J. I. Packer:
What
matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I
know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that he knows me. I am graven on
the palms of his hands [Isa. 49:16]. I am
never out of his mind. All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained
initiative in knowing me. I know him because he first knew me, and continues to
know me. He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when
his eye is off me, or his attention distracted from me, and no moment,
therefore, when his care falters.
This is momentous knowledge. There is
unspeakable comfort—the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not
enervates—in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and
watching over me for my good. There is tremendous relief in knowing that his
love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the
worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in the
way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his determination to
bless me.
—Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 1993), 41-42, emphasis added.
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