Devotional 94: The Diminishing of Assurance: Sin May Cloud but Cannot Destroy

The Confession Read

True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted; as, by negligence in preserving of it, by falling into some special sin which woundeth the conscience and grieveth the Spirit; by some sudden or vehement temptation, by God's withdrawing the light of his countenance, and suffering even such as fear him to walk in darkness and to have no light: yet are they never utterly destitute of that seed of God, and life of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart, and conscience of duty, out of which, by the operation of the Spirit, this assurance may, in due time, be revived; and by the which, in the meantime, they are supported from utter despair.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 18, Section 4

Introduction

A child walks through a wood at midday with his father's hand in his own, the sunlight falling in broad shafts between the leaves, the path clear and firm beneath his feet. Then, without warning, a mist descends — not slowly, but as though a curtain has been drawn across the landscape. The father's hand is still in his, the grip has not loosened, but the child can no longer see the face of the one who holds him. The path is still there, but he cannot discern it. Everything that was sure a moment before remains sure in fact, yet the child's experience of that sureness has dissolved into confusion. He is not lost. The hand has not let go. But the light has withdrawn, and the darkness, though temporary, is real. This scene is a parable of the Christian life as the Westminster Divines understood it, and as every honest believer has at some point experienced it. We have traced, in the preceding sections of this chapter, the grand architecture of the Reformed doctrine of assurance: that it is possible for ordinary believers in this life (Section 1); that it rests upon a threefold foundation of divine promise, inward evidence, and the Spirit's testimony (Section 2); and that, though not of the essence of faith, it is attainable through the ordinary means of grace (Section 3). But having ascended those three peaks, the Divines now lead us down into the valley — the valley where assurance, once possessed, is shaken, diminished, or altogether suspended. And they do so with the tenderness of the physician who has bound many wounds and dried many tears. This section addresses the question that torments the believer who has tasted the sweetness of assurance and then lost it: Have I lost everything? Is the darkness proof that the light was never real? When the promises that once leapt from the page now lie flat and voiceless upon it; when prayer, which was once the breath of my soul, has become the gasp of a man drowning — am I still His? The answer is one of the tenderest notes sounded anywhere in the Confession: the darkness is real, but it is not permanent, and even in the darkness, the soul is not abandoned. Assurance may be shaken, but the seed from which it grows is indestructible, and the Spirit who planted that seed will, in due time, cause it to flower again.

