Packer Quotes

Quotes from Knowing God…

“When Paul says he counts the things he lost rubbish, or dung (KJV), he means not merely that he does not think of them as having any value, but also that he does not live with them constantly in his mind: what normal person spends his time nostalgically dreaming of manure?  Yet this, in effect, is what many of us do.  It shows how little we have in the way of true knowledge of God (p. 25).”

“Ninety years ago C. H. Spurgeon described the wobblings he then saw among the Baptists on Scripture, atonement and human destiny as ‘the downgrade.’  Could he survey Protestant thinking about God at the present time, I guess he would speak of ‘the nosedive’ (p. 13)!”

“Do we desire such knowledge of God?  The two things follow.  First, we must recognize how much we lack knowledge of God.  We must learn to measure ourselves, not by our knowledge about God, not by our gifts and responsibilities in the church, but by how we pray and what goes on in our hearts.  Many of us, I suspect, have no idea how impoverished we are at this level.  Let us ask the Lord to show us (p. 32).”

 

On the Kingdom of God…

A quote from Christopher J. H. Wright in his book Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament…

So when Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God, he was not talking about a place or an idea or an attitude.  It was not just pie in the sky nor joy in the heart.  The reality of God’s rule cannot be spiritualized into heaven (now or later) or privatized into individuals.  Now of course it does  have spiritual and personal dimensions which are fundamental also.  But the term itself speaks of the aligning of human life on earth with the will of the divine government of God.

‘Heaven rules’, said Daniel – on earth.  And the rule of the God of heaven demands a repentance that puts things right in the social realm as much as in personal humility (Dan. 4:26-7).  Jesus cannot have meant any less.  Espcially since his declared agenda, taken as we saw in its precise wording from Isaiah 61, could as easily have been taken from [Psalm 146] – a Psalm celebrating Yahweh’s kingship in specific terms related to human needs and social evils.

To enter the Kingdom of God means to submit oneself to the rule of God and that means a fundamental reorientation of one’s ethical commitments and values into line with the priorities and character of the God revealed in the scriptures.  The point of being Israel and living as the people of Yahweh was to make the universal reign of God local and visible in their whole structure of religious, social, economic and political life.  They were to manifest in practical reality what it meant to live as well as sing, ‘the Lord reigns’ (pp 247-48).

 

A Small Child’s Draw to God

I was listening to Andrew Davis’ sermon in Matthew 19:13-15.  He quoted this wonderful insight about small children and their desire to know and be open to God (Andrew did not give the author):

As the flower in the garden stretches toward the light of the sun, so there is in the child a mysterious inclination toward the eternal light.  Have you ever noticed this mysterious thing that when you tell the smallest child about God, the child never asks with strangeness and wonder, “Who is God; I have never seen him,” but listens with a shining face to the words as though they were soft loving sounds from the land of home?

Or when you teach a child to fold its little hands in prayer it does this as though it was just a matter of course. As though there were an opening for that child of that world of which the child has been dreaming and longing with anticipation.

“but Jesus said, ‘Let the children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt. 19:14).”