“By the instrument of faith, this Spirit gives light to our minds concerning the gospel of Jesus Christ and the words of Scripture. This point bears restatement: the Holy Spirit works in us, bringing about this change. The Spirit who gave the prophets and the apostles the Scriptures is the same Spirit who convinces us of their reliability.⁹  By the ministry of the Spirit of God, we now know what we could not know. We see what we could not see. The Spirit of God shines in our hearts this Spiritual understanding.”

The questions of life plague our souls, shake us mercilessly, and even cast us into a tailspin of desperation. Into this chaos, we have considered a universally pressing question, drawing upon a booklet entitled, How Can We Know For Sure?

The answer, as we have contended in the prior articles,2 is that God has spoken. He has spoken authoritatively, clearly, necessarily, and sufficiently. He has given us his written Word, a Word that, as Jesus has declared, “cannot be broken.” (John 10:35).

But does that assertion, even by Jesus himself, satisfy your soul’s quest for confidence?

You may still protest. How do we avoid the seemingly inevitable conclusion that we are still left to decide? Are we not left irreducibly to our own assessments, our own interpretation and confined by our own limitations? How do we become convinced of the Bible’s trustworthiness?

Surely it is one thing to make the claim that the Bible is the word of God, but making such a claim does not by fiat create the truthfulness of that claim. A purely assumed certainty of Scripture makes quite uncertain the purported certainty itself. Is not the argument circular, so that the conclusion of the Bible’s truthfulness comes from the very presupposition of its truthfulness?

But such a crude, unreasonable, and deflating circularity is hardly at work here. Let us return to a theme introduced earlier.

As corrupt and sinful people, our sinfulness dwells not only in our hearts, lives, and tongues (stubbornness), but also in our minds (blindness).3 In our rebellion against God we are wholly unwilling, non-desirous, and unable to accept divine truth. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”4

Romans 1 indicates that as unbelievers we “suppress the truth” (1:18), and have “exchanged the truth of God for a lie” (1:25). Such suppression and idolatrous substitution of lies for truth turn us into fools, though we claim “to be wise” (1:22). In short, our rejection of God’s words in general revelation distorts our view of God and of reality. Such warping rebellion marks a point of no return morally and intellectually.

Having already described this pervasive corruption, we noted the wholly undeserved gift of God’s Word. He comes to us graciously and discloses to us forgiveness in the Son of God. His Word is a redemptive Word, and by faith in Jesus Christ – the Protagonist of Scripture,5 our eyes are opened to the real and glorious hope of the gospel. We see Jesus for who he really is. We also have our eyes peeled to the truths and truthfulness of Scripture. Such understanding is entirely a gift. It is not a production of our wills or our minds. It simply cannot be.

In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul explains this fact by way of the “impossible” task of gospel ministry. Why is it impossible? Because human hearts are blind, recalcitrant, and humanly irretrievable. Paul and his fellow apostles were fully aware that human words were positively insufficient to bring any sort of spiritual renewal. If it were not for the divine nature of the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit, Paul and his fellow preachers were pitiable fools!6 What instead compelled them to preach was the divine and personal power of the Word of God to bring about change.