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So we're going to move into a new phase today in the book. And it's a new phase in the Merrill Controversy, actually. If you remember, the book's subtitle has three parts. There's legalism, antinomianism, and we've already covered those.
And so it's on to part three, which is gospel assurance. Legalism, antinomianism, and gospel assurance. Now we have some key questions that we're going to need to ask ourselves over these next few sessions as we look at assurance.
We have today, we're scheduled for three more. Today, and then two more in October. And when we're talking about assurance, we need to ask an answer. First off, is assurance possible? Is assurance possible?
This is a question that Christians have been asking for 2 ,000 some odd years, and entire denominations have split over that question. How is it obtained? How is it obtained? Same thing. What exactly are we assured of when we're talking about assurance?
Just what is it that we're assured of? And then lastly, which is the question you might be asking yourself right now, what on earth do legalism and antinomianism have to do with assurance? Why are they even coming up in this book?
Well, now, like we did with legalism and antinomianism, we're going to start with one definition of assurance, a working definition, but we're going to keep modifying it and improving it the more and more we look at it.
So let me offer up this as our opening definition for assurance. And I offer it, like I said, with everyone's understanding that it's bad. But it's going to sound very familiar. Here we go. Assurance is being completely convinced of your salvation.
Now, I think a lot of you would say, yeah, I've heard that before. That sounds roughly correct. If you had asked me, I didn't want to open it up to the floor, but if you had asked, I think at least one of you would have raised your hand and said something close to that.
Is that fair? Assurance is being completely convinced of your salvation. Now, here's the problem. Like so many of our very pithy definitions, we probably hear it at first. It sounds good. But the longer you consider it and the more that this stuff sort of gets stuck in your head like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth, and you just, something doesn't quite sound right.
Let's start with the word completely. Completely. Just how complete is completely? Do I have assurance if I doubt for a while and then I don't anymore? What if I go back and forth? Sometimes I feel like I'm saved, and sometimes I don't.
Is it a null and joy kind of assurance? What if maybe I say to myself, well, I think all the time I'm assured, but sometimes I'm tempted to doubt. And I didn't really fall to the temptation maybe, but I'm tempted.
But maybe even the temptation is evidence that I'm not really completely assured. I mean, it's completely like 100%. Is it 99 of the time? And then how do I know if I'm not assured now, how do I know when I've crossed the line into completely?
That now, OK, now I have arrived. I am now assured. So we got that problem. And the answer to all those questions is we need a better definition. And what about the theological questions of my definition?
Is assurance by faith? Or is it by works? Isn't salvation by faith? And is it possible to be saved and not assured? Or here's another one. Is it possible to be assured and not saved? And I think to most of those questions, we would say the answer is yes to all of them.
We're certainly aware of the idea of false assurance. I don't think I have to give you too many examples, but you can certainly understand that there's the possibility, the potential for false assurance.
Christ closes the Sermon on the Mount with his warning to those who are falsely assured. Right? There are so-called Christian denominations where the people who are in them are totally convinced that because they are a member of that denomination, they are saved and they are going to heaven.
And that's all it takes. Right? There are cults, same deal, that say that no matter what, because I'm a member of my particular religious organization or I'm following the practices of my particular religion, that I am going to heaven.
Many of them just eliminate any possibility of the existence of hell. And so thus, they have this universalism kind of thing going on where everybody gets to go to heaven. Right? And that's their form of assurance.
So we've got false assurance. And certainly also, we should be aware of false uncertainty, the opposite of that, which is where we are saved and we don't need to be uncertain, but we are uncertain. And to that, I say, go read the Psalms, because probably a third to half of them are psalmists wrestling with doubt, with fear, with a lack of security, and praying to God and asking him to reassure them, asking him to bless them, asking him to comfort them in their distress, because they just don't know what's going on.
They don't know if he's angry at them forever. They don't know if his anger is going to burn on them forever or if they're going to be forgiven. Right? And they work through these things. Almost you can see it unfold over the course of a single psalm and many, many psalms, that by the time you get to the end, then finally at the end, they're praising the Lord.
They've worked it out. They've remembered what they know of him, of his character, and of the scriptures. And they've brought themselves up out of that pit by sort of preaching to themselves. But these men, these are men of God, if they're psalmists.
They still yet wrestled with it. There was at least some moment, some periods of time in which they had this false uncertainty. So without further ado, let me explain where we are in time in the marrow controversy and why we're here now, why we're dealing with it third.