Scripture Foundation

The Divines did not invent this doctrine out of pastoral sympathy, however genuine. They found it in the pages of Scripture, where the experience of lost assurance is recorded with a candour that would be scandalous if it were not so evidently inspired. The Bible does not present a gallery of untroubled saints whose confidence never wavered. It presents men and women who were genuinely God's and who yet passed through seasons when the light of His countenance seemed utterly withdrawn. The honesty of Scripture on this point is itself a ground of comfort, for it assures the doubting believer that his darkness is not unprecedented and his anguish is not proof of reprobation. Consider David, the man after God's own heart, who knew assurance in its richest measure and yet knew also its catastrophic loss. In the fifty-first Psalm, composed in the aftermath of his sin with Bathsheba and the murder of Uriah, David does not pray for the restoration of his salvation, as though he had forfeited it. He prays for the restoration of the joy that accompanies the knowledge of salvation: "Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit" (Psalm 51:12). The petition is precise. He does not say, "Restore unto me thy salvation," for the covenant of grace is not dissolved by the sins of its beneficiaries. But he says, "Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation," because a special sin has wounded his conscience and grieved the Spirit — a wound not fatal but deep, a grieving not final but present. The verb hashivah (restore, cause to return) acknowledges that the joy was once present and is now absent, and that only the God who gave it can give it again. David confesses fully — "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned" (Psalm 51:4) — and casts himself upon the mercy that alone can create a clean heart. The cause was a special sin; the remedy was repentance, not despair; the outcome was restoration, not rejection. But special sin is not the only cause of spiritual darkness. The forty-second and forty-third Psalms give voice to a believer whose desolation has no obvious moral cause — a man not conscious of any scarlet sin and yet exiled from the sanctuary, taunted by enemies, and oppressed by a melancholy rising from the depths of his own soul. Three times the refrain sounds like a bell tolling across the water: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God" (Psalm 42:5, 11; Psalm 43:5). The psalmist is arguing with himself — not merely recording his depression but interrogating it, preaching to his own soul with the very truths his soul has momentarily ceased to feel. "Hope thou in God" — not in feelings, not in the return of joy, not in the lifting of the darkness, but in God, who is unchanging even when the experience of His presence is withdrawn. The Hebrew verb shachach, translated "cast down," means to bow low, to sink down, to be prostrated. It is the posture of a man struck to the ground by a blow he did not see coming. Yet even from that posture, the psalmist commands his soul to hope — a settled expectation grounded in the character of the One who has promised never to leave or forsake His own. The apostle John addresses the phenomenon of the accusing heart with a pastoral wisdom that directly anticipates this section of the Confession: "For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God" (1 John 3:20-21). The logic is striking. John does not dismiss the heart's condemnation as always false — the heart can and does condemn rightly when sin is unconfessed. But he insists that the heart's verdict is not the final verdict. God is greater than our heart — greater in knowledge, for He knows all things, including the sincerity of faith that our own self-examination may miss; greater in mercy, for He is more willing to forgive than our hearts are willing to receive forgiveness. The Greek term translated "confidence" is parrēsian — the boldness of free speech, the liberty of a child who can approach his father without fear because he knows he is loved. When the heart condemns, the remedy is not to argue the heart into silence but to bring it again to the cross, where the blood that speaks better things than the blood of Abel silences every accusation that would drive the believer to despair. The apostle Paul, writing from a Roman prison with the prospect of execution before him, gives the New Testament's most vivid portrait of assurance under assault — and of the anchor that holds through every storm. "For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day" (2 Timothy 1:12). Paul is suffering — the Greek paschō describes real, present affliction. He is in chains, abandoned by friends, facing execution. And yet he is not ashamed — not because his circumstances are comfortable but because his confidence is placed in a Person, not a proposition. "I know whom I have believed" — the emphasis falls upon the object of belief. The verb pepisteuka is in the perfect tense: I have believed and I continue believing. The deposit he has committed to Christ (tēn parathēkēn mou) is his very soul, his eternal destiny. And he is persuaded — pepeismai, another perfect tense denoting settled, permanent conviction — that Christ is able to guard that deposit until the day of His appearing. Paul's assurance is not a mood. It is a conviction so deeply rooted that neither chains nor approaching death can shake it. Yet even Paul knew seasons of darkness — in Asia he despaired even of life — and the very strength of his confession here suggests that he had learned to preach to his own soul in the dark, rehearsing the truths his feelings could not supply. Behind every instance of lost assurance, whether caused by sin, temptation, or melancholy, stands the sovereign hand of God, who for His own wise purposes sometimes withdraws the felt sense of His presence. Isaiah speaks of this mystery with a metaphor drawn from the most intimate of human relationships: "For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee" (Isaiah 54:7-8). The contrasts govern the passage: a small moment against great mercies, a little wrath against everlasting kindness, the hidden face against the promised mercy. The withdrawal is real — God does hide His face. The pain of it is real — the believer feels forsaken. But the withdrawal is temporary, and the mercy that follows is everlasting. The moment of darkness is a parenthesis within the eternal sentence of love, and the parenthesis will close.

