Before you begin
Which Half Is Yours
This page is written for two readers who could hardly be further apart. One does not believe and has his reasons. The other believes and is afraid he does not.
If you are the first, the first half is yours. It takes the common objections one at a time and answers them straight. It will not flatter you, and it will not pretend the question is only about evidence.
If you are the second, the second half is yours, and the arguments will stay out of your way. You will see only what was written for you.
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
1 Peter 3:15 (KJV)
If you are a Christian who wants help answering a friend, borrow the first half. Peter asks for the answer to be given with meekness, and meekness is the word the King chose for himself. An argument can clear rubble out of the road, but only the Spirit gives life. So the aim is never to win. It is to see your friend at the feet of Christ.
Part One
For the One Who Objects
Most arguments about God treat him as a question you may settle at your leisure. The Bible treats you as a witness who already knows the answer.
The usual approach puts God on trial and seats you in the jury box. That picture is false. No one comes to the question of God neutral. You come already sure of what is possible and what could count as proof, and so do I.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Romans 1:20 (KJV)
Paul says that men knew God, yet did not glorify him as God and were not thankful, and so they held the truth down (Romans 1:18-21). Unbelief is not a lack of light. It is a quarrel with it.
So where your objection is about facts, you will get facts, and only ones that hold. Where it goes deeper, you will see that you must borrow from God to make it at all. And this page will keep speaking to your conscience, because the trouble between you and God is moral before it is intellectual.
God
Is God There
Every argument against God is made with tools that only work if he is there.
There is no evidence for God
The Bible says the whole world is God’s work and shows it, down to the mind you are reading with. So the real dispute is over what you will let the evidence prove. If you decided in advance that only matter exists, nothing could count for God.
Ask instead what has to be true for you to argue at all. You expect that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense, everywhere and always. That law of logic is not made of matter. It is not a habit of your brain either, or it would hold only in your head. Logic governs thought, and thought belongs to minds, so a law of thought that holds everywhere and never changes points to a mind that is everywhere and never changes. If you say logic only describes the world, then why should a world that no mind made be rational all the way through? And why ought you to think by its rules?
Science leans on more than logic. Every experiment assumes that the future will be like the past, and you cannot prove that by experiment without assuming it. David Hume saw that reason alone cannot prove it. The Christian knows why nature keeps its habits. God upholds it through his Son, and he has promised to (Genesis 8:22, Jeremiah 33:25).
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.
Colossians 1:17 (KJV)
You may say I trust that promise tomorrow only because it held yesterday. I trust it because of who made it, a God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2). A habit can only tell you what has happened, and a promise from God tells you what will.
Even trusting your mind is borrowed. If there is no God, your thoughts are chemistry in a brain shaped by whatever kept your ancestors alive. Granted, true beliefs about food and danger helped them survive. But no ancestor ever lived or died by being right about God, so on your own terms you have no good reason to trust your mind about him, even when it says there is none. The Christian has one. A God of truth made the mind to know his world.
So each of these tools is borrowed, and your sense of right and wrong is one more, taken up below. You are standing on God’s floor to argue that there is no floor. The God these tools point to is personal, and he stands above the world he made. The next sections ask whether he has spoken, and where.
Who made God?
Nobody did. Whatever begins to exist has a cause, and God never began (Psalm 90:2). Every view of the world ends at something that simply is, and for the atheist it is matter and energy or the laws of physics. What divides us is whether the eternal thing is a mind, and a mindless thing cannot account for the laws of thought.
Science has replaced God
Science studies how the world normally works, and why there is a world at all is another question. A man who learns how an engine runs has not learned that no one built it. Many of the men who built modern science, Kepler and Boyle and Faraday and Maxwell among them, believed in the God of the Bible. They looked for laws in nature because a wise God had made it.
Faith is believing without evidence
Not in the Bible. When Jesus blessed those who have not seen and yet believe (John 20:29), he was speaking to Thomas, who had refused the word of the disciples who saw him (John 20:25). Believing good witnesses is not believing without evidence. Faith as the Bible means it is trust in someone who has proved trustworthy, and Luke wrote so that his reader could know for certain (Luke 1:1-4). You trust the record that Julius Caesar lived, and you trust your memory, though you can only check it with your memory. What matters is whether your trust rests on something that can hold it.
Scripture
Can the Bible Be Trusted
The Bible claims that when it speaks, God speaks. It does not wait on your verdict to be true, and it has nothing to fear from your questions.
Men wrote it
They did, and the Bible never hides it. It says holy men spoke as they were moved by the Holy Ghost (2 Peter 1:21). If God made the mind, he can speak through a man without the man ceasing to be himself, and to deny it is to take for granted that there is no such God. The question under this one is Jesus. He treated the Scriptures of Israel as the word of God that cannot be broken (John 10:35), and he promised his apostles that the Holy Ghost would bring to their remembrance all that he had said to them and guide them into all truth (John 14:26, 16:13). If he rose, his word settles the Old Testament, and his promise stands behind the New.
