Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest.

We may be frankly bewildered at things that happen to us, but God knows exactly what he is doing, and what he

We ask again: what does it mean for God to give us wisdom? What kind of a gift is it? If another transportation illustration may be permitted, it is like being taught to drive. What matters in driving is the speed and appropriateness of your reactions to things and the soundness of your judgment as to what scope a situation gives you. You do not ask yourself why the road should narrow or screw itself into a dogleg wiggle just where it does, nor why that van should be parked where it is, nor why the driver in front should hug the crown of the road so lovingly; you simply try to see and do the right thing in the actual situation that presents itself. The effect of divine wisdom is to enable you and me to do just that in the actual situations of

everyday life. To drive well, you have to keep your eyes skinned to notice exactly what is in front of you. To live wisely, you have to be clear-sighted and realistic—ruthlessly so—in looking at life as it is. Wisdom will not go with comforting illusions, false sentiment, or the use of rose-colored glasses. Most of us live in a dream world, with our heads in the clouds and our feet off the ground; we never see the world, and our lives in it, as they really are. This deep-seated, sin-bred unrealism is one reason why there is so little wisdom among us—even the soundest and most orthodox of us. 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. We need to pay more heed to its message than we commonly do. Let us look at that

As the sermon itself shows, the text is intended as a warning against the misconceived quest for understanding, for it states the despairing conclusion to which this quest, if honestly and realistically pursued, must at length lead. We may formulate the message of the sermon as follows:

Look (says the preacher) at the sort of world we live in. Take off your rose-colored glasses, rub your eyes and look at it long and hard. What do you see? You see life’s background set by aimlessly recurring cycles in nature (1:4-7). You see its shape fixed by times and circumstances over which we have no control (3:1-8; 9:11-12). You see death coming to everyone sooner or later, but coming haphazard; its coming bears no relation to whether it is deserved (7:15; 8:8). Humans die like beasts (3:19-20), good ones like bad, wise ones like fools (2:14, 16; 9:2-3). You see evil running rampant (3:16; 4:1; 5:8; 8:11; 9:3); the wicked prosper, the good don’t (8:14). Seeing all this, you realize that God’s ordering of events is inscrutable; much as you want to make it out, you cannot do so (3:11; 7:13-14, 8:17 RV; 11:5). The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed and oppressed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything, and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks. But once

This is what happens when we do not heed the message of Ecclesiastes.

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

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).

For, though God is a great king, it is not his wish to live at a distance from his subjects. Rather the reverse: He made us with the intention that he and we might walk together forever in a love relationship. But such a relationship can exist only when the parties involved know something of each other. God, our Maker, knows all about us before we say anything (Ps 139:1-4); but we can know nothing about him unless he tells us.

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.

We are to believe and obey it, not only because he tells us to, but also, and primarily, because it is a true word.

God’s commands are

First, because they have stability and permanence as setting forth what God wants to see in human lives in every age;

We are familiar with the thought that our bodies are like machines, needing the right routine of food, rest and exercise if they are to run efficiently, and liable, if filled up with the wrong fuel—alcohol, drugs, poison—to lose their power of healthy functioning and ultimately to “seize up” entirely in physical death.

What we are, perhaps, slower to grasp is that God wishes us to think of our souls in a similar way. 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. One not only becomes desperately miserable, one is steadily being dehumanized. This is one aspect of spiritual death. Richard Baxter was right to formulate the alternatives as “A Saint—or a Brute”: that, ultimately, is the only choice, and everyone, sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously opts for one or the other.

Christians deprive themselves of their most solid comforts by their unbelief and forgetfulness of God’s promises.

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.

With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, nonuniversal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones.

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.

1. “God is love” is not the complete truth about God so far as the Bible is concerned.

The assertion that God is love has to be interpreted in the light of what these other two statements teach, and it will help us if we glance at them briefly now.

God, being spirit, is not so limited. God is nonmaterial, noncorporeal, and therefore nonlocalized.

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.

