Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

We can never distrust ourselves too much.

Fifth, unwillingness to discount personal magnetism.

Those who have not been made deeply aware of pride and self-deception in themselves cannot always d...

Sixth, unwillingness to wait.

God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or to guide us more than one step at a time.

When in doubt, do nothing, but continue to wait on God. When action is needed, light will come.

But it does not follow that right guidance will be vindicated as such by a trouble-free course thereafter.

Paul found trouble on the grand scale through following divine guidance.

For a final example and proof of the truth that following God’s guidance brings trouble, look at the life of the Lord Jesus himself. No human life has ever been so completely guided by God, and no human being has ever qualified so comprehensively for the description “a man of sorrows.”

Sooner or later, God’s guidance, which brings us out of darkness into light, will also bring us out of light into darkness. It is part of the way of the cross.

Our God is a God who not merely restores, but takes up our mistakes and follies into his plan for us and brings good out of them.

Slippings and strayings there will be, no doubt, but the everlasting arms are beneath us; we shall be caught, rescued, restored. This is God’s promise; this is how good he is.

Thus it appears that the right context for discussing guidance is one of confidence in the God who will not let us ruin our souls.

The effect is twofold: first, to depict the work of grace as less than it really is, second, to leave people with a gospel that is not big enough to cover the whole area of their need.

Scripture is full of truth that will heal souls, just as a pharmacy is stocked with remedies for bodily disorders; but in both cases a misapplication of what, rightly used, will heal, will have a disastrous effect.

But it must be said that of these two extremes of error, the first is the worse, just to the extent that false hopes are a greater evil than false fears.

But the absence of a bad motive and the presence of a good one do not in any way reduce the damage which his exaggerations do.

Having created bondage—for such it is—by leading young Christians to regard all experiences of frustration and perplexity as signs of substandard Christianity, it now induces further bondage by the straitjacket of a remedy by which it proposes to dispel these experiences.

Unregenerate apostates are often cheerful souls, but backsliding Christians are always miserable.

Sooner or later, the truth will be that God is now exercising his child—his consecrated child—in the ways of adult godliness, as he exercised Job, and some of the psalmists, and the addressees of the epistle to the Hebrews, by exposing them to strong attacks from the world, the flesh and the devil, so that their powers of resistance might grow greater and their character as people of God become stronger.

And if this is what is happening to the perplexed Christian, then the proposed remedy will be disastrous. For what does it do? It sentences devoted Christians to a treadmill life of hunting each day for nonexistent failures in consecration, in the belief that if only they could find some such failures to confess and forsake they could recover an experience of spiritual infancy which God means them now to leave behind.

Earthly parents enjoy their babies, but are, to say the least, sorry if their growing children want to be babies again, and they hesitate to let them return to babyish ways.

But the basic criticism must surely be that it loses sight of the method and purpose of grace.

What is the purpose of grace? Primarily, to restore our relationship with God.

How does God in grace prosecute this purpose? Not by shielding us from assault by the world, the flesh and the devil, nor by protecting us from burdensome and frustrating circumstances, nor yet by shielding us from troubles created by our own temperament and psychology; but rather by exposing us to all these things, so as to overwhelm us with a sense of our own inadequacy, and to drive us to cling to him more closely.

it is to ensure that we shall learn to hold him fast.

Therefore he takes steps to drive us out of self-confidence to trust in himself—in the classical scriptural phrase for the secret of the godly life, to “wait on the Lord.”

This truth has many applications. One of the most startling is that God actually uses our sins and mistakes to this end.

But the point to stress is that the human mistake, and the immediate divine displeasure, were in no case the end of the story.

All roads in the Bible lead to Romans, and all views afforded by the Bible are seen most clearly from Romans, and when the message of Romans gets into a person’s heart there is no telling what may happen.

Is it doctrine—truth about God, taught by God—that you are after? If so, you will find that Romans gives you all the main themes integrated together:

But the wise person also reads the Bible as a book of life, showing by exposition and example what it means to serve God and not to serve him, to find him and to lose him in actual human experience.

Another way of reading the Bible, much commended by modern scholars, is as the book of the church, where the God-given faith and self understanding of the believing fellowship are voiced.

The wise person also reads the Bible as God’s personal letter to each of his spiritual children, and therefore to him as much as to anyone. Read Romans this way and you will find that it has unique power to search out and deal with things which are so much part of you that ordinarily you do not give them a thought—your sinful habits and attitudes; your instinct for hypocrisy; your natural self-righteousness and self-reliance; your constant unbelief; your moral frivolity, and shallowness in repentance; your halfheartedness, worldliness, fearfulness, despondency; your spiritual conceit and insensitivity.

It was said of Jonathan Edwards that his doctrine was all application and his application was all doctrine.

The law that operates is that the more you have dug into the rest of the Bible, the more you are exercised with the intellectual and moral problems of being a Christian, and the more you have felt the burden of weakness and the strain of faithfulness in your Christian life, the more you will find Romans saying to you.

Paul makes his point by dwelling on four gifts of God given to all who by faith are “in Christ Jesus.” The first is righteousness—“no condemnation” (v.1). The second is the Holy Spirit (vv. 4-27). The third is sonship—adoption into the divine family in which the Lord Jesus is the firstborn (vv. 14-17, 29). The fourth is security, now and forever (vv. 28-30).

The thought behind “what shall we say?” is “I know what I shall say; will you say it too?”

Though he does not know them personally (nor us who read him in the twentieth century), he knows that what determines their state is two factors common to all real Christians everywhere in every age. The first is commitment to all-round righteousness.

The second factor is exposure to all-round pressures.

Paul knows that those set on what the Puritans called “universal obedience” have to swim against the world’s stream all the way and are constantly made-to feel it.

Our unpossessed possessions are not, as is sometimes thought, techniques of sinlessness, but the peace, hope and joy in God’s love which are the Christian’s birthright.

Think against your feelings; argue yourself out of the gloom they have spread; unmask the unbelief they have nourished; take yourself in hand, talk to yourself, make yourself look up from your problems to the God of the gospel, let evangelical thinking correct emotional thinking.

The thought here is that no opposition can finally crush us.

when worshipers say “my God,” and God says “my people,” covenant language is being talked.

First, he praises, and what he praises is God’s word (vv. 4, 10)—that is, he attends to God’s revelation and venerates God in it and according to it, rather than indulging his own unchecked theological fancies. Second, he prays, and the desire that prompts his prayer is for communion with God as life’s goal and end—“that I may walk before God” (v.13). Third, he pays—pays his vows, that is, of faithfulness and thanksgiving (vv. 12-13). The praising, praying, thankful, faithful person has on him the marks of being a child of God.

The thought expressed by Paul’s second question is that no good thing will finally be withheld from us.

Note, first, what Paul implies about the costliness of our redemption.

Yet we can say this: that if the measure of love is what it gives, then there never was such love as God showed to sinners at Calvary, nor will any subsequent love-gift to us cost God so much.

Most Christians know the fearful feeling that God may not have anything more for them beyond what they have already received; a thoughtful look at Calvary should banish this mood.