God Has Spoken

J.I. Packer

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473637085
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

J. I. Packer maintains that anyone who wants to know God will want to know as much as they can of what is in the Bible. For through it God reveals himself and his purpose to us; and in it we discover his fellowship and grace. Packer presents the case for reliability of the Bible and urges us to return with open hearts to reading God's word, and to discovering its overwhelming power in our lives.This challenging sequel to Knowing God is a great resource for the Christian journey.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION (1979)

The first version of this book was published in 1965, in a series called Christian Foundations. The series was by Anglicans for Anglicans, which is why so much Anglican matter was deployed in my text. The present revised and enlarged reissue is less specifically Anglican in its angle, though its demonstration of the Bible-based, Bible-oriented character of the Church of England formularies (the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the Homilies attested in Article 35) remains intact, as a testimony to my fellow-Anglicans of where their true roots are. Material from other traditions, is, however, freely used as well. Positions taken in 1965 are maintained, so far as I am aware, unchanged, but some of them are now amplified, illustrated and applied in a way that restrictions of length previously forbade.

My aim throughout is to prepare the minds of thinking Christian people to read and study their Bibles as Christians should. That aim determines both the contents and the spirit of what I now write.

 

ENJOYING YOUR BIBLE

A very helpful wayfarer’s introduction to Bible study is John Blanchard’s Enjoy your Bible. His title has a history: it belonged first to a book of a generation ago by the late G. Harding Wood, written to do essentially the same job, and it echoes the title of another fine book which went the rounds a generation before that, Harrington C. Lees’ The Joy of Bible Study (1909). You see the emphasis: what is being highlighted is the prospect of pleasure through coming closer to the Scripture. And this emphasis is right. Pleasure, unalloyed and unending, is God’s purpose for His people in every aspect and activity of their fellowship with Him. ‘You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand’ (Ps. 16:11).

I hold the heady doctrine that no pleasures are so frequent or intense as those of the grateful, devoted, single-minded, whole-hearted, self-denying Christian. I maintain that the delights of work and leisure, of friendship and family, of eating and mating, of arts and crafts, of playing and watching games, of finding out and making things, of helping other people, and all the other noble pleasures that life affords, are doubled for the Christian; for, as the cheerful old Puritans used to say (no, sir, that is not a misprint, nor a Freudian lapse; I mean Puritans – the real, historical Puritans, as distinct from the smug sourpusses of last-century Anglo-American imagination), the Christian tastes God in all his or her pleasures, and this increases them, whereas for other people pleasure brings with it a sense of hollowness which reduces it. Also, I maintain that every encounter between the sincere Christian and God’s word, ‘the law from your mouth’ (Ps. 119:72), however harrowing or humbling its import, brings joy as its spin-off, just as Blanchard, Wood and Lees imply, and the keener the Christian the greater the joy.

I know for myself what it is to enjoy the Bible – that is, to be glad at finding God and being found by Him in and through the Bible; I know by experience why the psalmist called God’s message of promise and command his delight (Ps. 119:16, 24, 35, 47, 70, 77, 92, 143, 174 – nine times!) and his joy (vs. 111, cf. 14, 162; Ps. 19:8), and why he said that he loved it (Ps. 119:47, 48, 97, 113, 119, 127, 140, 159, 163, 167 – ten times!); I have proved, as have others, that as good food yields pleasure as well as nourishment, so does the good word of God. So I am all for Christians digging into their Bibles with expectations of enjoyment, and I applaud these writers for highlighting the prospect of joy to counter the common idea that Bible study is bound to be dry and dull. But for all that a balancing point needs, I think, to be made.

What is enjoyment? Essentially, it is a by-product: a contented, fulfilled state which comes from concentrating on something other than enjoying yourself. If enjoyment, as such, is your aim, you can expect to miss it, for you are disregarding the conditions of it. Pleasure-seeking, as we learn by experience, is a barren business; happiness is never found till we have the grace to stop looking for it, and to give our attention to persons and matters external to ourselves. In this case, Bible study will only give enjoyment if conforming to our Creator in belief and behaviour, through trust and obedience, is its goal. Bible study for our own pleasure rather than for God ends up giving pleasure neither to Him nor to us.

