One of my favorite books of all time is J.I. Packer’s Knowing God. There are many reasons that I put it near the top of my list, not the least of which is timing.
I was never much of a reader until I became a Christian. I scarcely opened a book after I graduated from college, and when I did it was always in the self-help genre. I’d read parenting books, marriage books and anything that I thought was useful or beneficial to me, about me.
I suppose I felt like I had some catching up to do if I was going to participate in Biblical conversations, and the best way to get there was to read my way up the ladder. You can imagine how frustrated I was reading my way through all of the latest best sellers from today’s Christian bookstores. I read them all; “Purpose driven this,” “Crazy-Wild-Radical that,” you name it, I read it, “For Real.” There I was again, reading self-help books. Not much had changed except for the occasional Bible verse to help drive home the author’s point. Then one day I stumbled across J.I. Packer and it would ultimately change everything I read from that point forward. I realized that there were books out there written exclusively about God. It was exactly what I needed. With chapters like; The Majesty of God, The Wrath of God, and The Adequacy of God this book had nothing that would help me be a better me. This book was about God, our creator, and there was so much I didn’t know. The fourth question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism might not be as lengthy as Packer’s book, but it does get you closer to knowing God as it teaches us what God is. Q.4. What is God?
A.4. God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.
God is a spirit. While we tend to assign anthropomorphic qualities to God, we must always understand the enormous chasm between the creator and the creation. We cannot fully understand an infinite God with our finite minds. He does not have arms or gray hair. He does not get sick or tired. Yes, we have words in the Bible that talk about the face of God but we must understand that this is a limitation on the part of words and doesn’t restrict God into the confinement of a face. God must condescend in order that we may know anything about him at all. We see this throughout scripture as we read Heaven described as a City or likened to a feast. We simply don’t have a frame of reference to understand God as he truly is. That is why we should focus on His attributes, plainly revealed, else we run the risk of creating a god of our own imagination.
Looking at the rest of the answer gives us some small insight for understanding God by breaking it down into two sections. •God’s attributes – His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. •The nature of those attributes – infinite, eternal and unchangeable. Each of the attributes has all of the natures, both individually and simultaneously. I’ll spare you the redundancy of going through all of the combinations of applying the nature of each attribute to the attribute itself, but I will elaborate on one to explain. God’s wisdom is infinite. It is not limited to any one subject or realm of understanding. It has no boundaries that cannot be breached. God’s wisdom is eternal. The infinite wisdom of God has always been. Eternality is such a difficult concept for humans, but it is real. God’s wisdom didn’t start on the pages of scripture, nor did it end there. God’s wisdom is unchangeable. He isn’t learning anything new today, nor is he forgetting things from a few thousand years ago. The culture might determine how we see the world, but it doesn’t change God’s mind about what he’s revealed to us. There is so much more to God than we can aspire to understand, and we shouldn’t labor under the illusion that the Bible contains all that there is to know. Scripture is what God has chosen to reveal to us, and there’s a fine line between revelation and imagination. It is right to seek to know God, but foolish to think you can know Him fully. "We do then conceive most rightly of God, when we acknowledge him to be unconceivable; and therefor one being asked the question, what is God? answered rightly; If I fully knew that, I should be a God myself; for God only knows." – John Flavel
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