Devotional 92: The Grounds of Assurance: The Infallible Evidence of Grace

The Confession Read

This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion, grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith, founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God: which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 18, Section 2

Introduction

Two men walk the deck of the same ship on the same troubled sea. Both speak of reaching harbour. The first man squints at the horizon through a mist of wishful thinking and pronounces himself confident, though he has never consulted the compass, never checked the charts, and cannot say on what ground his confidence rests save that he feels it would be cruel of God to let him drown and so surely he will not. The second man, battered by the same gale and wet with the same spray, holds in his hand a sealed letter from the King of that country, promising safe passage to all who embark in the appointed vessel under the appointed Captain. The first man possesses what the Confession calls a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope. The second possesses what the Confession calls an infallible assurance of faith. Between these two confidences lies the distance between a gambler's hunch and a title deed. In Section 1, the Westminster Divines taught that true believers may be certainly assured of their salvation in this present life — a truth that stands in bold opposition to the settled doubts of Roman theology and the perpetual uncertainties of Arminianism. But having established the possibility of assurance, the Divines now press a question of equal urgency: what kind of certainty is this? What is its nature? Upon what does it rest? For there is a confidence that saves and a confidence that damns, a hope that anchors the soul and a hope that drifts it onto the rocks. The difference is not one of degree (more certainty versus less) but of kind. One is built on sand; the other on the triple foundation of divine promise, inward evidence, and the testimony of the Spirit. And unless a man knows which sort he possesses, he is like a soldier who cannot distinguish his own regimental colours from the enemy's and may march under the wrong banner to his ruin. Section 2 is the heart of the Confession's teaching on assurance. Everything before it — the warning against false hopes in Section 1 — leads to this affirmation. And everything after — the admission that assurance may be delayed (Section 3) or shaken (Section 4) — qualifies this affirmation. But the affirmation itself stands as an alpine peak, and from its summit the whole landscape of the Christian life appears in truer proportion. Here the Divines tell us not merely that assurance exists, but what it is. And what it is, in a word, is certainty: not mathematical certainty, which deals in abstractions, nor the certainty of sight, which belongs to glory, but the certainty of faith, which rests upon a God who cannot lie.