Men chose which books went in
The church did not make any book Scripture by voting on it. The Bible’s authority rests wholly on God who wrote it and not on the word of any man or church (WCF 1.4). The churches received the books that bore his voice. The four Gospels and Paul’s letters were read as Scripture long before any council drew up a list, and the council of Nicaea, which is often blamed for choosing them, issued no list at all. The gospels that were left out were mostly written in the second century or later, after the apostles were dead.
It contradicts itself
A contradiction is two statements that cannot both be true in the same sense at once. Most of what gets called one is two witnesses telling an event from different places. Matthew tells of one angel at the tomb and Mark of a young man in white. Luke tells of two men, whom the women later reported as angels (Luke 24:23), and John tells of two angels. Neither Matthew nor Mark says there was only one. There are harder places, and Christians have worked through them in the open for centuries. A difficulty you cannot yet solve is not a contradiction you can prove.
It has been changed over time
God has kept his word pure in all ages (WCF 1.8), and the copies bear that out. The New Testament survives in more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, some copied within about two centuries of the originals. The first six books of the Annals of Tacitus survive in one manuscript, copied more than seven hundred years after he wrote, and historians trust that text. The New Testament copies differ mostly in spelling and word order, and no doctrine hangs on any place where the wording is truly uncertain. The great scroll of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew copies known before it, and it reads substantially the same.
You are arguing in a circle
Every final authority has to vouch for itself, or whatever vouched for it would be the final authority instead.
For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself,
Hebrews 6:13 (KJV)
Your final authority is your reason, and you cannot defend reason without using it. The man who says only what science can prove is true has said something science cannot prove. So everyone has a circle at the bottom. The question is which one can hold the weight of the world, and the section on God argued that yours cannot account for the tools you used to make this charge. And the Christian circle touches history at a point where it could have been proved false, a tomb in Jerusalem that was found empty.
Nobody can take it all literally
Nobody should, and nobody reads any book that way. Taking a writer at his word means reading him as he meant to be read. The Bible usually tells you what kind of writing you are reading, a song or a letter or a vision. Read the history as history and the poetry as poetry. When a psalm tells the floods to clap their hands, no one looks for hands. Scripture is its own interpreter, the Westminster Confession says, so a hard place is read by the light of clearer ones (WCF 1.9). This objection is usually aimed at Genesis, and there the clearer places settle what matters most. Jesus spoke of the man and woman God made at the beginning (Matthew 19:4), and Paul compares Adam with Christ as one real man with another (Romans 5:12-19). Where faithful readers have differed over details in the visions, those can be held with an open hand.
None of that is reason to doubt what is written as history, and the Gospels are written as history. Luke dates the start of John the Baptist’s preaching by the fifteenth year of Tiberius and names the governor and the high priests (Luke 3:1-2). Paul says that if Christ was not raised, your faith is vain (1 Corinthians 15:17). That is not how anyone speaks of a metaphor.
The resurrection
Did Jesus Rise
The faith rests on an event at a real time and place. If Jesus did not rise, set it all aside. If he did, you will have to deal with him.
He may never have lived
Almost no historian of the ancient world doubts that Jesus lived and was crucified. Tacitus, a Roman historian who despised Christians, recorded that Christ was put to death under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. In 2012 Bart Ehrman, an agnostic scholar, wrote a whole book to answer those who say Jesus never lived.
The resurrection is a legend
A rumor can start in a day. A legend that crowds out the facts needs time, and distance from anyone who could correct it, and the resurrection had neither. Paul wrote to the Corinthians within about twenty-five years of the cross, handing on a summary that many scholars, including some who deny the resurrection, date to within a few years of it.
And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.
1 Corinthians 15:5-8 (KJV)
Most of the five hundred were still alive when Paul wrote. He names Cephas and James, and he had met them both (Galatians 1:18-19). A man inventing a story does not point you to living witnesses who could expose him. The resurrection was preached in Jerusalem, a short walk from the grave, and there is no record that anyone produced the body. His enemies said the disciples had stolen it, which grants that the tomb was empty, and Matthew says that story was still being told when he wrote (Matthew 28:13-15).
The disciples lied, or they were fooled
The disciples gained nothing by the story but trouble, and some were killed for it. Herod put James the brother of John to the sword (Acts 12:2), and the Jewish historian Josephus records that James the brother of Jesus was stoned in Jerusalem. Men will die for a lie they believe. They do not choose prison and death for a story they know they invented, and these men said they had seen him and eaten with him.
Even scholars who reject the resurrection generally grant that the disciples believed they had seen him alive. Were they fooled by grief? A vision does not empty a tomb, and the appearances did not come only to grieving friends. That same James had not believed in his brother (John 7:5), and he became a leader of the church in Jerusalem. Paul was hunting Christians down when Christ met him. Grief does not turn a doubting brother into a leader, or an enemy into an apostle.
Dead men do not rise
They do not, and the disciples knew it as well as you do (Luke 24:11). The Christian claim is not that dead men rise on their own. It is that God raised this one. To rule it out because dead men stay dead is to assume there is no God who could raise them, which is the very thing in question. Hume put the objection more carefully, saying a report of a miracle is always more likely false than true. But how likely it is that God raised this man depends on whether there is a God who would, so it comes back to whether God is there. And experience is all against it only if you first leave out the men who said they saw him. Paul told the philosophers of Athens what the resurrection means for every man alive.
Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.
Acts 17:31 (KJV)
The empty tomb is God’s assurance to all men that the Judge has been named. If it is empty, you will stand before the man who left it.
The problem of evil
Why Is There Evil
Many who ask this are carrying a grief of their own, and they should be answered with care.
A good and powerful God would stop it
The argument assumes that God could have no good purpose in allowing evil for a time. You could not know that without knowing everything, and you cannot even call it likely. A small child who cannot see why his father lets the doctor hurt him is in no position to say there is probably no reason. The gap between you and God is far wider than that (Romans 11:33). The Bible shows God with exactly such a purpose. Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, and years later he told them they had meant it for evil and God had meant it for good (Genesis 50:20).
If you mean only that Christians contradict themselves, they do not. There is nothing contradictory in a good God allowing evil for a good reason. If you mean that evil is really evil, you are appealing to a moral law only God can give, as the section on right and wrong shows.
Sickness and disaster spring from the same root as the evil that men do. When Adam sinned, God cursed the ground for his sake (Genesis 3:17), and the whole creation has groaned under that curse ever since (Romans 8:20-22). A cancer is a mark of a fallen world.
And God will stop evil. He has set the day. But if he ended all evil tonight, where would he stop? It runs through every human heart, yours included. That he has not ended it yet is his patience, and his goodness is leading you to repentance (Romans 2:4).
Then God is to blame
The Bible holds two things together. God ordains all that comes to pass, and the men who do evil are guilty of it. The clearest case is the cross.
Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain:
Acts 2:23 (KJV)
God planned the death of Jesus, and the hands that carried it out were wicked. God meant it for the saving of sinners, and the men meant murder. Guilt belongs to the one whose purpose is evil, and God’s never is. He is not the author of sin, and he never forces a man’s will (WCF 3.1). If he could ordain the worst evil ever done without sharing its guilt, and bring from it the greatest good ever given, he can be trusted with the rest.
The God of the Old Testament is cruel
The hardest case is Canaan, where Israel was told to leave nothing alive that breathed in the cities God gave them (Deuteronomy 20:16-17). It was judgment after four centuries of patience, for the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full (Genesis 15:16). By then they were burning their own children to their gods (Deuteronomy 12:31). God showed no favoritism, and he later threw Israel out of the land for the same sins (Leviticus 18:28, 2 Kings 17:7-8). Mercy was open even then. Rahab of Jericho confessed Israel’s God and was spared, and her name stands in the line of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).
Those commands belonged to one nation at one point in history, and they were never a standing order. Anyone who says God has told him to kill is claiming a word from heaven the Bible does not allow. As for the children, every life is God’s to give and his to take back. Job said as much on the day he lost all ten of his own (Job 1:18-21). What was unusual in Canaan is that God commanded men to carry out his sentence on those nations, and told us why.
The Bible approves of slavery
The law of Moses made it a crime worthy of death to steal a man and sell him (Exodus 21:16), and Paul names menstealers among the lawless (1 Timothy 1:10). That is how the Atlantic trade filled its ships. The law did allow servitude. An Israelite who grew poor and was sold served as a hired servant until the jubilee, and those bought from the nations around Israel could be kept as bondmen for life (Leviticus 25:39-46). But the law hemmed it in. A servant who escaped from his master was not to be handed back (Deuteronomy 23:15-16), and a master who struck out his servant’s eye or tooth had to let him go free (Exodus 21:26-27). The law of Moses bore with some things because men’s hearts were hard, as Jesus said of divorce (Matthew 19:8). The apostles told a Christian slave to take his freedom if he could (1 Corinthians 7:21), and told a master to receive his runaway as a brother beloved (Philemon 16). Some Presbyterians in the American South defended slavery from the Bible, and they were wrong.
The moral law
Who Decides What Is Good
Nearly everyone is sure that some things are really wrong. Very few ask what makes them so.
I can be good without God
In one sense you can, and Christians have never denied it. God’s law is written on every heart, so men who never read a Bible know a great deal about right and wrong (Romans 2:14-15). But good by whose measure? Jesus said the first and great commandment is to love God himself with everything you are (Matthew 22:37-38). A man can be kind to his neighbor and break that commandment every day he lives. Even his good works, the Confession says, are sinful and cannot please God, because they do not come from a heart purified by faith or aim at the glory of God, though leaving them undone would be more sinful still (WCF 16.7, Hebrews 11:6).
Morality is only evolution or culture
If morality comes only from evolution, it tells you what kept your ancestors alive and nothing about what you ought to do. Nature has produced cruelty as surely as kindness, and it cannot tell you which is right. If it is only culture, then no culture can ever be wrong, and the men who ended the slave trade were not right, only different. No one lives that way.
You say torturing a child for fun is wrong everywhere and always, and you are right. That is a law above every culture. You might call it simply a fact, like two and two making four. But a sum does not accuse you, and you wrong no one when you add it up badly. A law that binds every man and accuses him when he breaks it needs a Lawgiver with the right to bind him. His law is no whim, as if he could have made cruelty good. He commands what agrees with his own nature, and he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13). And you do not only know that law. You hold other people to it every time they break their word to you or run you down behind your back, and you have done both.
