On Knowing God

The below is an excerpt from an email written for the congregation where I am one of the pastors.

Last Saturday, news broke over my social media feeds that J.I. Packer was, as some in his generation might well say, ‘promoted to glory’ on 17 July 2020, a few days shy of his 94th birthday.

One of the most influential evangelical theologians of the last 70 years, tributes have steadily poured forth in the days since, with one describing him as ‘saintly and sensible, brilliant and practical, faithful and peaceable, courageous and charitable, cheerful and serene, blunt and gentle, humble and bold, submissive to Scripture and sensitive to the Spirit’.

Even those who have never heard of J.I. Packer are arguably indebted to him, along with a few other significant figures in the years following the Second World War, who – in the providence of God – defended the Christian faith during a period when it might otherwise have been overtaken by swirling currents. Packer demonstrated the credibility of evangelical expressions of faith at a time when Christians were being made to feel they were committing intellectual and spiritual suicide because of their beliefs in the sovereignty of God, the authority and trustworthiness of Scripture, and the saving significance of the death of Christ.

I was working in the Christian bookshop in Southport in 1984 when his book, Keep in Step with the Spirit, first came out. It brought some much-needed clarity and charity at a time of confusion and contention, and we sold copies in the thousands. In later years, Packer served as general editor for the English Standard Version of the Bible, which many in our church use, a role he described as ‘the most important thing that I have ever done for the Kingdom’.

But the book for which he is most well-known, and which is rightly hailed as a ‘classic’ is Knowing God, first published in 1973. I pulled my copy off the shelf earlier today and a card fell out, reminding me that it was a gift from a friend on the date of my baptism (12 September 1982).

I confess I didn’t understand all of it when I first read it, but it was rich, and there was no escaping its central message – knowledge about God is no substitute for knowing God himself. As Packer says early on in the book: ‘if we pursue theological knowledge for its own sake, it is bound to go bad on us [...] Our aim in studying the Godhead must be to know God himself better. Our concern must be to enlarge our acquaintance, not simply with the doctrine of God’s attributes, but with the living God whose attributes they are.’

I needed that prompt at the start of my Christian life, and I need it still. Perhaps you do, too. Perhaps we need it as a church, given that we have just finished a series on ‘What’s so great about God?’, exploring some of the attributes of God. How easy it would be to fall into the trap of thinking that what really matters is knowledge about God, rather than knowledge of God. Packer’s advice, still good today, is that ‘we turn each truth that we learn about God into matter for meditation before God, leading to prayer and praise to God’.

Leaving the last word to him: ‘Godliness means responding to God’s revelation in trust and obedience, faith and worship, prayer and praise, submission and service. Life must be seen and lived in the light of God’s Word. This, and nothing else, is true religion.’