Scripture Foundation

The author of Hebrews, having expounded the superiority of Christ's priesthood over Aaron's and demonstrated that the new covenant renders the old obsolete, turns in his sixth chapter to ground the believer's confidence in the very character of God. "Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us" (Hebrews 6:17-18). The two immutable things are God's bare promise and God's sworn oath: the word of the Almighty, and the word of the Almighty backed by His own name, as though the first were not sufficient and He deigned to double the guarantee for the comfort of His trembling children. This is the "divine truth of the promises of salvation" upon which the Confession says assurance is founded. Not human reasoning, however acute. Not inward feeling, however elevated. Not the testimony of the church, however ancient. But the promise of a God for whom it is impossible to lie. The Greek term translated "immutability" is to ametatheton, that which cannot be altered or transferred, the unchangeable character of the divine decree. The believer's assurance rests upon a counsel that was fixed before the mountains were born, a purpose that no rebellion in heaven or on earth can revise, a promise sealed with an oath by the lips of Him who is truth itself. And what does this promise produce in the soul? The epistle answers with a metaphor drawn from the maritime world of the ancient Mediterranean: "Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil; whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec" (Hebrews 6:19-20). The anchor in Hebrews does what no earthly anchor can do: it does not drop downward into the depths but rises upward into the heavens, passing through the veil into the Holy of Holies where Christ Himself has gone as our forerunner (prodromos). An anchor that holds the seafloor holds a ship in place; but an anchor that is fixed in heaven holds the soul in place through every earthly storm. The believer's hope is moored not to his own constancy but to Christ, who has entered the presence of God on our behalf and whose intercession cannot fail. This confidence is not conjectural. A conjecture cannot hold a ship in a hurricane. It is certain, as certain as the risen Christ at the right hand of the Father. But the promises of God, precious as they are, are made to a particular people. How does the believer know that he is among that number? Here the Confession introduces its second ground: "the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made." The apostle Paul speaks of just such an inward evidence when he writes to the Corinthians: "For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward" (2 Corinthians 1:12). The Greek word for "testimony" here is to martyrion, from the same root that gives us "martyr." The conscience bears a witness that can be examined, as a witness in a courtroom is examined under oath. Paul does not claim sinless perfection; the same epistle will chronicle his weaknesses and afflictions. But he claims a pattern of life marked by simplicity, godly sincerity, and dependence upon grace — and this pattern, this observable evidence, this outward fruit of an inward root, gives his conscience something to testify. The testimony of a good conscience is not the ground of salvation but the evidence of it, not the foundation but one of the girders by which the foundation is known. And it is a real evidence, not an imaginary one. The Spirit who regenerates a man leaves traces of His work that can be detected, as a man walking through a garden cannot help but leave footprints in the soil. The apostle Peter arrays these graces in a chain, a golden sequence of virtues that the believer is to pursue with all diligence: "Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity" (2 Peter 1:4-7). The promises precede the graces; God's gift is prior to our growth. Yet the graces confirm the promises, for a man in whom these virtues are taking root — however imperfectly, however slowly — has within him the evidence that the promises belong to him. Peter then draws the conclusion that the Westminster Divines will echo: "Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall" (2 Peter 1:10). The verb translated "make sure" is bebaian poieisthai, to make firm, to confirm, to establish. The calling and election are already sure in God's decree; the command is to make them sure to one's own conscience through the diligent cultivation of the graces that evidence them. This is the inward evidence of which the Confession speaks — not a sudden revelation, not a voice from heaven, but a life increasingly conformed to the image of the Son, a life in which the promises of God are working themselves out in visible, though imperfect, holiness. The apostle John, in his first epistle, presses the same logic with characteristic simplicity: "And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments" (1 John 2:3). And again: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren" (1 John 3:14). The marks are plain: obedience to God's commandments, love for God's people. Where these are present, however mixed with remaining corruption, there is evidence of regeneration — and where there is evidence of regeneration, the promises belong to that soul. It is the reasoning of a man who finds buds on a tree in April and concludes the tree is alive, though summer's fruit has not yet appeared. But the promises of God and the evidences of grace, vital as they are, would leave the believer's certainty incomplete without the third and crowning ground: the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit. "For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Romans 8:15-16). The compound verb symmartyrei, to bear witness together with, indicates a double testimony converging upon a single conclusion. The believer's own spirit testifies, by the marks of grace it observes; the Holy Spirit adds His own witness, confirming that testimony, raising it from probability to certainty. The Spirit does not reveal new truth but applies the truth already revealed, bringing the promises home with unmistakable power. Paul extends this teaching in his epistle to the Ephesians, employing the imagery of commerce and law: "In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory" (Ephesians 1:13-14). The word translated "earnest" is the Greek arrabōn, a commercial term borrowed from Phoenician traders, denoting a down payment, a deposit that guarantees the full payment to follow. When a merchant put down an arrabōn, he was legally bound to complete the transaction. The Spirit Himself is God's down payment on the believer's full inheritance, the first instalment of a glory so vast that the present experience of the Spirit, precious as it is, is only a fraction of what awaits. And because God does not default on His obligations, the presence of the earnest guarantees the delivery of the whole. The same epistle returns to the theme with an exhortation: "And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption" (Ephesians 4:30). The seal (sphragis) in the ancient world served three purposes: it marked ownership, it guaranteed authenticity, and it protected from tampering. The believer is God's property, stamped with His seal. His salvation is authenticated by the presence of the Spirit. And he is guarded by that same Spirit against the powers that would snatch him from the Father's hand. The seal will not be broken; the day of redemption will come and find the sealed ones intact.