Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

Where can we find wisdom? What steps must a person take to lay hold of this gift? There are two prerequisites, according to Scripture.

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.

His word relates both to things around us and to us directly: God speaks both to determine our environment and to engage our minds and hearts.

The word which God addresses directly to us is (like a royal speech, only more so) an instrument, not only of government, but also of fellowship.

though God is a great king, it is not his wish to live at a distance from his subjects.

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

summing up, from the believer’s standpoint, of what the whole revelation set forth in Scripture tells us about its Author. This statement presupposes all the rest of the biblical witness to God.

the true condition of acceptable worship is not that your feet should be standing in either Jerusalem or Samaria, or anywhere else for that matter, but that your heart should be receptive and responsive to his revelation. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24 RSV).

God is love to us—holy, omnipotent love—at every moment and in every event of every day’s life. 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.

the love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused. God loves people because he has chosen to love them—as Charles Wesley put it, “he hath loved us, he hath loved us, because he would love” (an echo of Deut 7:7-8)—and no reason for his love can be given except his own sovereign good pleasure.

The New Testament writers constantly point to the cross of Christ as the crowning proof of the reality and boundlessness of God’s love.

It is repeatedly pointed out in books and sermons that the Greek New Testament word for grace (charis), like that for love (agapē), is a wholly Christian usage, expressing a notion of spontaneous, self-determined kindness which was previously quite unknown to Greco-Roman ethics and theology.

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.

“No one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law,” declares Paul (Rom 3:20). To mend our own relationship with God, regaining God’s favor after having once lost it, is beyond the power of any one of us. And one must see and bow to this before one can share the biblical faith in God’s grace.

The God of the Bible does not depend on his human creatures for his well-being (see Ps 50:8-13; Acts 17:25), nor, now that we have sinned, is he bound to show us favor.

Moral indifference would be an imperfection in God, not a perfection. But not to judge the world would be to show moral indifference. The final proof that God is a perfect moral Being, not indifferent to questions of right and wrong, is the fact that he has committed himself to judge the world.

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; see Romans 2:12 and Luke 12:47-48. 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.

“A study of the concordance will show that there are more references in Scripture to the anger, fury, and wrath of God, than there are to His love and tenderness” (A. W. Pink, The Attributes of God, p. 75).

God’s wrath in the Bible is always judicial—that is, it is the wrath of the Judge, administering justice.

the key to interpreting the many biblical passages (often highly figurative) which picture the divine King and Judge as active against us in wrath and vengeance is to realize that what God is hereby doing is no more than to ratify and confirm judgments which those whom he “visits” have already passed on themselves by the course they have chosen to follow. 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.

“Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness.” The Christians at Rome are not to dwell on God’s goodness alone, nor on his severity alone, but to contemplate both together. Both are attributes of God—aspects, that is, of his revealed character. Both appear alongside each other in the economy of grace. Both must be acknowledged together if God is to be truly known.

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.

Those who decline to respond to God’s goodness by repentance, and faith, and trust, and submission to his will, cannot wonder or complain if sooner or later the tokens of his goodness are withdrawn, the opportunity of benefiting from them ends, and retribution supervenes.

The reason why God uses these terms to speak to us about himself is that language drawn from our own personal life is the most accurate medium we have for communicating thoughts about him.

From these passages we see plainly what God meant by telling Moses that his name was “Jealous.” He meant that he demands from those whom he has loved and redeemed utter and absolute loyalty, and he will vindicate his claim by stern action against them if they betray his love by unfaithfulness.

God’s jealousy over his people, as we have seen, presupposes his covenant love; and this love is no transitory affection, accidental and aimless, but is the expression of a sovereign purpose. 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.

“I am the LORD; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols.” “For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed? I will not yield my glory to another” (Is 42:8; 48:11). Here in these texts is the quintessence of the jealousy of God.

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.

Along with the other New Testament writers, Paul always points to the death of Jesus as the atoning event and explains the atonement in terms of representative substitution—the innocent taking the place of the guilty, in the name and for the sake of the guilty, under the axe of God’s judicial retribution.

the destiny of those who reject God. Universalists suppose that the class of people mentioned in this heading will ultimately have no members, but the Bible indicates otherwise. Decisions made in this life will have eternal consequences. “Do not be deceived” (as you would be if you listened to the universalists), “God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows” (Gal 6:7).

