Four Kinds of People: The Assurance of Salvation with R.C. Sproul

SPROUL: We’re going to continue now with our study  of the subject of the assurance of salvation, and in our first two messages, we saw the  controversy that there is in various camps of theology about the very possibility of  having assurance of salvation. And then in our second message, we looked at the biblical  call to seek that assurance of salvation, and so now I want to look at some of the  problems that we encounter when we’re diligent in our quest for the assurance of  salvation. When I deal with this subject, I frequently mention that there are four kinds  of people in the world.

Now, I know that that differentiates us from the standard division  of people in the world, where normally we say there are two kinds of people in the world, and  those two kinds of people in the world are those who divide the world into two kinds of people  and those who don’t. Or as James Kennedy says, there are three kinds of people in the world,  those that can count and those that can’t. But we’re now going to look at the four types of  people that we must discriminate in terms of this issue of the assurance of salvation, and let’s  start with the first type of person, and that is the person who is unsaved and who knows it. 

I remember once sharing the Gospel to a man in Cincinnati, and I asked him the evangelistic  – Evangelism Explosion diagnostic questions, and I began with the first question. “Have you  come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for sure that when you die you’re going  to go to heaven? ” And this man didn’t flinch.

He looked me straight in the eye, and he says, “Oh  no,” he says, “I’m sure I’m not. ” He said, “I’m sure I’m going to hell. ” And I was really stunned  by that response because I had never met a person before who was that certain of their destiny in  terms of it being hell itself, but this man was; this man was living a Godless life, and  he knew he was living a Godless life, and he knew the consequences of living a  godly life, which again, bears out what the Apostle Paul tells us in the first chapter  of Romans, at the very end of that chapter, after giving a list of all the various sins  and vices that fallen humanity practices, he comes to the conclusion.

He said but we  as fallen people not only do these things, but we encourage others to do them, knowing that  those who do such things are worthy of death. And what Paul is saying there is that in God’s  natural revelation, not only in the Bible – one doesn’t have to be exposed to biblical preaching  to be aware of this – but as God writes His law on the hearts of people, implants into the human mind  His Word by way of conscience, people deep down know that they are culpable for their behavior,  and they know that they are out of fellowship with their Creator. And so there are many, many  more people in the world who know their condition of being lost than often we recognize, because  on the surface, most people will deny that they are exposed to the wrath of God, or they may even  deny the existence of God.

But as the Bible says, the wicked flee when no one pursues and that  the wicked tremble at the fluttering of a leaf, so that there is, beneath the surface and  behind the façade of natural fallen humanity, an awareness that they are in serious trouble  before God. That’s why we have the phenomenon that we have called the foxhole conversion,  where people at the last days of their life, if they know that they are dying, they  suddenly sober up. They’ll call for the priest, or they’ll call for the minister and are  prepared to get their eternal life insurance.

You know the story of W. C. Fields, who was on  his death bed and to everybody who knew him’s astonishment, you know, one of the friends came  in, found him on his deathbed leafing through the Bible, and his friend said, “W.

C. what are you  doing? ” And he said, “Looking for loopholes.

” So even in his humor, he was aware that he was  in a very precarious state as he was about to face his Maker. And so that’s the first category  of people who are unsaved and they’re aware of it; they know that they aren’t in a state of grace,  they know that they’re out of fellowship with God, they know that they’re estranged from God, and  so their assurance is of quite a negative sort. But then you have the second person and that  is the person who is saved and knows that he is saved.

That is, this person has full assurance  of being in a state of grace and in a state of salvation, and we’re going to be talking further  as we proceed here in this series on how it is possible to gain from Scripture and in our  relationship with God a full assurance of our being in a state of grace. And so you have people  who aren’t saved and know they aren’t saved, and you have people who are saved and  know that they are in that condition of salvation. So these two represent mirror  opposites – both have assurance.

One of the assurances is for a good end;  the other assurance is for a bad end. Alright, the third group are those who are saved  but don’t know it, so it’s possible to be in a state of grace and not to have the full assurance  that you are in a state of grace. Now that – some people would challenge that, not only from those  who would challenge number two – that you can even know that you have salvation – but some would say  that it’s impossible really to be in a state of grace and not know it, because if you have saving  faith, the very content of that faith is a trust in a Savior who you are believing will save  you.

And so if you don’t have saving faith, I mean, if you – excuse me. If you have faith  but don’t have the faith that He is saving you, then the question becomes, do you really have  faith? Or another way of looking at it is, some people say, well, I think I’m converted,  but I’m not sure.

Now, we run into people like that all the time, and part of that problem  has to do with kind of a sub-cultural popular view of religion. We hear of Billy Graham, for  example, who can tell you the day and the hour where he became a Christian. He points back to  his conversion after he had been playing baseball, and he went to this evangelistic meeting after  the game, and this itinerate evangelist Mordecai Ham was preaching.

