The Plan of God
http://www.the-highway.com/plan_Packer.html

by J.I. Packer, M.A., D.Phil.

Table of Contents

“THE PLAN”

“ALL THINGS . . . FOR GOOD”

“THE GLORY OF GOD”

I

“THE PLAN”

MEN and women today feel lost and astray in this world. A glance at our modern art, poetry or novels, or five minutes’ conversation with a sensitive unbeliever, will assure us of that. In an age that has won a higher degree of control over the forces of nature than any before, this may seem odd; but it is not really odd. It is God’s judgment, which we have brought down on ourselves by trying to feel too much at home in this world.

For that is what we have done. We have set our faces against the idea that one should live on the basis that there is something more than this world to live for. Even if we privately thought that the materialists were wrong in denying God and another world exist, we have not allowed our belief to stop us living on materialistic principles: treating this world as if it were the only home we should ever have, and concentrating exclusively on arranging it to our comfort. We thought we could build heaven on earth, and tried. And now God has judged us for our impiety. In less than half a century, we have had two “hot” world wars and one “cold” one, and now we find ourselves in the age of such horrors as nuclear warfare and brainwashing. In such a world, it is not possible to feel at home. It is a world which has disappointed us. We expected life to be friendly (why? — but we did); instead, however, it has mocked our hopes and left us disillusioned and baffled. We thought we knew what to make of life, but now we do not know whether anything can be made of it. We thought of ourselves as wise men, but now we find ourselves like benighted children, lost in the dark.

Sooner or later, this was bound to happen; for God’s world is never friendly to those who forget its Maker. The Buddhists, who link their atheism with a thorough pessimism about life, are to that extent right. Without God, man loses his bearings in this world, and he cannot find them again till he has found the One whose world it is. God made our life, and God alone can tell us its meaning. If we are ever to make sense of life in this world, we must know about God. And if we want to know the facts about God, we shall be wise to turn to the Bible.

Reading the Bible

Let us read the Bible then — if we can. But can we? The truth is that many of us have lost the ability to read the Bible. When we open our Bibles, we do so in a frame of mind which forms an insuperable barrier to our ever reading it at all. This may sound startling, but it is not hard to show that it is true.

When you sit down to any other book, you treat it as a unit. You look for the plot, or the main thread of the argument, and follow it through to the end. You let the author’s mind lead yours. Whether or not you allow yourself to “dip” before settling down to the book properly, you know that you will not have understood it till you have been through it from start to finish, and if it is a book that you want to understand you set aside time to read it in full. But when we come to Holy ????ure, our behaviour is different. In the first place, we are in the habit of not treating it as a book — a unit — at all, but simply as a collection of separate stories and sayings. We take it for granted before we look at the text that the burden of them — or, at least, of as many of them as affect us — is either moral advice or comfort for those in trouble. So we read them (when we do) in small doses, a few verses at a time. We do not go through individual books, let alone the two complete Testaments, as a single whole. We browse through the rich old Jacobean periods of the Authorised Version, waiting for something to strike us. When the words bring to our minds a soothing thought or a pleasant picture, we feel that the Bible has done its job for us. It seems that the Bible is for us not a book, but a collection of beautiful and suggestive snippets, and it is as such that we use it. The result is that we never read the Bible at all. We take it for granted that we are handling Holy Writ in the truly religious way; but in truth, our use of it is more than a little superstitious. It is the way of natural religiosity, perhaps, but not of true religion.

For God does not mean Bible-reading to function simply as a drug for fretful minds. The reading of ????ure is intended to awaken our minds, not to send them to sleep. God asks us to approach ????ure as His Word — a message addressed to rational creatures, men with minds; a message which we cannot expect to understand without thinking about it. “Come now, and let us reason together,” said God to Judah through Isaiah (Isa. 1:18), and He says the same to us every time we take up His book. He has, indeed, taught us to pray for divine enlightenment as we read — “open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (Ps. 119:18); but this is a prayer that God will enable us to think about His Word with insight, and we effectively prevent its being answered if after offering it we make our minds a blank and stop thinking as we read. Again, God asks us to read the Bible as a book — a single story with a single theme. We are to read it as a whole, and as we read, we are to ask ourselves: what is the plot of this book? What is its real subject? What is it really about? Unless we ask these questions, we shall never reach the point from which we can see what it is saying to us about our own individual lives.

When we do reach this point, we shall find that God’s real message to us is more drastic, and at the same time more heartening, than anything that human religiosity could conceive.

The Main Theme

What do we find when we try to read the Bible as a single unified whole, with our minds alert to observe what it is really about?

