Majesty, a word which comes from the Latin word for “greatness,” constitutes one of the Bible’s fundamental perspectives on the glory of God’s nature. Packer suggests that some modern Christians have gotten to a place where they too infrequently think high and glorious thoughts of God. “We are modern people, and modern people, though they cherish great thoughts of themselves, have as a rule small thoughts of God” (83). While it is true that God is a personal God, he is not a person made in human likeness, with all its manifest limitations; rather, he is infinite, glorious, and great.

Packer draws on the creation accounts of Genesis as well as Psalm 139 to make the case that God is both personal and majestic, and this means that he has no limitations. There are two necessary steps to regain a sense of God’s greatness: first, to remove any thought of limits upon his power or glory, and second, to consider him in comparison to those other things humans regard as great. Turning to Isaiah 40, Packer notes that the biblical text draws comparisons between God’s greatness and other things that people customarily regard as great, vast, or glorious: the nations, the world, rulers and authorities, and even the stars. Isaiah 40 then goes on to note that God is incomprehensibly greater even than all of these. The proper response to God is to take these biblical meditations on his majesty to heart and to allow the greatness of God—beyond anything else that humans could conceive—to shape their view of the world.

The next attribute of God to consider is his wisdom. Tradition has long cast wisdom as an expression of God’s very essence, alongside such traits as power, truth, and goodness. In the Bible, God’s wisdom is often paired with his power, and this dual expression of his character is lauded over and over again throughout Scripture. “Omniscience governing omnipotence, infinite power ruled by infinite wisdom, is a basic biblical description of the divine character” (91). God’s wisdom orders all of his actions, completing his purpose through history, a purpose that never changes—to save fallen humanity. This salvation draws people into relationship with him, and in knowing him, they will rejoice unendingly in his majesty and favor just as he rejoices in their love for him.

One can see God’s wisdom in his dealings with people, and Packer draws on the Genesis narratives of the patriarchs Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph to illustrate this point. In each case, the human character exhibits a clear development arc as they interact with God’s plan, provision, and will, eventually coming to a deep and trusting reliance on God. This does not mean, however, that they had an easy or comfortable life. On the contrary, they were surrounded by troubles and trials. But by learning to trust in God’s wisdom rather than their own self-reliance, they came gradually to an enlargement of their moral character. God’s wisdom, then, at times permits difficult circumstances in human lives, but the one who seeks to know God should learn to learn to rest in God’s wisdom in such moments, allowing him to use those times to refine and purify one’s heart.

Addressing wisdom as a divine attribute brings up a corollary question of how it relates to human wisdom. Previous generations of theologians recognized this connection and ordered God’s attributes into categories of communicable and incommunicable—those which can be shared with humans, and those (like omnipotence or omniscience) which cannot. Wisdom, as one of the communicable attributes, is available to humans, but they must seek it out and lay hold of it. This is done, Packer writes, in two ways: first, by learning to reverence God, and second, by learning to receive God’s word. God himself, and his self-revelation in the Bible, are the only true sources of this wisdom.

Packer also addresses a common misconception about wisdom, which some people suppose is the ability to know God’s will and plan in any circumstance. In Packer’s analogy, it’s akin to standing in the signal box at a train station, with a view of how everything works and the purposes behind the patterns—this, he notes, is not the biblical view of human wisdom. Packer draws on the biblical book of Ecclesiastes to make his point, defining true wisdom as a sense of trust and acceptance in God’s purposes, even when those plans seem entirely incomprehensible to the human mind. Human wisdom, he says, is more like driving the train than being in the signal box. In the driver’s seat, all one knows is what is happening in the moment right around them, and the proper response is simply to make the right choice for the situation immediately before them. Human wisdom is not all-seeing, but Packer believes it’s at its best when it exhibits a confident trust in the divine wisdom of the all-seeing God.

This chapter examines the concept of God’s word, referring not only to the Bible but the very act of God expressing his will. The Bible presents God as sovereign, as king over the whole universe, and like any king, he speaks and sends out messages to enact his purposes. Toward creation, God rules by fiat, and his will is done. Toward humanity, to whom it belongs to choose either loyal obedience or rebellion against his sovereignty, God speaks by his torah, a Hebrew word which signifies “instruction.” This royal torah takes three forms: some of God’s word toward humans is law (commands and prohibitions), some of it is testimony (delivering information), and some of it is promise. Packer examines the Genesis accounts of creation once again to show how these forms of God’s royal torah fill out the categories of his communication toward the world, as he exercises his sovereignty by speaking forth his word.

Packer also notes that for humanity, there is good reason to heed God’s word not only because of their relationship to him, as subjects to a king, but also because his word is true. “Truth” in the Bible conveys the normal sense of propositional truth, but it is more commonly set in the context of persons rather than of abstract veracity. “[Truth] means stability, reliability, firmness, trustworthiness, the quality of a person who is entirely self-consistent, sincere, realistic, undeceived. God is such a person” (113). In this sense, not only does God convey true information and render his promises true by the constancy of his character, but even his commands are “true.” God’s commands convey stability, wholeness, and consistency to the order of human lives; they help believers live along the grain of reality. All the forms of God’s word are truth: true testimony about himself and the world, promises rendered true by his purpose and will, and even commands that apply the truth about humans and the world to the shape of their daily lives.