So you remember in February of 1717, I'm sure you all have that date perfectly memorized at this point. February 1717, there was a young minister named William Craig who was appearing before his ordination board in the Scottish Presbytery of Octorother.
I didn't say Octorother. There we go. And the presbytery at Octorother asked him if he subscribed to a certain statement. Right? Do you remember that? And they called, we ended up naming that statement the Octorother Creed.
And I'm not even going to try to do it, because if you remember, it like flips over on itself in the false negative sense. But it was essentially about the idea of whether or not you ought, when preaching the gospel, whether or not you ought to see some sense of the spirit working in a person before offering the gospel, right?
That there was this idea of that there was some predecessor in the ordo salutis of God working on their hearts, and that there would be some repentance or some evidence, and then you would preach the gospel to them.
And that was how mixed up things were getting back then. And so the creed was against that, and said that no, the idea is that we ought to, in a more free grace sort of way, that the gospel offer is for all, and we ought to preach that freely and to everyone.
Right? And in May of 1717, because William Craig doesn't sign up to the creed, and then he objects, and it gets sort of escalated up the chain of the Scottish Presbytery all the way up to the General Assembly of the whole country.
And in May of that year, the General Assembly sides with Craig and rejects the creed. OK? So two months later. And then a few months later after that, there's this special committee that happens, because there's always a committee.
And the committee restores William Craig, or doesn't really restore him, but just actually says he's ordained now, and he gets to be a pastor, and they completely shoot down the off-roaders. But in May of 1717 at the General Assembly, there's this man, Thomas Boston, who was there, and James Hogg, and a few others.
And they say, well, the creed wasn't really worded well, but it's correct. And we're wrong as a General Assembly for rejecting it. And so in early 1718 now, things kind of move slowly, but in early 1718, they reprint a book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity, which had been out in 1640-something or other, originally.
And so they publish a new printing of that book. And James Hogg, he writes this preface about it. And the Marrow controversy now erupts. I mean, it's all about legalism versus antinomianism, OK? Versus the gospel.
So that's what we've been talking about all this time. So here's what happens, though, a few more years later, 1720. Again, in May of 1720, this is when the General Assembly meets every year is in May.
In May of 1720, the General Assembly, they meet together again, and they ban the book. They just flat out ban The Marrow of Modern Divinity. They say that no one's allowed to read it if you want to be part of the Church of Scotland.
And any minister who has a copy ought to go burn it, or throw it out, or whatever else. And if they catch anybody in their denomination reading it, they need to strongly rebuke them, and so on and so forth.
They use much flowery Puritan words, but you get the idea, right? They ban the book. And now we get to one year later, and this is where we are, that in May of 1721, Hogg, he goes back to the assembly.
And as a representative of the Marrow men, he gives a presentation to the assembly in which he tries to convince the assembly that they were wrong the previous year to have banned the book, and that the book really was orthodox and gospel.
The assembly, in response, at the end of that, the body at the end of the assembly session, issues a list of 12 questions to Hogg and the rest of the, in Boston, and the rest of the Marrow men. And they say, here, please give us your response to these 12 questions.
And these guys, they take a while to think about it, and come up with a good answer, because they don't actually submit their answer until the following March, so nearly 12 months later. So here we are, March of 1722.
And they provide their written response. Now, all of these questions, as you go through them, very much deal with all the issues we've been talking about here over these sessions, about the idea of what's the role of the law in the life of the believer?
Are believers, is there such a thing as being saved, but not following the law? When you're offering the gospel, what do you say? Repent and believe, right? All these sorts of aspects that we've been talking about.
And then we get to the eighth question, though, out of 12. And this comes up. It's a question about assurance, where they ask, they ask, basically, is it sound and orthodox that assurance is the very essence of the justifying act of faith?
Is assurance the very essence of the justifying act of faith? This question has all the hallmarks of the suspicious kind of sideways glance, that anyone who's experimentally legalist is the glance that they're going to cast in the direction of anybody that they think is less scrupulous than them.
The assembly, they were going one speed down the freeway, and anybody going faster than them was a maniac, or in this case, antinomian. And they said, they were worried that someone's preaching a little too much free grace.
And if you're worried that someone's preaching a little too much free grace, then you're worried that they're preaching that assurance is the very essence of the justifying act of faith, which, to put it in our terms, you might say that to be saved is to be 100 completely assured of your salvation, that there's no room for not being assured.
