WhatGodDoeth Study Series
Knowing God
- CoversAll 3 Parts
- Study units16
- Review questions114
- Print edition108 pages
Every question in the guide with lines to write on, without the study guide. Part of the online edition. Compare editions
Online, Kindle or paperback
Every edition has the full study guide and the workbook. The workbook is the review questions and “Can You Say It?” prompts at the end of each study unit.
Kindle and paperback
The study guide with the workbook inside, as one book.
- Every study unit, followed by its workbook questions
- Write in the paperback, or keep a notebook beside the Kindle edition
- 108-page print edition, on Amazon
Online edition
Follows the print edition, and adds:
- A place to write your answer under every question, as you read
- Download just the workbook, without the study guide: blank, or with your answers (Word)
- Download the full guide with your answers, to print or save as PDF
- Part of All-access: every guide, $15/month or $75/year
Series introduction
Follow the author’s argument
The WhatGodDoeth Study Series is built for readers who want the architecture of an important Christian book without losing the author’s actual argument.
Each guide compresses the source into a shorter path through its main claims, distinctions, examples, and turning points. The goal is clarity, not replacement. The original book remains the authority for what the author said.
That matters especially in Knowing God. Packer distinguishes knowing about God from knowing God, and holds doctrine and devotion together throughout. This guide keeps those distinctions rather than reducing the book to its conclusions.
Use the guide to see how the pieces connect, then return to Packer whenever a doctrine, term, or conclusion needs the full context of the source.
Four-section roadmap
Knowing God in one movement
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Part I
Know the Lord
Knowing God: the difference between theological information and personal knowledge, the marks of people who know God, the priority of being known by God, the danger of remaking God in our own image, and the triune God revealed through the Son and Spirit.
Open Part I -
Part II
Behold Your God!
God’s character: unchangeableness, majesty, wisdom, truth, love, grace, judgment, wrath, goodness, severity, and jealousy. Packer repeatedly resists allowing one attribute to cancel another.
Open Part II -
Part III
If God Be for Us ...
The gospel lived: propitiation, adoption, guidance, inward trials, and finally the adequacy of God in Romans 8. The book ends by asking whether doctrine has become usable knowledge of the God who is for his people.
Open Part III
How to read this guide
Four marks, four kinds of help
A small marker at the start of a paragraph tells you what kind of work that paragraph is doing.
Structure — how Packer’s argument is built and where a section is going.
Key — the one central idea to retain from each study unit.
Decoded — difficult theological language, distinctions, or references unpacked plainly.
Connection — meaningful links to Scripture, another part of Packer’s argument, or lived Christian experience.
Read the argument in layers
- Follow the movement. Notice how knowledge about God is meant to become knowledge of God, and how one doctrine prepares for another.
- Keep the distinctions. Packer’s argument depends on differences that are easy to flatten: justification and adoption, expiation and propitiation, guidance and private certainty, goodness and mere indulgence, grace and spiritual ease.
- Turn truth toward God. Review & Work It Out and Can You Say It? test whether you can reconstruct the argument. Before God asks you to do what Packer commends in Chapter 1: turn truth into meditation, prayer, praise, trust, and obedience.
Full study guide
Everything in the full guide
16 study units
Every chapter of all four Books, followed as one continuous argument, with Study Connections to Scripture.
Open Part IReview & Work It Out
136 questions and “Can You Say It?” prompts, with space to write your answers right on the page.
Open the final reviewKey-term glossary
Packer’s key terms, defined the way he uses them, in one place for quick reference.
Open the glossaryJust this book
On Amazon, as a Kindle ebook or a paperback.
- The full study guide, with the workbook inside
- Every study unit, followed by its questions
- Buy once, keep it for good
All-access
- Every study guide, online, with a place to write your answers
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- Cancel anytime
Prefer it in print?
The Knowing God study guide is coming soon to Amazon in Kindle and paperback.