On the plan of redemption and on faith

How is this for the big picture?

“God, the sovereign Creator, who within his world ‘worketh all things after the counsel of his own will’ (Eph. 1:11), foresaw the ruin of the race through sin, determined to glorify himself by saving a church, and appointed his Son to effect its salvation by his mediatorial ministry. World history has been to date, and will be to the end, nothing more nor less than God’s execution of the plan which he then formed in order to compass his goal” (J. I. Packer, The J. I. Packer Collection, ed. Alister McGrath, 20-21).

I also really liked this statement from the same article on the reason why faith is necessary.

“God has put forward his truth as an object for faith, and the proper ground of faith is God’s own authoritative testimony… Man’s original sin was a lust after self-sufficient knowledge, a craving to shake off all external authority and work things out for himself (cf. Gen. 3:5-6); and God deliberately presents saving truth to sinners in such a way that their acceptance of it involves an act of intellectual repentance, whereby they humble themselves and submit once more to be taught by him. Thus they renounce their calamitous search after a self-made wisdom (cf. Rom. 1:22; 1 Cor. 1:19-25) in order to regain the kind of knowledge for which they were made, that which comes from taking their Creator’s word. So as to make this renunciation clear-cut, God has ensured that no single article of faith should be demonstrable as, say, a geometrical theorem is, nor free from unsolved mystery. Man must be content to know by faith, and to know, in this world at any rate, in part” (p. 31).