When Paul preached at Berea, the Jews there ‘received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true’ (Acts 17:11). The ‘word’ was the message of salvation for lost mankind through Jesus Christ alone – ‘there is no other name under heaven … by which we must be saved’; ‘believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved’ (4:12, 16:31). The ‘eagerness’ sprang, no doubt, from a sense that each man’s first need is to get clear on the issues of eternal destiny which the Gospel focuses and resolves. Such eagerness might nowadays be called ‘existential concern’, though ‘eagerness’ remains a clearer word for most people. The many Bereans who believed (Acts 17:12) doubtless testified afterwards to the joy of that spell of Bible study; what they undertook it for, however, was not joy as such, but certainty about God’s way of salvation, and their joy came from finding what they sought – even though it must have cut across their previous ideas, and brought them a sense of sin and shame and helplessness that they had not known before. So for us: what brings joy is finding God’s way, God’s grace and God’s fellowship through the Bible, even though again and again what the Bible says – that is, what God in the Bible tells us – knocks us flat.

Thus, the joy of Bible study is not the fun of collecting esoteric titbits about Gog and Magog, Tubal-cain and Methuselah, Bible numerics and the beast, and so on; nor is it the pleasure, intense for the tidy-minded, of analysing our translated text into preacher’s pretty patterns, with neatly numbered headings held together by apt alliteration’s artful aid. Rather, it is the deep contentment that comes of communing with the living Lord into whose presence the Bible takes us – a joy which only His own true disciples know.

 

SCRIPTURE AND SALVATION

In the last two paragraphs, as elsewhere in this book, I imply that our eternal destiny may depend on our attending to the Bible. In an age in which many do not attend to the Bible, some may find this implication at first blush incredible. So I had best come clean and face at once the question: do you really mean that? and are you really asking us to swallow it? The answer is yes, in the following sense.

First: in speaking of eternal destiny, I refer to that state of joy or grief beyond death of which I have learned from Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son, who rose from the dead, and about which the authors of the New Testament, whom I take to be God-inspired and therefore worthy of trust, all agree. I am talking not of survival as such, but of a future state in which we consciously reap what we have actually sown. The New Testament makes plain that this life, in which bodies grow and wear out while characters get fixed, is an ante-chamber, dressing-room and moral gymnasium where, whether we know it or not, we all in fact prepare ourselves for a future life which will correspond for each of us to what we have chosen to be, and will have in it more of joy for some and distress for others than this world ever knows. ‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad’ (2 Cor. 5:10).

Granted, secular fashion treats this life as the only life, and sees physical death as personal extinction, and cocks a snook at the notion of divine judgment. Granted, the self-absorbed passion for personal survival which pops up constantly in the modern West takes cranky and repellent forms. Granted, many Protestants (fewer Roman Catholics and Orthodox, to their credit) are so cowed by Marxist mockery of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, and so keen to string along with secular opinions, that they are no longer ready to tell anyone that life hereafter matters more than life here, and indeed they often themselves forget that this is actually so. (And what trouble that brings! Whenever God’s providential programme of preparing us to enjoy Him hereafter proves to include physical or mental disability, cruelty or injustice from others, poverty, pain or deprivation – what the realistic old Puritans called ‘losses and crosses’ – these Protestants are at once bewildered and thrown off balance, and turn out to be pastorally useless; for, as Hebrews 12:1-14 shows, it is only by reference to the life to come that these things make sense.) Granted, too, exponents of biblical other-worldliness sometimes feed it into a funk-hole theology in which action for abolishing injustice, altering demonic power structures, controlling use of natural resources and reforming social evils is never a duty; and we cannot wonder if those who see these as obligatory concerns feel hostile to the doctrine which, as they think, teaches neglect of them. So anyone facing either the typical irreligion or the typical religion of the contemporary West might well feel uncertain and suspicious at any mention of the life beyond.