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.

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.

Sonship to God, then, is a gift of grace. It is not a natural but an adoptive sonship, and so the New Testament explicitly pictures it.

God has not left us to guess what his fatherhood amounts to by drawing analogies from human fatherhood. He revealed the full meaning of this relationship once and for all through our Lord Jesus Christ, his own incarnate Son.

God intends the lives of believers to be a reflection and reproduction of Jesus’ own fellowship with himself. Where can we learn about this? Chiefly from John’s Gospel and first epistle.

your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Mt 6:7-8). Second, prayer may be free and bold. We need not hesitate to imitate the sublime “cheek” of the child who is not afraid to ask his parents for anything, because he knows he can count completely on their love. “Ask and it will be given to you. . . . Everyone who asks receives. . . . If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” (Mt 7:7-11).

how can I help worrying, when I face this, and this, and this? To which Jesus’ reply is: Your faith is too small. Have you forgotten that God is your Father? “Look at the birds of the air; . . . your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (v. 26). If God cares for the birds, whose Father he is not, is it not plain that he will certainly care for you, whose Father he is? The point is put positively in verses 31-33: “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need [these things]. But seek first his [your Father’s] kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

“The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son. Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. . .

while it is certainly true that justification frees one forever from the need to keep the law, or try to, as the means of earning life, it is equally true that adoption lays on one the abiding obligation to keep the law, as the means of pleasing one’s newfound Father.

they remain anxious, because they are not certain of their own receptiveness to the guidance God offers.

Belief that divine guidance is real rests upon two foundation-facts: first, the reality of God’s plan for us; second, the ability of God to communicate with us.

“Teaching” means comprehensive instruction in doctrine and ethics, the work and will of God; “reproof,” “correction” and “training in righteousness” signify the applying of this instruction to our disordered lives; “equipped [ready] for every good work”—that is, a life set to go God’s way—is the promised result.

the true way to honor the Holy Spirit as our guide is to honor the holy Scriptures through which he guides us. The fundamental guidance which God gives to shape our lives—the instilling, that is, of the basic convictions, attitudes, ideals and value judgments, in terms of which we are to live—is not a matter of inward promptings apart from the Word but of the pressure on our consciences of the portrayal of God’s character and will in the Word, which the Spirit enlightens us to understand and apply to ourselves.

The Spirit leads within the limits which the Word sets, not beyond them. “He guides me in paths of righteousness” (Ps 23:3)—but not anywhere else.

unwillingness to suspect oneself. We dislike being realistic with ourselves, and we do not know ourselves at all well; we can recognize rationalizations in others and quite overlook them in ourselves. “Feelings” with an ego-boosting, or escapist, or self-indulging, or self-aggrandizing base must be detected and discredited, not mistaken for guidance.

We need to ask ourselves why we “feel” a particular course to be right, and to make ourselves give reasons—and we shall be wise to lay the case before someone else whose judgment we trust, to give a verdict on our reasons.

unwillingness to wait. “Wait on the Lord” is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting.

God does not make their circumstances notably easier; rather the reverse. Dissatisfaction recurs over wife, or husband, or parents, or in-laws, or children, or colleagues or neighbors. Temptations and bad habits which their conversion experience seemed to have banished for good reappear. As the first great waves of joy rolled over them during the opening weeks of their Christian experience, they had really felt that all problems had solved themselves, but now they see that it was not so, and that the trouble-free life which they were promised has not materialized. Things which got them down before they were Christians are threatening to get them down again. What are they to think now?

as they grow stronger, and are able to bear more, he exercises them in a tougher school. He exposes them to as much testing by the pressure of opposed and discouraging influences as they are able to bear—not more (see the promise, 1 Cor 10:13), but equally not less (see the admonition, Acts 14:22). Thus he builds our character, strengthens our faith, and prepares us to help others. Thus he crystallizes our sense of values. Thus he glorifies himself in our lives, making his strength perfect in our weakness.

He wants us to grow in Christ, not to stay babes in Christ.