John’s point is that only those who “walk in the light,” seeking to be like God in holiness and righteousness of life, and eschewing everything inconsistent with this, enjoy fellowship with the Father and the Son; those who “walk in the darkness,” whatever they may claim for themselves, are strangers to this relationship (1 Jn 1:6-7).

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

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

Every single thing that happens to us expresses God’s love to us, and comes to us for the furthering of God’s purpose for us.

It is an outgoing of God in kindness which not merely is undeserved, but is actually contrary to desert, for the objects of God’s love are rational creatures who have broken God’s law, whose nature is corrupt in God’s sight, and who merit only condemnation and final banishment from his presence.

love; its gods were often credited with lusting after women, but never with loving sinners;

have in previous chapters made the point that God’s end in all things is his own glory—that he should be manifested, known, admired, adored. This statement is true, but it is incomplete. It needs to be balanced by a recognition that through setting his love on human beings God has voluntarily bound up his own final happiness with theirs. It is not for nothing that the Bible habitually speaks of God as the loving Father and Husband of his people. It follows from the very nature of these relationships that God’s happiness will not be complete till all his beloved ones are finally out of trouble:

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

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

Deus meus et omnia

They tend to dismiss a bad conscience, in themselves as in others, as an unhealthy psychological freak, a sign of disease and mental aberration rather than an index of moral reality. For modern men and women are convinced that, despite all their little peccadilloes—drinking, gambling, reckless driving, sexual laxity, black and white lies, sharp practice in trading, dirty reading, and what have you—they are at heart thoroughly good folks. Then, as pagans do (and modern man’s heart is pagan—make no mistake about that), they imagine God as a magnified image of themselves and assume that God shares his own complacency about himself. The thought of themselves as creatures fallen from God’s image, rebels against God’s rule, guilty and unclean in God’s sight, fit only for God’s condemnation, never enters their heads.

Willingness to tolerate and indulge evil up to the limit is seen as a virtue, while living by fixed principles of right and wrong is censured by some as doubtfully moral.

God is the judge of all the earth, and he will do right, vindicating the innocent, if such there be, but punishing (in the Bible phrase visiting their sins upon) lawbreakers (see Gen 18:25). God is not true to himself unless he punishes sin. And unless one knows and feels the truth of this fact, that wrongdoers have no natural hope of anything from God but retributive judgment, one can never share the biblical faith in divine grace.

Ancient paganism thought of each god as bound to his worshipers by bonds of self-interest, because he depended on their service and gifts for his welfare. Modern paganism has at the back of its mind a similar feeling that God is somehow obliged to love and help us, little though we deserve

“It does not depend on man’s will or effort, but on God’s mercy”

We have seen why the thought of grace means so little to some church people—namely, because they do not share the beliefs about God and man which it presupposes. Now we have to ask, why should this thought mean so much to others?

it is evident from what has already been said. It is surely clear that, once a person is convinced that his state and need are as described, the New Testament gospel of grace cannot but sweep him off his feet with wonder and joy. For it tells how our judge has become our Savior.

am, and will be, “kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation”

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. Faith, both in its origin and continuance, is a gift of grace (see

It has been said that in the New Testament doctrine is grace, and ethics is gratitude; and something is wrong with any form of Christianity in which, experimentally and practically, this saying is not being verified.

The one basic certainty underlying all discussion of life’s problems in Job, Ecclesiastes and all the practical maxims of Proverbs is that “God will bring you to judgment,” “God will bring every deed into

But if we examine the New Testament, even in the most cursory way, we find at once that the Old Testament emphasis on God’s action as judge, far from being reduced, is actually intensified.

so that the judge does not make the laws he administers;

He is both the Lawgiver and the judge.

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

There are no mistrials. No one gets off the hook. If you don't own a suit they still put you in one when you come to court. They want the people to see you, in a more favorable light than what normally shines on you. It's an honest cleaning up of the image, but it still deceptive, even if not done maliciously. These things may work on people but not on God.