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines were not writing in a theological vacuum. Behind every phrase of this section stand the contested questions of the seventeenth century, and the precision of the language is a map of the battles they had fought and were fighting. The opening negation, "not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion, grounded upon a fallible hope," strikes at two adversaries with one blow. Against Rome, which at the Council of Trent had declared that no one can know with a certainty of faith that he has obtained the grace of God, the Confession asserts that the believer's persuasion is not merely probable. The Tridentine decree had consigned the faithful to a life of moral probability at best, a balancing of evidences that could never tip the scale into certainty, since one could never be sure that one had cooperated sufficiently with prevenient grace. The certainty the Confession claims is of an entirely different order, grounded not in the sufficiency of human cooperation but in the sufficiency of divine promise. Against the Remonstrants, who made final perseverance dependent upon the contingent fidelity of the human will, the Confession insists that this persuasion is not grounded upon a fallible hope — a hope that might fail because it rests upon the fallible will of man. The Arminian system, carried to its logical conclusion, can offer no more than a hopeful perhaps, a conditional optimism that hopes for the best but cannot guarantee it, since the decisive factor in perseverance is not the decree of God but the continued faith of the believer. The Confession sweeps both the Roman probability and the Arminian fallibility aside with a single sentence. What it offers instead is an infallible assurance. The adjective "infallible" is deliberate and strong. It does not mean that the believer is infallible in his reasoning or immune to error in his self-examination. It means that the ground upon which assurance rests (the promises of God, the work of the Spirit, the truth of the gospel) is infallible. The foundation is unshakeable, even if the building erected upon it sometimes trembles in the wind. As a ship anchored to the seabed may roll in the waves but cannot be carried away, so the believer whose hope is fixed on the immutable promise may experience seasons of doubt and darkness but cannot be finally separated from the certainty that rests beneath the turbulence. The certainty is objective before it is subjective, rooted in the character of God before it is felt in the heart of man. The three grounds of assurance that follow are not three independent pathways to certainty but three strands of a single cord, each reinforcing the others and each necessary to the integrity of the whole. The first ground is "the divine truth of the promises of salvation." Assurance begins not with introspection but with extra-spection: a looking outward to the Word of God, where the promises are recorded and offered. The promise is prior to the evidence, as the foundation is prior to the building. A man may have all the marks of grace imaginable and yet lack assurance if he has never grasped the promise that the marks signify, just as a man may see buds on a tree and yet not know that the tree is an apple tree if he has never learned what apple buds look like. The promise defines the evidence; the evidence confirms the promise. But the promise is first, because God's word is the norma normans — the norm that norms all other norms. The second ground is "the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made." Here the Confession endorses what the Puritan tradition would call the practical syllogism: major premise, those who possess such graces are children of God; minor premise, I possess such graces through the Spirit's work; conclusion, therefore I am a child of God. The syllogism is not the ground of salvation but of assurance — the reflex act by which faith examines its own existence. The Divines were aware of the danger: the syllogism can be abused by the hypocrite who mistakes common grace for saving grace. But they had already guarded against this in Section 1 with their warning about false hopes. The danger of abuse does not negate the legitimate use. The third ground is "the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God." This testimony is not a new revelation added to Scripture but the application of Scripture's promises to the individual heart by the Spirit who inspired them. The Spirit does not whisper secrets in the ear of the soul; He shines light upon the promises that are already there and upon the graces that He Himself has wrought, enabling the believer to see what was always true and to rest in what is now known. The testimony is immediate, not mediated by syllogism or evidence, but not independent of the Word and the evidences, for the Spirit who testifies is the same Spirit who inspired the promises and produces the graces. He does not contradict Himself. The witness He bears in the heart harmonizes with the witness He has borne in the Scripture and the witness He produces in the life. The final clauses of the section anchor the believer's confidence in the eschatological work of the Spirit. He is "the earnest of our inheritance," the down payment that guarantees the fullness to come. He is the seal "whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption." The present possession of the Spirit is a pledge of the future possession of glory, the first fruits that guarantee the full harvest. This eschatological dimension lifts assurance out of mere introspection and sets it in the grand sweep of redemptive history, where the same Spirit who brooded over creation, raised Christ from the dead, and regenerated dead souls now indwells the believer as the guarantee of redemption's consummation.

