Friday, January 9, 2009

Knowing God chapters 3-6

I pray that you were blessed this week as I was after reading chapters 3-6 in our ongoing book study of Knowing God. Below I will post my thoughts and synopsis of these chapters and ask that you will interact with the text as well and post your comments accordingly.
Chapter 3
I loved the way Packer began the chapter by asking questions of our ultimate existence, all of which was for the reason of knowing God. Passages such as John 17, Jeremiah 9, and Hosea 6 all affirm that our main business is to be knowing God. It is a goal that will never prove to be mundane and that will never be exhausted, we will never fully know Him. It should provide excitement to us.
As you read you saw that knowing a person is dependent upon them. If they are unwilling to disclose information about themselves then it is a fruitless exercise. This, however, is not the case with God, He desires that we know Him. He has provided His word that knowing Him may occur in our lives. He has given His son, that we may know Him. Above and beyond this, we may know Him as believers, because He knows us.
How well do you know God? I am not speaking of mere intellectual assent, but a deep knowledge of the Father who gave His son so that you might be adopted into His family.
Chapter 4
In a somewhat obscure chapter Packer speaks about idolatry, especially in the area of visual images of God. I would not say that I am as staunch an advocate as Packer is of having no visual pictures of the cross or perhaps other symbols of our faith. While I will not be placing a statue of Jesus out in my yard next to the yard gnome, I see nothing that dishonors God in looking at the cross and visualizing the death of our saviour, remembering also that He rose again. How did you react to this chapter, what are your feelings about these visual images?
Chapter 5
Following the obscurity of chapter 4, chapter 5 is one of those chapters that makes the book worth buying in and of itself as he speaks about the incarnation.
I pray that as we have just celebrated the birth of the saviour, you realize that He was born to die. We can never grasp completely every aspect of the resurrection, but Packer systematically analyzes much of what we can understand.
His greatest contribution is in dealing with the kenosis presented in Philippians 2. What does it mean that God emptied Himself to become a man. Packer asserts that God did not lose any of His deity, but He was now God plus all that He had made His own by taking manhood upon Himself. How do we explain that there are some things that Jesus appeared not to know and to be unable to do while on earth, while at other times He performed miracles and fulfilled prophecy with His words. The explanation is in that He fully placed Himself under the will of the father, doing only what the father's will allowed Him to do. Being fully submissive to the Father was His course, and as we see, it led Him ultimately to the garden to cry out, and to the cross to die in the place of a world of sinners. What is your view of Jesus' deity, was He fully God in your eyes? Read and reread chapter five in order to get what he is saying here.

For Next Week
Read chapter six, I will post on it next Friday. God bless, and have a great weekend.

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