Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

It is not possible to argue that a God who is love cannot also be a God who condemns and punishes the disobedient;

So the love of the God who is spirit is no fitful, fluctuating thing, as human love is, nor is it a mere impotent longing for things that may never be; it is, rather, a spontaneous determination of God’s whole being in an attitude of benevolence and benefaction, an attitude freely chosen and firmly fixed.

Nothing can separate from it those whom it has once embraced (Rom 8:35-39).

God’s love is holy love.

Scripture does not allow us to suppose that because God is love we may look to him to confer happiness on people who will not seek holiness, or to shield his loved ones from trouble when he knows that they need trouble to further their sanctification.

we must make a second, balancing comment.

the statement “God is love” means that his love finds expression in everything that he says and does.

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.

Goodness in God, writes Berkhof, is “that perfection in God which prompts him to deal bountifully and kindly with all His creatures. It is the affection which the Creator feels towards His sentient creatures as such” (Systematic Theology, p. 70, citing Ps 145:9, 15-16; compare Lk 6:35; Acts 14:17).

The New Testament writers constantly point to the cross of Christ as the crowning proof of the reality and boundlessness of God’s love.

A covenant relation is one in which two parties are permanently pledged to each other in mutual service and dependence (example: marriage).

Deus meus et omnia

John wrote that “God is love” in order to make an ethical point, “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4:11).

There are four crucial truths in this realm which the doctrine of grace presupposes, and if they are not acknowledged and felt in one’s heart, clear faith in God’s grace becomes impossible.

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. This has confirmed modern men and women in the faith which has animated pagan religion ever since there was such a thing—namely, the belief that we can repair our own relationship with God by putting God in a position where he cannot say no anymore. Ancient pagans thought to do this by multiplying gifts and sacrifices; modern pagans seek to do it by churchmanship and morality.

Grace and salvation belong together as cause and effect. “It is by grace you have been saved” (Eph 2:5, 8). “The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared” (Titus 2:11).

Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance.

we believers may rejoice to know that our conversion was no accident, but an act of God which had its place in an eternal plan to bless us with the free gift of salvation from sin (2:8-10);

I need not torment myself with the fear that my faith may fail; as grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end.

Grace first inscribed my name, In God’s eternal book: ’Twas grace that gave me to the Lamb Who all my sorrows took. Grace taught my soul to pray, And pardoning love to know; ’Twas grace that kept me to this day, And will not let me go.

For love awakens love in return; and love, once awakened, desires to give pleasure. And the revealed will of God is that those who have received grace should henceforth give themselves to “good works” (Eph 2:10; Titus 2:11-12); and gratitude will move anyone who has truly received grace to do as God requires,

Oh! to grace how great a debtor Daily I’m constrained to be; Let that grace now, like a fetter, Bind my wandering heart to Thee! Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love— Take my heart, oh, take and seal it, Seal it for Thy courts above!