What the Divines Meant

The opening words — "True believers may have the assurance of their salvation divers ways shaken, diminished, and intermitted" — establish the crucial distinction upon which the entire pastoral theology of this section rests. The subjects are true believers, not hypocrites, not temporary professors. The fact that such persons may lose their assurance is itself a proof that assurance and faith are not identical. Faith may remain firm while assurance is shaken, as the root remains deep in the soil while the branches are lashed by the storm. The three verbs chosen — shaken, diminished, intermitted — are not synonyms but represent a descending scale of severity. To be shaken is to have one's confidence unsettled, as a table trembles when struck but does not collapse. To be diminished is to have assurance reduced in degree, as a flame may be turned down without being extinguished. To be intermitted is to have the conscious experience of assurance suspended entirely for a season, as a stream may flow underground through a limestone cavern and emerge again miles distant, unseen but unbroken. The Divines acknowledge all three experiences as part of the normal, if painful, course of the Christian life, and in doing so they deliver the afflicted conscience from the false syllogism that would reason from the absence of felt assurance to the absence of saving grace. The causes of this shaking divide naturally into two categories: causes within the believer's conduct and causes within the sovereign purpose of God. The first is negligence in preserving assurance. The Divines have already taught, in Section 3, that assurance is attained through the right use of ordinary means and that its pursuit is a duty. It follows that the neglect of those means will ordinarily result in assurance's decline, as the neglect of a fire will cause it to burn low. The believer who grows slack in prayer, careless in reading Scripture, absent from the Table, or indifferent to the fellowship of the saints, should not be surprised when the warmth that once filled his heart begins to fade. Grace is not lost, but its comfortable sense is diminished, and the diminishment is a merciful chastisement designed to drive the negligent soul back to the means it has forsaken. The second cause is falling into some special sin which woundeth the conscience and grieveth the Spirit. It is not every sin that has this effect — the daily infirmities of the believer do not ordinarily destroy assurance. But a special sin — a sin against light, a sin indulged, a sin of particularly scandalous nature — may deal such a blow to the conscience that the Spirit's comforting work is suspended. The Spirit is grieved, and though He does not depart, He withdraws His consolations. David after Bathsheba is the paradigmatic case: he did not cease to be a believer, but the joy of salvation departed and did not return until he had passed through the deep waters of repentance. The purpose of this withdrawal is medicinal. A father who withdraws the warmth of his smile from a disobedient child does not cease to be a father. He intends that the child should feel the loss and return to the embrace from which he has strayed. The third cause is some sudden or vehement temptation. The emphasis falls not upon the believer's fault but upon the enemy's assault, which may come so suddenly and with such force that the soul is thrown into confusion before it can marshal its defences. A blasphemous thought injected into the mind, a wave of doubt rising without warning, a provocation catching the believer off guard — any of these may so shake the soul that assurance, for a season, cannot be laid hold of. The temptation does not overthrow faith, but it obscures it, as a sudden fog may hide a lighthouse from the mariner without extinguishing the lamp. The believer in such a case is not guilty of willful sin; he is the victim of an assault, and the Spirit who indwells him will, in time, clear away the fog and restore the light. The fourth cause stands apart from the other three, for it originates in the inscrutable wisdom of God Himself: "by God's withdrawing the light of his countenance, and suffering even such as fear him to walk in darkness and to have no light." This is the deepest mystery of the spiritual life, and the Divines handle it with a restraint that is itself pastoral. They do not explain why God sometimes withdraws the felt sense of His presence from those who fear Him. They simply record that He does, and they point the sufferer to the example of Job, of Heman the Ezrahite, of the psalmist who cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The darkness in such cases is not punitive but probationary. It tests faith, purifies love, deepens dependence, and teaches the soul to trust the God it cannot feel. Faith that walks in darkness is faith indeed, for it trusts the hand it cannot see. Against this dark background, the Confession sets a promise that rises like the dawn after a long night: "yet are they never utterly destitute of that seed of God, and life of faith, that love of Christ and the brethren, that sincerity of heart, and conscience of duty." The word "never" is absolute. There is no depth of spiritual declension in which the true believer is entirely stripped of the seed of grace. Five things remain: first, the seed of God — the incorruptible principle of new life implanted in regeneration; second, the life of faith — the act by which the soul clings to Christ, perhaps with a desperate grip, but a grip that does not let go; third, love of Christ and the brethren — an affection that may burn very low without being extinguished; fourth, sincerity of heart — that uprightness of intention which the all-knowing God discerns even when the believer himself cannot; and fifth, conscience of duty — the ongoing sense of obligation to walk in God's ways, even when the heart feels no delight. This catalogue teaches the believer to look for the seed beneath the soil rather than the flower above it. When assurance is withdrawn, the evidences of grace that once seemed bright may appear dim and questionable. The believer who examines himself in the dark may conclude that he has no grace at all, because he is looking for the full-grown plant and finding only the buried seed. The Divines direct his gaze downward, to the root rather than the fruit, and assure him that the seed is still there, alive and indestructible, even when the frost has killed every visible leaf. And from this seed, "by the operation of the Spirit, this assurance may, in due time, be revived." The revival is the Spirit's work, not the believer's achievement. The phrase "in due time" counsels patience. The believer who has lost assurance wants it restored immediately, but the Spirit works according to His own wisdom, and the season of waiting is never wasted. The man who receives assurance back immediately after a fall may soon forget the cost of his folly. The man who waits long in the darkness will prize the returning light with an intensity that the unafflicted soul can scarcely imagine. In the interval — "in the meantime" — the believer is "supported from utter despair." He may not have the joy of assurance, but he has the grace of support. He may cry out with Job, "Oh that I knew where I might find him," but he will not, like Judas, go out and hang himself. The hypocrite, when his false hope perishes, has nothing left. The true believer has the seed, the faith, the love, the sincerity, the conscience of duty — and these, weak as they feel, are the cords by which the Spirit holds him back from the abyss.

