Quote 396
People who do not actually read the Bible confidently assure us that when we move from the Old Testament to the New, the theme of divine judgment fades into the background; but if we examine the New Testament, even in the most cursory way, we find at once that the Old Testament emphasis on God's action as Judge, far from being reduced is actually intensified. 
J.I. Packer
Knowing God (God as Judge, 155)1.5K
Other Quotes from the Author & Topic
a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth A Quest for Godliness (126)
I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is.
People treat God's sovereignty as a matter of controversy, but in Scripture it is a matter of worship.
With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones. Knowing God (The Love of God, 130)
Were I asked to focus the New Testament message in three words, my proposal would be adoption through propitiation, and I do not expect ever to meet a richer or more pregnant summary of the gospel than that.
God ordains our prayers as means of receiving what he plans to give, all to enrich our relationship to him. As the perfect Father of his children, he reserves the right to answer the requests we should have made rather than those we actually made when we have asked for the wrong thing; but he will take action one way or another in every situation of need that we bring before him. Systematic Theology A Lecture
The Supper is rightly viewed as a means of grace. The efficacy of the sacraments ...resides not in the faith or virtue of the minister but in the faithfulness of God. As the preaching of the Word makes the gospel audible, so the sacraments make it visible, and the Holy Spirit stirs up faith by both means.
Tom Wright foregrounds what the Bible backgrounds, and backgrounds what the Bible foregrounds, but Wright does more than that; he denies a crucial component of justification, namely imputation.
Calvary's saving power does not depend on faith being added to it; its saving power is such that faith flows from it.
The Christian's motto should not be 'Let go and let God' but 'Trust God and get going.
In goodness and sovereignty God permits evil, punishes evil with evil, brings good from evil and redeems from evil.
The cross is the object of faith, the theme of worship, the means of bringing men to God, the basis of living the saved life, the burden of apostolic preaching, and the reality signified by the sacraments.
If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.
For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. 'Father' is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.Knowing God (??)
Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive and one fears, prayerless. Cultivating an ethos that encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor, for the most part, seek influence beyond their own Christian circle... [but] the Puritans labored for a holy England and New England -sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgement threatens.
New Testament references to the blood of Christ are regularly sacrificial (e.g., Rom 3:25; 5:9; Eph 1:7; Rev 1:5). As a perfect sacrifice for sin (Rom 8:3; Eph 5:2; 1Pet 1:18–19), Christ's death was our redemption (i.e., our rescue by ransom: the paying of a price that freed us from the jeopardy of guilt, enslavement to sin, and expectation of wrath; Rom 3:24; Gal 4:4–5; Col 1:14)Concise Theology, Tyndale House, 135
God loves all in some ways, and God loves some in all ways.
Father' is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.
In the New Testament, grace means God's love in action toward people who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves. Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.
If you ask, 'Why is this happening?' no light may come, but if you ask, 'How am I to glorify God now?' there will always be an answer.
There is tremendous relief in knowing his 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 me.
Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you.
Adoption is the highest privilege of the gospel. The traitor is forgiven, brought in for supper, and given the family name. To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is greater.
Readiness to die is the first step in learning to live.
It is here, in the thing that happened after the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. 'The Word became flesh' (Jn. 1:14); God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth as a helpless human baby, unable to do more than lie and stare and wriggle and make noises, needing to be fed and changed and taught to talk like any other child. ... The more you think about it, the more staggering it gets.Knowing God
The fact that today's evangelicals are so largely out of touch with their own history, and so cannot discern how small and dry and lightweight and superficial and childish they are compared with those from whom they take their name, is one of the more glaring of our current shortcomings, all the more so for going constantly unnoticed.
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