Knowing God by J. I. Packer - "God's Wisdom and Ours" (Chapter 10)

Knowing God by J. I. Packer
“God’s Wisdom and Ours” (Chapter 10)

The Attributes of God

• Incommunicable Attributes
• Communicable Attributes

When God made man, he communicated to him certain qualities corresponding to his moral attributes. This is what the Bible means when it tells us that God made man in his own image (Gen 1:26-27).

Moral Qualities of the Divine Image:

• Lost at the Fall
• Being Renewed through Redemption
• Fully Restored at Glorification

Among these communicable attributes, the theologians put wisdom. As God is wise in himself, so he imparts wisdom to his creatures.

Where can we find wisdom?

1. We must learn to reverence God.
2. We must learn to receive God’s word.

What Wisdom Is Not

Wisdom is not “a deepened insight into the providential meaning and purpose of events going on around us, an ability to see why God has done what he has done in a particular case, and what he is going to do next.” – J. I. Packer

This incorrect view of wisdom from God may lead to:

• Disappointment
• Disillusionment
• Depression

Realism Needed

Wisdom is like driving. “What matters in driving is the speed and appropriateness of your reactions to things and the soundness of your judgment as to what scope a situation gives you… you simply try to see and do the right thing in the actual situation that presents itself. The effect of divine wisdom is to enable you and me to do just that in the actual situations of everyday life.” – J. I. Packer

What Ecclesiastes Teaches Us

The pursuit of wisdom does not provide an understanding of “the reasons of God’s various doings in the ordinary course of providence.” – J. I. Packer

“...the real basis of wisdom is a frank acknowledgment that this world’s course is enigmatic, that much of what happens is quite inexplicable to us, and that most occurrences ‘under the sun’ bear no outward sign of a rational, moral God ordering them at all.” – J. I. Packer

“God’s ordering of events is inscrutable; much as you want to make it out, you cannot do so. The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed and oppressed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything, and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks.” – J. I. Packer

“...the truth is that God in his wisdom, to make and keep us humble and to teach us to walk by faith, has hidden from us almost everything that we should like to know about the providential purposes which he is working out in the churches and in our own lives.” – J. I. Packer

What Is Wisdom Then?

• “Fear God and keep his commandments”
• Trust and obey him
• Reverence him
• Worship him
• Be humble before him
• Mean what you say when you pray to him
• Do good
• Remember God will hold you to account
• Eschew things you will be ashamed of
• Live in the present and enjoy God’s gifts
• Seek grace to work hard at whatever life calls you to do
• Enjoy your work as you do it
• Leave providence and the measure of the worth of your deeds to God
• Take advantage of the opportunities that lie before you

What grounds and sustains this way of wisdom?

• The conviction that the inscrutable God of providence is the wise and gracious God of creation and redemption
• We can trust him and rejoice in him, even when we cannot discern his path.

The Fruit of Wisdom

• Wisdom consists in choosing the best means to the best end.
• God’s gift of wisdom to us is part of the process of restoring the relationship between himself and human beings.
• This wisdom is not a sharing in all his knowledge, but a disposition to confess that he is wise, and to cleave to him and live for him in the light of his Word through thick and thin.
• Thus the effect of his gift of wisdom is to make us more humble, more joyful, more godly, more quick-sighted as to his will, more resolute in the doing of it and less troubled.
• The fruit of wisdom is Christlikeness—peace, and humility, and love—and the root of it is faith in Christ as the manifested wisdom of God.

“Thus, the kind of wisdom that God waits to give to those who ask him is a wisdom that will bind us to himself, a wisdom that will find expression in a spirit of faith and a life of faithfulness.” – J. I. Packer