Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

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.

just as the blood-shedding of the Lord Jesus was the direct manifesting of his Father’s love toward us, so it was the direct averting of his Father’s wrath against us.

This double ritual taught a single lesson: that through the sacrifice of a representative substitute God’s wrath is averted and that sins are borne away out of sight, never to trouble our relationship with God again.

What we have said so far may be summed up as follows. The gospel tells us that our Creator has become our Redeemer. It announces that the Son of God has become man “for us men and for our salvation” and has died on the cross to save us from eternal judgment.

Do you understand this? If you do, you are now seeing to the very heart of the Christian gospel. No version of that message goes deeper than that which declares man’s root problem before God to be his sin, which evokes wrath, and God’s basic provision for man to be propitiation, which out of wrath brings peace.

Your basic impression will be of a man of action:

Your further impression will be of a man who knew himself to be a divine person (Son of God) fulfilling a messianic role (Son of Man).

How strong was his temptation to say “amen” after “take away this cup from me,” rather than go on to “nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt”

And how should we explain the fact that, whereas martyrs like Stephen faced death with joy, and even Socrates, the pagan philosopher, drank his hemlock and died without a tremor, Jesus, the perfect servant of God, who had never before showed the least fear of man or pain or loss, manifested in Gethsemane what looked like blue funk, and on the cross declared himself God-forsaken?

The Holy One did hide His face; O Christ, ’twas hid from Thee: Dumb darkness wrapped Thy soul a space, The darkness due to me. But now that face of radiant grace Shines forth in light on me.

Universalism is the doctrine that, among others, Judas will be saved,

We cannot, of course, form any adequate notion of hell, any more than we can of heaven, and no doubt it is good for us that this is so; but perhaps the clearest notion we can form is that derived from contemplating the cross.

The truth after which this account of God’s peace is feeling (though it misrepresents them, as we said) is that God’s peace brings us two things: power to face and to live with our own badness and failings, and also contentment under “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (for which the Christian name is God’s wise providence).

The peace of God is first and foremost peace with God; it is the state of affairs in which God, instead of being against us, is for us.

When Jesus came to his disciples in the upper room at evening on his resurrection day, he said, “Peace be with you”; and when he had said that, “he showed unto them his hands and side”

Do you see the glory of God in his wisdom, power, righteousness, truth and love, supremely disclosed at Calvary, in the making of propitiation for our sins?

What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father.

You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator. In the same way, you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father.

By this name, God announced himself as the “great I AM”—the One who is completely and consistently himself. He is: and it is because he is what he is that everything else is as it is. He is the reality behind all reality, the underlying cause of all causes and all events. The name proclaimed him as self-existent, sovereign, and wholly free from constraint by or dependence on anything outside himself.

The angels’ song which Isaiah heard in the temple, with its emphatic repetitions—“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty” (Is 6:3)—could be used as a motto-text to sum up the theme of the whole Old Testament.

Father has now become his covenant name—for the covenant which binds him to his people now stands revealed as a family covenant.

And the stress of the New Testament is not on the difficulty and danger of drawing near to the holy God, but on the boldness and confidence with which believers may approach him: a boldness that springs directly from faith in Christ, and from the knowledge of his saving work.

it is just not true to suggest that in the realm of personal relations positive concepts cannot be formed by contrast—which is the suggestion implicit here. Many young people get married with a resolve not to make the mess of marriage that they saw their parents make:

Similarly, the thought of our Maker becoming our perfect parent—faithful in love and care, generous and thoughtful, interested in all we do, respecting our individuality, skillful in training us, wise in guidance, always available, helping us to find ourselves in maturity, integrity and uprightness—is a thought which can have meaning for everybody, whether we come to it by saying, “I had a wonderful father, and I see that God is like that, only more so,” or by saying, “My father disappointed me here, and here, and here, but God, praise his name, will be very different,” or even by saying, “I have never known what it is to have a father on earth, but thank God I now have one in heaven.”

To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.

Social experts drum into us these days that the family unit needs to be stable and secure, and that any unsteadiness in the parent-child relationship takes its toll in strain, neurosis and arrested development in the child himself. The depressions, randomnesses and immaturities that mark the children of broken homes are known to us all. But things are not like that in God’s family. There you have absolute stability and security; the parent is entirely wise and good, and the child’s position is permanently assured. The very concept of adoption is itself a proof and guarantee of the preservation of the saints, for only bad fathers throw their children out of the family, even under provocation; and God is not a bad father, but a good one.

Now, just as the knowledge of his unique Sonship controlled Jesus’ living of his own life on earth, so he insists that the knowledge of our adoptive sonship must control our lives too. This comes out in his teaching again and again, but nowhere more clearly than in his Sermon on the Mount.

Number one is the principle of imitating the Father. “I tell you: Love your enemies . . . that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. . . . Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”

It is a fine thing for children to be proud of their father, and to want others too to see how wonderful he is, and to take care that they behave in public in a way that is a credit to him;

Number three is the principle of pleasing the Father.

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.

but often he gives us what we should have asked for, rather than what we actually requested.

These two concepts, indeed, link together; were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.