Written by Kevin J. Vanhoozer |
Tuesday, November 2, 2021
This is the primary benefit of knowing Packer: not to become more like him, but to be inspired to become more like Christ. Every pilgrim needs words to sustain us in the journey. The benefit of knowing Packer is having a wise, godly, and winsome companion along the way.

I first met J. I. Packer in Cambridge in the mid-1980s when I was a doctoral student at Cambridge University. He was already J. I. Packer, the elder statesman of evangelical theology—and had been for some time. Knowing God had been published in 1973 and was by then an established bestseller. It was also the first book I gave to the woman who would later become my wife (C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was the second). It proved to be an apt choice: Packer is one of the handful of authors I’ve met who lived up to, and in his case surpassed, the mental image I had constructed through reading his works.
Packer had come to Cambridge to give a lecture at Tyndale House, a study center for evangelical biblical scholars. That in itself was impressive, as Jim was decidedly an Oxford man. He obtained all his degrees, including his doctorate, from Oxford University and later served as warden of Latimer House, the Oxford counterpart of Tyndale House. He later moved from Oxford to Trinity College, Bristol, and eventually to Regent College, Vancouver, where he taught theology from 1979 to 2016, long after his official retirement.
The topic of Packer’s Tyndale House address was biblical authority and hermeneutics. This quickened my heartbeat, for I had come to Cambridge to answer the question, “What does it mean to be biblical when we speak about God?” I had learned that there was no easy way around the challenge of the plurality of interpretations, in which everyone, or at least every denomination, finds in the Bible what they think is right in their own eyes. Packer clearly understood the problem and faced up to it. That alone was significant. But there was more to come.
For half a century, J. I. Packer’s classic has helped Christians around the world discover the wonder, the glory, and the joy of knowing God.
Stemming from Packer’s profound theological knowledge, Knowing God brings together two key facets of the Christian faith—knowing about God and knowing God through a close relationship with Jesus Christ. Written in an engaging and practical tone, this thought-provoking work seeks to renew and enrich our understanding of God.
Named by Christianity Today as one of the top 50 books that have shaped evangelicals, Knowing God is now among the iconic books featured in the IVP Signature Collection. A new companion Bible study is also available to help readers explore these biblical themes for themselves.
Packer engaged the big names in 20th-century hermeneutics—Bultmann, Heidegger, Fuchs, and Gadamer—and assessed their significance for coming to know God via biblical interpretation. He then went on to set out an evangelical hermeneutic, laying special weight on the importance of the Holy Spirit’s work as illuminator and interpreter. After his lecture, I asked him about deconstruction, the latest challenge to biblical interpretation at the time. He confessed that he did not know a lot about it, but said that he was interested. “My windows are open,” he commented.
And then he said something to the effect of “That’s for you and your generation to handle.” I got the distinct impression that he was passing the baton. I have been running ever since. That handoff symbolized how the church always relays the faith—from one person to the next. It also had a formative influence on the eventual shape of my dissertation, my calling, and much of my subsequent work.
Packer’s Knowing God is not about hermeneutics, but actually knowing God. Packer divides it into three sections: why we should know God, what God is like, and the benefits of knowing God. It is only fitting that I structure my introduction in the same way: why readers should get to know Packer, what Packer’s books are like, and the benefits of reading Packer.
Why Knowing Packer Matters
Packer liked to describe himself as, above all else, a catechist: someone who instructs others in the Christian faith and life. A catechist need not be an academic. By definition, however, a catechist must be an ecclesial theologian, someone whose teaching builds up the church, one disciple at a time. Packer’s catechetical fingerprints are all over To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism (2020), an Anglican Church in North America project for which he served as theological editor, and which he wryly referred to as “Packer’s Last Crusade.”
As Packer elsewhere points out, Christianity is not instinctive to anyone. It is learned not on the street but in the pew. The content of the Christian faith—what the apostle Paul calls the “good deposit” (2 Tim. 1:14), what accords with sound doctrine, or what Packer calls the “Great Tradition”—is handed from one generation to the next. A Christian catechism teaches people everything they need to know in order to be a Christ-follower. Doctrine and discipleship fit hand in glove: action without doctrine is blind; doctrine without action is dead.
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When you believe God, he counts it to you as righteousness, as full acceptance from God himself. And when you believe God, it leads to the Isaac-laughter of inexpressible joy as you at last see God do for you what he has promised. And when you believe God, you will share inexpressible joy with a host of others who, because you believed, will be laughing in joy with you.