Theological Depth

Robert Shaw, whose commentary on the Confession has instructed generations of Scottish Presbyterians, observes that the three grounds enumerated in this section correspond to the three Persons of the Trinity in their distinctive operations. The divine truth of the promises is the Father's ground: He who made the promises is faithful, and His immutable counsel is the ultimate anchor of assurance. The inward evidence of graces is the Son's ground: the graces that evidence regeneration (faith, love, obedience) are all conformities to the image of Christ, and the believer's growth in them is his progressive assimilation to the pattern of the Son. The testimony of the Spirit is the Spirit's ground: He who applies the redemption purchased by the Son and planned by the Father now seals that redemption upon the heart of the individual believer. None of the three grounds can be reduced to the others; each has its own distinct character and operation. And none can be safely neglected, for a cord of three strands is not quickly broken, but a cord of one is no cord at all. Shaw is careful to distinguish between the direct act of faith and the reflex act of assurance. Faith looks to Christ and receives Him; assurance looks back upon faith and concludes that it is genuine. The direct act is simple, immediate, and in the first instance unconscious of itself — as the eye that sees the sun does not at that moment see its own seeing. The reflex act is complex, mediated, and requires a degree of spiritual maturity and self-knowledge that may be absent in the young believer. Faith may be strong when assurance is weak; the man who clings to Christ with a death grip may be unable to articulate the grounds of his confidence or to answer the accuser's objections with theological precision. But Christ does not cast off those who cannot pass a theological examination. The bruised reed He will not break, and the smoking flax He will not quench. Shaw's pastoral wisdom here is a corrective to any who would make assurance a prerequisite of salvation rather than a fruit of it. John Owen, whose deep learning always serves pastoral care, devotes substantial attention in his treatise on the Holy Spirit to the nature of the Spirit's sealing and earnest. For Owen, the sealing of the Spirit is not a bare metaphor but a real transaction, an act of the Spirit whereby the believer is marked as God's property, assured of God's favour, and secured against spiritual enemies. The seal does not confer new graces but confirms the graces already given, stamping them with the divine imprint and making them evident to the believer's consciousness. Owen notes that the sealing is not constant in its felt effects; a believer may be sealed and yet not sense the comfort of the seal, as a document may bear the royal signet even when the wax is obscured by dust and handling. But the seal remains, and the Spirit who impressed it will, in His own time, clear away the obscuring dust and cause the impression to appear again. The sealing, moreover, is unto the day of redemption. Owen makes much of this eschatological orientation. The Spirit's work in the believer is not complete in this life; it is the beginning of a process that will be consummated when Christ returns and the believer's body is raised and glorified. The present sealing is the promise of that future completion, and the present earnest is the guarantee that the full inheritance will be paid. Assurance, therefore, is not a static possession but a dynamic foretaste, a present participation in a future glory. The believer who tastes the earnest of the Spirit in prayer, in the Word, in the sacraments, is tasting, however faintly, the very life of heaven. And the purpose of the earnest is not merely to guarantee but to whet the appetite, to make the believer long for the fullness as a man who has tasted the first grapes of the vintage longs for the wine. B. B. Warfield, combining exegetical precision with systematic breadth, addresses the relationship between faith and assurance. Warfield acknowledges a tension in the Reformed tradition: Calvin, followed by many of the early Reformed confessions, tended to identify faith and assurance; the later tradition, culminating in the Westminster Confession, distinguished them more sharply, allowing for genuine faith without felt assurance. Warfield argues that both positions are correct from different angles. Faith, in its intrinsic nature, is a firm and certain persuasion resting upon the divine promise, and in that sense assurance belongs to its essence. But the believer's subjective apprehension of that certainty may be weak, clouded, and interrupted, and in that sense assurance may be absent where true faith is present. The resolution lies in distinguishing between the objective certainty of faith and the subjective certainty of the believer. This distinction also illuminates the threefold ground of assurance. The promises of God carry their own evidence; the inward graces can be examined and verified; the testimony of the Spirit supplies a certainty no external evidence can achieve. Together, these three grounds answer the three questions any system of assurance must address: How do I know that the promise is true? How do I know that it is for me? And how do I know that my apprehension is not self-deception? The promise answers the first; the evidences answer the second; the Spirit's witness answers the third. Francis Turretin, in his Institutes of Elenctic Theology, distinguishes between fiducia (trust), which constitutes the essence of faith, and certitudo (certainty), which constitutes the fruit of faith. The former is the act by which the believer rests upon Christ for salvation; the latter is the consciousness that this resting is genuine and its object secure. Turretin insists, against Roman polemicists, that the certainty of which the Confession speaks is not carnal presumption but a certainty grounded in the ordinary means of grace. The Roman objection that such certainty must breed license is met with the observation that true assurance always produces holiness. The man who knows himself a son of God does not conclude that he may live as he pleases; he concludes that he must live as his Father pleases.