Theological Depth

Thomas Watson, whose works are a treasury of pastoral wisdom applied with surgical precision to the conscience, devotes sustained attention to what he calls the "eclipses of assurance" and the "soul's recovery out of them." The Sun of Righteousness, like the created sun, may be obscured by clouds without ceasing to shine. The believer who has lost assurance, Watson writes, is like a man who holds the title deed to a great estate but has mislaid the document and cannot for the present lay his hands upon it. He is no less an heir; he is only, for a season, an uncomfortable one. Watson warns against a particular danger that attends the loss of assurance: the temptation to conclude that because the comfort is gone, the grace is gone as well. He calls this the logic of the sick man who, because he has lost his appetite, concludes that he has lost his life. The appetite may return, and with it the evidence of life; but the life was there all along. Watson counsels the believer to act against his feelings — to pray when he has no heart for prayer, to read when the page seems blank, to attend upon the means when the means seem barren — for in the very act of obedience, the Spirit often kindles the spark that has been hidden beneath the ashes. Duty performed without feeling is more pleasing to God than duty omitted through despair. William Bridge, whose book A Lifting Up for the Downcast is among the richest treatments of spiritual depression ever penned in English, takes his text from the forty-second Psalm's refrain. Bridge argues that spiritual depression is compatible with true faith and is among the commonest experiences of the people of God. He distinguishes between depression from natural causes — melancholy, sickness, exhaustion — and depression from spiritual causes — the sense of God's absence, the accusation of conscience, the assault of temptation — and insists that neither is evidence of reprobation. His most penetrating insight concerns the believer's duty in the darkness: he is not to sit still and wait. He is to argue with his own soul, as the psalmist did — to preach to himself the truths his feelings deny, to command his hope to rise when every instinct tells him to sink. The believer who can trust when he cannot feel is exercising a faith purer than the faith that walks always in sunshine, for it rests upon God alone and not upon the corroborating witness of comfortable experience. John Newton, writing to a correspondent who had fallen into grievous sin and lost the sense of God's favour, offers counsel that is all the more weighty for coming from one who had himself been a blasphemer and slave-trader before grace found him. Newton does not minimize the evil of the sin, but he insists that the very grief the correspondent feels is evidence that the seed of God remains. The unregenerate man sins and feels no wound; the believer sins and the wound bleeds. A corpse does not bleed. A dead conscience does not ache. The very pain of lost assurance is a backhanded evidence that the Spirit has not utterly departed, for it is the Spirit who convicts of sin and produces that sorrow which leads to repentance. Newton directs his correspondent not to the barren work of endless self-examination but to the cross, where the blood that atones for every sin — including the sin just committed — is ever fresh, ever sufficient, ever available. The man who looks at his sin will despair. The man who looks at the cross, confessing his sin, will find that the darkness lifts, not because the sin was small but because the Saviour is great. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on this section, draws out the logical connection between the preservation of the seed and the certain revival of assurance. The seed is not merely a remnant of something that once was; it is a principle of life that necessarily tends toward growth and fruitfulness. Where the seed of God remains, the operation of the Spirit remains, and where the Spirit operates, assurance will, in God's time, be revived. Hodge emphasizes the word revived rather than restored, for assurance was not entirely dead but only dormant, and the Spirit's work in its revival is to rekindle what had been banked rather than to create something new. He also addresses a practical question: how is the believer to distinguish between the loss of assurance arising from his own fault and the darkness that is sovereignly imposed? If the conscience can identify no special sin unconfessed, no known duty neglected, the darkness is more likely a trial than a chastisement, and the proper response is patient waiting. But if the conscience does identify such causes, the first step is not passive waiting but active repentance — confessing the sin, forsaking it, and returning to the neglected means. In either case, the remedy involves looking to Christ rather than looking inward, for it is Christ who restores the joy of salvation, whether the loss was caused by the believer's fault or by the Father's purpose.

