Knowing God, Not Merely Knowing About God

In the twentieth century there lived a man whose great gift was not novelty, but nearness. His name was James Innell Packer, and millions of ordinary Christians came to know God more truly because of a book he wrote. He was born in England in 1926, raised within Anglican evangelicalism, and later he crossed an ocean to teach at Regent College in Vancouver. He could have spent his life among scholars, trading footnotes. Instead he gave his life to a single, stubborn conviction. Theology does not belong only to specialists. It belongs to the whole church, to the praying mother, the grieving widow, the tired labourer, the child learning his first words about God.

Picture the world he was speaking into. A church drifting toward inspiration without awe. Christians who wanted to feel something on Sunday but had stopped trembling before the holiness of God. Believers who could collect religious facts the way some people collect stamps, knowing about God, sorting Him into neat labels, yet never falling on their knees before Him.

Into that world, in 1973, came a book with a quiet and almost dangerous title. Knowing God. Not knowing about God. Knowing Him. The difference is the whole story. Packer reached back into the world of the Scriptures, where to know the Lord was never mere data stored in the head. It was covenant knowledge. Reverent. Relational. The knowing that leads a person to worship, to obey, to do justice, to trust the Father in the dark.

His genius was clarity joined to gravity. He could write so a plain reader understood every line, and yet he never made God small. He believed that what you think about God shapes everything. It shapes how you pray. How you suffer. How you endure. A small God, he warned, produces small discipleship. But a true vision of God's holiness and sovereignty and fatherly grace can steady a believer when the ground gives way beneath them.

And here is the heart of it. Packer refused to tear the mind from the heart. He filled the mind with truth so that the heart might burn rightly. Emotion without truth, he knew, becomes unstable, swept about by every mood. But truth without worship becomes cold, a museum of correct ideas with no living God inside. He held them together. He insisted that doctrine is pastoral, because God is real, and the trembling soul needs not a slogan but a Saviour.

There is a tenderness in this that is easy to miss. Knowing God, in Packer's telling, was never a prize for the clever. It was a grace offered in Christ. The simple believer who reads the Scriptures, prays honestly, receives correction, and trusts the Father's love, that one may know God more truly than the scholar who can explain every doctrine yet never bends the knee. To be known by God, summoned by Him, corrected and loved by Him, that was the whole aim.

He was a man of his time, working from a Reformed Anglican framework, and he walked through real controversies that others judged differently. He was not beyond critique, and he would have been the first to say so. But pull back, and see what endured. He taught a forgetful church to do theology on its knees. He reminded a generation that every Christian is already thinking about God, whenever they pray or suffer or speak His name, and the only question is whether what they think is true.

When Packer died in 2020, just short of his ninety-fourth birthday, he left behind no empire and no monument. He left something heavier. A church gently turned back toward the God who is not our projection, the God who humbles, steadies, and sends. For in the end his life pressed one quiet truth into the memory of all who heard him. It is a small thing to know about God. It is everything to know Him.