Puritan Application

First, let this section teach you the difference between the ground of your hope and the felt comfort of it. The ground is Christ, His promise, His righteousness, His intercession — and this ground is as immovable as the throne of God. The comfort is your conscious enjoyment of that ground, and it may rise and fall as the mercury in a thermometer. There are days when the believer walks in the full light of God's countenance and could sing on the scaffold, and there are days when the same believer can barely whisper a prayer and feels himself to be the chief of sinners. Both days belong to the same man, because the ground has not shifted, only the weather has changed. Do not measure your standing with God by the temperature of your emotions. Measure it by the promise of God and the evidences of His grace. If you are trusting Christ, however feebly; if you are loving His people, however imperfectly; if you are grieving over your sin, however fitfully — these are the marks of life, and the Spirit who produced them will not abandon the work of His own hands. Second, learn to distinguish between the three grounds of assurance and to make use of each according to your present need. Some souls are helped most by the direct promise of God: they need to hear again that God is not a man that He should lie, that His word is settled in heaven. Let such souls bathe themselves in the promises, reading them aloud, praying them back to God. Other souls are helped most by the evidence of graces: they need to take inventory of the Spirit's work in their lives, to see that there is, however faint, a new direction, a new desire, a new sorrow over sin and a new hunger for righteousness. Let such souls take up the work of self-examination, not morbidly but soberly, using the tests that John gives. Still other souls are helped most by the direct testimony of the Spirit: a word from the Word that leaps off the page with personal force, a sense of the Father's love poured into the heart, a cry of "Abba" that rises unbidden. All three grounds are scriptural, and the wise believer will employ all three, never pitting one against the others but receiving each as a strand in the cord that holds the soul to Christ. Third, beware of resting your assurance upon any ground that this section does not authorize. There is a confidence that rests upon a single emotional experience, perhaps decades old — a moment at a revival meeting, a tear shed during a hymn, a resolution made in youth — and concludes from that moment alone that all is well. But the Spirit is not a single event in the past; He is a present earnest and a present seal. There is a confidence that rests upon comparison with others — the Pharisee's confidence, which thanks God that it is not as other men are — and mistakes relative decency for regenerate life. But the standard is not the neighbour; the standard is the holiness of God and the image of Christ. There is a confidence that rests upon doctrinal correctness — a head full of sound theology attached to a heart that has never closed with Christ — and mistakes orthodoxy for faith. But the devils also believe, and tremble. Examine the foundation, beloved. If it is anything other than the promises of God, confirmed by the evidences of grace, sealed by the testimony of the Spirit, it will not hold when the storm rises. And the storm will rise, for every soul, sooner or later. Fourth, let the doctrine of the Spirit as earnest and seal fill you with a hope that looks forward as well as inward. The present experience of the Spirit is only a fraction of what awaits — the first instalment of an inheritance that eye has not seen nor ear heard nor heart conceived. Every taste of joy in prayer, every glimpse of Christ's beauty in the Word, every stirring of love for the brethren — these are the arrabōn, the down payment on the glory that will be revealed. And if the down payment is so sweet, what will the full inheritance be? Let this hope make you patient in suffering, cheerful in trial, and eager for the appearing of Christ. The Spirit who seals you will not let you go until He has delivered you, body and soul, into the presence of the King. Fifth, let this section drive you to the ordinary means of grace as the place where assurance is cultivated and restored. The Spirit who seals is the Spirit who speaks in the Word, meets His people at the Table, hears them when they pray, ministers through the fellowship of the saints. If your assurance is weak, do not sit idle waiting for a special revelation. Go to the Word, where the promises are recorded. Go to the throne of grace, where the Spirit teaches you to cry "Abba." Go to the assembly of the saints. Go to the Table, where Christ is set forth as the anchor of the soul. The Spirit ordinarily works through these means, and to neglect them while complaining of the want of assurance is to fast while praying for bread.

Prayer

Almighty God, who art not a man that Thou shouldest lie, neither the son of man that Thou shouldest repent, we bless Thee for the immutability of Thy counsel and the certainty of Thy promises. We thank Thee that the hope Thou hast set before us is not a bare conjecture but an infallible assurance, grounded upon promises that cannot fail, confirmed by the inward evidence of graces that Thou Thyself hast wrought, and sealed by the testimony of the Spirit of adoption. We confess, O Lord, that we have often lived below this certainty — treating our salvation as a matter of probabilities rather than promises, of shifting moods rather than the unchanging word of the living God. We have grieved the Spirit by whom we are sealed and neglected the evidences Thou hast placed within our reach. Forgive us for the doubt that dishonours Thy faithfulness and for the presumption that mistakes a fallible hope for the anchor of the soul. Teach us to distinguish what Thou hast joined and never to separate what Thou hast united — the promise, the evidence, and the witness of the Spirit — the threefold cord that is not quickly broken. Let us not rest upon the evidence without the promise, lest we fall into legal self-righteousness. Let us not rest upon the promise without the evidence, lest we fall into presumptuous antinomianism. And let us not rest upon the witness of the Spirit without testing it against the promise and the evidence, lest we mistake the voice of our own imagination for the voice of God. Grant us, we beseech Thee, the grace to anchor our souls in the forerunner who has entered within the veil for us, even Jesus Christ, our great High Priest. When the storms of doubt arise and the winds of temptation beat against our frail vessel, let the anchor hold. When the enemy accuses and our own hearts condemn us, let the anchor hold. When the light of Thy countenance seems withdrawn and we walk in darkness with no light, let the anchor hold. For the anchor is not our fickle faith but Thy faithful Son; the anchor is not our wavering love but Thy everlasting covenant; the anchor is not our variable obedience but the finished work of Christ and the unceasing intercession of our great High Priest. And we pray for the full enjoyment of that inheritance of which the Spirit is the earnest. Let the down payment make us hungry for the fullness. Let the foretaste make us eager for the feast. Let the first fruits make us long for the harvest, when faith shall give way to sight, and hope to possession, and the earnest to the inheritance itself, and we shall see Thee as Thou art and be made like Thee, for we shall see Thee face to face. Until that day, keep us by Thy power, seal us by Thy Spirit, and assure us by Thy promises. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.