But wise persons will discount the emotional and reactionary element in their immediate thinking, and take seriously the sustained witness of Jesus and His apostles to the world to come, in which the abiding consequences of choices and commitments made here will be revealed and received. ‘God “will give to each person according to what he has done”. To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honour and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who … follow evil, there will be wrath and anger’ (Rom. 2:6-8). Wise persons will keep in view this truth, which their own conscience will confirm to them if they let it speak, and will not let themselves fall victim to reactionary scepticism, even if others around them do so. Wise people know that reaction is never a sure guide to what is right and true.

Second: when I speak of attending to the Bible, I do so in terms of a distinction between its content, the message it embodies, and its outward form as a book now standing on your shelf or lying on your desk or by your bed. Having drawn the distinction, I can say at once that what determines our destiny is whether in our hearts we accept or reject the message of the Bible, and that message can be savingly received through liturgy, sermons, literature or conversations without ever reading the Bible for oneself. Christians who lived before the age of printed books, Christians who lived and died in illiteracy, and Roman Catholic Christians of the bad old days who were told that a vernacular Bible is a Protestant book, and lay study of it a Protestant vice which good Catholics eschew, and who believed this, but yet loved the Lord Jesus, are all proof of our point. God in His mercy will give understanding of His truth, knowledge of Christ and spiritual life, to any who sincerely seek Him, irrespective of the means by which His truth reaches them. So it is not absolutely necessary for salvation that one must read and study the biblical text. It would be gross superstition to think there is saving magic in the mere reading of the text where understanding and faith are lacking; it would be equally superstitious to suppose that God withholds grace from folk who know the Christian facts but, for whatever reason, fail to read the Bible for themselves.

Yet, as contemporary Roman Catholicism no less than historic Protestant evangelicalism knows and urges, one who fails to read the Bible is at an enormous disadvantage. Rightly are Bible reading and Bible-based meditation seen as prime means of grace. Not only is Scripture the fountain-head for knowledge of God, Christ and salvation, but it presents this knowledge in an incomparably vivid, powerful and evocative way. The canonical Scriptures are a veritable book of life, showing us God in relation to the most dramatic human crises (births, sicknesses, deaths, loves, losses, wars, falls, risks, disasters, failures, victories), the most elemental human emotions (joy, grief, love, hate, hope, fear, pain, anger, shame, awe) and the most basic human relationships (to parents, spouses, children, friends, neighbours, civil authorities, enemies, fellow-believers). Purely as man-to-man communication, simple, economical, imaginative, logical, Scripture is superb; it is no wonder that during the present century it has been the world’s best-seller. On top of that, the fellowship of God with us humans to which it testifies is the most momentous reality we can ever know, and the power of the Bible in its readers’ lives, a power springing both from its precious subject-matter and from its unique divine inspiration, is overwhelming.

The godly old Puritans called Scripture a ‘cordial’, meaning that it does for the soul what hot spirits do for the body, and everyone who reads the Bible seeking God finds this to be true. Scripture, which on the face of it is human witness to God, a compendium of sixty-six items put together over more than a millennium, proves itself to be God’s authentic word by mediating God’s presence, power and personal address to us in and by its record of men’s knowledge of Him long ago. Still, as on the Emmaus road, nothing brings such balm and such a glow to the sad heart as to find that some part of Scripture, written centuries ago, nonetheless deals with precisely one’s own personal problem, and that central to its resolution of that problem is the abiding reality of the person, place, work and grace of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (cf. Lk. 24:13-35). Still, through the records of His earthly ministry, the quickening voice of Christ Himself is heard. Still, through the written word,

He speaks, and, listening to his voice,

New life the dead receive;

The mournful, broken hearts rejoice,

The humble poor believe.

