Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Not the labours of my hand Can fulfil Thy law’s demands. Could my zeal no respite know, Could my tears for ever flow, All for sin could not atone —leading to the admission of one’s own helplessness and to the conclusion: Thou must save, and Thou alone.

“God will forgive—that’s his job

Now we have to ask, why should this thought mean so much to others?

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 free to us, but it was costly to God,

The plan of salvation will be brought to a triumphant completion; thus grace will be shown to be sovereign.

I need not torment myself with the fear that my faith may fail; as grace led me to faith in the first place, so grace will keep me believing to the end.

But there are few things stressed more strongly in the Bible than the reality of God’s work as judge.

People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament to the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background.

1. The judge is a person with authority. In the Bible world, the king was always the supreme judge, because his was the supreme ruling authority.

2. The judge is a person identified with what is good and right. The modern idea that a judge should be cold and dispassionate has no place in the Bible. The biblical judge is expected to love justice and fair play and to loathe all ill treatment of one person by another. An unjust judge, one who has no interest in seeing right triumph over wrong, is by biblical standards a monstrosity.

3. The judge is a person of wisdom, to discern truth. In the biblical setting, the judge’s first task is to ascertain the facts in the case that is before him.

Nothing can escape him; we may fool men, but we cannot fool God. He knows us, and judges us, as we really are.

4. The judge is a person of power to execute sentence. The modern judge does no more than pronounce the sentence; another department of the judicial executive then carries it out. The same was true in the ancient world. But God is his own executioner. As he legislates and sentences, so he punishes. All judicial functions coalesce in him.

To reward good with good, and evil with evil, is natural to God.

The retributive principle applies throughout: Christians as well as non-Christians will receive according to their works.

Why, then, do we fight shy of the thought of God as a judge?

If we know that retributive judgment faces us at the end of the road, we shall not live as otherwise we would.

For Jesus constantly affirmed that in the day when all appear before God’s throne to receive the abiding and eternal consequences of the life they have lived, he himself will be the Father’s agent in judgment, and his word of acceptance or rejection will be decisive.

How can these two statements be fitted together? How do free forgiveness and justification by faith square with judgment according to works? The answer seems to be as follows. First, the gift of justification certainly shields believers from being condemned and banished from God’s presence as sinners.

But, second, the gift of justification does not at all shield believers from being assessed as Christians, and from forfeiting good which others will enjoy if it turns out that as Christians they have been slack, mischievous and destructive.

Final judgment will also be according to our knowledge. All people know something of God’s will through general revelation, even if they have not been instructed in the law or the gospel, and all are guilty before God for falling short of the best they knew. But ill-desert is graded according to what that best was;

The principle operating here is that “where a man has been given much, much will be expected of him” (v. 48 NEB). The justice of this is obvious. In every case the Judge of all the earth will do right.

Jesus the Lord, like his Father, is holy and pure, we are neither. We live under his eye, he knows our secrets, and on judgment day the whole of our past life will be played back, as it were, before him, and brought under review.

What then are we to do? The New Testament answer is: Call on the coming judge to be your present Savior. As Judge, he is the law, but as Savior he is the gospel.

The fact is that the subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society, and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter.

The Bible labors the point that just as God is good to those who trust him, so he is terrible to those who do not.

Clearly, the theme of God’s wrath is one about which the biblical writers feel no inhibitions whatever. Why, then, should we?

The root cause of our unhappiness seems to be a disquieting suspicion that ideas of wrath are in one way or another unworthy of God.

Before hell is an experience inflicted by God, it is a state for which a person himself opts by retreating from the light which God shines in his heart to lead him to himself.

The unbeliever has preferred to be by himself, without God, defying God, having God against him, and he shall have his preference. Nobody stands under the wrath of God except those who have chosen to do so.

The essence of God’s action in wrath is to give men what they choose, in all its implications: nothing more, and equally nothing less.

but it is plain that his attitude here is supremely just—and is poles apart from the wanton and irresponsible inflicting of pain which is what we mean by cruelty.

This appears in the story of God’s first act of wrath toward humanity, in Genesis 3, where we learn that Adam had already chosen to hide from God and keep clear of his presence, before ever God drove him from the Garden. And the same principle applies throughout the Bible.

If you want proof, that the wrath of God, revealed as a fact in your conscience, is already working as a force in the world, Paul would say you need only look at life around you and see what God has “given them over to.”

Yet if we would know God, it is vital that we face the truth concerning his wrath, however unfashionable it may be, and however strong our initial prejudices against it.

The Christians at Rome are not to dwell on God’s goodness alone, nor on his severity alone, but to contemplate both together.

One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word,

A second answer is that modern people think of all religions as equal and equivalent-they draw their ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources;

A third answer is that people have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do;

A fourth answer, no less basic than the three already given, is that people today are in the habit of disassociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of his severity;

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.

Goodness, in God as in human beings, means something admirable, attractive and praiseworthy. When the biblical writers call God good, they are thinking in general of all those moral qualities which prompt his people to call him perfect, and in particular of the generosity which moves them to call him merciful and gracious and to speak of his love.

Psalm 18 as a whole is David’s retrospective declaration of how he had himself proved that God is faithful to his promises and all-sufficient as a shield and defender, and every child of God who has not forfeited his birthright by backsliding enjoys a parallel experience.

Generosity means a disposition to give to others in a way which has no mercenary motive and is not limited by what the recipients deserve but consistently goes beyond it.

The biblical way of putting this distinction would be to say that God is good to all in some ways and to some in all ways.

And how abundant these gifts are! “Count your blessings, name them one by one,” urges the children’s chorus, and anyone who seriously begins to list his natural blessings alone will soon feel the force of the next line—“and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”

The first example is of God redeeming the helpless from their enemies and leading them out of barrenness to find a home; the second is of God delivering from “darkness and the shadow of death” those whom he had himself brought into this condition because of their rebellion against him; the third is of God healing the diseases with which he had chastened “fools” who disregarded him, the fourth is of God protecting voyagers by stilling the storm which they thought would sink their ship.

The Bible makes much of the patience and forbearance of God in postponing merited judgments in order to extend the day of grace and give more opportunity for repentance.

The patience of God in giving a chance to repent (Rev 2:5) before judgment finally falls is one of the marvels of the Bible story.