Billy Graham went  forward and had this sudden conversion, turned his life upside down. I can tell the same  kind of story in my life; I know exactly the time when I met Christ. I can tell you the date and  the hour, exactly where I was and how it happened.

Then you have other people who can’t tell you  the year or within five years when they became Christians. Ruth Graham, for example, Billy’s  wife, doesn’t know when she became a Christian. And we have a problem in the church where we  have a tendency to project our own personal experiences and try to make them normative  for everybody else, so that people who have had a sudden dramatic Damascus road conversion,  where you can name the day and the hour sometimes become suspicious of people who haven’t had  that kind of experience, and they wonder, if you can’t point to the day and the hour,  they think maybe you’re really not a Christian.

And at the same time, there’re those who can’t  point to the day and the hour who are suspicious of those who preach that they do know the  day and the hour. And the whole point is, nowhere in the Scripture does it say that we  have to know the exact time of our conversion. Now, here’s where the plot thickens and  becomes a little bit problematic.

Nobody is half regenerate or semi-regenerate; you’re  either born of the Spirit of God or you’re not, and regeneration, which is that work of God  by which we are transformed from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light,  is a real conversion, and regeneration happens immediately by the power of God, by the  work of the Holy Spirit. It happens instantly, and you’re either in that state or you’re not  in that state. Again, there’s no process of regeneration; it is instantaneous.

Well, if that’s  the case, then that would raise suspicions about people who can’t tell you the day and the hour.  No, no, no, no. We have to distinguish between a conversion and a conversion experience, and  have to recognize that not everybody is instantly aware of the moment when the Spirit of God has  done His supernatural work within the soul.

And that’s why it’s very dangerous when we  create categories by which we suspect people who don’t meet our experience. In fact, as much  as I talk about my conversion experience – I can tell you with certainty the day and the hour of  my conversion experience – but that experience may not actually correspond to the work of God in my  soul. God, the Holy Spirit may have regenerated me a week before that, a month before that, five  years before that, before I experienced the reality of what had happened internally.

So even  my assurance of that particular time of conversion only applies to my experience of conversion,  not to the fact of it, because again, we can fool ourselves in terms of our experience, and  our experience can be one of the most misleading things that we can encounter in our Christian  life. One of the most dangerous things you can do as a Christian is to determine your theology  by your experience, because your experience and my experience, neither of those is normative for the  Christian life. We have to determine our theology from the Word of God, not from what we feel.

And  not only that, we are open to misunderstanding and misinterpreting the meaning and significance  of the experiences that we go through. That’s why we are called to go and check our experiences with  the Scripture, with the Word of God so that we are defining our faith by what Scripture says, not  by what we feel or by what we have experienced. And so that’s a caveat that we need to be aware  of as we work through this whole business of the assurance of salvation, because if we rest our  assurance on an experience and not on the Word of God, we’re asking for all kinds of doubts  and problems to assail us in our pilgrimage.

Again, people have experience of feeling  warm fuzzies in their spirit, in their soul, and say, well, I felt something that night  and therefore I’m converted. It might have been indigestion, and we don’t know that; and  again, when we look at this business of being saved and don’t know that we are saved, we have  to allow for the ways in which we can be fooled, the ways in which we can be deceived, so that  we seek the authentic knowledge of our assurance and not just some fuzzy experience. But again,  this third group has to do with the people who are saved but don’t know that they are saved.

They  haven’t learned the way in which to be grounded in the Scriptures, to be certain of their salvation.  And again, this is even presupposed when Peter writes to his constituents in the book, in the  first two books of his writings where he says, be diligent to make your election and your  calling sure, and it’d be foolish to give that admonition to people if all of them were already  sure. So that presupposes that people can be in this condition of being in a state of salvation  without actually having the assurance of it.

Well so far, so good. This is easy for us to  follow, that there are those who are unsaved and they know it, then there are those who  are saved and they know that they’re saved, and then there are those who are saved but  have not yet, for one reason or another, come to the assurance of their state of grace  before God. These are – categories are all kind of clean and easy to understand.

It’s the  fourth one that puts the monkey wrench in the whole business of assurance of salvation.  There are those who are unsaved who know they are saved. The fourth category, people who are  not in a state of grace but who think they’re in a state of grace.

They’re not saved, but  they are assured that they are saved. Now, we’re going to spend some time on trying to  unwrap that particular group and see why it is that people can have a false sense of  assurance because it’s just as important for us to be able to understand the counterfeit if  we’re going to be able to recognize the authentic. Now, I think it’s standard training of  bank tellers to be able to learn the basic characteristics of counterfeit money so that they  can recognize it when they see it, and the more you study the counterfeit, the more you have the  ability to know what are the signs of the reality.