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.
Romans 2:1 (KJV)
Judgment
Is Hell Just
Hell is real, and it is felt without end. It should never be spoken of lightly, and never left out.
A loving God would not send anyone there
Your own sense of justice already asks for some kind of hell. When a man murders and is never caught, and dies old and comfortable in his bed, something in you says that cannot be the end of it. It is not. What you may not have reckoned with is that God will do to all evil what you want done to some of it, and that he will count yours. No one in the Bible warned of hell more often than Jesus, the gentlest man who ever lived.
But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear him.
Luke 12:5 (KJV)
The warning comes from a God who swears by his own life that he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). And hell is exact. Some will be beaten with many stripes and some with few, and the many are for the servant who knew his lord’s will and did not do it (Luke 12:47-48). No one will bear a stroke more than he deserves.
Forever is too long for a short life of sin
A crime is not measured by how long it took, since a murder can take a second. We weigh a wrong by what was done and by who was wronged, and striking your mother is worse than striking a stranger. Sin is a wrong done to the infinitely holy God, to whom you owe all you have.
Every sin, even the least, being against the sovereignty, goodness, and holiness of God, and against his righteous law, deserveth his wrath and curse, both in this life, and that which is to come; and cannot be expiated but by the blood of Christ.
Westminster Larger Catechism Q&A 152
In Matthew 25:46 the Authorized Version calls the punishment everlasting and the life eternal, but in the Greek they are the same word. If one ends, so does the other. The catechism ends where it must, with the blood of Christ, who bore that wrath so that those who trust him never will.
Other religions
Why Only Jesus
Few things Christians say offend more in our day than that Jesus is the only way to God.
All religions lead to God
They cannot all lead to the same place, because they do not agree about where it is. Islam teaches that Jesus was not crucified, though almost every historian holds that he was, and Christianity puts his cross at the center of everything. To say all religions are the same is to say each is wrong about what it cares about most. That sounds humble, but the man who says it claims to see what every religion in the world has missed.
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
John 14:6 (KJV)
Only one faith says that God became a man and died for the sins of his enemies. If there were another way, the cross would be the most needless cruelty in history. The night before he died, Jesus asked his Father, if it were possible, to let the cup pass from him (Matthew 26:39). It did not pass, because there was no other way.
What about those who never heard?
No one will be condemned for rejecting a Christ he never heard of. Men are judged for sinning against the light they had, in creation and in conscience (Romans 1:20, 2:12-15). But ignorance saves no one, or the kindest thing the church could do would be to keep quiet. Christ sent his church to every nation because men cannot call on one they have not heard of (Romans 10:14). Apart from him no one is saved, however carefully he lives by the light of nature or his own religion (WCF 10.4).
Then there is you. Whatever God does with the man who never heard, you are not that man. You have heard.
It is arrogant to say you are right
Every claim to truth rules out its opposite, including the claim that Christians are wrong. Arrogance lies in how a man holds what he believes and why he thinks he came by it. We did not find God by being wiser or better than anyone. We were lost, and he found us, and we have nothing we did not receive (1 Corinthians 4:7). A man pulled out of the river is not boasting when he tells you where the rope is.
The church
What About the Christians
Some of the strongest arguments against Christ come from people who carry his name, and they deserve an honest answer.
The church is full of hypocrites
Some who sit in churches are hypocrites, and Jesus said there would be (Matthew 7:21-23). His hardest words were for religious men who looked clean outside and were rotten within (Matthew 23:27-28), so on this point you and he agree. But a hypocrite fails to live by what he claims, which tells you about the man and nothing against the claim. Counterfeit money is only worth making because real money exists. Many of the Christians you have in mind are not hypocrites at all. They are sinners who know it, which is why they are in church.
They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
Mark 2:17 (KJV)
Religion has done great harm
It has, and some of it was done in the name of Christ. There is no excuse to make, and Reformed Christians have no clean hands to hold up. Geneva burned Michael Servetus for heresy in 1553, and Calvin had pressed for his death. Cruelty like that defies Christ, who rebuked James and John when they wanted to call down fire on a village that would not receive him (Luke 9:54-55).
But the harm does not leave when religion does. The officially atheist governments of the last century killed their own people by the millions. The trouble is the human heart, which goes wherever men go, into churches and into prison camps alike. The last section turns to it.
Election
Is Election Fair
The Bible teaches that God chooses whom he will save. Some hear that as a way off the hook.
If God chooses, how can he blame me?
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
Romans 9:19-20 (KJV)
Paul raised your objection himself, and he had to, because he taught that God chooses. No one would raise it if God’s choice only followed ours. His first answer is a rebuke. The thing formed does not put its maker on trial.
Then see what the Bible never says, that a man is condemned for not being chosen. He is condemned for his sin (WCF 3.7), and no one ever sinned against his own will. Every sin you have committed, you committed because you wanted to. Election pushes no one into sin. It pulls some out who would have stayed in it gladly, and God wrongs no one when he leaves a man to the sin he loves.
