The Nature of Assurance

Having looked at the reality of assurance, we now turn to its nature. For this we move on to Article 2 of Chapter XVIII in the Westminster Confession of Faith. It says this:

“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.”

Reformed theologians have spoken of a “certainty of faith,” by which they are focusing on salvation per se, not about the relationship between faith and reason. Turretin divided this under a “twofold certainty,” namely, that one is certain of possessing that faith which justifies, and that one has all of its gracious benefits: the righteousness of Christ, the forgiveness of sins, and so forth.1

Assurance Has an Infallible Ground

Those framers of this Confession pointed to the latter half of Hebrews 6 to show this ground in Scripture. 

“And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end … So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain” (vv. 11, 17-19).

It is the substance of the gospel itself that grounds assurance. It is not as though assurance of salvation looks at one thing and the announcement of it looks at another. If one was in the act of being rescued out of a thirty-story building, and is descending the ladder by the help of a fireman, and suddenly wondered whether or not it was really happening, would it make any sense at all to seek the answer back in the raging inferno above? All analogies break down, and the doubting saint is likely to reply, “But the inferno is also raging in me and sometimes all around me, even in the company of other Christians!” The fact would still remain that the conceptual surgeon’s knife will need to divide between the substance of the rescue and the dangers of the flames.

Needless to say, in this metaphor, Jesus is the lone Fireman in the picture and the ladder is the cross. He can reach because He is Man. His ladder can hold and water can extinguish because He is God. That assurance is a constant reminder is no strike against it. Paul tells us that, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). These are the words of someone who knows he needs a reminder. Our neglect of the gospel is but one sin among many. But surely the answer is to not neglect it more, first by supposing it inefficient, as if the gospel is what caused us to neglect the gospel! If we black out while descending the ladder, or come under a trance of imagining ourselves as the hero, none of this is an argument against the fireman or the ladder.

Assurance Has Both a Root and a Fruit

The Confession speaks of both “the promises of salvation” and “the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made.” In other words, salvation is promised, but also various effects of salvation that one might also call “graces” in the plural. One is “salvation” in the stricter sense of that which saves; the other may be called “salvation” in the looser sense of promises which we may expect but which are not, in the most important sense, the object that our faith is to rest upon. In short, there is a hierarchy of evidence here. Although, I have always preferred to use the imagery of the root and the fruit of the gospel.

Fruit shines. There is a reflection in it of the one who holds it.

Therein lies the danger of the introspective search for assurance. The fruit is not to be confused with the root, and yet the whole plant is the life. If we are after signs of life, and we look only to fruit rather than to the root and stem and branches, we are like those poor fellow citizens who think that food just “comes from the supermarket” as if it grew on the shelves. The Bible is abundantly clear that all who look to Christ will be saved (cf. Isa. 45:22; Jn. 3:14; 6:40). Yes, we are told to examine our fruit, and this is a kind of looking, but we are never told to look to our fruit to be saved. Even the classic text, where Jesus says, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Mat. 7:16)—even here, the context is outwardly directed toward spotting false prophets. It is relevant to evidence of salvation, but that is not its primary context.

All of that is to say that ongoing belief in the gospel is the fundamental sign of being saved (cf. Rom. 1:16; 1 Cor. 15:1-2). Indeed, belief in the gospel is fruit: the chief fruit. Such a gospel embrace is not mere mental assent, but is accompanied by love, joy, peace, and a few other things I think we can remember Paul one time describe as “fruit.”

But this is not to minimize the place of inspecting other fruit in the assurance process.    

The early reformer, Jean Taffin, wrote The Marks of God’s Children (1586) to Dutch believers who faced heavy persecution and exiles, which naturally shook their own faith. Of internal marks, the fruit of the Spirit and faith were treated as preeminent. Of external marks, he devoted his main attention to membership in the church, so long as it is a true church. If that seems arbitrary, consider that the evidence of one’s character is always best discovered by two factors: time and community. It is no coincidence then that commitment to a church family is going to manifest fruit in bunches. This is why John emphasizes love of the brothers in his First Epistle as a chief evidence that the love of God in Christ has affected us (1 Jn. 3:10–4:21).

