Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

J. C. Ryle.

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 which some believers feel so much more strongly than

others that they alone deserve to be ca...

A zealous man in religion is pre-eminently a man of one thing. It is not enough to say that he is earnest, hearty, uncompromising, thorough-going, whole-hearted, fervent in spirit. He only sees one thing, he cares for one thing, he lives for one thing, he is swallowed up in one thing; and that one thing is to please God. Whether he lives, or whether he dies—whether he has health, or whether he has sickness—whether he is rich, or whether he is poor—wh...

whether he gets blame, or whether he gets praise—whether he gets honour, or whether he gets shame—for all this the zealous man cares nothing at all. He burns for one t...

to advance God’s glory. If he is consumed in the very burning, he cares not for it—he is content. He feels that, like a lamp, he is made to burn; and if consumed in burning, he has but done the work for which God appointed him. Such a one will always find a sphere for his zeal. If he cannot preach, work, and give money, he will cry, and sigh, and pr...

If he is cut off from working himself, he will give the Lord no rest till help is raised up from another quarter, and the work is done. This is what ...

What, now, of us? Does zeal for the house of God, and the cause of God, eat us up?—possess us?—consume us?

2. The jealousy of God threatens churches which are not zealous for God.

How many of our churches today are sound, respectable—and lukewarm?

Revive us, Lord, before judgment falls!

There are various gods, none enjoying absolute dominion, but each with some power to make life easier or harder for you. Their temper is uniformly uncertain; they take offense at the smallest things—they get jealous because they feel you are paying too much attention to other gods

The only course at that point is to humor and mollify them by an offering.

Thus pagan religion appears as a callous commercialism, a matter of managing and manipulating your gods by cunning bribery.

Now, the Bible takes us right away from the world of pagan religion. It condemns paganism out of hand as a monstrous distortion of truth.

In place of a cluster of gods

the Bible sets the one almighty Creator, the only real God, in whom all goodness and truth find their source, and to whom all moral evil is abhorrent. With him there is no bad temper, no capriciousness, no vanity, no ill will.

The idea of propitiation—that is, of averting God’s anger by an offering—runs right through the Bible.

Has the word propitiation any place in your Christianity? In the faith of the New Testament it is central.

a gospel without propitiation at its heart is another gospel than that which Paul preached.

these versions replace the thought of

propitiation by that of expiation.

What is the dif...

Expiation is an action that has sin a...

Propitiation, however, in the Bible, denotes all that expiation means, and the pacifying of the wrath of God thereby.

in this century a number of scholars,

have revived the view of the sixteenth-century Unitarian Socinus,

to the effect that there is in God no such thing as anger occasioned by human sin, and consequently no need or possibility of propitiation.

“The wrath of God is dynamically, effectively operative in the world

Here, then, are all of us in our natural state, without the gospel; the finally controlling reality in our lives,

whether we are aware of it or not, is the active anger of God.

The wrath of God against us, both present and to come, has been quenched.

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. Henceforth, instead of showing himself to be against us, he would show himself in our life and experience to be for us.

by his sacrificial death for our sins Christ pacified the wrath of God.

The wrath of God is as personal, and as potent, as his Love;

What manner of thing is the wrath of God which was propitiated at Calvary?

It is not the capricious, arbitrary, bad-tempered and conceited anger which pagans attribute to their gods.

It is a function of that holiness which is expressed in the deman...

God’s wrath is “the holy revulsion of God’s being against that which is the contradiction of his holiness”;

this is righteous anger—the right reaction of moral perfection in the Creator toward moral perversity in the creature.

God is not just—

he does not act in the way that is right, he does not do what is proper to a judge—unless he inflicts upon all sin and wrongdoing the penalty it deserves.

Note, now, three facts about the propitiation,

1. Propitiation is the work of God himself.

In Christianity, however, God propitiates his wrath by his own action.

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

it is a sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian, idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son

The doctrine of the propitiation is precisely this: that God loved the objects of His wrath so much

that He gave His own Son to the end that He by His blood should make provision for the removal of His wrath. It was Christ’s so to deal with the wrath that the loved would no longer be the objects of wrath, and love would achieve its aim of making the children of wrath the children of God’s good pleasure.