Clearly, then, anyone who wants to know God will want to know as much as he or she can of what is in the Bible, and needs to know it too. Clearly, therefore, anyone who cannot read the Bible stands to forfeit a great deal of knowledge and of joy. Equally clearly, professed Christians who are able to dig into the Bible but neglect to do so cast doubt on their own sincerity; for inattention to Scripture is right out of character for a child of God.

Third: when I say that our attitude to the Bible (attention or inattention; compliance or defiance; acceptance or rejection) may determine our destiny, I have in mind the specific fact that all Scripture is a witness and a signpost pointing to the living, saving Lord Jesus Christ. ‘You diligently study the Scriptures,’ said Jesus to a group of learned Jewish theologians, ‘because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life’ (Jn. 5:39f.). ‘God has given us eternal life,’ declares John, ‘and this life is in his Son’ (1 Jn. 5:11). Paul congratulates Timothy because ‘from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (2 Tim. 3:15). What Jesus and Paul say of the Old Testament may be said equally of the New, and so of the whole Bible: it all directs us to Christ. The written Word of the Lord leads us to the living Lord of the Word, and our attitude to Him is effectively our choice of destiny. For the one who truly attends to the Bible will attend to its God, and will learn from Him that the way to serve Him is to receive His Christ as Saviour and Master; and in thus finding Christ he will find life.

The contents page of the first printing of this book told its readers, ‘R.S.V.P. denotes Revised Standard Version’. Not so, alas; but R.S.V.P. (reply, please) is precisely God’s request to us in relation to Holy Scripture. I hope this book will help some to hear and meet God’s request.

Two last points, both brief.

First, this is a study book, hence its compressed style (which saves paper, and thus, I hope, reduces the price to the reader). I have tried to ensure that clarity does not suffer through brevity. The Bible references in the text are neither ornament nor clutter, but part of my argument, and are meant to be looked up.

 

A VARIETY OF VERSIONS

Second, a word on translations. This century has brought forth a large litter of new versions, so many indeed that some folk now feel swamped, and by a natural if irrational reaction are resolved to trust none of them, but stick to the King James Version of 1611. In fact, however, all the main modern renderings are very good; no English-speaking generation was ever better served with vernacular Bibles than ours. They fan out. At one extreme are paraphrases and ‘dynamic equivalent’ versions, aiming at a total impact like that of the original on its own first readers. Such versions cut loose from the word-order and sentence-structure of the original, thus concealing the terms, and therefore the existence, of many problems of interpretation, and identify with one current literary culture. Thus, Kenneth Taylor’s Living Bible reflects American ‘pop’ magazines and paperbacks, the Good News Version sticks as closely as it can to Basic English, and J. B. Phillips’ New Testament in Modern English uses the full resources of twentieth-century English prose. At the other extreme are versions which as far as possible are word-for-word, clause-for-clause and sentence-for-sentence; the English Revised Version of 1881, and the New American Standard Version, go this way, but sacrifice smooth English in the process. Striking a balance between these extremes are two sober and steady versions, the New International and the Revised Standard, and two brilliant but uneven ones, the New English Bible and the Jerusalem Bible, a Roman Catholic translation. The two former aim at good plain English, and achieve it; the latter pair are more ‘literary’ in style, sometimes with odd results. All have the defects of their qualities and the limitations of their strengths.

So what to do? No perfect, definitive version of the Bible is possible, any more than a definitive performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or C sharp minor quartet is possible; there is more in it waiting to be expressed than any one rendering can encompass. Both the word-for-word and the ‘dynamic equivalent’ versions are needed if we are fully to appreciate the meaning and force of the original: the former safeguards accuracy, the latter deepens understanding. I suggest that you try, as I do, to get the best of all worlds by having four Bibles at hand – the King James, with its majestic language and hallowed associations; a paraphrase; a word-for-word version; and one from the middle – and regularly comparing them. In any case, however, concentrate on one version for reading and memorizing. This brings most benefit with least confusion.

CHAPTER TWO

THE LOST WORD

‘The days are coming,’ declares the Sovereign LORD, ‘when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD. Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it’ (Amos 8:11f.).

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