Knowing God

In Christian theology, adoption is one of the benefits secured by the salvific death of Christ, by which believers are counted as members of God’s own family. The Bible refers to Christians as sons and daughters of God, adopted into God’s household. For Packer, the idea of adoption frames much of the practical ethos of knowing God: a human’s way of relating to him is that of a child to their father, and the rules by which they are asked to live are akin to a familial code of honor.

The grace of God is his unmerited favor, granted to believers in place of the wrath that their sins deserve. Sovereignly unconstrained by anything beyond himself, God lavishes grace through the sacrifice of Christ. In Packer’s terminology, grace is a way of speaking about all of God’s activity toward believers: “God operating in love toward people” (128).

Incarnation (which also appears in its adjectival form, incarnate) is the doctrine that the Son of God, one of the three divine persons of the Trinity, became a human being and was born as Jesus of Nazareth. This doctrine includes the idea that Jesus was both fully divine—sharing the divine nature in all its fullness with God the Father and the Holy Spirit—and also fully human, sharing in everything that makes human beings what they are.