Book Review: Knowing God by J.I. Packer

You’re sitting in a hospital waiting room at 2 a.m. The fluorescent lights are humming. The coffee is terrible. Someone you love is behind a set of double doors, and you don’t know what’s happening. And in that moment — not in a seminary classroom, not in a Sunday school, not during a quiet time with a journal and a latte — you realize you have no idea who God actually is.

You know facts about Him. You could pass a theology quiz. You could diagram the Trinity on a whiteboard if someone handed you a marker. But knowing God? Knowing Him the way a child knows a father’s voice in the dark? That’s something else entirely. And it’s the difference between a faith that collapses under pressure and one that holds.

J.I. Packer understood that difference. And in 1973, he wrote a book about it that has refused to go out of print for over fifty years. Knowing God isn’t a theology textbook disguised as a devotional. It’s not a devotional pretending to be theology. It’s something rarer — a book that insists the two were never meant to be separated in the first place. Over 1.5 million copies later, it’s still doing what it was written to do: dragging Christians out of the shallow end of their own faith and showing them something deeper, fiercer, and more beautiful than they expected.

What It’s About

Knowing God is organized into three parts. Part One, “Know the Lord,” lays the foundation — what it means to study God, why it matters, and the critical distinction between knowing about God and actually knowing Him. Part Two, “Behold Your God,” walks through the attributes of God one by one: His unchangeableness, His majesty, His wisdom, His jealousy, His wrath, His goodness, His severity, His love. Part Three, “If God Be For Us,” turns the lens around and asks: what difference does this knowledge make in the life of the believer? Guidance, providence, adequacy, the security of the saints — Packer takes the theology he’s laid out and drives it into the soil of actual human experience.

Each chapter is relatively short, built to be read and meditated on rather than consumed in a weekend binge. Packer writes with the precision of a theologian and the warmth of a pastor who has buried people and baptized their grandchildren. The book is not a systematic theology. It’s an invitation — carefully argued, richly illustrated, and relentlessly personal.

Why This Book Still Matters

We live in an era of theological fast food. TikTok theologians. Instagram quote cards ripped from context. Podcasts where everyone has an opinion about God but nobody seems to have spent time in His presence. The average Christian in 2026 has access to more theological content than Calvin had in his entire library — and yet biblical illiteracy is at an all-time high. We’re drowning in information and starving for knowledge.

Packer saw this coming. Even in the 1970s, he was alarmed by what he called “a world of unreality” in which Christians talk about God without actually reckoning with who He is. The opening chapter of Knowing God draws a sharp line between the study of God and the knowledge of God. The first is an academic exercise. The second changes everything — how you pray, how you suffer, how you die.

This book still matters because that distinction still matters. Maybe more than ever. If your theology can’t survive a hospital waiting room, you don’t need more content. You need this book.

What It Gets Right

It bridges the gap between head and heart without apologizing for either. One of the greatest lies in modern Christianity is that you have to choose: either you’re a “head person” who studies doctrine, or you’re a “heart person” who pursues experience. Packer demolishes this false dichotomy with the quiet confidence of a man who has spent decades in both the academy and the pastorate. Chapter 2, “The People Who Know Their God,” makes the case that true knowledge of God always produces energy, boldness, contentment, and courage. Not mere intellectual satisfaction — transformation. He’s not asking you to feel less. He’s asking you to think more deeply so you can feel more truly. Every chapter builds doctrine and then immediately asks: “Now, what does this mean for how you live?” It’s theology with a pulse.

Chapter 18 on propitiation is the theological heart of the book — and it’s devastating. Packer titles it “The Heart of the Gospel,” and he means it. In an age when many evangelicals are embarrassed by the wrath of God, Packer walks straight toward it. He explains propitiation — the turning away of God’s wrath through the sacrifice of Christ — with clarity, reverence, and unflinching honesty. He doesn’t soften the doctrine. He doesn’t apologize for it. He shows you why it’s the most loving thing God has ever done. If you remove propitiation from the gospel, Packer argues, you don’t get a kinder gospel. You get no gospel at all. You get a God who doesn’t care enough to be angry at evil, and a cross that doesn’t actually accomplish anything. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

Chapter 22, “The Adequacy of God,” is a masterpiece of pastoral theology. This is the chapter Packer wrote for the people in the waiting room. It’s about what happens when life exceeds your capacity — when the suffering is too great, the loss too deep, the road too long. Packer doesn’t offer platitudes. He doesn’t tell you to try harder. He points you to 2 Corinthians 12:9 — “My grace is sufficient for you” — and then he unpacks what that actually means with the care of a man who has watched people break and watched God hold them together. It’s the culmination of everything the book has been building toward: you can’t survive on a theology about God. You need the God your theology describes.

Where It Falls Short

Packer was a brilliant theologian, but he was also a mid-twentieth-century British Anglican, and occasionally the book shows its age. Some of the cultural illustrations feel dated — references and assumptions that would have landed in 1973 but require a mental adjustment for a contemporary reader. The theological content is timeless. But younger readers may need a moment to translate some of the cultural furniture.

More substantively, the book lacks meaningful engagement with suffering from the margins. Packer writes about pain and providence with real pastoral sensitivity, but his frame of reference is predominantly Western, educated, and comfortable. If you’re coming to this from a place of deep, grinding suffering, you may find Packer’s treatment necessary but not fully sufficient. Pair it with something like Joni Eareckson Tada’s writings for a more embodied perspective.

Who Should Read This

The Bottom Line

There are a handful of books that deserve to be called essential. Not “helpful.” Not “recommended.” Essential — the kind of book that, if you haven’t read it, there’s a gap in your understanding of the Christian faith that you might not even know is there. Knowing God is one of those books.

Packer didn’t write this to show off. He wrote it because he watched an entire generation of Christians confuse information about God with intimacy with God, and he knew the difference would eventually show — in their marriages, in their suffering, in their dying. He was right. The difference always shows.

This book won’t fix your life. It won’t answer every question. But it will introduce you — or reintroduce you — to the God who is actually there. The God who is holy, sovereign, wrathful, merciful, patient, and adequate. Read it slowly. Read it on your knees if you can. And let it do what it’s been doing for fifty years: making God bigger and making you more willing to be small.

Rating: 5/5

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