Puritan Application

First, let this section teach you to distinguish between the loss of assurance and the loss of grace, for the confusion of these two is the engine of a thousand unnecessary sorrows. When the light of God's countenance seems withdrawn and comfort has faded to a memory, the tempter will whisper that your former joy was a delusion and your present darkness the beginning of an eternal night. But the Confession insists that the true believer may be shaken in his assurance without being separated from the love of God in Christ. The seed remains. The faith, however weak, is still faith. The love, however cold, is still love. The sincerity, however clouded, is still sincerity. The conscience of duty, however joyless, is still active. These are the vital signs of the regenerate soul, and where they are present — however faintly — there is life. A winter tree is not a dead tree. The sap has withdrawn into the root, but the root holds, and spring will come. Your feelings are not the measure of your standing before God. Christ is the measure, and He does not change with the weather of your soul. Second, when you find your assurance shaken, do not rest until you have traced the cause, for the cause will determine the remedy. The physician does not prescribe the same treatment for a wound, a fever, and a broken bone. If negligence has cooled your love, the remedy is diligence: return to the Word, resume the prayer you have abandoned. If some special sin has wounded your conscience, the remedy is repentance — not shallow confession but the deep repentance that calls sin by its proper name and turns from it. If a sudden temptation has thrown your soul into confusion, wield the sword of the Spirit against the specific assault, as our Lord did in the wilderness. If the darkness is sovereign — if God Himself has withdrawn the light — the remedy is patience: to trust His heart when you cannot see His face, remembering that the hiding is for a moment but mercy is everlasting. Third, when assurance is intermitted and you walk in darkness with no light, lean your full weight upon the seed that remains rather than upon the fruit that has withered. The temptation in such seasons is to examine yourself obsessively, to hold your heart up to the light and search for a spark you cannot find, to measure every evidence until the very act of measurement has destroyed your capacity to see anything clearly. The Confession directs you to a different course. Ask yourself not whether your faith is strong but whether it is real — whether, however feebly, it clings to Christ. Ask not whether your love for the brethren is warm but whether it exists at all — whether you desire their good, whether you grieve when Christ is dishonoured. Ask not whether your obedience is cheerful but whether it is sincere — whether, when you fall, you rise again, and whether the direction of your life, for all its stumbles, is Godward. These are the seed. They are small, hidden, easily overlooked by the soul searching for flowers. But they are there, placed by the Spirit who cannot fail, and they are the pledge that the flower will come again. The believer who is most cast down is often the believer in whom the seed is deepest, precisely because the storm has driven the roots further into the soil. Fourth, never conclude that because the darkness is prolonged, the dawn will never break. The phrase "in due time" acknowledges that the interval between the loss of assurance and its revival may be long, painful, and humanly inexplicable. Some believers wait weeks; some wait years; some, like Heman the Ezrahite, wait until the very end of their pilgrimage and die with the lament still on their lips — and yet the lament itself was faith, and the cry in the darkness was heard by the God who hears. If God delays the return of your assurance, it is not because He is unwilling but because He is teaching you something in the waiting that you could learn in no other school: the sufficiency of His grace apart from felt comfort, the difference between faith and sight, the art of resting in the promise rather than in the experience of the promise. He is preparing you for a deeper, steadier assurance than you possessed before — an assurance tested by the loss of every earthly prop and found to rest on Christ alone. Wait for the Lord. Be strong, and let your heart take courage. The watchman waits through the darkest hour of the night, and the morning comes — always comes — not a moment before the appointed time, and never a moment after. Fifth, let this section teach you to deal tenderly with the downcast believer, whether that believer is another member of Christ's body or your own soul. The doctrine that assurance may be shaken is not a doctrine that permits carelessness; it is a doctrine that commands sympathy. If true believers may walk in darkness, then we must not treat every doubting Christian as though his doubt were unbelief or his darkness proof of hypocrisy. There is a cruelty in the church that greets the troubled conscience with theological interrogation rather than pastoral comfort, that mistakes the bruised reed for a dead stick and the smoking flax for an extinguished wick. The bruised reed He will not break — and neither should we. When a brother or sister comes to you heavy under the sense of God's absence, do not hasten to diagnose the cause before you have first sat with them in the darkness. Point them, gently, to the Christ who welcomes the weary. Remind them that the seed remains. Pray with them the prayer of the father of the demoniac: "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." And trust that the Spirit who keeps the seed alive in them will, in His own time, cause it to spring up again to everlasting life.