What is most positive in Taffin is his “piety of persecution.” The doctrine of adoption serves as a foundation to this. To know and feel that we are children of God leads to the conclusion that, in whatever suffering, it is designed for our greatest good.2 Small faith begets discouragement, but any faith is a birth certificate which the unregenerate do not have.

There is a necessity to this. The flesh desires a kingdom of this world, and so we have a “gospel as soft as velvet,” but Christ lays a cross on all who would believe. God has been crystal clear and constant in his word that suffering is the normal path to glory.3 Suffering unmasks our sin, reverses our idolatrous perspective, and confirms our belonging as sons and daughters.4

Turretin lists as fruit “grief for sin, desire of grace, repentance and the desire for holiness, abnegation of self and the love of God above all things and the like.”5 Such statements are useful because even passages like Galatians 5:22-23 on the “fruit of the Spirit” are not designed to be exhaustive lists.

Assurance is a Gift and Guarantee of the Spirit

The activity which is ascribed to the Spirit here is of a “testimony” and “witness.” I have already mentioned those two places where Paul describes the Spirit’s work inside us as a “cry,” by the words, “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6) That passage in Romans goes on to say, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (v. 16). To this child-like longing is added an expectation of the inheritance shared with Christ:

“and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17).

Here again the unregenerate has no place. It is not just that he has no portion, where he might otherwise want one. It is that—even if he does have this or that desire for a blessed afterlife—he does not at all want the inheritance of Christ Himself. He does not desire the good on God’s terms; and where there is no care for properly ordered affections there can be no peace.

When Paul talks about the sealing of the Spirit, he joins together that activity with the ongoing testimony:

“And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee” (2 Cor. 1:21-22; cf. Eph. 1:13-14).

One of the main purposes of this specific act of the Spirit is to prevent us from what the older thinkers would call “morbid introspection.” Those who are especially analytical and anxious begin to turn the evidence of salvation into some obscure and abstract search. However, the whole point is that the genuine search itself is something that the unregenerate would not launch out upon. I will have more to say about this in our final section on challenges to assurance. For now, it is enough to see that the kind of cry that the Holy Spirit births in us is familial and desperate to find out that we are loved by God. This is not something that enemies do, and the Bible makes it plain that the unregenerate are enemies of God (Rom. 1:30; 5:10; Jas. 4:4). In other words, to have the desire to discover whether we are loved by God is itself an evidence of salvation, one that should encourage us to press on and not shrink back.

What the Divine Act and Infallible Ground Are Not

One last point should be made by way of distinction. When we speak of the Spirit’s work being divine—and therefore just as perfect as any other divine work—or of the ground of assurance being infallible, we must not confuse either of those objective realities with the subjective experience of the believer. Turretin speaks of assurance being “divine and infallible” and in the next breath adds, “which is greater or less as faith is found to be stronger or weaker.”6 How do we explain this distinction? If the whole point of the objective divine work is to give help in exactly this subjective experience, should not the certainty of every believer be both equal and perfect?

Here it is no different than God giving His other graces diversely, as those who produced thirty, sixty, and a hundred fold in the Parable of Seeds (or Soils) in Matthew 13, or those invested with differing resources in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25. Paul tells us about “the measure of faith that God has assigned” (Rom. 12:3). While the context there is about spiritual gifts for use in the body, the principle still applies. God gives diversely. He has that right. He also has a perfect design in it. The exact circumstances that bring about greater and lesser degrees of assurance also happen to be the same experiences that draw forth other virtues in us. Why should we treat assurance in the abstract when everything else in the Christian life is attached to it?

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1. Francis Turretin, Institutes, II.15.17.1.

2. Jean Taffin, The Marks of God's Children (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 35.

3. Taffin, The Marks of God's Children, 85-86.

4. Taffin, The Marks of God's Children, 105.

5. Turretin, Institutes, II.15.17.6.

6. Turretin, Institutes, II.15.17.6.