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Scripture focus
I will speak of the glorious honour of thy majesty, and of thy wondrous works.
Psalm 145:5 KJV
At a glance
What happens to faith when God is imagined as merely relatable, without also being imagined as great?
It shrinks, Packer warns — a God cut down to a manageable, human scale cannot sustain the kind of worship or confidence that the God of Genesis and Isaiah, personal and majestic at once, actually calls for.
Summary of the chapter
Packer observes that much modern piety emphasizes God's nearness and approachability while quietly losing hold of his greatness, producing a faith that is comfortable but thin. He argues the two qualities are not in competition: Genesis presents a God who is intensely personal — speaking, creating, responding — while simultaneously and without contradiction wielding absolute power over everything that exists.
To recover a sense of that greatness, Packer points to Psalm 139's insistence that no one can escape God's presence or knowledge, and to Isaiah 40's sweeping comparisons between God and the nations, the rulers, and the created order itself — all of it, Isaiah insists, is nothing set against him. The effect is to strip away every human limitation we unconsciously project onto God.
The chapter closes with three questions Isaiah puts to a discouraged people, and Packer puts to the reader: have we quietly reduced God to human proportions, have we assumed he has abandoned us, and do we actually believe his power is equal to the trouble we are in? Recovering God's majesty, he argues, is what renews both strength and worship.
Key points
- 'Majesty' in Scripture names God's unrivaled greatness, and it is meant to be held together with, not apart from, his personal nearness.
- Genesis presents God as both intimately personal and supremely powerful within the same opening chapters.
- Psalm 139 removes any possibility of limiting God's presence or knowledge to human scale.
- Isaiah 40 systematically compares God to every rival source of greatness and finds none of them comparable.
- Isaiah's three challenges — misconceived limits, assumed abandonment, and doubted power — remain the questions worth asking of our own faith.
A line worth remembering
Reigning in majesty, God's glorious splendor and royal authority stand above all.
J. I. Packer Knowing God, ch. 8
Related Scripture
- Psalm 93:1-2
- Psalm 139:7-12
- Isaiah 40:12-31
- Isaiah 6:1-5
For reflection and discussion
- Has your own sense of God become more relatable than great? What would restore the balance?
- Which of Isaiah's three questions — misjudging God's limits, assuming his absence, or doubting his power — lands closest to home right now?
- How does worship change when both God's nearness and his majesty are held in view together?
These notes are an original UECF.NET study companion and are not a reproduction of the book. Read the full chapter — chapter 8, “The Majesty of God” — in Knowing God by J. I. Packer (InterVarsity Press / Hodder & Stoughton, 1973).