And in that sense, the church has been aided  historically by false doctrine, by heresies, not because heresies are good or false doctrine  is good, but what happens in the history of the church is that every time a serious heresy  arises and the church has to address it, it forces the church to examine the truth much  more carefully. We wouldn’t have a Bible today to read from, presumably, if it weren’t for  the heretic Marcion. Marcion was the first one to produce a copy of the New Testament,  but it was an expurgated version of the New Testament.

He had nothing but animosity towards  the God of the Old Testament, so every reference to Yahweh of the Old Testament, in the New  Testament record, was expunged by Marcion, and he got rid of much of the gospel material and  many of the epistles and so on. And he presented, really, a counterfeit Bible which forced the  church to say, wait a minute, let’s set down the guidelines for what is to be included in the canon  of Scripture and what isn’t, and if it hadn’t been for the impetus of that heretic, I don’t  think the church would’ve gotten around to it. But then the same thing happens in the fourth  century with the heretic Arius who denies the deity of Christ.

You know, it’s not like the  church didn’t believe in the deity of Christ until the fourth century, until the Council  of Nicea and the writing of the Nicean Creed; that’s not true. The church had confessed  the deity of Christ from the very beginning, but there was ambiguity there, and the  clear definition of the deity of Christ and of the Trinity didn’t come until  heresy forced the definition. So again, understanding the counterfeit can help with our  gaining a better understanding of the authentic.

A few years ago, we did a tour of the Reformation  and we followed in the footsteps of Martin Luther. We went through all the various places in  what had been Eastern Europe, Eastern Germany, where Luther’s ministry was carried out. We were  in Erfurt and Wittenberg and Worms and places like that – Nuremberg – and we had this woman who was  with us who was funny.

She was really one of these characters. And one day, we had done – visited a  site on the bus, and then we were free for lunch on our own, and so groups of people from the  tour went in different directions in the town, and we had instructions as to what time to be back  and where to meet to regroup for the tour. Well, we went out and we had our lunch.

We wandered  around the town, we had our lunch, and we came out of the restaurant, and said, now which way did  we come? How do we get back to the bus? And this lady said, “I know.

” So she goes to the front of  the line and she starts walking through this town, and we’re all following her, and we’re wandering  all over the place. And I started getting a little worried, and I said, “Excuse me, Mary,”  I said, “Are you sure that we’re going in the right way? ” And she said, “Yes, I’m positive.

”  And I felt great and she took a couple more steps and then she turned around. She said, “Of  course, I’m always sure, but I’m rarely right. ” So maybe that’s what we’re talking about when  we talk about these people who exude confidence that they’re on their way to heaven, that they  are Christians, they’re sure of their salvation, they don’t worry about their salvations – or their  salvation.

They have assurance, but it’s false. So this is what creates the tension and the anxiety  that we’re trying to deal with in this series, particularly as we compare number two and number  four – this group comprises the people who are saved and have the assurance of salvation;  this group comprises the people who are not saved but have the assurance of salvation. So the  question that we faced in the very first lecture raises its ugly head again, doesn’t it?

If I have  the assurance of salvation – this group has the assurance, this group has the assurance – how can  I be sure of my assurance? You’ve been in those discussions where you ask somebody something, they  say, they give their affirmation or assertion, you say, “Are you sure? ” They say, “Yes,  I’m sure.

” And the next question is, “Are you sure that you’re sure? ” Because  when we talk about certitude or certainty, we’re talking not simply about philosophical  categories of certitude but we’re really describing, in a sense, our emotional state  with respect to various questions or assertions. And the tendency for human beings when it comes  to assurances of truth claims is that there is a broad continuum on which our assurance operates. 

For example, somebody could say to you, “Do you believe that God exists? ” Now how – there are many  ways you can answer that question. You could say, “No, I don’t.

” Or you could say, “I don’t think  so. ” Or you could say, “I don’t know. I hope so.

” Or you could say, “Maybe. ” Or you could say, “Yes,  I believe in God. ” Or you could say, “Of course I believe in God.

” Each of those answers describes  a different level of intensity of confidence that attends a proposition or an assertion. So when  we’re not talking about mathematical certitude, that two and two are four, here, we’re  talking about assurance of my personal state, which vacillates from day to day. There are days  when somebody says to me, “R.

C. are you sure that you’re saved? ” And I say, “Absolutely.

” And the  next day if I’m under the burden of guilt, I say, “You know, I think so. ” But there are ups and  down in the Christian life, and so what we have to understand is where we can find a foundation  for the strength of assurance by which we can say, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded –  I am fully persuaded – that He is able to keep what I have committed against that day,”  and so the big problem here is discerning between false assurance and true assurance,  which we’ll take up in our next session.