Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

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 inscrutable God of providence is the wise and gracious God of creation and redemption.

a disposition to confess that he is wise, and to cleave to him and live for him in the light of his Word through thick and thin.

Thus, the kind of wisdom that God waits to give to those who ask him is a wisdom that will bind us to himself, a wisdom that will find expression in a spirit of faith and a life of faithfulness. Let us see to it, then, that our own quest for wisdom takes the form of a quest for these things, and that we do not frustrate the wise purpose of God by neglecting faith and faithfulness in order to pursue a kind of knowledge which in this world it is not given to us to have.

God speaks both to determine our environment and to engage our minds and hearts.

God, our Maker, knows all about us before we say anything (Ps 139:1-4); but we can know nothing about him unless he tells us.

It comes to woo us as well as to instruct us;

Here, within the compass of these three short chapters, we see the word of God in all the relations in which it stands to the world, and to man within it-on the one hand, fixing man’s circumstances and environment, on the other, commanding man’s obedience, inviting his trust, and opening to him the mind of his Maker. The rest of the Bible sets before us many new utterances of God, but no further categories of relationship between God’s word and his creatures. Instead, the presentation of the word of God in Genesis 1—3 is reiterated and confirmed.

the word of God really determines world events

God’s word is his executive instrument in all human affairs.

Always it is stressed that the claim of the word of God upon us is absolute: the word is to be received, trusted and obeyed, because it is the word of God the King.

The mark of true humility and godliness, on the other hand, is that a person “trembles at my word” (Is 66:2).

Truth in the Bible is a quality of persons primarily, and of propositions only secondarily.

One not only becomes desperately miserable, one is steadily being dehumanized.

Sexual laxity does not make you more human, but less so; it brutalizes you and tears your soul to pieces.

He is a covenant-keeping God; he never fails those who trust his word.

Christians deprive themselves of their most solid comforts by their unbelief and forgetfulness of God’s promises.

promise boxes

Check out this quote.

Christians are independent folks, for they use the Word of God as a touchstone by which to test the various views that are put to them, and they will not touch anything which they are not sure that Scripture sanctions.

we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, nonuniversal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones.

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

So the God who is love is first and foremost light, and sentimental ideas of his love as an indulgent, benevolent softness, divorced from moral standards and concerns, must therefore be ruled out from the start. God’s love is holy love. The God whom Jesus made known is not a God who is indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, a God whose ideal for his children is that they should “be perfect. . . as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). He will not take into his company any person, however orthodox in mind, who will not follow after holiness of life.

he exposes to drastic discipline,

Every single thing that happens to us expresses God’s love to us, and comes to us for the furthering of God’s purpose for us.

the love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused. God loves people because he has chosen to love them—as Charles Wesley put it, “he hath loved us, he hath loved us, because he would love” (an echo of Deut 7:7-8)—and no reason for his love can be given except his own sovereign good pleasure.

God has voluntarily bound up his own final happiness with theirs.

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God’s happiness will not be complete till all his beloved ones are finally out of trouble:

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God was happy without humans before they were made; he would have continued happy had he simply destroyed them after they had sinned; but as it is he has set his love upon particular sinners, and this means that, by his own free voluntary choice, he will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of them to heaven. He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.

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

God operating in love toward people.

modern man’s heart is pagan—make no mistake about that),

Willingness to tolerate and indulge evil up to the limit is seen as a virtue, while living by fixed principles of right and wrong is censured by some as doubtfully moral.

God is not true to himself unless he punishes sin.

Thou must save, and Thou alone.

The God of the Bible does not depend on his human creatures for his well-being (see Ps 50:8-13; Acts 17:25), nor, now that we have sinned, is he bound to show us favor.

gratitude will move anyone who has truly received grace to do as God requires, and daily to cry out thus—

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, Seat it for Thy courts above! Do you claim to know the love and grace of God in your own life? Prove your claim, then, by going and praying likewise.

“A study of the concordance will show that there are more references in Scripture to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness” (A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God, p. 75).

cursing and banishment of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 to the

when Scripture speaks of God anthropomorphically, it does not imply that the limitations and imperfections which belong to the personal characteristics of us sinful creatures belong also to the corresponding qualities in our holy Creator; rather, it takes for granted that they do not.

objective moral evil.

adverse reaction to evil, which is a necessary part of moral perfection,

Two biblical considerations

Jesus himself—who actually had more to say on this subject than any other New Testament figure—made

God’s wrath in the Bible is something which people choose for themselves.

letting Jesus have his own disruptive way with one.

Nobody stands under the wrath of God except those who have chosen to do so.

Adam had already chosen to hide from God and keep clear of his presence, before ever God drove him from the Garden.

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

No one is entirely without inklings of judgment to come.