Prayer

O Lord, whose faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds and whose mercy endureth forever, we bless Thee for the tenderness with which Thy Word handles the soul that walketh in darkness and hath no light. We thank Thee that the assurance which Thou givest may be shaken without the grace that undergirds it being withdrawn, and that Thy children are never utterly destitute of that seed of God which liveth and abideth forever. We confess before Thee that we have often been negligent in preserving that precious assurance which Thou didst once grant us. We have neglected the Word, slighted prayer, avoided Thy Table, and forsaken the fellowship of the saints, and then complained that our confidence was shaken. Forgive us for every duty omitted and restore unto us the years that the locust hath eaten. We confess also the special sins that have wounded our consciences and grieved Thy Holy Spirit — the sins against light, the sins indulged, the sins we have called by gentler names than Thou dost call them. We acknowledge, with David, that against Thee and Thee only have we sinned, and we cast ourselves upon the mercy that alone can create a clean heart. Speak peace to the conscience that accuseth us, not by silencing the accusation but by satisfying it with the blood of Christ. And for those of Thy children who walk in darkness by Thy sovereign appointment — who find the light of Thy countenance withdrawn though they have not, so far as they can discern, grieved Thee by any special sin — we pray Thy special grace for them. Teach them to trust the hand they cannot see. Let not the enemy drive them to despair. Grant that the darkness may do its refining work — purifying their faith and preparing them for a communion with Thee richer for having been tested in the furnace. Revive Thy work, O Lord, in the midst of the years. Let the seed that Thou hast planted spring up anew at the breath of Thy Spirit. Restore unto us the joy of Thy salvation, and uphold us with Thy free Spirit. Let the conscience of duty, which even in our darkest hours hath not been extinguished, be satisfied with the glad obedience of sons who know their Father's heart. Until the day when faith shall give way to sight, keep us from utter despair. Let the seed, however hidden, abide. And bring us at last to that blessed land where the sun shall no more go down, for the Lord shall be our everlasting light, and the days of our mourning shall be ended. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross and is not ashamed to call us brethren. Amen.