Then there is no point in trying
God’s decree about you is hidden, and you do not need to know it before you come. What is revealed is his command to repent and believe, and his promise that Christ will cast out no one who comes (John 6:37). Nothing has ever kept a sinner from Christ but that he would not come (John 5:40).
The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Deuteronomy 29:29 (KJV)
The God who ordains the end ordains the means, and the means is the gospel, heard and believed. The gospel page says more about election and the sinner who wants to come.
The heart of it
The Objection Under the Others
Every objection on this page has had an answer. Jesus said the reason men stay away from him lies somewhere else.
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
John 3:19-20 (KJV)
That is the real objection. It is not that God has hidden himself. It is that we do not want to be seen, and that was once true of me. So set the arguments down and answer honestly. No one is watching but God.
I am a good person
You have lied, and no lie is too small for God to count. You have taken what was not yours, whether money or time or credit. Jesus said that whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28). John calls hatred murder (1 John 3:15), and you know whether you have hated. God’s name has been a curse in your mouth, or a word that meant nothing, and he will not hold that man guiltless (Exodus 20:7). And have you loved God with all your heart for a single hour? You have not even thanked him for the breath you argue with.
Perhaps you hope the good you have done will outweigh the bad. It will not. Whoever keeps the whole law and yet breaks it in one point is guilty of all (James 2:10), because the God who said do not commit adultery also said do not kill (James 2:11). Break his law at any point and you have defied the one who gave all of it.
Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God.
Romans 3:19 (KJV)
Jesus said that evil thoughts, adulteries, murders, thefts and deceit come from within, out of the heart (Mark 7:21-23). Ask yourself whether you want to be free of your sins, or only free of what they cost you. There are some you would keep if you could keep them without the judgment, and that is what it means to love darkness. You are not a good man with a few faults and some questions. You are a sinner by nature and by choice. You were born that way, a child of Adam, and Paul says we were all by nature the children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). I do not say it from above you. The same law shut my mouth.
Then what hope is there for me?
Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.
Luke 15:1-2 (KJV)
His enemies meant it as a charge, and it is the best news you will ever hear. Christ came for sinners exactly like you. He kept the law you have broken, and on the cross he bore its curse for everyone who trusts him, and God raised him from the dead. The gospel page tells it in full.
So the call is the one Jesus preached. Repent, and believe the gospel (Mark 1:15). Turn your back on your sin, and rest on Christ alone, not your own record, to answer for you before God. You do not have to settle every question on this page first.
Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
Isaiah 55:7 (KJV)
The unrighteous man must forsake his thoughts as well as his way, and some of those thoughts may be the objections you brought here. Leave them with the rest, and take the pardon.
- Call on him. You do not need fine words. A tax collector asked God to be merciful to him as a sinner, and Jesus said he went home justified (Luke 18:13-14).
- Read the Gospel of John. A chapter a day is enough. John wrote it so that you would believe that Jesus is the Christ and have life through his name (John 20:31).
- Hear the Word preached. Go to a faithful church this Sunday. Faith comes by hearing the word of God (Romans 10:17), and no one has to believe anything to walk in and listen.
- Write to me. If an objection is still standing in your way, tell me what it is.
Part Two
For the Believer Who Is Afraid
Weak faith is still faith. It takes hold of the same Christ as strong faith, and it is Christ who saves.
This faith is different in degrees, weak or strong; may be often and many ways assailed and weakened, but gets the victory; growing up in many to the attainment of a full assurance through Christ, who is both the author and finisher of our faith.
Westminster Confession of Faith 14.3
Faith may be attacked often and weakened, and still the Confession says it wins, because the victory comes from Christ.
When Israel was dying of snakebite in the wilderness, God had Moses lift a serpent of brass on a pole and promised that everyone bitten who looked at it would live. The promise was made to the look, and a man whose sight was failing lived as surely as a man who saw sharp. Jesus said in John 3 that he would be lifted up in the same way, so that whoever believes in him should not perish.
So look at Christ first. Every fear in this half of the page will pull your eyes back onto yourself, to take your own pulse and grade your own heart. There is a right time for looking inward, and the next section comes to it. But nobody in that camp was healed by studying the bite.
Assurance
Am I Really His
God does not want his children living on guesses. John wrote his first letter to believers so that they would know they have eternal life (1 John 5:13).
I do not know if I am saved
You can know. The Confession calls assurance something far firmer than a guess, and it names three grounds for it in an order that protects a frightened conscience.
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:
Westminster Confession of Faith 18.2
Start with the promises, because they do not change when you do. God has promised everlasting life to everyone who believes on the Son (John 3:36), and that was as true on the morning you felt nothing as on the morning you wept for joy.
Then look at the graces with an honest eye. A weak trust in Christ counts. So does hatred of the sin you keep falling into, and grief that you love him so little. Every grace is imperfect in this life, so the graces confirm the promise and never replace it. Start with them and you will find a reason to doubt each one.
Last comes the Spirit himself, who bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God (Romans 8:16). He bears that witness through the Word, often quietly, in the simple fact that you come to God as a child comes to his father.
Maybe my faith was never real
The Confession says in 18.3 that assurance is not of the essence of faith, and that a true believer may wait long before he has it. A lack of certainty does not prove a lack of faith. The Larger Catechism goes further.
