Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Here, therefore, is a further reason why God speaks to us: not only to move us to do what he wants, but to enable us to know him so that we may love him.

fixed, constant attention to the promises, and a firm belief of them, would prevent solicitude and anxiety about the concerns of this life. It would keep the mind quiet and composed in every change, and support and keep up our sinking spirits under the several troubles of life. . . Christians deprive themselves of their most solid comforts by their unbelief and forgetfulness of God’s promises. For there is no extremity so great, but there are promises suitable to it, and abundantly sufficient for our relief in it.

“God’s love has flooded our inmost heart.” Paul is not talking of faint and fitful impressions, but of deep and overwhelming ones.

The thought is that knowledge of the love of God, having flooded our hearts, fills them now, just as a valley once flooded remains full of water. Paul assumes that all his readers, like himself, will be living in the enjoyment of a strong and abiding sense of God’s love for them.

we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, nonuniversal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Thus, we show a great deal more interest in the gifts of healing and tongues—gifts of which, as Paul pointed out, not all Christians are meant to partake anyway (1 Cor 12:28-30)—than in the Spirit’s ordinary work of giving peace, joy, hope and love, through the shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God.

Revival means the work of God restoring to a moribund church, in a manner out of the ordinary, those standards of Christian life and experience which the New Testament sets forth as being entirely ordinary; and a right-minded concern for revival will express itself not in a hankering after tongues (ultimately it is of no importance whether we speak in tongues or not), but rather in a longing that the Spirit may shed God’s love abroad in our hearts with greater power.

worship is not that your feet should be standing in either Jerusalem or Samaria, or anywhere else for that matter, but that your heart should be receptive and responsive to his revelation.

Thus, so far as we are concerned, God is love to us—holy, omnipotent love—at every moment and in every event of every day’s life. Even when we cannot see the why and the wherefore of God’s dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always, even when, humanly speaking, things are going wrong. We know that the true story of our life, when known, will prove to be, as the hymn says, “mercy from first to last”—and we are content.

God loves people because he has chosen to love them—as Charles Wesley put it, “he hath loved us, he hath loved us, because he would love” (an echo of Deut 7:7-8)—and no reason for his love can be given except his own sovereign good pleasure.

God was happy without humans before they were made; he would have continued happy had he simply destroyed them after they had sinned; but as it is he has set his love upon particular sinners, and this means that, by his own free voluntary choice, he will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of them to heaven. He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.

That is as if he said, You shall have as true an interest in all my attributes for your good, as they are mine for my own glory. . . My grace, saith God, shall be yours to pardon you, and my power shall be yours to protect you, and my wisdom shall be yours to direct you, and my goodness shall be yours to relieve you, and my mercy shall be yours to supply you, and my glory shall be yours to crown you. This is a comprehensive promise, for God to be our God: it includes all. Deus meus et omnia [God is mine, and everything is mine], said Luther. (Works Y, 308)

John wrote that “God is love” in order to make an ethical point, “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4:11). Could an observer learn from the quality and degree of love that I show to others—my wife? my husband? my family? my neighbors? people at church? people at work?—anything at all about the greatness of God’s love to me? Meditate upon these things. Examine yourself.

The gospel centers upon justification—that is, upon the remission of sins and the acceptance of our persons that goes with it. Justification is the truly dramatic transition from the status of a condemned criminal awaiting a terrible sentence to that of an heir awaiting a fabulous inheritance. Justification is by faith; it takes place the moment a person puts vital trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior. Justification is free to us, but it was costly to God, for its price was the atoning death of God’s Son.

For the New Testament sets God’s gift of pardon in the context of a plan of salvation which began with election before the world was and will be completed only when the church is perfect in glory.

To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex and self-will, the church mumbles on about God’s kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment.

Thus, God’s love, as the Bible views it, never leads him to foolish, impulsive, immoral actions in the way that its human counterpart too often leads us. And in the same way, 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. God is only angry where anger is called for.

One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word, we have to try to help them unlearn the pride and, in some cases, the misconceptions about Scripture which gave rise to this attitude and to base their convictions henceforth not on what they feel but on what the Bible says.

his willingness to forbear and forgive when his servants fall into sin

Earlier in Romans, Paul addressed the self-satisfied non-Christian critic of human nature as follows: “God’s kindness leads you toward repentance”—that is, as J. B. Phillips correctly paraphrases, “is meant to lead you to repentance.” “You. . . pass judgment on them and yet do the same things”—yet God has borne with your faults, the very faults which you regard as meriting his judgment when you see them in others, and you ought to be very humble and very thankful. But if, while tearing strips off others, you omit to turn to God yourself, then “you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience” and thereby “because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself” (Rom 2:1-5).

It is no wonder that the New Testament stresses that longsuffering is a Christian virtue and duty; it is in truth a part of the image of God (Gal 5:22; Eph 4:2; Col 3:12).

Or if you are a true believer, and he still puts thorns in your bed, it is only to keep you from falling into the somnolence of complacency and to ensure that you “continue in his goodness” by letting your sense of need bring you back constantly in self-abasement and faith to seek his face. This kindly discipline, in which God’s severity touches us for a moment in the context of his goodness, is meant to keep us from having to bear the full brunt of that severity apart from that context. It is a discipline of love, and it must be received accordingly. “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline” (Heb 12:5). “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps 119:71).