Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

1. Appreciate the goodness of God. Count your blessings. Learn not to take natural benefits, endowments and pleasures for granted, learn to thank God for them all. Do not slight the Bible, or the gospel of Jesus Christ, by an attitude of casualness toward either.

2. Appreciate the patience of God. Think how he has borne with you, and still bears with you, when so much in your life is unworthy of him and you have so richly deserved his rejection. Learn to marvel at his patience, and seek grace to imitate it in your dealings with others; and try not to try his patience any more.

3. Appreciate the discipline of God. He is both your upholder and, in the last analysis, your environment. All things come of him, and you have tasted his goodness every day of your life.

But if, now, he (in Whitefield’s phrase) puts thorns in your bed, it is only to awaken you from the sleep of spiritual death—and to make you rise up to seek his mercy. 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.

Nor has he left his messages, and the memory of his mighty acts, to be twisted and lost by the distorting processes of oral transmission.

When God brought Israel out of Egypt to Sinai, to give them his law and covenant, his jealousy was one of the first facts about himself which he taught them.

1. Biblical statements about God’s jealousy are anthropomorphisms.

We have to remember that man is not the measure of his Maker,

God’s jealousy is not a compound of frustration, envy and spite, as human jealousy so often is, but appears instead as a (literally) praiseworthy zeal to preserve something supremely precious.

2. There are two sorts of jealousy among humans, and only one of them is a vice.

Now, Scripture consistently views God’s jealousy as being of this latter kind: that is, as an aspect of his covenant love for his own people.

The goal of the covenant love of God is that he should have a people on earth as long as history lasts, and after that should have all his faithful ones of every age with him in glory. Covenant love is the heart of God’s plan for his world. And it is in the light of God’s overall plan for his world that his jealousy must, in the last analysis, be understood.

1. The jealousy of God requires us to be zealous for God.

His concern for us is great; ours for him must be great too.

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-whether he pleases man, or whether he gives offence—whether he is. thought wise, or whether he is thought foolish—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 thing; and that one thing is to please God, and to advance God’s glory.

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

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

any explanation from which the thought of propitiation is missing will be incomplete, and indeed actually misleading, by New Testament standards.

In saying this, we swim against the stream of much modern teaching and condemn at a stroke the views of a great number of distinguished church leaders today,

The difference is that expiation means only half of what propitiation means. Expiation is an action that has sin as its object; it denotes the covering, putting away or rubbing out of sin so that it no longer constitutes a barrier to friendly fellowship between man and God. Propitiation, however, in the Bible, denotes all that expiation means, and the pacifying of the wrath of God thereby.

What, then, does the phrase “a propitiation. . . by his blood” express? It expresses, in the context of Paul’s argument, precisely this thought: that by his sacrificial death for our sins Christ pacified the wrath of God.

It is rather a personal quality, without which God would cease to be fully righteous and his love would degenerate into sentimentality”

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

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

1. Propitiation is the work of God himself. In paganism, man propitiates his gods, and religion becomes a form of commercialism and, indeed, of bribery. In Christianity, however, God propitiates his wrath by his own action.

2. Propitiation was made by the death of Jesus Christ. Blood, as we hinted earlier, is a word pointing to the violent death inflicted in the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant.

Christ bore the curse of the law which was directed against us, so that we might not have to bear it. This is representative substitution.

Representative substitution, as the way and means of atonement, was taught in typical form by the God-given Old Testament sacrificial system.

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. The second goat (the scapegoat) illustrates what, in terms of the type, was accomplished by the death of the first goat.

3. Propitiation manifests God’s righteousness. So far from calling into question the morality of God’s way of dealing with sin, says Paul, the truth of propitiation establishes it and was explicitly intended to establish it.

Our sins have been punished; the wheel of retribution has turned; judgment has been inflicted for our ungodliness—but on Jesus, the lamb of God, standing in our place.

By sin the New Testament means not social error or failure in the first instance, but rebellion against, defiance of, retreat from and consequent guilt before God the Creator;

It is a shallow fallacy to imagine, as many scholars unfortunately do, that this variety of language must necessarily imply variation of thought.

Think first, then, of the driving force in the life of Jesus.

The driving force in Jesus’ life was his resolve to be “obedient to death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8), and the unique dreadfulness of his death lies in the fact that he tasted on Calvary the wrath of God which was our due, so making propitiation for our sins.

Think, second, of the destiny of those who reject God.

and what was packed into less than four hundred minutes was an eternity of agony—agony such that each minute was an eternity in itself, as mental sufferers know that individual minutes can be.

Think, third, of God’s gift of peace.

The use of right words does not guarantee right thoughts!

The truth which this account ignores is that the basic ingredient in God’s peace, without which the rest cannot be, is pardon and acceptance into covenant—that is, adoption into God’s family.

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.

Think, fourth, of the dimensions of the love of God.

Christ’s love was free, not elicited by any goodness in us (2:1-5); it was eternal, being one with the choice of sinners to save which the Father made “before the creation of the world” (1:4); it was unreserved, for it led him down to the depths of humiliation and, indeed, of hell itself on Calvary; and it was sovereign, for it has achieved its object—the final glory of the redeemed, their perfect holiness and happiness in the fruition of his love (5:26-27), is now guaranteed and assured (1:14; 2:7-10; 4:11-16; 4:30).

Think, lastly, of the meaning of God’s glory.

Sonship to God is not, therefore, a universal status into which everyone enters by natural birth, but a supernatural gift which one receives through receiving Jesus.

The gift of sonship to God becomes ours not through being born, but through being born again. “To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (Jn 1:12-13).

Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.

He is: and it is because he is what he is that everything else is as it is.

But in the New Testament we find that things have changed. God and religion are not less than they were; the Old Testament revelation of the holiness of God, and its demand for humility in man, is presupposed throughout. But something has been added. A new factor has come in, New Testament believers deal with God as their Father.

But this is silly.