Images mislead us, for they convey false ideas about God” (45-46). “Images dishonor God, for they obscure his glory…. We mustn’t, says Packer, focus on just one aspect of God, or our thoughts and praises of him will become distorted and we’ll begin to emphasize certain parts of him over others, usually whichever fits our liking. Jesus died on a cross, but he also rose in victory and sits enthroned as King over all. He says that whenever we imagine mentally, or see in stone or paint, God in one particular moment - on the cross, for example - we lose his majestic totality. As in, literal images of Jesus that people bow down to and mental images we conjure up. I was expecting the same old treatment of idolatry, as anything we focus on more than God. Tremendous indeed.Ĭhapter 4, “The Only True God,” is not at all what I expected to find in a Chapter about idolatry.
“There is tremendous relief in knowing that love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about myself, and quench his determination to bless me” (42). Packer closes Chapter 3 by emphasizing that although our knowing God is crucial, the fact that he knows us is of the utmost importance.
What’s more, “to know Jesus is to be saved by Jesus, here and hereafter, from sin, and guilt, and death” (38). It is in the person of Jesus, Packer notes, that God has completely opened himself up to us. I like to call the former “factual” and the latter “intimate.” Concerning the latter, Packer writes that we know a person “according to how much, or how little, they have opened up to us” (35). Knowledge and IdolatryĬhapter 3, “Knowing and Being Known,” deals more directly with the distinction between knowledge about and knowledge of (which I highlighted in last Thursday’s post).
This week I’m going to take a look at the remaining chapters of Part I before moving on and moving through a bit of Part II. Last week I wrote the first part of what will be a several-part review of J.I.
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