One who doubteth of his being in Christ, or of his due preparation to the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, may have true interest in Christ, though he be not yet assured thereof; and in God’s account hath it, if he be duly affected with the apprehension of the want of it, and unfeignedly desires to be found in Christ, and to depart from iniquity:
Westminster Larger Catechism Q&A 172
If it troubles you that you are not sure, and you truly want to be found in Christ and to be done with your sin, then the Catechism says you may belong to Christ before you are sure of it, and that in God’s account you do. That answer asks what you want. It does not ask whether you have won the fight yet.
There is also a shorter road than weighing your faith. If you cannot tell whether you ever came to Christ, come to him now. You do not have to settle whether the first time was real. He promised to cast out none who come, and you can come today.
I am afraid I was not chosen
Election is true, and the Confession says it should bring abundant consolation to all who sincerely obey the gospel. The gospel is obeyed by believing it, and Paul puts the two words side by side (Romans 10:16). You are not asked to read the decree to find your name there, and nobody can read it and find his name left out.
Jesus said no one can come to him unless the Father draws him (John 6:44). If you have come to Christ, however weakly, the Father drew you. So believers may be assured of their election from the certainty of their calling (WCF 3.8), and Peter tells us to make our calling and election sure (2 Peter 1:10). Look for your election in the call you answered.
Remaining sin
When Sin Will Not Leave
Few things shake a Christian like meeting the same sin again, years after he first wept over it. Your fear draws one conclusion from that. God has drawn another, and he has written it down.
I keep going back to the same sin
If you think a real Christian would be free of this by now, read Romans 7. Paul wrote it as an apostle, and he says he does the very thing he hates. There is a war in every believer between the flesh and the spirit, and it lasts as long as this life (WCF 13.2).
God doth continue to forgive the sins of those that are justified; and although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may by their sins fall under God’s fatherly displeasure, and not have the light of his countenance restored unto them, until they humble themselves, confess their sins, beg pardon, and renew their faith and repentance.
Westminster Confession of Faith 11.5
God gave his verdict when you believed, and he does not reopen the case. What your sin can bring on you is his fatherly displeasure. He may hide the light of his face until you come back humbled and confess it, and he may use the rod, yet he will not take his lovingkindness from you (Psalm 89:30-33). That is a father correcting his son, and there is nothing of the judge in it.
My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins:
1 John 2:1-2 (KJV)
Your advocate does not plead that you are innocent. He pleads his own blood, and that plea does not wear thin as your record grows, because it never rested on your record.
So do not hide the sin, and do not make peace with it. Name it to God each time you fall, and let a brother you trust know what you are fighting. Romans 13:14 says not to make provision for the flesh, so if you keep falling in the same place at the same hour, change the place and the hour. Remaining sin may prevail for a time, but the part of you that is born again will overcome, because the Spirit of Christ keeps giving it strength (WCF 13.3).
What I did is too great to forgive
You may carry one sin heavier than all the rest. If you did it after you came to Christ, it may feel heavier still.
As there is no sin so small but it deserves damnation, so there is no sin so great that it can bring damnation upon those who truly repent.
Westminster Confession of Faith 15.4
David took another man’s wife and had the man killed to cover it. When he confessed, Nathan told him the Lord had put away his sin (2 Samuel 12:13). The consequences stayed in his house, but the guilt was gone. Paul had hunted Christians into prison. He called himself the chief of sinners and said Christ showed him mercy as a pattern for everyone who would believe after him (1 Timothy 1:15-16). If your sin is great, that pattern was set up for sinners like you.
Once you have confessed it and turned from it, the pardon is yours. The memory may come back for years, and the shame with it, but the guilt does not. Take him at his word, and thank him for it.
He must be tired of forgiving me
We tire of forgiving because every pardon costs us something. Your pardon cost God his Son, and that price was paid once and in full. He is not paying it again each time you come.
Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? he retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.
Micah 7:18-19 (KJV)
He has promised to subdue the very sins he pardons. And when Peter asked how often he must forgive his brother, Jesus said seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22). He does not ask more mercy of you than he shows you.
Night fears
Fears That Keep You Awake
Some fears come back at night, when the house is quiet and there is nothing to do but think. Each of these has an answer that will not give way under you.
I think I have committed the unpardonable sin
The scribes from Jerusalem could not deny that Jesus was casting out devils, so they said he did it by the prince of the devils. Jesus answered them.
Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation: Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit.
Mark 3:28-30 (KJV)
The sin Jesus named was the settled verdict of men who were faced with the Holy Spirit’s work in Christ and called it the devil’s. Those men were not asking for mercy. They were accusing the Savior. If you are asking Christ for mercy, you are doing the opposite of what they did, and whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Romans 10:13). No exception is written into that promise, so whatever you fear you did, it has not shut you out. If the fear began with a blasphemous thought that came against your will, that is no settled verdict, and what this page says about thoughts you would never choose is for you.