The first thing we find is that this book is not primarily about man at all. Its subject is God. He (if the phrase may be allowed) is the chief actor in the drama, the hero of the story. The Bible proves on inspection to be a factual survey of His work in this world, past, present, and to come, with explanatory comment from prophets, psalmists, wise men and apostles. Its main theme is not human salvation, but the work of God vindicating His purposes and glorifying Himself in a sinful and disordered cosmos by establishing His kingdom and exalting His Son, by creating a people to worship and serve Him, and ultimately by dismantling and re-assembling this order of things, so rooting sin out of His world entirely. It is into this larger perspective that the Bible fits God’s work in saving man. And it depicts the God who does these things as more than a distant cosmic architect, more than a ubiquitous heavenly uncle, more than an impersonal life-force — more than any of the petty substitute deities which inhabit our twentieth century minds. He is the living God, present and active everywhere, “glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders” (Exod. 15:11). He gives Himself a name — Yahweh (Jehovah: see Exod. 3:14-15; 6:2-3) — which, whether it be translated “I am that I am” or “I will be that I will be” (the Hebrew means both), is a proclamation of His self-existence and self-sufficiency, His omnipotence and His unbounded freedom. This world is His; He made it, and He controls it; He “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11). His knowledge and dominion extend to the smallest things: “The very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:30). “The LORD reigneth” — the Psalmists make this unchangeable truth the starting-point for their praises again and again (see Psa. 93:1; 96:10; 97:1; 99:1). Though hostile forces rage and chaos threatens, God is King; therefore His people are safe. Such is the God of the Bible.

And the Bible’s dominant conviction about Him, a conviction proclaimed from Genesis to Revelation, is that behind and beneath all the apparent confusion of this world lies His plan. That plan concerns the perfecting of a people and the restoring of a world through the mediating action of Christ. God governs human affairs with this end in view, and human history is a record of the outworking of His purposes. It has been truly said that history is — His story. The Bible details the stages in God’s plan. God visited Abraham, led him into Canaan, and entered into a covenant relationship with him and his descendants — “an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee . . . I will be their God” (Gen. 17:7 f). He gave Abraham a son. He turned Abraham’s family into a nation, and led them out of Egypt into a land of their own. Over the centuries He prepared them and the Gentile world for the coming of the Saviour-King, “who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you, who by him do believe in God” (1 Pet. 1:20f). At last, “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons” (Gal. 4:4f). The covenant promise to Abraham’s seed is now fulfilled to all who put faith in Christ: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29). The plan for this age is that the gospel should go through the world, and “a great multitude . . . of all nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues” (Rev. 7:9) be brought to faith in Christ; after which, at Christ’s return, heaven and earth will in some unimaginable way be re-made, and where “the throne of God and of the Lamb” is, there “his servants shall serve him: and they shall see his face . . . and they shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 22:3-5).

This is the plan of God, says the Bible. It cannot be thwarted by human sin, because human sin itself is taken up into it, and defiance of God’s revealed will is used by God for the furtherance of His will for events. Joseph’s brothers, for instance, sold him into Egypt. “Ye thought evil against me,” said Joseph afterwards, “but God meant it unto good . . . to save much people alive” (Gen. 50:20); “so it was not you that sent me hither, but God” (Gen. 45:8). The cross of Christ itself is the supreme illustration of this principle. “Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,” said Peter in his Pentecost sermon, “ye . . . by wicked hands have crucified and slain” (Acts 2:23). At Calvary God over-ruled Israel’s sin, which He foresaw, as a means to the salvation of the world. Thus it appears that man’s lawlessness does not thwart God’s plan for His people’s redemption; rather, through the wisdom of omnipotence, it is turned to the service of that plan.

Accepting the Plan

This, then, is the God of the Bible, the God with whom we have to do: a God who reigns, who is master of events, and who works out through the stumbling service of His people and the folly of His foes alike His own eternal purpose for His world. And now we begin to see what the Bible really has to say to a generation like our own which feels itself lost and bedevilled in an inscrutably hostile order of things. There is a plan, says the Bible. There is sense in things, but you have missed it. Turn to Christ; seek God; give yourself to the service of His plan, and you will have found the key to living in this world which has hitherto eluded you. “He that followeth me,” Christ promises, “shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Henceforth you will have a motive: God’s glory. You will have a rule: God’s law. You will have a Friend in life and death: God’s Son. You will have in yourself the answer to the doubting and despair called forth by the apparent meaninglessness, even malice, of circumstances: the knowledge that “the LORD reigneth,” and that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). Thus, you will have peace.

And the alternative? We may defy and reject God’s plan in our unbelief, but we cannot escape it. For one aspect of His plan is the judgment of sin. Those who reject the gospel offer of life through Christ bring upon themselves the dark eternity appointed for all such. Those who choose to be without God shall have what they choose; God respects their choice. But this also is part of the plan, and God’s will is done no less in the condemnation of unbelievers than in the salvation of those who put faith in Christ.

Such are the outlines of God’s plan, the central message about God which the Bible brings us. Its exhortation to us is that of Eliphaz to Job: “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace; thereby good shall come unto thee” (Job 22:21). In the light of our knowledge that “the LORD reigneth”, working out His plan for His world without let or hindrance, we can begin to appreciate both the wisdom of this advice and the glory that lies hidden in this promise.