Packer turns his attention to the grace of God, an attribute that, for many people, has come to characterize the Christian religion as a whole. The idea of grace is the gospel message writ large—it is, in Packer’s words, “God operating in love toward his people” (128). Yet many cannot offer a decent definition or understanding of grace; it is simply nice-sounding religious jargon to them. To catch the full biblical nuance of the idea of grace, Packer notes that there are four necessary truths which one must presuppose: (1) the moral ill-desert of humanity (that human attempts at morality are warped at best and deserving of judgment); (2) the retributive justice of God (that God can and does address sin seriously); (3) the spiritual impotence of humanity (that one cannot achieve or earn salvation by one’s own efforts); and (4) the sovereign freedom of God (that by his own will, he can choose to save). In the light of these biblical assertions, the grace of God emerges as his unmerited favor, freely given. God’s grace results in the pardon of human sin, which underlies every divine act in the plan of salvation and which guarantees the Christian’s future hope in God.

To correct these common misperceptions, Packer delves into the biblical evidence to sketch the outlines of this divine role of judge. First, the judge is someone with authority—God is judge because he is sovereign. Second, the judge is identified with what is good and right. A judge does the good and necessary work of setting things right and seeing that justice is done. Third, a judge has the wisdom to discern the truth of the matter. And fourth, a judge has the power to execute the proper judgment. In many cases, the justice which the Bible demonstrates is retributive justice—punishing evildoers for their wickedness. As Packer asks his readers: “Would a God who did not care about the difference between right and wrong be a good and admirable Being? […] Moral indifference would be an imperfection in God, not a perfection” (143). Packer acknowledges that grappling with such an idea may bring discomfort, but he believes it is important to understand the biblical perspective and to remind his readers that just as humans trust earthly judges to do what is right and to execute justice—in part by censuring the wicked—the work of God as judge is similarly a good and necessary thing. 

The New Testament fills out this picture even more fully, casting Jesus in the role of the final judge and asserting that he is a good judge, who sees and judges the heart of the matter. The proper response, according to Packer, is to put one’s trust in God now, to be saved from one’s sins, and grow in the grace of his goodness, so that when they meet the great judge of all things, they meet him as their savior.This chapter moves from describing the attributes of God—the concern of the previous chapters—to illuminating one of the roles of God, that of judge. This lays the groundwork for Packer’s treatment of other divine attributes, such as wrath, in the subsequent chapters. Packer notes that for many modern Christians, the topic of God as judge is an uncomfortable one, and they shy away from it despite the significant biblical attestation for this divine role. Some try to work around it by asserting that it is only part of the Old Testament‘s view of God but not the New Testament‘s, but this will not work either, Packer avers. The New Testament is woven throughout with references to God as judge, and given the Bible’s consistency on this topic, it is more likely that human perceptions have mishandled the idea to the point where it has become a doctrine of which Christians are ashamed.

Packer now turns his attention to the divine attribute of wrath, noting that this idea, like God’s role as judge, can tend to make people uncomfortable, and perhaps to an even greater degree. Yet here, as in the last chapter, Packer notes that the biblical witness to the wrath of God is so abundant as to make it impossible to overlook. God’s wrath or anger against evil is noted more often in the Bible, for example, than is his love and tenderness, even though the latter are abundantly present. Packer believes that people hesitate to attribute wrath to God because it seems unworthy of him, but this is likely due to a misunderstanding of the way that anthropomorphic language works in Scripture. To speak of the wrath of God is not to attribute to him the emotional loss of control that so often accompanies human anger, any more than to speak of his love is to attribute to him the human foible of letting one’s emotions guide one’s decisions into spontaneous and unreflective acts. “God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is. It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil” (151). Packer argues that the wrath of God is closer to what humans would call “righteous indignation,” that sort of anger that properly responds to injustice.

