Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

as in fact it has always been taken—as

Charles Hodge) “idolatry consists not only in the worship of false gods, but also in the worship of the true God by images.”

The commandment thus deals not with the object of our worship, but with the manner of it, what it tells us is that statues and pictures of the One whom we worship are not to be used as an aid to worshiping him.

But the very wording of the commandment rules out such a limiting exposition. God says quite categorically, “Thou shalt not make any likeness of any thing” for use in worship. This categorical statement rules out not simply the use of pictures and statues which depict God as an animal, but also the use of pictures and statues which depict him as the highest created thing we know-a human. It also rules out the use of pictures and statues of Jesus Christ as a man, although Jesus himself was and remains man; for all pictures and statues are necessarily made after the “likeness” of ideal manhood as we conceive it, and therefore come under the ban which the commandment imposes.

“A true image of God,” wrote Calvin, “is not to be found in all the world; and hence. . . His glory is defiled, and His truth corrupted by the lie, whenever He is set before our eyes in a visible form. . . Therefore, to devise any image of God is itself impious; because by this corruption His majesty is adulterated, and. He is figured to be other than He is.”

the crucifix obscures the glory of Christ, for it hides the fact of his deity, his victory on the cross, and his present kingdom. It displays his human weakness, but it conceals his divine strength; it depicts the reality of his pain, but keeps out of our sight the reality of his joy and his power.

his glory is precisely what such pictures can never show us.

the use of the crucifix as an aid to prayer has encouraged people to equate devotion with brooding over Christ’s bodily sufferings; it has made them morbid about the spiritual value of physical pain, and it has kept them from knowledge of the risen Savior.

remarks of this kind serve as the prelude to a denial of something that the Bible tells us about God.

We were made in his image, but we must not think of him as existing in ours. To think of God in such terms is to be ignorant of him, not to know him.

To follow the imagination of one’s heart in the realm of theology is the way to remain ignorant of God, and to become an idol-worshipper-the idol in this case being a false mental image of God, made by one’s own speculation and imagination.

God the Creator is transcendent, mysterious and inscrutable, beyond the range of any imagining or philosophical guesswork of which we are capable-and

humble ourselves, to listen and learn of him, and to let him teach us what he is like and how we should think of him.

God is not the sort of person that we are;

We cannot know him unless he speaks and tells us about himself.

the positive force of the second commandment is that it compels us to take our thoughts of God from his own holy Word, and from no other source whatsoever.

live, as it were, at the foot of the mount, with God’s own word ringing in their ears to direct them and no supposed image of God before their eyes to distract them.

God did not show them a visible symbol of himself, but spoke to them;

therefore they are not now to seek visible symbols of God, but sim...

To make an image of God is to take one’s thoughts of him from a human source, rather than from God himself; and this is precisely what is wrong with image-making.

You may say, how can I tell? Well, the test is this. The God of the Bible has spoken in his Son. The light of the knowledge of his glory is given to us in the face of Jesus Christ. Do I look habitually to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ as showing me the final truth about the nature and the grace of God? Do I see all the purposes of God as centering upon him? If I have been enabled to see this, and in mind

and heart to go to Calvary and lay hold of the Calvary solution, then I can know that I truly worship the true God, and that he is my God, and that I am even now enjoying eternal life, according to our Lord’s own definition, “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3).

minds on the fringes of faith

determining human destiny,

he took humanity without loss of deity, so that Jesus of Nazareth was as truly and fully divine as he was human.

became a Jew;

It is from misbelief, or at least inadequate belief, about the Incarnation that difficulties at other points in the gospel story usually spring.

It is not strange that he, the Author of life, should rise from the dead.

if the immortal Son of God did really submit to taste death, it is not strange that such a death should have saving significance for a doomed race.

The baby born at Bethlehem was God.

He wanted to make it clear from the outset that the Sonship which Jesus claimed, and which Christians ascribed to him, was precisely a matter of personal deity and nothing less.

and rightly so.

seven things about the divine Word.

in all its forms: life is given and maintained by the Word.

Created things do not have life in themselves, but life in the Word, the second person of the Godhead.

The Son of God is the Word of God.

The Christmas message rests on the staggering fact that the child in the manger was—God.

God made man.

God plus

now in a state in which he could be tempted—could

yet was without sin.

We shall be wise to remember this,

great act of condescension and self-humbling.

Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation,

so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

only two courses are open. Either we accept them and ascribe full divine authority to all that Jesus taught, including his declarations of the inspiration and authority of the Old Testament, or else we reject them and call into question the divine authority of his teaching at every point.

divine capacities restrained.

The Son appears in the Gospels not as an independent divine person, but as a dependent one, who thinks and acts only and wholly as the Father directs.

proceed from the Father and the Son

His knowing, like the rest of his activity, was bounded by his Father’s will.