Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

I ask you for the moment to stop your ears to those who tell you there is no road to knowledge about God, and come a little way with me and see. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and anyone who is actually following a recognized road will not be too worried if he hears nontravelers telling each other that no such road exists.

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).

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.

But these private mock heroics have no place at all in the minds of those who really know God. They never brood on might-have-beens; they never think of the things they have missed, only of what they have gained.

All very fine—yet interest in theology, and knowledge about God, and the capacity to think clearly and talk well on Christian themes, is not at all the same thing as knowing him. 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.

that God’s hand is on history at every point, that history, indeed, is no more than “his story,” the unfolding of his eternal plan, and that the kingdom which will triumph in the end is God’s.

He knows, and foreknows, all things, and his foreknowledge is foreordination, he, therefore, will have the last word, both in world history and —in the destiny of every man; his kingdom and righteousness will triumph in the end, for neither men nor angels shall be able to thwart him.

Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him as he takes knowledge of you. Knowing about him is a necessary precondition of trusting in him (“how could they have faith in one they had never heard of?” [Rom 10:14 NEB]), but the width of our knowledge about him is no gauge of the depth of our knowledge of him.

There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to bless me.

God is not the sort of person that we are; his wisdom, his aims, his scale of values, his mode of procedure differ so vastly from our own that we cannot possibly guess our way to them by intuition or infer them by analogy from our notion of ideal manhood. We cannot know him unless he speaks and tells us about himself.

as soon as the images are treated as representational rather than symbolic, they begin to corrupt the devotion they trigger.

The baby in the manger at Bethlehem was none other than the eternal Word of God.

It comes from him who sent me. . . I. . . speak just what the Father has taught me. . . For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it.

“I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn 6:38). “I do nothing on my own.... I always do what pleases him” (Jn 8:28-29).

and the blind do not respond to the stimulus of light.

It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart. It is the sovereign prerogative of Christ’s Spirit to convince men’s consciences of the truth of Christ’s gospel; and Christ’s human witnesses must learn to ground their hopes of success not on clever presentation of the truth by man, but on powerful demonstration of the truth by the Spirit.

People sometimes say things that they do not really mean, simply because they do not know their own mind; also, because their views change, they frequently find that they can no longer stand behind things that they said in the past.

And just as there are no bounds to his presence with me, so there are no limits to his knowledge of me. Just as I am never left alone, so I never go unnoticed.

I can talk in a way that deceives my fellow creatures as to what I really am, but nothing I say or do can deceive God. He sees through all my reserve and pretense; he knows me as I really am, better indeed than I know myself.

Living becomes an awesome business when you realize that you spend every moment of your life in the sight and company of an omniscient, omnipresent Creator.

The most universally awesome experience that mankind knows is to stand alone on a clear night and look at the stars.

Human wisdom can be frustrated by circumstantial factors outside the wise person’s control.

Misunderstanding what the Bible means when it says that God is love (see 1 Jn 4:8-10), they think that God intends a trouble-free life for all, irrespective of their moral and spiritual state, and hence they conclude that anything painful and upsetting (illness, accident, injury, loss of job, the suffering of a loved one) indicates either that God’s wisdom, or power, or both, have broken down, or that God, after all, does not exist.

We may be frankly bewildered at things that happen to us, but God knows exactly what he is doing, and what he is after, in his handling of our affairs.

It is true that when God has given us guidance by application of principles he will on occasion confirm it to us by unusual providences, which we will recognize at once as corroborative signs. But this is quite a different thing from trying to read a message about God’s secret purposes out of every unusual thing that happens to us.

And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God’s secret councils is shattered.

Behind this morbid and deadening condition often lies the wounded pride of one who thought he knew all about the ways of God in providence and then was made to learn by bitter and bewildering experience that he didn’t.

Though Ecclesiastes condemns flippancy (7:4-6), he clearly has no time for the superspirituality which is too proud or too pious ever to laugh and have fun. Seek grace to work hard at whatever life calls you to do (9:10), and enjoy your work as you do it

God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil.

It is true that some recent theologians, in reaction, have tried to reaffirm the truth of God’s holiness, but their efforts have seemed halfhearted and their words have fallen for the most part on deaf ears. Modern Protestants are not going to give up their “enlightened” adherence to the doctrine of a celestial Santa Claus merely because a Brunner or a Niebuhr suspects this is not the whole story. The certainty that there is no more to be said of God (if God there be) than that he is infinitely forbearing and kind—that certainty is as hard to eradicate as bindweed. And when once it has put down roots, Christianity, in the true sense of the word, simply dies off. For the substance of Christianity is faith in the forgiveness of sins through the redeeming work of Christ on the cross.

It is no accident that when belief in the “good God” of liberalism became widespread, about the turn of the twentieth century, 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. This was inevitable, for it is not possible to see the good will of a heavenly Santa Claus in heartbreaking and destructive things like cruelty, or marital infidelity, or death on the road, or lung cancer. The only way to save the liberal view of God is to dissociate him from these things and to deny that he has any direct relation to them or control over them; in other words, to deny his omnipotence and lordship over his world. Liberal theologians took this course fifty years ago, and the man on the street takes it today. Thus he is left with a kind God who means well but cannot always insulate his children from trouble and grief. When trouble comes, therefore, there is nothing to do but grin and bear it. In this way, 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.

his wrath is not the ignoble outburst that human anger so often is, a sign of pride and weakness, but it is holiness reacting to evil in a way that is morally right and glorious.

(a freakish sequence of anomalies

The purpose of our Lord’s promise of reward (6:4, 6, 18) is not to make us think in terms of wages and a quid pro quo, but simply to remind us that our heavenly Father will notice, and show special pleasure, when we concentrate our efforts on pleasing him and him alone.