And that's the question they posed to the mailman. Do you believe it? Do you believe that you're not saved unless you're 100 assured? Because they didn't think that. The Westminster Confession of Faith, which was the basis of the Church of Scotland, and also the London Baptist Confession of 1689, which is our statement of faith, which was based on the Westminster Confession, both of those two confessional statements make it very clear that you don't necessarily, or that people are saved, and yet some are not sure.
Did that come out right? OK, all right. So we talked a bunch about the experimental strands of antinomianism and legalism, that there's this idea of there's doctrinal, dogmatic strands and exegetical strands, where actual denominations are founded or where people are preaching and they're reading the Bible and they have scriptural reasons.
And then there's just the experimental one, which is where most people end up falling into, in that they kind of just tend to drift a little bit in their thinking legalist, or they drift the other way into the other gutter towards antinomianism.
And they just get mixed up and wrong and they start to lose sight of the rule giver and focus on the rules. They define their life in terms of their relationship to the law. And those experimental strands of legalism and antinomianism, if we think about it, really they are far more often about your assurance than they are about your salvation, you mentally, as you're processing it.
Think about it this way. You set up for yourself a rule or a set of rules and you say to yourself, maybe not even consciously, but you've convinced yourself that as long as you're following that set of rules, then you're sure God loves you.
That's kind of what we set up for ourselves. We call that the performance treadmill. I was saved by faith, but I'm going to be sanctified entirely by works. And then, or defensively or reflexively, we might say that when we fail to follow that set of rules that we've set up for ourselves, that we convince ourselves, we once thought they were deal breakers, but we failed and we don't want to have the deal broken, we get scared.
And so instead, we mentally kind of go through this thing and we say, all right, well, I'm going to throw out all the rules. Forget the rules. There's no rules. It's OK. Everything's fine. I'm cool. God loves me, no matter what.
Everything's great. And we say, we're still saved, even though we never do the right thing. So that's how, can you see? For those, that's the experimental legalists and the experimental antinomians. Interestingly, as I was thinking about this, thinking through this, I realized that both of these, if you didn't take them to so great of an extreme and you brought them in a little bit, not a little bit, a lot of it, there's biblical truth to both of those, especially if you bring them in.
Then they really are biblical. Turn to 2 Peter, chapter 1. There is a biblical sense in which both of those are right, that we ought to be diligent, that we do participate in our sanctification. And there's also the truth that we are forgiven, no matter what.
2 Peter, chapter 1, verse 10. Who can read that for us? For if you practice these qualities, you will never fall. What qualities are they talking about there, Spencer? Any guesses? Look up farther in the chapter.
Yeah, look a few verses earlier in the chapter. Right, yeah, that whole list, right? Peter goes through this whole list a little bit earlier in verses 5 and 6 and 7 and 8, right? Of all these qualities, these are the qualities he's saying.
If you practice these qualities, you will never fall. Does he mean fall from grace? Does he mean fall out of salvation? No, what kind of fall is he talking about? A sanctification stumble, yeah, that's a good one, yeah.
Anybody else? What's that? Assurance, yes, exactly. That you're never going to fall out of assurance, right? You're not going to fall into doubt, if you do. MacArthur says on this verse, if you want to make your calling and election sure, you're going to make it sure by virtues that are visible in your life.
Virtues produced by the spirit of God as you pursue those virtues. And as you pursue those things, and you see that you're useful to God and fruitful, and these are increasing in your life, you'll never stumble into doubt, despair, fear, and questioning, OK?
Now, until we've attained, until we get that perfectly, sometimes you're going to stumble into doubt, despair, fear, and questioning. And no one's going, this side of heaven, going to perfectly exercise those qualities.
But we should be able to see, as we grow in Christian maturity, the sort of ever-increasingness of these qualities in our life and the corresponding decrease, then, in our fear and uncertainty. Now, let's turn to Romans chapter 7 and 8 on the other side of things.
Have one person read Romans 7 .19. Yes, Will. And then someone else read Romans 8 .35 through 39. Mark. OK. Will, Romans 7 .19. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
The Apostle Paul, you're in good company if you struggle with doing the right thing, right? You're in good company. Even Paul says he wants to do right, but he keeps on finding himself doing the evil thing instead, right?
And what is the solution to that? What's that? The next verse. Go ahead, Bob. Can you read that verse? Yeah, 20. Yep. Within me. Yep. And then later on, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Right? And then in Romans 8, Mark. He keeps going and developing this, right? 35. 35 through 39. What is excluded from the list in verse 38 and 39? What's not in that list?
