Packer God's Plans for You

1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1737-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Dr. J. I. Packer offers biblical reflections on life's tough issues. Discussing topics like pleasure, health, disappointment, and holiness, he maps out problematic situations and then superimposes relevant biblical teachings.

J. I. Packer (1926-2020) served as the Board of Governors' Professor of Theology at Regent College. He authored numerous books, including the classic bestseller Knowing God. Packer also served as general editor for the English Standard Version Bible and as theological editor for the ESV Study Bible.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Packer, J. I.

Leseproben

2
THE PLAN OF GOD
The Basic Christian Orientation

IS THERE A PLAN?

People today feel lost and astray. Modern art, poetry, and novels, or five minutes’ conversation with any sensitive person will assure us of that. It may seem odd that this is so in an era when we have more control over the forces of nature than ever before. But it really is not. It is God’s judgment, which we have brought down on ourselves by trying to feel too much at home in this world.

For that is what we have done. We refuse to believe that one should live for something more than this present life. Even if we suspect the materialists are wrong in denying that God and another world exist, we have not allowed our belief to keep us from living on materialistic principles. We have treated this world as if it were the only home we shall ever possess and have concentrated exclusively on arranging it for our comfort. We thought we could build heaven on earth.

Now God has judged us for our impiety. During the past century we had two “hot” world wars and one “cold” one, the latter in some respects still continuing. We find ourselves today in the age of nuclear warfare, racism, tribalism, global racketeering, torture, terrorism, and all sorts of brainwashing. In such a world it is not possible to feel at home. It is a world that has disappointed us. We expected life to be friendly. Instead, it has mocked our hopes and left us disillusioned and frustrated. We thought we knew what to make of life. Now we are baffled as to whether anything can ever be made of it. We thought of ourselves as wise men. Now we find ourselves like benighted children, lost in the dark.

Sooner or later this was bound to happen. God’s world is never friendly to those who forget its Maker. The Buddhists, who link their atheism with a thorough pessimism about life, are to that extent correct. Without God, man loses his bearings in this world. He cannot find them again until he has found the One whose world it is. It is natural that nonbelievers feel their existence is pointless and miserable. We should not wonder when these bitter, frustrated souls turn to drugs and drink or when teenagers respond to the traumatic chaos around them by committing suicide. God made life, and God alone can tell us its meaning. If we are to make sense of life in this world, then, we must know about God. And if we want to know about God, we must turn to the Bible.

READ THE BIBLE

So let us read the Bible—if we can. But can we? Many of us have lost the ability. When we open our Bibles, we do so in a frame of mind that forms an insurmountable barrier to reading it at all. This may sound startling, but it is true. Let me explain.

When you read a book, you treat it as a unit. You look for the plot or the main thread of the argument and follow it through to the end. You let the author’s mind lead yours. Whether or not you allow yourself to “dip” before settling down to absorb the book, you know that you will not have understood it till you have read it from start to finish. If it is a book that you want to master, you set aside time for a careful, unhurried journey through it.

But when we come to Holy Scripture, our behavior is different. To start with, we are not in the habit of treating it as a book—a unit—at all; we approach it simply as a collection of separate stories and sayings. We take it for granted that these items represent either moral advice or comfort for those in trouble. So we read the Bible in small doses, a few verses at a time. We do not go through individual books, let alone the two Testaments, as a single whole. We browse through the rich old Jacobean periods of the King James Version or the informalities of the New Living Translation, waiting for something to strike us. When the words bring a soothing thought or a pleasant picture, we believe the Bible has done its job. We have come to view the Bible not as a book, but as a collection of beautiful and suggestive snippets, and it is as such that we use it. The result is that, in the ordinary sense of “read,” we never read the Bible at all. We take it for granted that we are handling Holy Writ in the truly religious way, but this use of it is in fact merely superstitious. It is, I grant, the way of natural religiosity. But it is not the way of true religion.

God does not intend Bible reading to function simply as a drug for fretful minds. The reading of Scripture is intended to awaken our minds, not to send them to sleep. God asks us to approach Scripture as his Word—a message addressed to rational creatures, people with minds, a message we cannot expect to understand without thinking about it. “Come now, and let us reason together,” said God to Judah through Isaiah (Isa. 1:18 KJV), and he says the same to us every time we take up his book. He has taught us to pray for divine enlightenment as we read. “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18 KJV). This is a prayer for God to give us insight as we think about his Word. But we effectively prevent God from answering this prayer if after praying we blank out and stop thinking as we read.

God wants us to read the Bible as a book—a single story with a single theme. I am not forgetting that the Bible consists of many separate units (sixty-six to be exact) and that some of those units are themselves composites (such as the Psalter, which consists of 150 separate prayers and hymns). For all that, however, the Bible comes to us as the product of a single mind, the mind of God. It proves its unity over and over again by the amazing way it links together, one part throwing light on another part. So we should read it as a whole. And as we read, we are to ask: What is the plot of this book? What is its subject? What is it about? Unless we ask these questions, we will never see what it is saying to us about our lives.

When we reach this point, we shall find that God’s message to us is more drastic and at the same time more heartening than any that human religiosity could conceive.

THE MAIN THEME

What do we find when we read the Bible as a single, unified whole, with our minds alert to observe its real focus?

We find just this: The Bible is not primarily about man at all. Its subject is God. He (if the phrase may be allowed) is the chief actor in the drama, the hero of the story. The Bible is a factual survey of his work in this world—past, present, and future, with explanatory comments from prophets, psalmists, wise men, and apostles. Its main theme is not human salvation, but the work of God vindicating his purposes and glorifying himself in a sinful and disordered cosmos. He does this by establishing his kingdom and exalting his Son, by creating a people to worship and serve him, and ultimately by dismantling and reassembling this order of things, thereby rooting sin out of his world.

It is into this larger perspective that the Bible fits God’s work of saving men and women. It depicts God as more than a distant cosmic architect, or a ubiquitous heavenly uncle, or an impersonal life-force. God is more than any of the petty substitute deities that inhabit our twentieth-century minds. He is the living God, present and active everywhere, “glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders” (Exod. 15:11 KJV). He gives himself a name—Yahweh (Jehovah: see Exod. 3:14-15; 6:2-3), which, whether it be translated “I am that I am” or “I will be that I will be” (the Hebrew means both), is a proclamation of his self-existence and self-sufficiency, his omnipotence and his unbounded freedom.

This world is his, he made it, and he controls it. He works “all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11 KJV). His knowledge and dominion extend to the smallest things: “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30). “The Lord reigns”—the psalmists make this unchangeable truth the starting point for their praises again and again (see Ps. 93:1; 96:10; 97:1; 99:1). Though hostile forces rage and chaos threatens, God is King. Therefore his people are safe.

Such is the God of the Bible. And the Bible’s dominant conviction about him, a conviction proclaimed from Genesis to Revelation, is that behind and beneath all the apparent confusion of this world lies his plan. That plan concerns the perfecting of a people and the restoring of a world through the mediating action of Jesus Christ. God governs human affairs with this end in view. Human history is a record of the outworking of his purposes. History is in truth his story.

The Bible details the stages in God’s plan. God visited Abraham, led him into Canaan, and entered into a covenant relationship with him and his descendants—“an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. . . . I will be their God” (Gen. 17:7ff.). He gave Abraham a son. He turned Abraham’s family into a nation and led them out of Egypt into a land of their own. Over the centuries he prepared them and the Gentile world for the coming of the Savior-King, “who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God” (1 Pet. 1:20ff. KJV).

At last, “when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Gal. 4:4ff. KJV). The covenant promise to...