Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

It takes more than sound doctrine to cure us of unrealism: There is, however, one book in Scripture that is expressly designed to turn us into realists, and that is the book of Ecclesiastes.

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.

For the truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.

Indeed he does, in outline at any rate. “Fear God and keep his commandments” (12:13); trust and obey him, reverence him, worship him, be humble before him, and never say more than you mean and will stand to when you pray to him (5:1-7); do good (3:12); remember that God will some day take account of you (11:9; 12:14), so eschew, even in secret, things of which you will be ashamed when they come to light at God’s assizes (12:14). Live in the present, and enjoy it thoroughly (7:14; 9:7-10; 11:9-10); present pleasures are God’s good gifts. 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 (2:24; 3:12-13; 5:18-20, 8:15). Leave to God its issues; let him measure its ultimate worth; your part is to use all the good sense and enterprise at your command in exploiting the opportunities that lie before you (11:1-6). This is the way of wisdom.

We have said that wisdom consists in choosing the best means to the best end.

Thus, the kind of wisdom that God waits to give to those who ask him is a wisdom that will bind us to himself, a wisdom that will find expression in a spirit of faith and a life of faithfulness.

Let us see to it, then, that our own quest for wisdom takes the form of a quest for these things, and that we do not frustrate the wise purpose of God by neglecting faith and faithfulness in order to pursue a kind of knowledge which in this world it is not given to us to have.

Torah from God the king has a threefold character: some of it is law (in the narrow sense of commands, or prohibitions, with sanctions attached); some of it is promise (favorable or unfavorable, conditional or unconditional); some of it is testimony (information given by God about himself and people—their respective acts, purposes, natures and prospects).

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.

How could a man with no official position, whose only job was to talk, be described as the God-appointed ruler of the nations? Why, simply because he had the words of the Lord in his mouth (v. 9): and any word that God gave him to speak about the destiny of nations would certainly be fulfilled.

Always it is stressed that the claim of the word of God upon us is absolute: the word is to be received, trusted and obeyed, because it is the word of God the King.

As rational persons, we were made to bear God’s moral image—that is, our souls were made to “run” on the practice of worship, law-keeping, truthfulness, honesty, discipline, self-control, and service to God and our fellows.

If we abandon these practices, not only do we incur guilt before God, we also progressively destroy our own souls. Conscience atrophies, the sense of shame dries up, one’s capacity for truthfulness, loyalty and honesty is eaten away, one’s character disintegrates.

How does God’s faithfulness show itself? By his unfailing fulfillment of his promises. He is a covenant-keeping God; he never fails those who trust his word.

A thorough acquaintance with the promises would be of the greatest advantage in prayer.

These things were understood once; but liberal theology, with its refusal to identify the written Scriptures with the word of God, has largely robbed us of the habit of meditating on the promises, and basing our prayers on the promises, and venturing in faith in our ordinary daily life just as far as the promises will take us.

True Christians are people who acknowledge and live under the word of God.

Christians will tell you, if you ask them, that the Word of God has both convinced them of sin and assured them of forgiveness.

Christians know that in addition to the word of God spoken directly to them in the Scriptures, God’s word has also gone forth to create, and control, and order things around them; but since the Scriptures tell them that all things work together for their good, the thought of God’s ordering their circumstances brings them only joy.

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;

1. “God is love” is not the complete truth about God so far as the Bible is concerned. It is not an abstract definition which stands alone, but a summing up, from the believer’s standpoint, of what the whole revelation set forth in Scripture tells us about its Author.

God has no body—therefore, as we have just said, he is free from all limitations of space and distance, and is omnipresent. God has no parts—this means that his personality and powers and qualities are perfectly integrated, so that nothing in him ever alters. With him “there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas 1:17 RSV). Thus he is free from all limitations of time and natural processes, and he remains eternally the same. God has no passions-this does not mean that he is unfeeling (impassive) or that there is nothing in him that corresponds to emotions and affections in us, but that whereas human passions—especially the painful ones, fear, grief, regret, despair—are in a sense passive and involuntary, being called forth and constrained by circumstances not under our control, the corresponding attitudes in God have the nature of deliberate, voluntary choices, and therefore are not of the same order as human passions at all.

So the love of the God who is spirit is no fitful, fluctuating thing, as human love is, nor is it a mere impotent longing for things that may never be, it is, rather, a spontaneous determination of God’s whole being in an attitude of benevolence and benefaction, an attitude freely chosen and firmly fixed.

So the God who is love is first and foremost light, and sentimental ideas of his love as an indulgent, benevolent softness, divorced from moral standards and concerns, must therefore be ruled out from the start. God’s love is holy love.

He will not take into his company any person, however orthodox in mind, who will not follow after holiness of life.

And those whom he does accept he exposes to drastic discipline, in order that they may attain what they seek.

Scripture does not allow us to suppose that because God is love we may look to him to confer happiness on people who will not seek holiness, or to shield his loved ones from trouble when he knows that they need trouble to further their sanctification.

2. “God is love” is the complete truth about God so far as the Christian is concerned.

The knowledge that this is so for us personally is the supreme comfort for Christians.

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’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners whereby, having identified himself with their welfare, he has given his Son to be their Savior, and now brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation.

1. God’s love is an exercise of his goodness. The Bible means by God’s goodness his cosmic generosity.

2. God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward sinners. As such, it has the nature of grace and mercy.

Love among persons is awakened by something in the beloved, but the love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused.

3. God’s love is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners. It is not a vague, diffused good will toward everyone in general and nobody in particular, rather, as being a function of omniscient almightiness, its nature is to particularize both its objects and its effects.

4. God’s love to sinners involves his identifying himself with their welfare. Such an identification is involved in all love: it is, indeed, the test of whether love is genuine or not.

He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.

Thus God saves, not only for his glory, but also for his gladness.

5. God’s love to sinners was expressed by the gift of his Son to be their Savior. The measure of love is how much it gives, and the measure of the love of God is the gift of his only Son to become human, and to die for sins, and so to become the one mediator who can bring us to God.

6. God’s love to sinners reaches its objective as it brings them to know and enjoy him in a covenant relation.

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.

This is what God does for those he loves—the best he can; and the measure of the best that God can do is omnipotence!

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.

in the moral realm they are resolutely kind to themselves, treating small virtues as compensating for great vices and refusing to take seriously the idea that, morally speaking, there is anything much wrong with them.

they imagine God as a magnified image of themselves and assume that God shares his own complacency about himself.

The way of modern men and women is to turn a blind eye to all wrongdoing as long as they safely can.

The accepted maxim seems to be that as long as evil can be ignored, it should be;

Yet the Bible insists throughout that this world which God in his goodness has made is a moral world, one in which retribution is as basic a fact as breathing.

God is not true to himself unless he punishes sin.

the belief that we can repair our own relationship with God by putting God in a position where he cannot say no anymore.