You think so? Yep. Nothing present can separate us. The answer is nothing is excluded from that list. I got you, Mark. I understand what you're saying. I understand where you're coming from. But once we are saved, once we are his, not even sin can remove us from the relationship.
We are justified. We are adopted. We are always sons and daughters in Christ from there on out, no matter what. Shall we go on sinning then that grace may abound? Certainly not. God forbid, right? God forbid.
But you remember a long time ago when we were talking about legalism, we said that that question came up as an accusation against Paul, right? Because Paul, there were some people who were listening to Paul preach, and they said, boy, Paul, it sounds like you're being a little too antinomian.
They didn't call it that back then, right? And Luther and a few others, when they were preaching, were commenting on Paul, basically said the same thing about being in good company with Paul, that our gospel preaching, at least every once in a while, if we're not being accused of being a little too antinomian, we're not preaching the gospel right, because there is a freedom in the grace that we offer.
There is a freedom in the grace that we offer. And so both of these ideas are true, in that sanctification, that we do have rules, that we do follow the law as a rule of life, or we ought to, I should say, follow the law as a rule of life, as guidance.
We talked about it previously in other weeks as the train tracks themselves, right? That our love for God is the engine on that train, and that's what ought to be compelling us forward and moving us forward towards glorification, towards Christlikeness.
But the law is the train tracks that guides us in the right direction towards Christ, and Christlikeness. And at the same time, if we ever fall off those tracks, there is grace and forgiveness, abundant and free, and inexhaustible, right?
1 John 1, if any man, what's that? Anybody? Let's turn there, just so we remember. We can read it together. Even I blanked out there halfway through. Sorry, 1 John 2. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
He is the propitiation for our sins, and not ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And in 1 John 1, if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. The truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
OK. So I've mentioned several times already about the Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession of Faith. And Steve just did the London Confession for many weeks. He was going through that for his Sunday school class.
So if you remember from his time when he covered Chapter 18, you already know this about assurance. But I think it's helpful for us to review it. Because the Church of Scotland subscribed to this. The Merriman subscribed to this.
The Westminster Divine subscribed to this. They're all on the same page here. And we're on the same page with them. Assurance, this infallible assurance, they call it, doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long and conflict with many difficulties before he be a partaker of it, before he comes to assurance.
Yet being enabled by the Spirit to know the things that are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of means, attain thereunto. And therefore it is the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure, I think we just read that, that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Spirit and love and thankfulness to God and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance.
So far is it from inclining men to looseness. That's a great Puritan term right there, right? Inclining men to looseness. It's so far from that. We're not getting anywhere close to that is essentially what they're trying to say there.
And that bit about without extraordinary revelation, just as a side, that's a historical side note here. That part comes from a rejection of the Catholic Church. Because by the time of the Reformation, the only way that Catholics, the Catholic thinking had evolved to the point where the only way that someone could quote unquote be assured of salvation in the Catholic faith was extraordinary revelation.
That's their term. Namely that, quite literally, Mary came down or a saint came down or God came down and gave them a vision or whatever. And that was the only way that they could know for sure that they were saved.
Everybody else, nope, right? I still remember, oh man, it's been a while now. So 15 some odd years ago when Pope John Paul II was on his deathbed. And I was in Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh, like here, has a very large Catholic population.
And I had a lot of coworkers who were Catholic. And the news, we were at work, but everyone was following the news very closely about how he was doing and his health and if he was gonna pass away. And I remember that from his deathbed, he issued a statement, maybe it was one of his assistants or whatever, but a statement was issued in his name that said to please pray for him, asking all the Catholics of all the world to please pray for him that he might get into heaven.
And I said to my Catholic coworkers, if your Pope can't get in, what hope do you have? If your Pope can't get in, right? And of course, later they canonized him or whatever. And so now he's officially in, according to them.
But that's how little assurance they have. And because of that, by the time we get to, as the Reformation explodes, assurance becomes really the thing that the Catholic Church, more than anything else, hates about the Reformation.
Why is that? Can anybody guess? What does assurance take away from the Catholic? What did it take away from them? Yeah, exactly, the need for them, all their sacraments, all their rituals, right? That was just a continuation really of Old Testament, yeah.
And it was a big moneymaker, exactly. Yes, excellent. Fasten ourselves on our position in Christ. And Bob, because he always steals my notes ahead of time, Bob, no, that's great. Bob has given us a sneak preview of my new definition that we're gonna get to by the end of the class.