Hebrews 6 and 10 frighten me
Hebrews 6 speaks of people who were enlightened and tasted the good word of God and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and then fell away. They had stood close to Christ and walked away from him with their eyes open, like ground that drinks the same rain as a good field and bears only thorns. The passage says such people cannot be renewed to repentance. If you have come back to Christ in repentance, or are coming now, you are not the person it describes.
But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things that accompany salvation, though we thus speak.
Hebrews 6:9 (KJV)
The writer did not think his readers had fallen. He warned them to keep them from falling, since warnings are one of the ways God keeps his people. And the chapter ends with an anchor, a hope sure and steadfast, given with a promise and an oath so that all who have fled for refuge to it might have strong consolation (6:17-20). If you have fled to Christ for refuge, that anchor is yours.
Hebrews 10:26 frightens many for the same reason. It says no sacrifice remains for those who sin wilfully after they have received the knowledge of the truth, and a man who keeps falling into a sin he knows is wrong fears it means him. Verse 29 says who is meant, the man who has trodden under foot the Son of God and counted the blood of the covenant an unholy thing. If you keep running back to that blood, you are not trampling it, and you are among them that believe to the saving of the soul (10:39).
I might lose my salvation
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.
John 10:27-29 (KJV)
Jesus said that no man can pluck his sheep out of his hand, and he said more. They shall never perish. If a sheep could slip away and be lost for good, that promise would not be true.
This perseverance of the saints depends, not upon their own free will, but upon the immutability of the decree of election, flowing from the free and unchangeable love of God the Father; upon the efficacy of the merit and intercession of Jesus Christ; the abiding of the Spirit and of the seed of God within them; and the nature of the covenant of grace:
Westminster Confession of Faith 17.2
Not one of those supports is your willpower. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus told Peter that Satan had desired to sift the disciples like wheat, and that he had prayed for Peter himself, that his faith would not fail (Luke 22:31-32). Within hours Peter swore with curses that he did not know him. His courage failed. His faith did not finally fail, because Christ had prayed for it. Before Peter ever fell, Jesus told him to strengthen his brethren once he was turned back.
True believers may fall into grievous sins and continue in them for a time (WCF 17.3). They will not fall all the way, and they will not fall for good.
In the dark
When God Feels Far
There are seasons when prayer feels like talking to the ceiling and the Bible is only ink. They do not mean that God has gone.
I feel nothing, and God is silent
A man can fear the Lord and obey him and still walk in the dark with no light at all. Isaiah says so, and tells him what to do there.
Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.
Isaiah 50:10 (KJV)
Lean your whole weight on your God while you cannot see him. The Confession builds on this verse in 18.4, and says such believers are never left without the seed of God and the life of faith. Out of that the Spirit may revive assurance in due time, and meanwhile he keeps them from utter despair, even on the days they feel hopeless. David once said in his haste that he was cut off from before God’s eyes, and God heard his cries all the same (Psalm 31:22).
Psalm 88 never turns toward the light, even at the end, yet in its first line Heman calls the Lord the God of his salvation. In Psalm 77 Asaph asks whether the Lord has cast him off for ever. Then he stops reading his own heart and starts remembering what God has done, and he goes back to the night Israel crossed the sea.
Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known. Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.
Psalm 77:19-20 (KJV)
No one could trace God’s footsteps in the sea that night. He led them the whole way through.
The darkness is in my body too
Sometimes the heaviness is in the body as much as the soul. Grief or illness or depression can settle on the mind and make God himself feel far away. Soon after Elijah watched fire fall from heaven on Carmel, he lay down under a juniper tree and asked God to take his life. God did not argue with him. He let him sleep, and sent an angel with bread and water, and let him sleep again.
And the angel of the Lord came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee.
1 Kings 19:7 (KJV)
The word of the Lord came later, at Horeb. Sleep and food came first. If your heaviness has lasted for weeks and changed your sleep or your appetite or how you see yourself, tell your elders and see a doctor. God works through means (WCF 5.3), and medicine is one of them, as the angel’s bread was. Needing it is not a failure of faith. If you have had thoughts of ending your life, tell someone today. In the United States you can call 988 or text 988 at any hour.
Doubt
Doubts and Unwanted Thoughts
Some believers are afraid it is not true, and the question will not leave them alone. Others are afraid of what their own minds keep saying to them.
Sometimes I wonder if any of it is true
The pull to walk away is not new. When many of his disciples turned back, Jesus put the question to the twelve.
Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.
John 6:67-68 (KJV)
Peter answered with a question of his own. He knew the other voices on offer, and none of them had the words of eternal life. When doubt tells you to leave, ask it where it means to take you.
The arguments are real, and the first half of this page sets them out for a day when your mind is clear. But you did not come to faith by argument alone. The Confession says in 1.5 that our full persuasion of the truth of Scripture comes from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts. So when doubt comes, go back to the Word, and pray as a desperate father once prayed.
And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
Mark 9:24 (KJV)
He had just admitted he was not sure Jesus could help. Jesus healed his son, and he did not first make the man measure how much of him believed.
I have thoughts I would never choose
It may be a blasphemy that flashes through your mind in prayer, and the harder you push it away the louder it comes back. John Bunyan, who later wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, went through a season when blasphemies against God and Christ poured through his mind until he feared he was lost. His book Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners tells the story. He came through it and preached Christ for the rest of his life.
