Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

asks what hope there is of deliverance. Or

Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that

is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God.

irony is that modern Christians, preoccupied with maintaining religious practices in an irreligious world, have themse...

But these capitulations to the modern spirit are really suicidal so far as Christian life is concerned.

Trend two is that Christian minds have been confused by the modern skepticism.

It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity.

No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God. . . .

But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God, will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe.

sc...

Oh, there is, in contemplating Christ, a balm for every wound; in musing on the Father, there is a quietus for every grief; and in the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is a balsam for every sore.

Would you lose your sorrow? Would you drown your cares? Then go, plunge yourself in the Godhead’s deepest sea;

Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.

What do I intend to do with my knowledge about God, once I have it? For the fact that we have to face is this: If we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us. It will make us proud and conceited. The very greatness of the subject matter will intoxicate us, and we shall come to think of ourselves as a cut above other Christians because of our interest in it and grasp of it; and we shall look down on those whose theological ideas seem to us crude and inadequate and dismiss them as very poor specimens. For, as Paul told the conceited Corinthians, “Knowledge puffs up. . . . The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Cor 8:1-2).

Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.

As he is the subject of our study, and our helper in it, so he must himself be the end of it.

We must seek, in studying God, to be led to God. It was for this purpose that revelation was given, and it is ...

It is that we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God.

Meditation is the activity of calling to mind, and thinking over, and dwelling on, and applying to oneself, the various things that one knows about the works and ways and purposes and promises of God. It is an activity of holy thought, consciously performed in the presence of God, under the eye of God, by the help of God, as a means of communion with God.

Its effect is ever to humble us, as we contemplate God’s greatness and glory and our own littleness and sinfulness, and to encourage and reassure us—“comfort” us, in the old, strong, Bible sense of the word—as we contemplate the unsearchable riches of divine mercy displayed in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it is as we enter more and more deeply into this experience of being humbled and exalted that our knowledge of God increases, and with it our peace, our strength and our joy. God help us, then, to put our knowledge about God to this use, that we all may in truth “know the Lord.”

They never brood on might-have-beens; they never think of the things they have missed, only of what they have gained.

for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him.

Our friends tell us how much they value our contribution, and this spurs us to further explorations of God’s truth, so that we may be equal to the demands made upon us.

We may know as much about God as Calvin knew—indeed, if we study his works diligently, sooner or later we shall—and yet all the time (unlike Calvin, may I say) we may hardly know God at all.

about the practice of Christianity.

Yet one can have all this and hardly know God at all.

Those who know God have great energy for God.

do exploits”

stand firm and take action.”

This shows us that the action taken by those who know God is their reaction to the anti-God trends which they see operating around them.

While their God is being defied or disregarded, they cannot rest; they feel they must do something; the dishonor done to God’s name goads them into action.

It is simply that those who know their God are sensitive to situations in which God’s truth and honor are being directly or tacitly jeopardized, and rather than let the matter go by default will force the issue on men’s attention and seek thereby to compel a change of heart about it—even at personal risk.

People who know their God are before anything else people who pray, and the first point where their zeal and energy for God’s glory come to expression is in their prayers.

Yet the invariable fruit of true knowledge of God is energy to pray for God’s cause—energy, indeed, which can only find an outlet and a relief of inner tension when channeled into such prayer—and the more knowledge, the more energy!

If, however, there is in us little energy for such prayer, and little consequent practice of it, this is a sure sign that as yet we scarcely know our God.