Packer notes that the biblical picture of the wrath of God reveals two clarifying truths. First, God’s wrath is judicial—it is the appropriate response of the judge in his role of bringing judgment against evil. Second, God’s wrath is always in response to human wickedness, rather than capricious or spontaneously cruel. Packer draws on the book of Romans to show that God’s wrath—his punishment of sin—is something that is not merely reserved for a final judgment, but is already actively in motion. This provides an opportunity to repent and correct one’s course, because God the judge is also God the savior, who has provided a free and open way to find deliverance from the just penalty for sin.

Having touched on the Apostle Paul’s description of the wrath of God in the book of Romans, Packer now follows that up with an examination of another of Paul’s phrases from the same book: “the goodness and severity of God” (Romans 11: 22). Packer notes that modern Protestants (his branch of the Christian faith) have so given up the biblical witness about the wrath of God for a vision of milquetoast kindness that they have embraced a sort of “Santa Claus” theology—that God is a genial figure intent on trying to make them happy. This is dangerous to the whole Christian message, Packer believes: “The certainty that there is no more to be said of God (if God there be) than that he is infinitely forbearing and kind—[…] once it has put down roots, Christianity, in the true sense of the word, simply dies off” (160). Packer uses the example of the philosophical problem of evil, noting that it was only after Protestantism embraced this “Santa Claus” theology that the problem of evil—the persistence of suffering and sorrow in a world ordered by a good, all-powerful God—began to be considered a difficult theological issue. In classic Christian thought, the persistence of suffering and sorrow was seen as a result of the sinful nature of human beings, which God allows to serve as a reminder of the need to give up one’s wickedness and embrace righteousness instead. This, then, is the goodness and severity of God.

Packer notes that “goodness” in Scripture refers to the excellencies of all God’s attributes, the sum of all his moral perfections. This is especially the case with generosity, which the Bible highlights as a special evidence of God’s goodness. Coming back to Paul’s phrase “goodness and severity” in the book of Romans, Packer notes that it is used in the context of those who are welcomed into God’s community of faith and of those, by contrast, who are cut off from it due to their rejection of his grace. The effects of being cut off are long delayed because of the magnanimous patience of God, which bears with sinners long after they could justly be condemned. Packer suggests that the appropriate response is to appreciate God’s goodness and patience toward humans, and to accept the suffering and sorrow in their experience as the gracious hand of God’s discipline.

Packer turns his attention to the jealousy of God, another biblical description of the divine character which he acknowledges many modern readers find distasteful. He admits that no one, if imagining a perfect God, would ascribe jealousy as one of God’s dominating character traits. Nevertheless, it is a frequent description of God in the Bible—one that Packer believes represents a fundamental characteristic of God’s posture toward humanity.

Packer offers two main clarifications to help his readers understand the Bible’s insistence on this point. First, he points out that the biblical depiction of God’s jealousy is an anthropomorphism, much as the Bible would speak of God’s “hands” or “mouth” without the implication that God, who is spirit, has physical hands or a mouth like humans do. So, when one speaks of God’s jealousy, they are not ascribing to him any of the limitations of knowledge or emotional excesses which usually accompany the nature of human jealousy. Second, Packer notes that human jealousy comes in two forms, only one of which is a vice, and the biblical depiction of divine jealousy is always of the other form. For humans, jealousy can be a petty and resentful form of envy (thus, a vice), or it can be the just response of a person whose rights in a relationship have been trampled. A wife who finds her husband has been cheating on her, for instance, feels justifiable jealousy for her husband’s affections. It is this second form of jealousy which the Bible depicts of God—a divine jealousy sparked by the fact that his people, who pledged to enter a covenant with him, have been running after the worship of idols and pagan gods. Jealousy, then, is an outflowing expression of his desire for his people’s good: for them to recognize and delight in reality as it truly is, shaped and ordered by God’s sovereignty and glory, and for them to find salvation from their sins through his covenantal grace. The human response to God’s jealousy, then, ought to be one of zeal for God—to be passionately committed to him in response to his covenant-love toward them, and to order both their individual lives and their communal lives as churches away from apathy and toward greater devotion to God.