A thought you hate is not a thought you hold. Satan once proposed to the Son of God himself that he fall down and worship the devil, and Christ was without sin (Matthew 4:9-10). Being tempted is not the same as sinning, and whatever in these thoughts rises from the old nature still in you is pardoned in Christ with the rest of your sin. Your horror at them shows where your heart is.
So do not argue with them or keep checking whether you meant them. Turn from them to Christ, the way you would walk past a man shouting in the street. And if they come in a loop you cannot break, do not keep them secret. See a doctor, and if you are young, tell your parents first. It is a known affliction, and there is real help for it.
Affliction
When Life Breaks
The diagnosis comes, or the child dies, or the marriage comes apart. Under the grief a harder question rises, about what God thinks of you.
It feels as if God is against me
Paul asks who can be against us if God is for us, and he answers with the cross.
He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?
Romans 8:32 (KJV)
God has already given the most he had to give. If he meant you harm, he would not have paid so much for you. A few verses earlier Paul says all things work together for good to those who love God. He does not say all things are good. Many are not, and you may be living inside one. Romans 8:29 tells you what the good is. God means to make you like his Son.
For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.
Lamentations 3:31-33 (KJV)
He does bring grief, but he takes no pleasure in it, and his compassion outlasts it. You may weep. Jesus wept over Lazarus, though he knew he was about to raise him.
I think he is punishing me
The punishment for a believer’s sin fell on Christ, and God does not collect the same debt twice. What a believer may receive is chastening, the training a father gives the son he loves. Hebrews 12 says God does it for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness, though no chastening feels joyful at the time. Afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness.
The Confession says God’s children are chastened by him as by a father, yet never cast off (WCF 12.1). And not every blow is a rebuke for some particular sin. When the disciples asked whose sin had made a man born blind, Jesus said it was neither his nor his parents’ (John 9:3). You may never learn in this life why a thing was sent. You can know it was not sent in wrath.
For Scripture gathered by the kind of loss, a death or a diagnosis or a broken marriage, see Scripture for the Hard Hour.
The last enemy
When Death Comes Near
Christians still die, and many of them dread it. Hebrews says the Son of God took flesh and blood for this very reason.
That through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.
Hebrews 2:14-15 (KJV)
If you are afraid anyway, that does not mean he never delivered you. Death is an enemy, the last one to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26), and it is no sin to dread an enemy that has already lost. Christ will be with you in the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23:4), and he has gone through death itself ahead of you and come out the other side. For those who follow him there is no waiting room between, and no purging fire.
The souls of believers are at their death made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection.
Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 37
The sin you have fought all your life does not come with you. Even your body is still united to Christ, and it rests in the grave as in a bed until the resurrection.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 15:55-57 (KJV)
The sting was sin, and the law gave sin its power to condemn, but Christ kept the law and bore the sin. So for a believer even dying now comes out of God’s love, to free him from sin and bring him to Christ (WLC Q&A 85).
If you dread leaving the people you love, commit them to God. Psalm 68:5 calls him a father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows, which means he takes up their cause. And when the end comes near, do not face it alone. Call for the elders of your church, as James 5 says, and let them pray over you. Let your family hear from your own mouth where your hope is.
If the hard news has just come, the comfort page has Scripture for that day. If you are grieving someone else, start there.
If you find yourself wanting death rather than dreading it, God has not finished with your life. Call 988 or text 988, and tell someone near you.
Rest
Safe in His Keeping
Underneath all these fears is the same suspicion, that in the end it all hangs on you. Paul closes Romans 8 by naming everything that could come between a believer and God.
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:38-39 (KJV)
Paul does not say you are kept by your love for God. He says nothing can separate you from God’s love for you, and that love is in Christ Jesus our Lord, where no fear of yours can reach it. When Zion said the Lord had forgotten her, God answered through Isaiah.
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.
Isaiah 49:15-16 (KJV)
Moses, blessing Israel before his death, told them that the eternal God was their refuge and that underneath were the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27). On the nights you cannot hold on to anything, that is still where you are.
Do these things while you wait for the fear to lift.
- Come to the Lord’s Table. Question 172 of the Larger Catechism says the Supper was appointed for the relief even of weak and doubting Christians. One who doubts should mourn his unbelief and labor to have his doubts resolved, and as he does, he may and ought to come, so that his faith is made stronger. Take your doubts to your elders, and do not stay away from the table while they are being answered.
- Keep sitting under the preached Word. The Word that first worked your faith is how God goes on strengthening it (WCF 14.1). This page cannot feed you week by week. A faithful pulpit can. Go even when you feel nothing.
- Pray Mark 9:24 honestly. Tell him you believe and ask him to help your unbelief. Ask again tomorrow.
- Learn a few places in Scripture you can find in the dark. Romans 8 answers the accuser. Psalm 103 speaks to shame, and John 10 to the fear that you will slip from his hand.
Isaiah 40 opens with God commanding comfort for his people. A few verses on, Isaiah sees the Lord God come with a strong hand, his arm ruling for him. The next thing that arm does is gather lambs.
He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.
Isaiah 40:11 (KJV)