Daily Devotional By Desiringgod Ministry – John Piper Ministry 11 November 2024 | Topic: Can We Know Truth with Complete Certainty?
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Can We Know Truth with Complete Certainty?
Suffering has always been a major theme of our podcast — with about 1,800 mentions of the word suffering in our podcast history. You can find a digest of all the ways this has been addressed in the Ask Pastor John book on pages 365–394. And we have recently concentrated our attention on the theme — more than normally. Suffering, we saw, distinguishes true ministry from the prosperity gospel preachers. We saw that in APJ 2087. Then we looked at how not to respond to suffering in APJ 2094, looking at Job’s wife. We looked at the pain of a woman who has been sorely mistreated, and how she should respond, in APJ 2095. And last time we looked at how to press on in ministry, even after God takes your beloved wife away. That was in APJ 2096.
In this heavy season, a grieving dad writes to us about his struggle with doubt in this anonymous email: “Dear Pastor John, my wife and I are grateful for your ministry, for this podcast, and for the impact you have had on our lives. In January of this year, my wife gave birth to our firstborn baby boy. He was beautiful. My heart grew ten times. I have never seen my wife so happy. The Lord seemed to answer all of our prayers of anxiety and worry — general and specific — with a regularity that frankly stunned me. These seemed to be gentle signs, for my wife particularly, of his tender care and goodness to us. I sensed from this that despite our fears about pregnancy and the health of the baby, the Lord’s hand was with us, as I know it is.
“Two weeks later, we woke up, and our baby had suffocated. I did CPR for ten minutes as the paramedics arrived and took him. I prayed for God to make him breathe again. I prayed at the hospital for the same thing. But he was gone. A situation that seemed too good to be true so quickly turned into a situation that seemed too terrible to be real. Before this, I never processed deeply what happens when a child dies in infancy. Given our situation, I have thought about this a lot over the last several weeks, including APJ episodes in which you described your reasoning through Romans 1. This and other resources and my own inferences from the Bible all seem to point in the same direction: that my son is in heaven.
“But critically listening to the reasoning of others, there seems to be either a ‘best-guess’ attitude or arguments that have to skip to the conclusion sooner or later in their logic for lack of explicit biblical evidence on the topic. I find that I am 99 percent sure that my son is in heaven, but there is always the last little bit of questioning or doubt. This doubt holds me back from rejoicing in the safety and final security and life that my child has with the Lord. So, my question is this: Can I freely rejoice in the fact that my son is in heaven? Or will this be something I cannot be completely sure of until I am with Jesus in heaven, too?”
One of the reasons I want to address this question is because the essence of the issue being raised is much broader than the immediate question about how we can be sure if a deceased infant is in heaven. I don’t want to minimize that question, and I realize it is the most urgent one being asked at this heartbreaking moment by this heartbroken dad. But I think the way the question is posed really does make the issue very broad and very urgent for all of us.
The Problem of the 1 Percent
I would call it the question of the final 1 percent. This dad says that after all his biblical study, his thinking and praying, “I find that I am 99 percent sure that my son is in heaven. But there is always that last little bit of questioning or doubt. This doubt holds me back from rejoicing in the safety and final security and life that my child has with the Lord.” The final 1 percent prevents his joy. What is it that takes this dad all the way through 99 percent of certainty but not the 1 percent?
“Faith is not the opposite of knowing; it’s the opposite of distrusting, rejecting, scorning.”
Here are some of the key words that he gives in answer to that question: “thought,” “reasoning from Romans 1,” “other resources,” “inferences from the Bible,” “critical listening,” “arguments,” “logic.” In other words, his best efforts to use his God-given capacities for observation, and analysis, and reasoning, and critical reflection, and logic, and argument, and Bible — these are able to bring him, he says, to a 99 percent confidence, but there remains a voice in his mind that says, “You could be wrong.”
Now, my point is that there is perhaps no doctrine, no truth claim for which the same thing could not be said. Does God exist? Is Christ divine? Was Jesus raised from the dead? Is the death of Jesus the action of God to forgive sins? Is there a heaven? A hell? Is the Bible inerrant? When our humblest, most fair-minded, most thorough, most diligent investigation of all the evidence is complete, it would be honest for most people to say, “These efforts bring me to 80 percent, 90 percent, 99 percent certainty. But there remains, in my mind, a voice that says, ‘It is possible you could be mistaken on all of that.’” And so, the 1 percent gap remains the problem of the 1 percent.
I should make clear that the 1 percent gap exists for the atheist and the agnostic as well as the Christian. The assertion that there’s no God, that Jesus Christ is not God, that the gospel of Jesus is not needed for salvation, that the Bible is not true — these assertions, when all is said and done, leave a voice in your head, a gap, a voice saying, “You may be wrong.” So, for the Christian, how does God close the 1 percent? Or does he?
Our Full Assurance
Some would quote Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:7 — “We walk by faith, not by sight” — and conclude that faith leaps across the 1 percent without sight. I don’t think that’s what Paul meant. I don’t think “walk by faith, not by sight” means “walk by uncertainty, not certainty.” In the New Testament, faith is not the opposite of knowing; it’s the opposite of distrusting, rejecting, scorning.
In 2 Corinthians 4:13–14, Paul says, “We also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus.” We believe, knowing — knowing leads to belief. It’s not that the absence of knowing requires you to blindly believe. That’s just not the way the New Testament thinks about faith. When Paul was trying to awaken faith, he gave arguments and reasons and evidences. And when he was arguing for the resurrection, he said, “Then [Jesus] appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1 Corinthians 15:6), meaning, “You can go talk to them and increase your sense of evidential confidence by looking at evidences.”
“God wants his children to be fully assured that he is real, Christ is real, salvation is real.”
The Bible intends for Christians to have assurance. Paul describes his ministry like this: “I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you . . . that [your] hearts may . . . reach . . . the . . . full assurance of . . . the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ” (Colossians 2:1–2). He wants full assurance for his people. Hebrews 6:11: “We desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end.” First John 5:13: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” Paul prays in Ephesians 1:18 that “the eyes of [our] hearts [be] enlightened, that [we] may know what is the hope to which he has called [us].”
How God Addresses Our Doubts
The question is this: How does the Bible describe the closing of the 1 percent? It does not describe that closing as a leap in the dark. It does not describe it as a wager. It does not describe it as a crossing of our fingers for the last 1 percent.
Instead, the New Testament describes the closing of the last 1 percent as the supernatural shining in our hearts of a divine, spiritual light through the gospel: “God . . . has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). It describes it as the witness of God’s Spirit himself: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:16). It describes it as a divine sealing by the Spirit as a down payment of our inheritance (Ephesians 1:13–14). It describes it as the love of God poured into our hearts by the Spirit: “Hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).
So, the point is not that every doctrinal question has the same level of importance or is granted the same fullness of assurance. The point is that God wants his children to be fully assured that he is real, Christ is real, salvation is real — and that we are really saved and really destined for glory. The way this relates to doctrinal questions that may not rise to the same level of certainty is that the profound experience of God-given spiritual sight and confidence and joy concerning the central reality of our salvation will enable us to peacefully, joyfully leave in God’s hands all the unanswered questions that remain.
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