But to fashion ourselves on our position in Christ, that that's the diligence that we're exercising, right? That it's a lot about our motivations, it's a lot about our, because just like he said, on that knife edge, if we're pursuing these qualities but we're doing it for the wrong reasons, then we've fallen off that knife edge and we're fallen into legalism, right?
Calvin said that surely while we teach that faith ought to be certain and assured, we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt. There goes that completely part. Or any assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety.
On the other hand, we say that believers are in perpetual conflict with their own unbelief. It reminds me of that one man who came up to Jesus and asked for a miracle, right? And Jesus said, do you believe?
And he said, yes, Lord, I believe. Help me my unbelief, all in one sentence. That we're in perpetual conflict with their own unbelief. Far indeed are we from putting their consciences in any peaceful repose, undisturbed by any tumult at all.
So the Westminster divines, the London Baptist confessors, John Calvin, the Merrill men, everybody, they all saw and believed this struggle with assurance being a very common experience for many Christians and for many true believers.
Okay? Now it's important to acknowledge, I'm almost out of time, but it's important to acknowledge this subtlety here that Ferguson only begins to touch on in this chapter and he expands on more in the next chapter.
And that is that even though assurance is not the essence of faith, okay? That the Merrill men, by the way, they answered no to that question. It's not the essence of faith. There is a certain assurance of faith.
Or in, I'm sorry, not of faith. There is a certain assurance in faith. Westminster confession, they define the activity of faith as accepting, receiving, and resting on Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and eternal life.
Okay? Accepting, receiving, and resting on Christ alone. There we are, fixing ourselves on our position in Christ alone. Those three verbs, accept, receive, rest, they constitute the sort of direct act of assurance of something.
What is it? What are we assured of at that? We're assured of Christ. We're assured of Christ. You don't accept, receive, and rest on someone you don't find trustworthy, okay? And so the direct act of faith, the saving faith says Christ is able to save, right?
We have faith in that. We believe that to be true. Now compare that to the assurance of salvation and that's sort of a reflexive act. The object of the direct act is Christ. The object of this reflexive act of assurance, that's towards ourselves, where we say, I am someone who has been saved through faith in Christ.
Okay? Again, Calvin said that faith requires full and fixed certainty. He alone is truly a believer who, convinced by a firm conviction that God is a kindly and well-disposed father towards him, lays hold on an undoubted expectation of salvation.
So both of those statements are true, right? Both that he's laying hold on an undoubted expectation of salvation, but yet also earlier where he said, we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt.
Because one is about faith, right? This second statement that I just read, that's about faith, that he lays hold on an undoubted expectation of salvation. And the other is about assurance. Ferguson calls this, lays hold of this undoubted expectation, he calls this our assurance of Christ.
It's the idea that that's sort of the ground level, the floor through which we cannot fall as true believers. Even in our worst moments of weakest faith. Peter denied knowing Christ three times, yet still was restored, right?
On the basis of, Jesus asked him, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? And while his answer even was pretty weak and feeble, still yet he was restored. And sometimes those of us who struggle with assurance, we're gonna find that God has to take us there to that floor, to that weakest point, that lowest depth of despair, just to show us that way deep down there, the one and only thing we're gonna cling to is him.
We still, we don't even know how to pray. We don't know how to get out. We don't even know if there's any hope, but we still cry, Abba, Father, and groan. And so we find that this experience of assurance can be very complex because we're talking about this spiritual and psychological process.
And so next week, we're gonna explore more of that, how we go from assurance of Christ, how the assurance of Christ becomes assurance of salvation. All right? And so in conclusion, our time's gone. Let me just leave you with this new working definition for assurance and let it simmer in your brains until next week, which is this, that assurance is the knowledge, belief, and persuasion that Christ died for me, that he is mine, and that whatever he suffered, he did and suffered for me.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for this time that we can look into the matter of assurance. Lord, I know that there are so many who struggle with this, who desperately seek the peace of knowing that they are saved beyond a doubt.
Lord, I pray that this time and the times to follow might be an encouragement to them. Lord, that you would, if they truly are saved, bring them, by your grace, that sense of peace, of belonging to you, knowing that you have adopted them, that you are all-powerful, all-wise, all-knowing, and all-present, that nothing can surprise you and that nothing can ever separate you and separate them from you, from your love.
Father, help us, as we work through this, to think rightly about our assurance, and I pray that if anyone is falsely assured, Lord, that you would make that plain and evident to them, that they might repent and come to a true saving faith in your Son, Jesus Christ.
Amen.