by Peeter Lukas
Psalm 71:17,18
“O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to another generation, your power to all those to come.
As promised, I am today including a few quotes from a few J.I. Packer books. He wrote over 160; I have a very small selection of those. I’m mostly including quotes that I underlined “back in the day”.
From Fundamentalism and the Word of God, (1958). Packer wrote this at the age of 31. It has never been out of print:
“Once men reverse the proper relation between Scripture and their own thinking and start judging biblical statements about God by their private ideas about God, instead of vice versa, their knowledge of the Creator is in imminent danger of perishing, and with it the whole idea of supernatural redemption.”
“…God’s revealed truth does not need to be edited, cut, corrected and improved by the cleverness of man.”
From Packer’s introductory essay to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ:
“He [speaking of John Owen] will lead us to bow down before a sovereign Saviour who really saves, and to praise Him for a redeeming death which made it certain that all for whom He died will come to glory…the full meaning of the Cross…is the center of the gospel, flanked on the one hand by total inability and unconditional election, and on the other by irresistible grace and final preservation…That is what Calvary meant, and means. The Cross saved; the Cross saves. This is the heart of true Evangelical faith.”
From A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (1990):
“Puritanism was at heart a spiritual movement, passionately concerned with God and godliness…Puritanism was essentially a movement for church reform, pastoral renewal and evangelism, and spiritual revival…it was a world-view, a total Christian philosophy…And their knowledge was no mere theoretical orthodoxy. They sought to ‘reduce to practice’ (their own phrase) all that God taught them.”
From the chapter entitled “The Devil” in God’s Words: Studies in Key Bible Themes (1992):
“One certainty is that, like other professional liars, Satan has at one point at least lost his grip on reality. There is a maggot in his mind, a softening of his brain we might say, which compels him to deny that he is a captive and beaten foe and to believe that if he fights hard enough against God and God’s true children he will overthrow them in the end. Like Hitler in his bunker, Satan cannot bring himself to believe that he has lost the war, and cannot now win.”
From Concise Theology (1993):
“God is completely in charge of his world. His hand may be hidden, but his rule is absolute. The doctrine of providence teaches Christians that they are never in the grip of blind forces (fortune, chance, luck, fate); all that happens to them is divinely planned, and each event comes as a new summons to trust, obey, and rejoice, knowing that all is for one’s spiritual and eternal good.”
Looking for a “new” writer to take you deeper into the faith? Few would serve as well as James Innell Packer, and no one is more readable.
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