Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

the real heart of the gospel: that Jesus Christ, by virtue of his death on the cross as our substitute and sinbearer, “is the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn 2:2 KJV).

Otherwise we shall not understand the gospel of salvation from wrath, nor the propitiatory achievement of the cross, nor the wonder of the redeeming love of God. Nor shall we understand the hand of God in history and God’s present dealings with our own people; nor shall we be able to make head or tail of the book of Revelation; nor will our evangelism have the urgency enjoined by Jude—“save some, by snatching them out of the fire” (Jude 23 RSV). Neither our knowledge of God nor our service to him will be in accord with his Word.

First,

Second,

Third,

Our readiness or our reluctancy to meditate upon the wrath of God becomes a sure test of how our hearts really stand affected towards Him.

German theologians

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

the so-called problem of evil (which was not regarded as a problem before) suddenly leaped into prominence as the number one concern of Christian apologetics.

deny his omnipotence and lordship over his world.

by an ironic paradox, faith in a God who is all goodness and no severity tends to confirm men in a fatalistic and pessimistic attitude to life.

(Incidentally, if you have never read carefully through this psalm, asking yourself at each point how far your testimony matches up to that of David, I would urge you to do so at once—and then to do it again at frequent intervals. You will find it a salutary, if shattering, discipline.)

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.

common grace

every night’s sleep,

The principle which Paul is applying here is that behind every display of divine goodness stands a threat of severity in judgment if that goodness is scorned. If we do not let it draw us to God in gratitude and responsive love, we have only ourselves to blame when God turns against us.

storing up wrath against yourself”

“It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps 119:71).

man is not the measure of his Maker,

It is terribly potent, for it feeds and is fed by pride, the taproot of our fallen nature.

zeal to protect

demand for unqualified love and loyalty.

he demands from those whom he has loved and redeemed utter and absolute loyalty, and he will vindicate his claim by stern action against them if they betray his love by unfaithfulness.

The goal of the covenant love of God is that he should have a people on earth as long as history lasts, and after that should have all his faithful ones of every age with him in glory.

For God’s ultimate objective, as the Bible declares it, is threefold—to vindicate his rule and righteousness by showing his sovereignty in judgment upon sin; to ransom and redeem his chosen people; and to be loved and praised by them for his glorious acts of love and self-vindication.

to judge

to restore

I will not yield my glory to another” (Is 42:8;

Zeal in religion is a burning desire to please God, to do His will, and to advance His glory in the world in every possible way. It is a desire which no man feels by nature—which the Spirit puts in the heart of every believer when he is converted—but

Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity? In the faith of the New Testament it is central. The love of God, the taking of human form by the Son, the meaning of the cross, Christ’s heavenly intercession, the way of salvation—all are to be explained in terms of it, as the passages quoted show, and any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards.

and the pacifying of the wrath of God thereby.

The “blood”—that is, the sacrificial death—of Jesus Christ abolished God’s anger against us and ensured that his treatment of us forever after would be propitious and favorable.

It is rather a personal quality, without which God would cease to be fully righteous and his love would degenerate into sentimentality” (New Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Wrath”).

The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of his unkind Father by offering himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message—it

but that”—in

what quenched God’s wrath and so redeemed us from death

but the shedding of his blood in death.

representative substitution—the innocent taking the place of the guilty,

the public spectacle of propitiation, at the cross, was a public manifestation, not merely of justifying mercy on God’s part, but of righteousness and justice as the basis of justifying mercy.

postponement of judgment only,

of all that will ever be pardoned

man’s root problem before God to be his sin, which evokes wrath,

the deepest of all human problems, the problem of man’s relation with his Maker.

By sin the New Testament means not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from and consequent guilt before God the Creator;

twofold self-consciousness,

Four times at least after Peter had hailed him as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus predicted that he would be killed and rise, though without the disciples being able to make sense of what he said (8:31; compare vv. 34-35; 9:9; 9:31; 10:33-34). At other times he spoke of his being put to death as something certain (12:8;14:18, 24), something predicted in Scripture (14:21, 49), and something that would win for many a momentously new relationship with God. “The Son of Man [came] to give his life as a ransom for many” (10:45). “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many” (14:24).

Jesus was taking upon him the burden of the world’s sin, consenting to be, and actually being, numbered with the transgressors?”

It was because Jesus was to be made sin, and bear God’s judgment on sin, that he trembled in the garden, and because he was actually bearing that judgment that he declared himself forsaken of God on the cross.

the unique dreadfulness of his death lies in the fact that he tasted on Calvary the wrath of God which was our due, so making propitiation for our sins.

Calvary shows that under the final judgment of God nothing that one has valued, or could value, nothing that one can call good, remains to one.