so far as the Christian is concerned.

God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners whereby, having identified himself with their welfare, he has given his Son to be their Savior, and now brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation.

2. God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward sinners.

3. God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners.

4. God’s love to sinners involves his identifying himself with their welfare.

5. God’s love to sinners was expressed by the gift of his Son to be their Savior.

The four truths are these: 1. The moral ill-desert of man. Modern men and women, conscious of their tremendous scientific achievements in recent years, naturally incline to a high opinion of themselves. They view material wealth as in any case more important than moral character, and in the moral realm they are resolutely kind to themselves, treating small virtues as compensating for great vices and refusing to take seriously the idea that, morally speaking, there is anything much wrong with them.

2. The retributive justice of God. The way of modern men and women is to turn a blind eye to all wrongdoing as long as they safely can. They tolerate it in others, feeling that there, but for the accident of circumstances, go they themselves.

The spiritual impotence of man. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People has been almost a modern Bible. A whole technique of business relations has been built up in recent years on the principle of putting the other person in a position where he cannot decently say no.

4. The sovereign freedom of God. Ancient paganism thought of each god as bound to his worshipers by bonds of self-interest, because he depended on their service and gifts for his welfare.

Grace as the source of the pardon of sin.

People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament to the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background. But if we examine the New Testament, even in the most cursory way, we find at once that the Old Testament emphasis on God’s action as Judge, far from being reduced, is actually intensified.

A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out—those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned” (NEB has “will rise to hear their doom”) (Jn 5:22, 27-29). The Jesus of the New Testament, who is the world’s Savior, is its Judge as well.

The judge is a person with authority.

The judge is a person of power to execute sentence.

the subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society, and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter.

One cannot imagine that talk of divine judgment was ever very popular, yet the biblical writers engage in it constantly.

there are more references in Scripture to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness”

God’s love, as the Bible views it, never leads him to foolish, impulsive, immoral actions in the way that its human counterpart too often leads us. And in the same way, God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil.

God’s wrath in the Bible is always judicial—that is, it is the wrath of the Judge, administering justice. Cruelty is always immoral, but the explicit presupposition of all that we find in the Bible—and in Edwards’s sermon, for that matter—on the torments of those who experience the fullness of God’s wrath is that each receives precisely what he deserves.

1. The meaning of God’s wrath. The wrath of God in Romans denotes God’s resolute action in punishing sin.

2. The revelation of God’s wrath. “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness” (1:18 RV).

If you want proof that the wrath of God, revealed as a fact in your conscience, is already working as a force in the world, Paul would say you need only look at life around you and see what God has “given them over to.”

3. The deliverance from God’s wrath.

The outward trappings of religion cannot save us either, any more than mere circumcision can save the Jew. Is there any way of deliverance, then, from the wrath to come? There is, and Paul knows it. “Since we have now been justified by his blood,” Paul proclaims, “how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!” (5:9).

Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God,” writes Paul in Romans 11:22 (KJV). The crucial word here is and. The apostle is explaining the relation between Jew and Gentile in the plan of God.

he invites them to take note of the two sides of God’s character which appeared in this transaction. “Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness.”

For the substance of Christianity is faith in the forgiveness of sins through the redeeming work of Christ on the cross.

Generosity means a disposition to give to others in a way which has no mercenary motive and is not limited by what the recipients deserve but consistently goes beyond it. Generosity expresses the simple wish that others should have what they need to make them happy. Generosity is, so to speak, the focal point of God’s moral perfection; it is the quality which determines how all God’s other excellences are to be displayed.

1. Appreciate the goodness of God.

2. Appreciate the patience of God.

3. Appreciate the discipline of God.

1. Biblical statements about God’s jealousy are anthropomorphisms.

There are two sorts of jealousy among humans, and only one of them is a vice. Vicious jealousy is an expression of the attitude, “I want what you’ve got, and I hate you because I haven’t got it.”

1. The jealousy of God requires us to be zealous for God.

2. The jealousy of God threatens churches which are not zealous for God.

In the New Testament, the propitiation word group appears in four passages of such transcendent importance that we may well pause to set them out in full. The first is Paul’s classic statement of the rationale of God’s justification of sinners.