Had you been there that very moment, watching from a distance, you wouldn’t have observed anything dramatic. I’m talking about the moment Abraham (still called Abram at the time) stepped out of his tent and gazed into the heavens, looking at the stars.
You may have heard him muttering something or other, perhaps at some point raising his hands or bowing to the ground. These gestures wouldn’t have seemed out of character to you because everyone knew Abram was a deeply pious man. And being tired, since it was the middle of the night and all, you probably would have left Abram to whatever he was doing and headed to bed.
You would not have known that this was a defining moment in Abram’s life. You certainly wouldn’t have guessed this was a defining moment in world history that would impact billions of people. Because it would have seemed so undramatic.
But that’s the way moments like these — moments that powerfully direct and shape the arc of history — often appear at first. And in this case, what made the world-changing minutes of stargazing so quietly monumental was that this old man, in the deep recesses of his heart, believed God.
Pushed Nearly Beyond Belief
To understand the profundity of this defining moment, however, we need to see how this old man’s belief had been pushed to the very brink.
It all began in Genesis 12, where God delivered to Abram a promise that would have been incredible on its own, quite apart from the fact that Abram, at age 75, and Sarai, at age 66, as yet had no children:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1–3)
So, “by faith Abraham obeyed,” packing up his household and setting out, though “not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8). And when he and his small tribe arrived at Shechem, God spoke to him again and said, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:7).
Time passed. God’s blessing rested on Abram and his tribe, which included his nephew Lot’s household, and their combined possessions and herds grew larger — so large, in fact, that Abram and Lot had to separate into two tribes. Still, Abram had no offspring — the key to the fulfillment of the Lord’s greatest promise to him. Nonetheless, the Lord once again affirmed his promise (Genesis 13:14–16).
More time passed. God continued to prosper whatever Abram did. And once again, the Lord appeared to him and said,
Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great. (Genesis 15:1)
But for Abram, now in his eighties, and Sarai in her seventies, there was still the same glaring problem. Amid all the abundant blessing of prosperity God had showered on him, there was one conspicuous, crucial place of poverty: Abram still had no offspring.
Desperate Prayer of a Man of Faith
It was at this point that Abram could not contain his anguished perplexity over the ongoing void at the core of God’s promises, and it poured out in a desperate prayer.
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Written by Lucy S.R. Austen |
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Elizabeth had seen God as a stern judge, waiting to penalize anyone who failed to understand his direction. Instead, A Slow and Certain Light describes him as a guide “who has been there before and knows the way,” who can be trusted not to let us wander off and get lost. It characterizes him as a good shepherd, “the God who carries lambs in his arms.”

Seeking God’s Will
Of the many books Elisabeth Elliot wrote, her best-known is surely her first, Through Gates of Splendor. The 1957 multibiography is first and foremost a narrative of how five families came together to plan a missionary approach to a little-known people group in rural Ecuador, and how the plan ended in the deaths of five of the missionaries, including Elliot’s husband Jim. But the book is also an exposition of the then-twenty-nine-year-old Elliot’s beliefs about the will of God.
The first mention of God’s guidance appears just a page into the book, and his clear leading is described again less than a page from the end. In between, God’s will is characterized as covering both the big picture (“Christ said, ‘Go ye’; their answer was ‘Lord, send me.’”1) and the individual details (“He asked God specifically to show him his next move.”2) We see God’s will discovered through prayer, Bible reading, circumstances, and the impressions of the inner self.

This biography takes readers on an in-depth journey through the life of Elisabeth Elliot—her marriage to Jim Elliot, her years of international missions work, and her prolific career as a writer and speaker.

Seeking and obeying the will of God had been a constant emphasis throughout Elliot’s life. She had grown up in a world saturated in the Keswick Holiness tradition, with its stress on giving the whole person, inside and out, to God. She took this teaching seriously, responding to an altar call for salvation at age ten and another at twelve to make clear her commitment to God’s will for her life. Her letters home from boarding school and college reflect this focus; they are liberally sprinkled with requests for prayer that God’s will for her time at school be fulfilled, that she can have the strength to attain all that God has for her, that she be preserved from mistaking God’s guidance and stepping out of his plan for her life.
The fear of missing God’s direction caused Elliot much grief. A letter to her mother written not long after her college graduation shows her understanding of God’s will in greater detail:
More than anything else in the world I fear myself. I can trust God to be unchangingly faithful—I could trust Him to keep me and guide me if I could honestly say I desire nothing save His own, complete will. But how do I know that that is all I desire? How can I know a heart that is deceitful above all things and DESPERATELY WICKED? God judges those who are disobedient. We must suffer. Oh, suppose I should, by allowing feeling to overcome faith, miss His direction? Why must I struggle thro’ a maze of thought and feeling which spring from myself and my own soul, in order to reach Him? These are the thoughts that continually recur.3

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